I think that the sailors of old must have been at least partly motivated by the same sense of adventure that motivates the astronauts. If you told someone that you’d roll a die, and if it came up 6, they’d be fabulously wealthy, but if it came up 1-5, they’d be killed, how many would take that deal? That’s apparently the sort of odds that Magellan’s expedition faced. But if you then tell them that, either way, they’ll go places no man* had ever gone before, and see things no man* had ever seen, now you just might get some volunteers.
And consider that, even after they were fabulously wealthy from one voyage, a lot of these guys kept on sailing.
But there is only one first Twilight Zone episode. It seems everyone understood the reference but you.
Googling “Twilight Zone first episode” brings up Where Is Everybody as the very first reference. If you had done that, you would have seen that this was the episode being referenced. Easy-peasy. There was no ambiguity or confusion about it.
If you’ve never seen the original series, which seems evident from your puzzlement, I would recommend it. It’s one of the most memorable episodes of any of the series, and most fans would have gotten the reference immediately. One objective of a nitpick is to demonstrate that you know more about a subject than the person you’re nitpicking. This one does the reverse.
The applicability of national, or international law to anything outside of earth’s orbit has never even been attempted except the concept of ownership of things brought back to Earth. None of those are likely to be enforceable on Mars. (Unless military or at least official government missions have control of travel.)
Then what’s the first episode of Twilight Zone from 1985 or 2002 called?
I asked him to verify the season and he cleared it up. It’s not like it was some perplexing issue. I had a feeling he was talking about the original - that tends to happen when something has multiple versions. And yes, I have watched it and it’s a great episode. I know you tried to be a wise guy but I don’t need you to devalue my question. You could have just moved on.
Googling any of the other Twilight Zone versions will also lead you to Wikipedia, IMDB or any other database in existence, and you guessed it, all first episodes are labeled S01 (season 1) EP01 (episode 1) under each one. Amazing. But suddenly only the original has a first episode (despite the others being a different entity but still labeled Twilight Zone) and no one could ever possibly mean anything else.
I guess we better start renaming the first episode of Twilight Zone (1985) the 157th episode.
To be a mod and have been here since 2000 you’re mighty trivial arguing semantics. Are you always uptight like this? Do you do this with everyone? Geez.
This from someone whose first post (and additional posts in this thread) was trivial arguing of semantics? If you don’t like nitpicking, you shouldn’t nitpick. Live by the nitpick, die by the nitpick.
The point is, your post made absolutely no contribution to the thread. Clearly, you didn’t actually misunderstand which episode was meant, since you ended your initial post with “lol.” Neither did anyone else. All you did was mention that there were additional seasons, which again is what anyone familiar with the show would know. And anyone who was unfamiliar with the show could have found the correct reference with one second of Googling. Continuing to insist that there might be confusion over which episode was meant is just silly.
Nice to know I can’t just genuinely want to know a simple question without someone taking issue with it. If it will set you at ease any further questions I have I’ll inbox you to get your opinion on it first before I post. Then we can save the topic from being derailed :).
I saw a television show a year or two ago that featured interviews with some of those volunteers. Now, it’s possible that the show’s producers picked people who they thought would make for good TV, but they all came across to me as earnest, but definitely weird, and maybe just a little bit “off,” psychologically.
Then again, it’s possible that people who have embarked on missions in the past with significant likelihood of not returning (like the early sailing expeditions) were also a little bit psychologically off, too.
It takes approx 1000 engineers looking at screens about a mile away from the launch site to get a rocket into the orbit. And about 3000 technicians to se the launch pad up. On earth.
So where will these engineers be based on the return journey when the rocket with returning Mars astronauts will be fired into space.
How can this return journey even be possible by our current technical expertise.
You might note that they didn’t need those engineers and techs to be on the Moon for the return Apollo launches. OK, they were at Houston in constant radio communication, so it’s not that dfferent. However, if you get rid of the NASA overkill paradigm, those numbers should drop by about 2 orders of magnitude. Which is one reason to let the private sector do more in space.
The lunar ascent module still needed lots and lots of engineers to set up the launch platform. But they set it up in advance, built it on Earth, and then launched the entire fully-built launch platform to the Moon. Which required even more engineering than an ordinary launch platform. And it’d require a lot more yet for a Mars launch. A Mars launch is, as many in this thread including me have said, very, very difficult. But it’s not impossible.
Personally, I think that the way to do a Mars mission right is to first build a space elevator. Once you’ve got that, the rest becomes a lot simpler. And yes, it’ll take a lot of technological advances to build a space elevator, but what gives me hope is that most of those advances will also have plenty of practical applications on Earth, and so will get developed even if the people developing them don’t care about space.
Like what, putting communication satellites into orbit? You could lift a satellite and whatever fuel is needed to move it to a higher desired orbit for example.
I said “on Earth”, as in, applications which wouldn’t require a Space Elevator. The main technological advance needed for a Space Elevator is mass-production of carbon nanofiber. Which has the greatest tensile strength per weight of any substance anyone’s ever found, by a large margin. There are an awful lot of things that people would want to make stronger and/or lighter: Everything from fishing lines and golf clubs to suspension bridges and skyscrapers. Once we’ve got a few of those built, then we can start worrying about the elevator.
Can we get past this false dichotomy? The current NASA paradigm is to work with the private sector. That was NASA’s decision in 2009, to stop development of an orbital rocket for flights to the ISS, and instead take that money and invest in private companies. Even for the Artemis moon lander, NASA is mainly working as a customer and integrator rather than the developer.
And even in the days of Apollo, it wasn’t easy to draw a sharp line between NASA and the private sector. Most of the hardware was actually built by contractors like Boeing and Lockheed. NASA is more of an intersection and collaboration between aerospace companies, universities, and the DoD than it is its own separate entity.
