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Science & Alternative Science / Re: Blue Origins / William Shatner space launch (T-1hour)
« on: October 14, 2021, 03:53:09 PM »Thorks got a point.Not really. He’s got a bad case of confirmation bias and he’s operating in the sceptical context. Something which he and other FE people do very selectively. They don’t apply that much scrutiny to anything else.
Well legitimacy aside, it is curious how the observers were so bubbly and lucid after the violent G force that would have knocked them out. That's not something that takes seconds to recover from. Especially if its some out of shape 90 year olds first time. Did anyone even mention the G force experiences in detail?
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QuoteWhat possible need do people have that need them to go 100km vertically into the air?No one “needs” to climb Everest, or go to Antarctica. But humans have something in them, a spirit of adventure which drives us to do these things. To boldly go, to coin a phrase.
If you go climb Everest or Antarctica it personally challenges you. It's a real experience. This roller coaster is completely out of the passengers control and you gaze out a window for a few minutes. That's it. That's what tens of millions of dollars gets you. And if this was an industry with many flights every year, think of that pointless environmental damage. A trip like this is the height of selfish snobbery.
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QuoteAnd what do they see apart from the sky going from blue to black?They see the globe earth as it really is. They get the experience of weightlessness. They get a perspective on the earth which still very few people get. I think a lot of people would want that experience if they could.
At 100km high the Earth below still looks flat. You see very little of the Earth. The horizon would be ~1133km. If the ISS which is 4x higher than what Blue Origin gets was over the middle of Australia, it would not even see any of the coast lines
Weightlessness can be achieved on a commercial airplane. You dont need to spend $28 million. I personally could not care about 'personally' seeing the Earth from that perspective. The money, risk, G force hell and sheer pointlessness of the trip is not worth the couple of minutes up there. Just look at documentaries.
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QuoteAnd if people think space tourism is going to convince flat earthers that the earth is roundI don’t think that. Some people’s cognitive dissonance is off the charts and they’re never going to accept the truth of the shape of the earth. Space tourism is another reason their position is untenable but as we see in this thread some people will dismiss any evidence which contradicts their worldview.
As above, the Earth still looks pretty flat from 100km high. It does have a circumference of almost 40K km afterall
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QuoteGoing forward, humanity should concentrate on ways to travel that reduce our dependence on finite resources. Not waste them all and pollute our planet just to satisfy the wet dreams of a fewI largely agree, but I believe that as these things go Bezos’ rocket is relatively “green”.
One day, when we really need to get off this planet, we will find the resources scarce and look back and be like 'you know if we didn't have an entire industry devoted to pissing away our future resource needs, we might have been able to go.....
Or maybe the dumping of billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases screws us over before we get that chance.
Now for literally 10x less money (so you could take this trip 10x for every Blue Origins 1 time, you could go on Russias Mig29 'edge of space' (not really) flights. Sit in a fighter jet, go 20km high and do all sorts of acrobatics, fly at 2000km/h and the trip lasts a whole 45 minutes. You may not see a horizon of 1133km but you will see 505km. Honestly the difference in 'curvature' between those would be miniscule. At least the Mig actually goes sideways and offers a cooler view from a cockpit
http://29mig.com/strato/
Not sure on its carbon footprint per flight. But at least it's more fun and thrilling
