Chang'e-3 Lunar Rover Landing Slated For 13:40 UTC Saturday 90
savuporo writes "The Chinese Chang'e-3 probe will be landing on the moon [Saturday], 13:40 UTC. CCTV is likely to carry the event live as they did for initial launch. According to technical overview of the mission scenario and instruments, the landing will be fully autonomous with active landing hazard avoidance, which is the first time this has been attempted on any planetary landing. More real-time updates can be found on Twitter with ChangE3 hash tag and NASASpaceFlight forums live event section."
Re:Place your bets... (Score:5, Insightful)
Place your bets on something going wrong. Cause you know, China is known for things that explode or catch fire that shouldn't.
I hoping them the best, sry.
Racist dick (Score:2, Insightful)
You sir, are a racist dick.
Let me guess, you are American and know that only Americans can build space vechicles right?
Remember that time that NASA totally fucked up a Mars probe because they were too stupid to use metric?
Remember that time that NASA fucked up the Hubble telescope because they were too stupid to make sure the optics were correct before shooting into space? Geez, seems like all NASA does is fuck things up!
Of course, I know it is not true that they only fuck things up, but I am making a point.
China, despite your ignorant racist views is every bit as advanced as 'Murrica or Russia. Maybe you should think about going there. Maybe should consider leaving your basement and going to ANY other country.
Sad, but so often true; politics is everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Great example; the same is true of people living in harsh climates like snowy areas -- or even, like on slashdot of people giving each other technological advice yet probably working in competing companies. One might even see that in a marriage -- with spouses working together when a child is sick yet also squabbling over housework... Life is at the interface of fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, competition and cooperation...
Politics is a process of resource allocation by discussion (backed ultimately by violence and also gift-giving or its withdrawal), as opposed to, say, mainstream US capitalist/consumer economics which is about resource allocation by moving the digital equivalent of pieces of artificially-scarce green paper around (within a larger US political context, as above backed by violence and gift-giving or its withdrawal). Yet, there is no reasons those communications and currencies could not be emails and IRC chats and bug tracker pstings, like coordinates much of Debian GNU/Linux.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization [slashdot.org]
So, it is not unreasonable to say that wherever human go, they will take some aspects of all that along. My father travelled the world as a merchant marine sailor for about twenty years, and one of his favorite sayings was a variation on "wherever you go, you take yourself along".
Yet. I think there is a deeper issue like mentioned in my sig. China has demonstrated new technologies of abundance by putting a robot on the moon powered by solar and nuclear technologies. Those technologies could produce physical abundance for all by today's standards -- even for trillions of people via self-replicating space habitats. That is a new truth. It can be a new truth even if probably humans may always find things to squabble about, like two kids in a room filled with toys can fight over the same one for whatever reasons of the moment.
Yet, such new technologies in a way make the world a smaller place, like the how the US space program to put a man on the moon in the 1960s was seen in US government as only justified in getting lots of funding in order to show the USSR that the USA was capable of landing a nuclear missile on Red Square. So many technologies can make the world smaller and smaller relative to our capacity to use such technologies to cause harm, like I write about here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
We may always have competition between people for various reasons (the mating dance?), yet our society can still figure out ways to structure that competition in healthier ways.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm [shareintl.org]
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"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These word