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Message: <blockquote data-quote="weambulance" data-source="post: 959594" data-attributes="member: 7174">Watching the 1969 lunar landing video, it's pretty clear they are moving around very easily in terms of effort. But one of the astronauts comments that, essentially, his proprioception is off and he has a poor sense of where his center of mass is. It would probably take a relatively long time to become sufficiently accustomed to the conditions on the moon to start jumping around like a jackrabbit, and it's not worth the risk of injury anyway. They still have the same mass, and jumping high, landing wrong and breaking something could be deadly in that environment.As to the dust issue, well, it's a vacuum. Any dust that was kicked up would fall immediately back the surface because there's no atmosphere full of energetic gas molecules to keep the dust afloat or even local to the lander.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7uWK0Smq4U" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7uWK0Smq4U</a> < Dust in a vacuum videoMy biggest issue with the idea of a moon landing hoax is it would require the complicity of untold thousands of people who are notably not intelligence agents for almost 50 years. That's simply unbelievable....In preview I see Paracelsus beat me to it, but that's alright.-----------As to the point of the thread...I think there's a tendency to romanticize ancient works and knowledge and make it sound like the ancients knew all kinds of things that we don't. I don't think that's true at all.There are many things we don't know the specifics of, like we don't know for sure exactly what Greek fire was, but it's not like we can't make waterproof, floating incendiary weapons with period materials. We don't know exactly how the pyramids were built, but it's not difficult to come up with valid theories for how they might have been built with the available resources. Scientists have replicated moving Easter Island statues without powered equipment. I'm sure if someone wanted to donate enough money to the effort, historians and engineers could build a small pyramid with nothing but muscle power.Many ancient structures were better built than modern things because, I suspect, they operated on a longer time horizon than we do. And of course the structures that weren't well built aren't around anymore, so we're seeing only the best now. It's absurd to imagine that if we wanted to, we couldn't build structures that would last several thousand years*. But we don't want or need to. The world changes too fast and most people don't think beyond their own lifetimes, if they manage to think even that far ahead.Everything is on a budget, built by the lowest bidder who will probably cut corners, and few things are expected to last more than a handful of decades. Why build a bridge that will last 100 years when odds are its traffic or weight capacity will be exceeded by the local community in only 20 years? Why do the roads in most of the US suck? I assure you it's not because we don't know how to build better roads.I'm not saying knowledge hasn't been lost or that humans didn't experience civilizational setbacks because of it, I just think claims that ancient civilizations actually knew more than we do--and such claims are common enough--are sensationalist. We might not do things exactly the same way, but I've never heard of anything ancients could do that we literally cannot do anymore by any method, unless you count "look at species in nature that are extinct now".I do lament the general lack of craftsmanship in the things I see around me, though.*If you replicated the Parthenon in solid aluminum on quartzite bedrock in a geologically stable region, it would probably last longer than our species.-----------------------Now allow me to make my own sensationalist prediction. I think there's a real danger that humanity will be permanently technologically crippled in the next couple centuries. We're in what I think of as the easy energy window (readily available dinosaur squeezings), and eventually (150 years?) that easy energy will run out. When it does, we're not just losing easy energy. Oil is used in virtually everything. That's okay as long as we have loads of available energy when oil runs out, to power the alternate processes we develop, but if humanity suffers a societal collapse the materials required to rebuild might simply be unavailable because we already used them.The idea is somewhat explored in the novel The Mote in God's Eye, if anyone is curious. Good book.If we did have a societal, and thus technological collapse, we'd likely lose most of our accumulated knowledge. It's almost all stored on computers or non-archival paper in books. All it would take is a few decades of low tech and that's all she wrote: most of what we know would be gone.Another possibility is we'll run out the clock. We'll dither around like retards trying to make the wind blow and the sun shine on command, fail to develop nuclear power, and slowly backslide as energy gets more and more expensive. The rich would keep their toys for awhile, but innovation would halt. I think that is unlikely because Russia or China will say fuck the environmental concerns and develop nuclear power to maturity if we don't.Some sort of correction will be applied by mother nature before too long (<1000 years, I'd guess), though. We cannot perpetually grow our population. Maybe it will be war, maybe disease, maybe a terrible natural disaster. Maybe Skynet will awake, or we'll all sink into VR and stop living in the real world. Who knows? I just hope humans have built a robust enough civilization, one way or another, to weather the storm when it comes.Personally, I'd like us to get off planet and establish a colony elsewhere as soon as possible. I don't expect it in my lifetime, but now's the time to get cracking. Wait too long, and we might lose the ability to do it at all.</blockquote>

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