Being in the U.S., I am isolated from China and the zeitgeist of its people - but I'm getting little hints that the Moon may very well be in the forefront.
With this "mood", Chinese astronauts on the Moon seems inevitable now. And I don't say that with dread, it's just more of an awakening I am having to a future that I had not thought much about until very recently. I think in fact I look forward to it because I suppose I want a technological rival to also draw the U.S. back to the Moon.
I'm not sure why though. My child-brain has never even questioned the validity of pursuing space exploration. But I guess as I get old now and see the Earth itself heading into dangerous territory I can kind of understand the naysayers that may have not been as enthusiastic as I was as a kid about a future that follows a timeline similar to Kubrick's "2001".
This isn't authoritative in the slightest, but having lived in China I got a general feeling that Chinese see themselves as a third world country that's kinda backwards and trying it's best to catch up. This was my sense talking to normal people that sell noodles and whatnot. There is a kinda separate ultra nationalist crowd that probably see things different, but they don't really represent the majority. I think landing on the Moon is symbolic of that zeitgeist of "catching up" with the West and Japan
By contrast Indian colleagues seem extremely nationalistic - in a way that's a bit scary
When I visited China late last year, I spoke to the people there on what they thought about the US and the current trade war.
Almost everyone I spoke to said that they think the US is a very advanced country and admire the US. They have no interest in changing or influencing the US to be more like themselves. They see this trade war as just "what politicians do". They seem to have an understanding of why China is doing what it needs to do and why the US is doing what it needs to do. It's nothing personal for them.
In contrast, most Americans I've interacted with see China as more of an enemy, a sort of hateful resentment towards China, and ideologically incompatible with any of their own beliefs. It is much more personal for Americans. Americans want China to be more like themselves. It shows on HN comments as well.
In the past, on Hacker News, I've had to explain to commenters here that the level of anti-China propaganda in the US is magnitudes higher than any anti-American propaganda in China. Most don't believe me because they assume that China must be deploying the same level of anti-American propaganda as the US deploys the opposite.
In 2024, if you go to a coffee shop in China, you'll very often hear American music. If you go to a movie theater in China, you'll very often see viewings for Hollywood movies. If you walk around the street, you'll see many clear American logos like Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC, Apple, Walmart, Ford, Microsoft, Tesla, etc.
If you walk around the US, you won't see many Chinese brands, if at all. In fact, even if a Chinese company operates in the US, they have to hide the fact that they're a Chinese company. American cafes won't play Chinese music. AMC isn't showing Chinese movies.
Furthermore, in a democracy, in order for politicians to win elections, they have to have a popular opinion. The US media has been non-stop anti-China for a long time now. Therefore, the popular opinion is "China bad". In order for politicians to win an election, they must be "China bad" as well. It's a cycle really. It's almost political suicide for a politician to even have a moderate view on China. It's also hard for any American media to have moderate views on China nowadays.
To me, it's not surprising at all that Chinese people in China do not hate Americans the same way Americans hate the Chinese.
On Hacker News comments, I've been accused of being paid by the CCP more times than I can remember just because I'm not automatically "China bad".
I think its more normal to have a "moderate view on China" than you would assume if you only interact with other people online, or via reading newspapers. Normal Americans don't even see their own government as being their business (with good reason, since democratic inputs are not connected to governmental decision-making), let alone some country on the other side of the world where they'll never go, or likely even meet someone from.
I suspect the modal view on China among Americans is just nothing -- they've never even thought about it. We'll never get a poll that confirms this because asking the question at all clouds the answer.
yes, there is a widespread awareness that this is all realpolitik. in the western public, everything is a moral struggle between good and evil, where the west is the good guy de facto
to add on to this - far more chinese people visit the west than the other way around. many study english. there is significantly greater understanding of their counterpart's systems in china than in the US or europe. the US has trouble recruiting people who are even literate in mandarin, FFS, to say nothing about familiarity with the culture (even more incredibly, nobody questions reporting or analysis on china produced by these illiterate people!)
It’s a lot easier for the second place player to want to cooperate with the first place than vice versa. The U.S. doesn’t want to let their control subside, and is willing to push back at nations who come too close.
My impression as a not particularly nationalistic Indian is that most Indians also see India as a third world country that's kinda backwards and is trying to catch up, the problem is that they also get overly defensive when someone else implies something similar.
I've had so many people turn from crticizing every aspect of the country to arguing that India has all the quality of life, freedom and opportunity of a western country over the tiniest of comments from me.
in the major cities at least, there is significantly growing awareness atp that domestic infrastructure, technology, etc. is simply better than in the west. people meme about western cities as being comparable to villages
however
1. they certainly do recognize areas where they are "behind". more interesting than technologies (ex. space, hn's new pet topic in semiconductors eyeroll, etc.) are things like recognizing mental health concerns and better working conditions
2. there are obviously still millions upon millions of people not in the major cities, for whom life has improved but clearly hasn't reached western standards
i dont think the spirit of what youre saying is wrong, but the inferiority complex youre implying is fading fast
That's super interesting! and I believe it. I hope it doesn't get replaced with a smug nationalism. I just generally saw a lot of curiosity about the way people do things in other nations. Maybe this was in part due to an inferiority complex, but I thought it was a very healthy amount of humility and willingness to learn from others (which is completely absent in the US)
While it's inevitable that if China continues on its current trajectory, it'll eventually become the second nation to put people on the Moon on the back of its own tech, it still doesn't feel like their efforts are as heavily directed towards that goal yet. Even the US's poorly funded (besides SLS) and half-hearted (from Congress) Artemis program feels like an urgent rush to the Moon in comparison.
I wonder if these impressions are different for those less isolated from Chinese spaceflight efforts?
Yes I am aware of it, but Russia has been talking about doing big stuff for decades now with mainly a rapidly decaying space industry to show for it, and none of the other partners are exactly notable space industry participants either. So it just looks like a way to appear to be competing with Artemis without having to actually put in the same kind of effort.
I get the impression that it'll fall apart once Artemis starts doing crewed lunar landings and China will just have to do its own independent thing. Kind of like the initial claims about Russia participating in China's space station, where it turns out that Tiangong is in an orbit that Soyuz can't even reach from its current launch sites. Then Russia claimed to be building their own space station for post-ISS activities, only to later downgrade further into a station that is not always occupied.
Put differently, it seems even less serious than when any US official uses 'sustainable' and 'SLS' in the same sentence.
I agree about China's partners. Russia may have some legacy technology to contribute, the others are lightweights. That aspect of the program is mainly about politics.
The Chinese space program however looks serious enough. Some recent press:
This is China century. You should check out Chinese space station vs the American ISS. One day we will see it is Russian-Indian-Chinese doing the Star Trek. Kubricm's 2001 will be remade with corrected actual representation in future.
Imagine how different, and worse, the world would be had explorers not ventured across the sea just to see what was on the other side. We should explore for exploration's sake.
Then let's explore for the riches that could be (are) there? If that's the motivation some people need, so be it. We're undoubtably in a better place as a society now than we were in the 1200s so it stands to reason that exploring the solar system and beyond would stand to put us in a better position come 3200 or 4200 than if we simply languish here.
North America is populated mostly by desecandants of later immigrants to the continent that had nothing to do the original "exploration". The common folk in the colonizing countries had nothing to do with it either. The original local populations were all but wiped out by disease and war. The people who actually did most of the "exploring" were probably too busy worrying about surviving scurvy and and the winter to care about such romantic ideas. And at least one country (Scotland) was effectively bankrupted and lost its independence specifically because they spent an unreasonable amount of money on packing perfectly fine people onto ships to send to their deaths.
You could say we're better off as a civilization than we were a thousand years ago. But that's true in nearly all countries, regardless of their colonial history. I suspect it has more to do with the Haber process and refrigeration than James Cook or even Ferdinand Magellan.
Focusing inwards to grow isn't "languishing". And while I'm all for the platonic idea of exploration for exploring's sake, there is also a stage of (im)maturity where trying to go somewhere new just results in bringing all your old problems with you.
It's not like everything looks absolutely better today than it was for anyone anywhere in 1200s. For one thing there wasn't the anxiougenous messages broadcasted continuously h24 about massive extinction and global warming well on their road.
This is not saying all is darker, and denies the many benefits that social and technological progresses thhat can be hand picked.
The Iroquois had farms, you know. They grew corn and lived in a communal system where unused land was shared, but there was enough for everyone to have their own area as they wanted. Women had important roles in the labour force and political system. Famine was apparently quite rare, to the degree that the first Europeans across the pond were envious of their food security.
Down south, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, and had probably around as many people living in it as London, Paris, Venice, and Lisbon combined. The marketplace alone was around the size of a European capital. Tenochtitlan had aqueducts made out of terracotta, and the people bathed twice a day and drank spring water from a separate source. The palace had multiple zoos, gardens, and aquaria, and the nicer parts of the city were built entirely out of brick and masonry. The big temple in the middle was hundreds of feet tall, and only a couple meters shorter than Notre Dame in Paris.
Of course, all of that was destroyed, completely and utterly.
The myth of the romantic Age of Sail explorer is not compatible with the power structures of the time. What king would send perfectly good ships away "just to see what was on the other side", when there were political rivals to outcompete and usurp on this side? And what king would survive sending such resources away, if they did not gain a profit from doing so (through whatever tactics of exploitation were most expedient)?
Certainly the world would have been quite different if Columbus and Cortés decided to work on themselves, instead of concluding that the Earth is shaped like a tiny pear so they should raze a couple cities they just found out about, or whatever else was going on in those men's heads…
That looks almost identical to the one from 2022. The only obvious differences that I see (besides "pre-proofs" watermarked all over it) are in the Geologic Time Scale table and the credits on the lower left.
The map itself looks the same as far as I can tell.
Yeah, this article is triggered by the "release" of the multi-page atlas, although there's no obvious way to purchase it. The JPG of the single plate has not been updated since the 2022 release; the pre-print remains the only available copy.
In addition to the big jpeg linked in the sibling, [1] shows the photo of a pretty hefty tome being published in both Chinese and English. I found some Chinese online retailers carrying the Chinese version for about $400, but I can’t find the English version anywhere.
$400, damn. Although, to be fair, that book does look to be the size of a hefty fantasy trilogy. If the printing quality is up to snuff, it should be a gorgeous and very interesting read.
I started with NASA's "CGI Moon Kit" [1] to do my little voxel-based moon game, Mooncraft2000.
Higher-resolution data would have been cool – but at some point the enormity of the data would probably mean I would have to stick to a small area of the Moon lest I fill my little server with tiles, ha ha.
I was also trying keep parity more or less between the resolution of the elevation data and image data since those voxels have a color in addition to an elevation. I suppose you could add noise to fake that though. (I did end up using Blender to pre-process the color data and bake in the shadows).
Hopefully all this moon activity stays peaceful. What a complete failure combat on the moon would represent. Very interested in the Chinese mission to the South Pole of the Moon. Hopefully they find usable water.
First you make maps, then you profit. Normally by extracting some resources or energy from the area. China is following a classic path. The impetus for Artemis becomes more clear! Haha :)
Lunar resource extraction is unlikely to be viable for anything other than building on the moon - ever. The quantities of energy involved are simply too high.
I highly doubt that’s true, sending it back to earth is fairly cheap. Getting stuff to the moon can be expensive, but there will def be certain resources worth sending back. For instance, 10Kg of gold is worth $750k. Probably could just send that back with a few astronauts.
That’s not to include the possibility that there’s certain manufactured goods that could be cheaper or only possible to produce at lower gravity.
There's a big difference between simply shooting stuff at Earth (or even simply off the moon into space) and actually sending it back. Yes, SpaceX charges $300k for sending 50kg to SSO as a rideshare but that's with all the infrastructure and logistics already in place.
Landing on the moon is a very different endeavour than simply reaching Earth orbit from Earth. In order to refuel and reuse rockets on the moon, you'd need to build out all the infrastructure for doing so first, not to mention the resources necessary for continuous operation. Even getting running water on the moon would be a huge logistical and infrastructure challenge, let alone operating a launch pad.
> Landing on the moon is a very different endeavour than simply reaching Earth orbit from Earth. In order to refuel and reuse rockets on the moon, you'd need to build out all the infrastructure for doing so first, not to mention the resources necessary for continuous operation. Even getting running water on the moon would be a huge logistical and infrastructure challenge, let alone operating a launch pad.
You can send 50kg of garbage into orbit for $300k with SpaceX. I don't think sending it to the moon would be any more cost efficient (quite the opposite). Plus with the kind of garbage where you might find that cost acceptable (long-term radioactive waste, extreme biohazards) those are the kind of stuff you don't want to have to end up detonating in the air if the rocket malfunctions.
I guess it is where it is close, and I don't really care too much about it. I like Bezos idea of space rather than Musk's: use Moon as a production base or something, let's move the bad stuffs pollution, garbage, nuclear waste) to the moon.
What I mean is: if we're sending undesirable things like garbage into space, why do we want it on the Moon? Why not just launch it out of the solar system, or into the Sun? There doesn't seem to be a good reason to favor putting it on the Moon.
> Energetically, it costs less to shoot your payload out of the Solar System (from a positive gravity assist with planets like Jupiter) than it does to shoot your payload into the Sun.
This is kind of my point regarding the Moon. It's harder to hit the Moon than to miss it, so why aim for it?
Once you get into an orbit of the Earth, you are "halfway to anywhere" [1] in terms of fuel costs. Getting out of the Earth's gravity well is the hard part, once you're up there you might as well put the trash much further away than the moon. Especially because if we're shipping trash, we can just set and forget it on a trajectory to the dump site, we don't need to worry about it taking a long time or to land safely.
With this "mood", Chinese astronauts on the Moon seems inevitable now. And I don't say that with dread, it's just more of an awakening I am having to a future that I had not thought much about until very recently. I think in fact I look forward to it because I suppose I want a technological rival to also draw the U.S. back to the Moon.
I'm not sure why though. My child-brain has never even questioned the validity of pursuing space exploration. But I guess as I get old now and see the Earth itself heading into dangerous territory I can kind of understand the naysayers that may have not been as enthusiastic as I was as a kid about a future that follows a timeline similar to Kubrick's "2001".