Current Events > Is the moon landing the greatest engineering feat ever?

(+) Yeah! (+)

eh ?

I know maybe more helpful things have been invented but yeah that was humanity's peak.

MorbidFaithless posted...

I know maybe more helpful things have been invented but yeah that was humanity's peak.

what do you consider to be greater though?

Usa usa usa

Got to be something like the pyramids.

I say this because of the accomplishment in ratio to the relative tech and engineering baselines of the society that produced them.

The moon landing is amazing but doesn't seem so outlandish that the USA in the 60s could do it vs a giant ass pyramid built 4000 years ago or whatever.

Landing on a comet is more technically impressive from an engineering perspective but I have to give the moon landing credit for doing it with less processing power than a mid-range smartphone.

Rockets/aviation in general is humanities greatest feat IMO...

We went from wooden death machines to screaming metal death machines within a short amount of time.

probably

stuxnet is also a contender

The atomic bomb imo

Splitting atoms was thought to be Impossible of far off into the future according to scientists and Physicist only a few decades prior to the atom bomb.

Give the James Webb a few months...

TheMikh posted...

probably

stuxnet is also a contender

what?

DJ Roomba

Convincing everyone that the Earth is spherical, ie not flat, is the greatest achievement and lie ever told.

eh ?

No, auto reverse cassette player is.

Given how fucking shitty the computers were back then, it's fucking incredible.

Air conditioning

That and the city the Aztecs built was pretty damn impressive.

ya i think so.

Ever? No, but I would say it's in the top 10 without question. Honestly, managing to land on that comet a while back is the thing I find most impressive, at least in terms of space travel.

UT1999 posted...

what?

malware believed to have been developed by american and israeli intelligence which targeted and sabotaged nuclear facilities (particularly in iran).

quora had a fantastic description of how it works, since paywalled, but depaul university mirrored it at some point here:
https://dclo.org/2018/10/10/amazing-code-the-stuxnet-worm/

Stacking rocks is not hard. Ancient structures get hella overrated in these topics.

lilORANG posted...

Stacking rocks is not hard. Ancient structures get hella overrated in these topics.

It's more about how they managed to conceive of the technology required to lift those rocks at all. Obviously if you start with a massive technological lead it seems like child's play to move and stack extremely heavy stones, but...

Back in the days of the construction of the Pyramid of Giza, it wasn't so easy to just load a truck up with lightweight, strong building materials, drive it 50 miles to a construction site, then unload the materials using a crane to stack it up and use a rivet gun to hold the pieces in place.

There were tools, but they were absurdly primitive. Bricks had to be positioned with nothing more than manpower, rope, and wood. A more-modern example is that we have a building like the Empire State Building, which is very large and was an enormous undertaking even in the 1900s with the use of trucks, motor-powered cranes, etc.

For context? The Empire State Building weighs about 365,000 tons based on most estimates.

By comparison...The Great Pyramid of Giza weighs roughly 6,000,000 tons. It wasn't just stacked, either; there was mortar involved, there was a smooth limestone shell (that has mostly worn away, except for a small section at the very top), there were intricate interior chambers...It was a fucking colossal project. The logistics of mining and transporting 6,000,000 tons of stone would be a big deal even today, but back then it was completely absurd. Not to mention, according to records I've seen, pulley systems weren't invented until like 700 years after the pyramid of Giza was constructed.

There's a reason so many people think ancient pyramids were built and/or overseen by extraterrestrial entities--it's just so mind-boggling that ancient man, from thousands of years ago, could conceive of and carry out a task as monumental as the pyramids. They had to invent every process used. We take things like mortar and pulley systems and whatnot for granted, but back in the day those people had to work to come up with their simple machines.

lilORANG posted...

Stacking rocks is not hard. Ancient structures get hella overrated in these topics.

The ancient people of Peru devised a method of masonry that doesn't use mortar at all, just perfectly designed stones.

We're still not 100% sure how.

I would say the LHC.

the large hadron collidor is more impressive engineering wise. the moon landing isn't that complicated

I want to develop a video game and I'm currently writing it on and off when I feel like it. There is a moon landing in the first "chapter" of it.