A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets

The Aus­tri­an mil­i­tary engi­neer Con­rad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, con­sid­er­ing that he was work­ing on rock­ets aimed for out­er space back in the mid-six­teenth cen­tu­ry. Need­less to say, he nev­er actu­al­ly man­aged to launch any­thing into the upper atmos­phere. But you have to give him cred­it for get­ting as far as he did with the idea, a con­sid­er­able progress doc­u­ment­ed in his trea­tise “How You Must Make Quite a Nice Rock­et That Can Trav­el Itself into the Heights,” which no doubt sounds bet­ter in the orig­i­nal Ger­man. As Kaushik Pato­wary notes at Amus­ing Plan­et, its 450 pages are “filled with draw­ings and tech­ni­cal data on artillery, bal­lis­tics and detailed descrip­tions of mul­ti­stage rock­ets.”

“Born in 1509 in Dorn­bach, now part of Vien­na, to a Ger­man fam­i­ly from Bavaria,” Haas moved to Tran­syl­va­nia, then part of the Aus­tri­an Empire, ear­ly in his adult­hood. “In 1551, Haas was invit­ed by Stephen Bátho­ry, the grand prince of Tran­syl­va­nia, to Her­mannstadt (now Sibiu, Roma­nia), where he became the com­man­der of the artillery bar­racks and a weapons engi­neer.”

It was in this pro­fes­sion­al capac­i­ty that he began his research into rock­etry, which led him to dis­cov­er the con­cept of “a cylin­dri­cal thrust cham­ber filled with a pow­der pro­pel­lant, with a con­i­cal hole to pro­gres­sive­ly increase the com­bus­tion area and con­se­quent­ly the thrust,” a clear intel­lec­tu­al ances­tor of the mul­ti-stage design “still used in mod­ern rock­ets.”

Haas’ is the ear­li­est sci­en­tif­ic work on rock­ets known to have been under­tak­en in Europe. And until fair­ly recent­ly, it had been for­got­ten: only in 1961 was his man­u­script found in Sibi­u’s pub­lic archives, which moti­vat­ed Roma­nia to claim Haas as the first rock­et sci­en­tist. Though anachro­nis­tic, that des­ig­na­tion does under­score the far-sight­ed­ness of Haas’ world­view. So do the per­son­al words he includ­ed in his chap­ter about the mil­i­tary use of rock­ets. “My advice is for more peace and no war, leav­ing the rifles calm­ly in stor­age, so the bul­let is not fired, the gun­pow­der is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his mon­ey, the arse­nal mas­ter his life,” he wrote. But giv­en what he must have learned while liv­ing in polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble Euro­pean bor­der­lands, he sure­ly under­stood, on some lev­el, that it would be eas­i­er to get to the moon.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 16th-Cen­tu­ry Astron­o­my Book Fea­tured “Ana­log Com­put­ers” to Cal­cu­late the Shape of the Moon, the Posi­tion of the Sun, and More

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

Meet the Mys­te­ri­ous Genius Who Patent­ed the UFO

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Isaac Asimov Describes How Artificial Intelligence Will Liberate Humans & Their Creativity: Watch His Last Major Interview (1992)

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may be one of the major top­ics of our his­tor­i­cal moment, but it can be sur­pris­ing­ly tricky to define. In the more than 30-year-old inter­view clip above, Isaac Asi­mov describes arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as “a phrase that we use for any device that does things which, in the past, we have asso­ci­at­ed only with human intel­li­gence.” At one time, not so very long before, “only human beings could alpha­bet­ize cards”; in the machines that could even then do it in a frac­tion of a sec­ond, “you’ve got an exam­ple of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.” Not that humans were ever espe­cial­ly good at card alpha­bet­i­za­tion, nor at arith­metic: “the cheap­est com­put­er in the world can mul­ti­ply and divide more accu­rate­ly than we can.”

You could see arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as a kind of fron­tier, then, which moves for­ward as com­put­er­ized machines take over the tasks humans pre­vi­ous­ly had to do them­selves. “Every indus­try, the gov­ern­ment itself, tax-col­lect­ing agen­cies, air­planes: every­thing depends on com­put­ers. We have per­son­al com­put­ers in the home, and they are con­stant­ly get­ting bet­ter, cheap­er, more ver­sa­tile, capa­ble of doing more things, so that we can look into the future, when, for the first time, human­i­ty in gen­er­al will be freed from all kinds of work that’s real­ly an insult to the human brain.” Such work “requires no great thought, no great cre­ativ­i­ty. Leave all that to the com­put­er, and we can leave to our­selves those things that com­put­ers can’t do.”

This inter­view was shot for Isaac Asi­mov’s Visions of the Future, a tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary that aired in 1992, the last year of its sub­jec­t’s life. One won­ders what Asi­mov would make of the world of 2025, and whether he’d still see arti­fi­cial and nat­ur­al intel­li­gence as com­ple­men­tary, rather than in com­pe­ti­tion. “They work togeth­er,” he argues. “Each sup­plies the lack of the oth­er. And in coop­er­a­tion, they can advance far more rapid­ly than either could by itself.” But as a sci­ence-fic­tion nov­el­ist, he could hard­ly fail to acknowl­edge that tech­no­log­i­cal progress does­n’t come easy: “Will there be dif­fi­cul­ties? Undoubt­ed­ly. Will there be things that we won’t like? Undoubt­ed­ly. But we’ve got to think about it now, so as to be pre­pared for pos­si­ble unpleas­ant­ness and try to guard against it before it’s too late.”

These are fair points, though it’s what comes next that most stands out to the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry mind. “It’s like in the old days, when the auto­mo­bile was invent­ed,” Asi­mov says. “It would’ve been so much bet­ter if we had built our cities with the auto­mo­bile in mind, instead of build­ing cities for a pre-auto­mo­bile age and find­ing we can hard­ly find any place to put the auto­mo­biles or allow them to dri­ve.” Yet the cities we most enjoy today aren’t the new metrop­o­lis­es built or great­ly expand­ed in the car-ori­ent­ed decades after the Sec­ond World War, but pre­cise­ly those old ones whose streets were built to the seem­ing­ly obso­lete scale of human beings on foot. Per­haps, upon reflec­tion, we’d do best by future gen­er­a­tions to keep as many ele­ments of the pre-AI world around as we pos­si­bly can.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future in 1982: Com­put­ers Will Be “at the Cen­ter of Every­thing;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & the Exis­ten­tial Ques­tions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Stephen Hawk­ing Won­ders Whether Cap­i­tal­ism or Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Doom the Human Race

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Who Really Built the Egyptian Pyramids—And How Did They Do It?

Although it’s cer­tain­ly more plau­si­ble than hypothe­ses like ancient aliens or lizard peo­ple, the idea that slaves built the Egypt­ian pyra­mids is no more true. It derives from cre­ative read­ings of Old Tes­ta­ment sto­ries and tech­ni­col­or Cecil B. Demille spec­ta­cles, and was a clas­sic whataboutism used by slav­ery apol­o­gists. The notion has “plagued Egypt­ian schol­ars for cen­turies,” writes Eric Betz at Dis­cov­er. But, he adds emphat­i­cal­ly, “Slaves did not build the pyra­mids.” Who did?

The evi­dence sug­gests they were built by a force of skilled labor­ers, as the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above explains. These were cadres of elite con­struc­tion work­ers who were well-fed and housed dur­ing their stint. “Many Egyp­tol­o­gists,” includ­ing archae­ol­o­gist Mark Lehn­er, who has exca­vat­ed a city of work­ers in Giza, “sub­scribe to the hypothe­ses that the pyra­mids were… built by a rotat­ing labor force in a mod­u­lar, team-based kind of orga­ni­za­tion,” Jonathan Shaw writes at Har­vard Mag­a­zine. Graf­fi­ti dis­cov­ered at the site iden­ti­fies team names like “Friends of Khu­fu” and “Drunk­ards of Menkau­re.”

The exca­va­tion also uncov­ered “tremen­dous quan­ti­ties of cat­tle, sheep, and goat bone, ‘enough to feed sev­er­al thou­sand peo­ple, even if they ate meat every day,’ adds Lehn­er,” sug­gest­ing that work­ers were “fed like roy­al­ty.” Anoth­er exca­va­tion by Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, famed Egypt­ian archae­ol­o­gist and expert on the Great Pyra­mid, has found work­er ceme­ter­ies at the foot of the pyra­mids, mean­ing that those who per­ished were buried in a place of hon­or. This was incred­i­bly haz­ardous work, and the peo­ple who under­took it were cel­e­brat­ed and rec­og­nized for their achieve­ment.

Labor­ers were also work­ing off an oblig­a­tion, some­thing every Egypt­ian owed to those above them and, ulti­mate­ly, to their pharaoh. But it was not a mon­e­tary debt. Lehn­er describes what ancient Egyp­tians called bak, a kind of feu­dal duty. While there were slaves in Egypt, the builders of the pyra­mids were maybe more like the Amish, he says, per­form­ing the same kind of oblig­a­tory com­mu­nal labor as a barn rais­ing. In that con­text, when we look at the Great Pyra­mid, “you have to say ‘This is a hell of a barn!’’’

The evi­dence unearthed by Lehn­er, Hawass, and oth­ers has “dealt a seri­ous blow to the Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of a pyra­mid build­ing,” writes Shaw, “with Charl­ton Hes­ton as Moses inton­ing, ‘Pharaoh, let my peo­ple go!’” Recent arche­ol­o­gy has also dealt a blow to extrater­res­tri­al or time-trav­el expla­na­tions, which begin with the assump­tion that ancient Egyp­tians could not have pos­sessed the know-how and skill to build such struc­tures over 4,000 years ago. Not so. Ver­i­ta­si­um explains the incred­i­ble feats of mov­ing the out­er stones with­out wheels and trans­port­ing the gran­ite core of the pyra­mids 620 miles from its quar­ry to Giza.

Ancient Egyp­tians could plot direc­tions on the com­pass, though they had no com­pass­es. They could make right angles and lev­els and thus had the tech­nol­o­gy required to design the pyra­mids. What about dig­ging up the Great Pyramid’s 2 mil­lion blocks of yel­low lime­stone? As we know, this was done by a skilled work­force, who quar­ried an “Olympic swimming-pool’s worth of stone every eight days” for 23 years to build the Great Pyra­mid, notes Joe Han­son in the PBS It’s Okay to Be Smart video above. They did so using the only met­al avail­able to them, cop­per.

This may sound incred­i­ble, but mod­ern exper­i­ments have shown that this amount of stone could be quar­ried and moved, using the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able, by a team of 1,200 to 1,500 work­ers, around the same num­ber of peo­ple archae­ol­o­gists believe to have been on-site dur­ing con­struc­tion. The lime­stone was quar­ried direct­ly at the site (in fact the Sphinx was most­ly dug out of the earth, rather than built atop it). How was the stone moved? Egyp­tol­o­gists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool think they may have found the answer, a ramp with stairs and a series of holes which may have been used as a pul­ley sys­tem.

Learn more about the myths and the real­i­ties of the builders of Egypt’s pyra­mids in the It’s Okay to Be Smart “Who Built the Pyra­mids, Part 1″ video above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What the Great Pyra­mids of Giza Orig­i­nal­ly Looked Like

A Walk­ing Tour Around the Pyra­mids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Take a 360° Inter­ac­tive Tour Inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Includ­ing the Great Pyra­mids, the Sphinx & More

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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This Is What a Nuclear Strike Would Feel Like: A Precise Simulation

Though cer­tain gen­er­a­tions may have grown up trained to take cov­er under their class­room desks in the case of a nuclear show­down between the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union, few of us today can believe that we’d stand much chance if we found our­selves any­where near a det­o­nat­ed mis­sile. Still, the prob­a­ble effects of a nuclear blast do bear repeat­ing, which the New York Times video above does not just con­vey ver­bal­ly but also visu­al­ly, deriv­ing its infor­ma­tion “from inter­views of mil­i­tary offi­cials and com­put­er sci­en­tists who say we’re speed­ing toward the next nuclear arms race.”

The last nuclear arms race may have been bad enough, but the rel­e­vant tech­nolo­gies have great­ly advanced since the Cold War — which, with the last major arms treaty between the U.S. and Rus­sia set to expire with­in a year, looks set to re-open. Don’t both­er wor­ry­ing about a whole arse­nal: just one mis­sile is enough to do much more dam­age than you’re prob­a­bly imag­in­ing. That’s the sce­nario envi­sioned in the video: “trav­el­ing at blis­ter­ing speeds,” the nuke det­o­nates over its tar­get city, and “every­one in range is briefly blind­ed. Then comes the roar of 9,000 tons of TNT,” pro­duc­ing a fire­ball “hot­ter than the sur­face of the sun.” And that’s just the begin­ning of the trou­ble.

A destruc­tive “blast wave” emanates from the site of the explo­sion, “and then… dark­ness.” The air is full of “dust and glass frag­ments,” mak­ing it dif­fi­cult, even dead­ly, to breathe. What’s worse, “no help is on the way: med­ical work­ers in the imme­di­ate area are dead or injured.” For sur­vivors, there begins the “radi­a­tion sick­ness, nau­sea, vom­it­ing, and diar­rhea”; some of the dead­liest effects don’t even man­i­fest for weeks. “The imme­di­ate toll of this one war­head: thou­sands dead, expo­nen­tial­ly more wound­ed. Dam­age to the ecosys­tem will linger for years.” Indeed, the extent of the dam­age is too great to pon­der with­out resort to gal­lows humor, as evi­denced by the video’s cur­rent top com­ment: “My boss would still force me to come into the office the next day.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Would Hap­pen If a Nuclear Bomb Hit a Major City Today: A Visu­al­iza­tion of the Destruc­tion

See Every Nuclear Explo­sion in His­to­ry: 2153 Blasts from 1945–2015

Pro­tect and Sur­vive: 1970s British Instruc­tion­al Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

Every Nuclear Bomb Explo­sion in His­to­ry, Ani­mat­ed

When the Wind Blows: An Ani­mat­ed Tale of Nuclear Apoc­a­lypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

A Boy and His Atom: Watch The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film

What you’re watch­ing above isn’t your ordi­nary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom – holds the Guin­ness World Record for being the World’s Small­est Stop-Motion Film. It’s lit­er­al­ly a movie made with atoms, cre­at­ed by IBM nanophysi­cists who have “used a scan­ning tun­nel­ing micro­scope to move thou­sands of car­bon monox­ide mol­e­cules, all in the pur­suit of mak­ing a movie so small it can be seen only when you mag­ni­fy it 100 mil­lion times.” If you’re won­der­ing what that means exact­ly, then I’d encour­age you to watch the behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­tary below. It takes you right onto the set — or, rather into the lab­o­ra­to­ries — where IBM sci­en­tists reveal how they move 5,000 mol­e­cules around, cre­at­ing a sto­ry frame by frame. As you watch the doc­u­men­tary, you’ll real­ize how far nan­otech­nol­o­gy has come since Richard Feyn­man laid the con­cep­tu­al foun­da­tions for the field in 1959.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nano Gui­tar: Dis­cov­er the World’s Small­est, Playable Micro­scop­ic Gui­tar

Richard Feyn­man Intro­duces the World to Nan­otech­nol­o­gy with Two Sem­i­nal Lec­tures (1959 & 1984)

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

In the cred­its of Phil Collins’ No Jack­et Required appears the dis­claimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryp­tic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buy­ers, tech­nol­o­gy-mind­ed musi­cians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its intro­duc­tion, the Fairlight Com­put­er Musi­cal Instru­ment, or CMI, had reshaped the sound of pop music — or at least the pop music cre­at­ed by acts who could afford one. The device may have cost as much as a house, but for those who under­stood the poten­tial of play­ing and manip­u­lat­ing the sounds of real-life instru­ments (or of any­thing else besides) dig­i­tal­ly, mon­ey was no object.

The his­to­ry of the Fairlight CMI is told in the video above from the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald and The Age, incor­po­rat­ing inter­views from its Aus­tralian inven­tors Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. Accord­ing to Ryrie, No Jack­et Required actu­al­ly did use the Fairlight, in the sense that one of its musi­cians sam­pled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musi­cians, using the tech­nol­o­gy not yet wide­ly known as dig­i­tal sam­pling would have felt like mag­ic; to lis­ten­ers, it meant a whole range of sounds they’d nev­er heard before, or at least nev­er used in that way. Take the “orches­tra hit” orig­i­nal­ly sam­pled from a record of Stravin­sky’s The Fire­bird (and whose sto­ry is told in the Vox video just above), which soon became prac­ti­cal­ly inescapable.

We might call the orches­tra hit the Fairlight’s “killer app,” though its breathy, faint­ly vocal sam­ple known as “ARR1” also saw a lot of action across gen­res. A desire for those par­tic­u­lar effects brought a lot of musi­cians and pro­duc­ers onto the band­wag­on through­out the eight­ies, but it was the ear­ly adopters who used the Fairlight most cre­ative­ly. The ear­li­est among them was Peter Gabriel, who appears in the clip from the French doc­u­men­tary above gath­er­ing sounds to sam­ple, blow­ing wind through pipes and smash­ing up tele­vi­sions in a junk­yard. Kate Bush embraced the Fairlight with a spe­cial fer­vor, using not just its sam­pling capa­bil­i­ties but also its ground­break­ing sequenc­ing soft­ware (includ­ed from the Series II onward) to cre­ate her 1985 hit “Run­ning Up That Hill,” which made a sur­prise return to pop­u­lar­i­ty just a few years ago.

The Fairlight’s high-pro­file Amer­i­can users includ­ed Ste­vie Won­der, Todd Rund­gren, and Her­bie Han­cock, who demon­strates his own mod­el along­side the late Quin­cy Jones in the doc­u­men­tary clip above. With its green-on-black mon­i­tor, its gigan­tic flop­py disks, and its futur­is­tic-look­ing “light pen” (as nat­ur­al a point­ing device as any in an era when most of human­i­ty had nev­er laid eyes on a mouse), it resem­bles less a musi­cal instru­ment than an ear­ly per­son­al com­put­er with a piano key­board attached. It had its cum­ber­some qual­i­ties, and some leaned rather too heav­i­ly on its packed-in sounds, but as Han­cock points out, a tool is a tool, and it’s all down to the human being in con­trol to get pleas­ing results out of it: “It does­n’t plug itself in. It does­n’t pro­gram itself… yet.” To which the always-pre­scient Jones adds: “It’s on the way, though.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Her­bie Han­cock Demo a Fairlight CMI Syn­the­siz­er on Sesame Street (1983)

How the Yama­ha DX7 Dig­i­tal Syn­the­siz­er Defined the Sound of 1980s Music

Thomas Dol­by Explains How a Syn­the­siz­er Works on a Jim Hen­son Kids Show (1989)

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Every­thing Thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Syn­the­siz­er: A Vin­tage Three-Hour Crash Course

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Hear an AI Chatbot, Masquerading as a Clueless Grandmother, Waste the Time of an Internet Scam Artist

And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based tele­com com­pa­ny O2 has devel­oped a chat­bot (“named Daisy”) that per­forms a noble task. Imper­son­at­ing an elder­ly grand­moth­er, the chat­bot engages with inter­net fraud­sters and then sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly frus­trates them and wastes their time. As part of a demo, notes The Guardian, Daisy wast­ed a series of fraud­sters’ time for up to 40 min­utes each–“when they could oth­er­wise have been scam­ming real peo­ple.” The AI sys­tem was trained on real scam calls–according to Vir­gin Media O2’s mar­ket­ing direc­tor, Simon Valcarcel–so it “knows exact­ly the tac­tics to look out for, exact­ly the type of infor­ma­tion to give to keep the scam­mers online and waste time.” If you have three min­utes to spare, you can lis­ten to Daisy clown a scam artist above.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stir­ring Let­ter About Chat­G­PT and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty: “We Are Fight­ing for the Very Soul of the World”

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & the Exis­ten­tial Ques­tions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Has SpaceX Done Anything NASA Hasn’t? Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains His “Feud” with Elon Musk

One would count nei­ther Elon Musk nor Neil deGrasse Tyson among the most reserved pub­lic fig­ures of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Giv­en the efforts Musk has been mak­ing to push into the busi­ness of out­er space, which has long been Tyson’s intel­lec­tu­al domain, it’s only nat­ur­al that the two would come into con­flict. Not long ago, the media eager­ly latched on to signs of a “feud” that seemed to erupt between them over Tyson’s remark that Musk — or rather, his com­pa­ny SpaceX — “has­n’t done any­thing that NASA has­n’t already done. The actu­al space fron­tier is still held by NASA.”

What this means is that SpaceX has yet to take human­i­ty any­where in out­er space we haven’t been before. That’s not a con­dem­na­tion, but in fact a descrip­tion of busi­ness as usu­al. “The his­to­ry of real­ly expen­sive things ever hap­pen­ing in civ­i­liza­tion has, in essen­tial­ly every case, been led, geopo­lit­i­cal­ly, by nations,” Tyson says in the StarTalk video above. “Nations lead expen­sive projects, and when the costs of these projects are under­stood, the risks are quan­ti­fied, and the time frames are estab­lished, then pri­vate enter­prise comes in lat­er, to see if they can make a buck off of it.”

To go, bold­ly or oth­er­wise, “where no one has gone before often involves risk that a com­pa­ny that has investors will not take, unless there’s a very clear return on invest­ment. Gov­ern­ments don’t need a finan­cial return on invest­ment if they can get a geopo­lit­i­cal return on invest­ment.” Though pri­vate enter­prise may be doing more or less what NASA has been doing for 60 years, Tyson has­tens to add, pri­vate enter­prise does do it cheap­er. In that sense, “SpaceX has been advanc­ing the engi­neer­ing fron­tier of space explo­ration,” not least by its devel­op­ment of reusable rock­ets. Still, that’s not exact­ly the Final Fron­tier.

Musk has made no secret of his aspi­ra­tions to get to Mars, but Tyson does­n’t see that even­tu­al­i­ty as being led by SpaceX per se. “The Unit­ed States decides, ‘We need to send astro­nauts to Mars,’ ” he imag­ines. “Then NASA looks around and says, ‘We don’t have a rock­et to do that.’ And then Elon says ‘I have a rock­et!’ and rolls out his rock­et to Mars. Then we ride in the SpaceX rock­et to Mars.” That sce­nario will look even more pos­si­ble if the unmanned Mars mis­sions SpaceX has announced go accord­ing to plan. What­ev­er their dif­fer­ences, Tyson and Musk — and every true space enthu­si­ast — sure­ly agree that it does­n’t mat­ter where the mon­ey comes from, just as long as we get out there one day soon.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Explore the Sur­face of Mars in Spec­tac­u­lar 4K Res­o­lu­tion

Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘How Much Would You Pay for the Uni­verse?’

When Aster­oids Attack! Neil deGrasse Tyson and NASA Explain How To Stop an Armaged­don

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Are We Liv­ing in a Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion?: A 2‑Hour Debate with Neil deG­grasse Tyson, David Chalmers, Lisa Ran­dall, Max Tegmark & More

Space Sex is Seri­ous Busi­ness: A Hilar­i­ous Short Ani­ma­tion Address­es Seri­ous Ques­tions About Human Repro­duc­tion in Space

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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