Chuck Yeager has died

Re:Chuck Yeager has died by raldi on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:00AM (#25342054)

My watch is pretty neat. Self-driving cars, when perfected, will prevent incredible amounts of death and suffering. Electric bikes and the plummeting costs of solar tech and batteries will save the planet. And it's unbelievable how fast these covid vaccines were developed, tested, manufacturered at gigascale, and (soon) distributed to every corner of the planet.

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Re:Chuck Yeager has died by stonogo on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:25AM (#25342220)

Is this an intentional reference?

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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Re:Chuck Yeager has died by ryandrake on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:26AM (#25342230)

Yea, yea... but besides the Internet, smartphones, smart watches, self-driving cars, electric bikes, solar tech, advanced batteries, and amazing mRNA vaccines, where is my promised future??

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Re:Chuck Yeager has died by musicale on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:47AM (#25342314)

Yeah we're missing 2001's lunar hotel and human spaceflight to Jupiter, but killer AI seems on point.

Quadcopter/drone tech seems like it's bringing us closer to Blade Runner's flying cars of 2019, although noise and safety are major issues.

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Re:Chuck Yeager has died by rswail on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:07AM (#25342404)

and jetpacks! Aside from internet, smartphones, smart watches, self-driving cars, electric bikes, solar tech, advanced batteries, amazing mRNA vaccines, what has technology ever done for us? Nothing!

r/unexpectedmontypython

I was a "NASA" kid, was 5 when man landed on the moon, blew off a uni exam to watch the first shuttle landing, still amazed when a Falcon 9 lands on a ship, can hear "1201 alarm, kicking up some dust" and see the grey video and the shadow of the LEM...

But Chuck Yeager making that first "boom" is still the boundary between yesterday and today.

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Re:Chuck Yeager has died by dotancohen on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @05:54PM (#25352655)

I would say that Gagarin's flight was more a boundary beween before and after than was the flight of the X-1.

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