Do you know what constantly amazes me, even more than the concept that I can load a map of anywhere in the world on my phone or the idea that I can turn a
cog on a lump of metal, and hot clean water comes out? It's the idea that it was just over 60 years between the first heavier-than-air flight, and mankind landing on none other than
the Moon! That's a colossally short space of time, considering that it was about 1,800 years between men building London and men thinking "I should really get started on one of them new-fangled sewer systems, what with all the death and all". But sewer systems are easy to build. Landing men on the Moon wasn't even something you could class as "difficult", it was
immensely hard, with even less room for error than a man's response to the statement "I'm fine". To give you some idea as to how hard it was, it would be like working out the precise speed, trajectory, timing and conditions to successfully throw a frisbee from one end of a football field to the other, while hitting an
exact spot on a moving target, and then someone at the other end throwing it back to another
exact spot on a moving target. While strapped to explosive fuel. During a hurricane. At night. And if you make the slightest error at any point in the proceedings, people will die a long, drawn out fiery/vacuum death and the entire frisbee-throwing programme will be scrapped forever. All that, just over 60 years after a rickety airplane flew a distance less than the wingspan of a 747.
Read more...
