A few days after we recent interviews, science writer Joe Pappalardo took his 89-year-old father to the SpaceX Space Base in Boca Chica, Texas. The older Mr. Pappalardo had never seen anything like it before entering the facility. At the entrance, he examined the message “GATEWAY TO MARS” carved into the huge exterior wall.
These kinds of declarative (and imperative) statements evoke something pre-linguistic in us. For some reason, humans evolved into conquerors in search of more territory. This is good. It’s one of our best qualities.
There, father and son approached the massive megastructures of Elon Musk’s aerospace wonderland, and Musk’s promise became even more pronounced. Of course spaceflight is possible, but the most impressive thing is the possibility of safe return using rockets and other vehicles.
As Mr. Pappalardo strolled through the bustling, sun-drenched, futuristic streets of the city, the world around him must have felt mechanically altered. Protruding from the crowd are his three giant modules, each 160 feet tall. Was this a spire or beam at a science park?
Everything was like that advanced.
He didn’t expect much construction, but on second thought, it made sense. Invention and experimentation require continuous maintenance. Like the ants transporting soil to the empire, the hustle and bustle of their activity became a spectacle in itself. He couldn’t believe how many people were there and wondered why so many people had cameras.
“One guy had a telephoto zoom lens on his camera,” he told me. “He was taking pictures all. Maybe you’re thinking, “Maybe he was a spy.” I don’t know yet. “
very big chopsticks
Kevin Ryan
Pappalardo remembers waking everyone up to witness Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. The whole family was vacationing on the Jersey Shore. They were all tired after a day at the beach, but it didn’t matter because there was an American guy on the moon wearing giant space boots.
But SpaceX’s machine is much more advanced than that.
Weighing 5,000 tons, Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, rivaling the height of the Pyramids of Giza. Designed for reuse. Starbase has had 10 of her Starship launches, including 4 of his landings.
“The launch pad has an attachment called a ‘chopstick.’ They plan to bring the rocket back and land it on the launch pad from which it left. This is quite remarkable.” Pappalardo told me.
As you can see from his famous quote, this guy is incredibly sharp. For his age, But in general. We talked to him for 30 minutes in the late afternoon, but he could have kept talking for his hour or so.
Born and raised in Haverstraw, New York, Mr. Pappalardo worked as a chemist for decades. His attitude and intellectual precision reflect this, although not in the form of austerity.
I ask, “Do laboratory principles manifest themselves in a starbase setting?”
“Well, it varies a lot,” he says. “Because in the lab, we’re dealing with small things, but the principle is the same: When you want to accomplish something, you make a hypothesis about how you want to get there, and you test it to get there. Masu.”
sailor
Mr. Pappalardo is a Northeastern baritone who recalls his sailing days. One trip took me from Antigua in the Caribbean to Charleston, South Carolina. He quickly learned the difference between sailing straight across the Bermuda Triangle and sailing through the fury of the Atlantic Ocean.
When a storm comes, the waves can become mountains.
“On the left you can see the waves overhead, and on the right you can see the waves overhead,” he told me. “Okay, now we understand the physics that waves can’t do that. Waves can’t combine, but we don’t really know that while we’re there.”
Sometimes the endless waves stung the loneliness – a repeated howl that filled the clouds. But perhaps most of all, he remembers moments of serenity.
“When you get behind the wheel at night, the boat hisses over the waves and there’s nothing around you. It’s pitch black and all you can see is the moon. It’s so beautiful.”
Please remember. Humanity once knew of a world of clear water, and all we did was build ships and explore it.
how history fell apart
Head a little east along the Gulf of Mexico and you’ll hit South Padre Island. There, eager college students have been known to chug until they start throwing up.
On the other side, Brownsville has repeatedly been a battleground of all kinds over the past two centuries. This is the southernmost tip of the United States, he is one of them, and you can actually contact Mexico by sneezing.
The closeness of it all is eerily American, and it feels as if these places were accidentally spilled and sucked in like a Ziploc bag full of random souvenirs that don’t belong anywhere.
Of course, the uncanny nature of the events, ideas, and places in which a man like Mr. Pappalardo starts life as the son of Italian immigrants and then quickly and invisibly melts into the depths of history like ours What could be more American than a collection of random coincidences? So vibrant, strong and broken?
dromology
We discuss the engulfing pace of change, the heat of acceleration that continues to outpace everything and even itself. Too powerful and inhuman to be tiring. These breakthroughs are being put into action every day.
“The problem is that they are progressing so fast that no one can keep up,” he told me. “But whenever this topic comes up, I always think of my father. He went from his horse-drawn carriage days to being a man on the moon. There’s no greater variation than that.”
This debate is between evangelists of the neurally connected frontier, where instrumental technology is built and destroyed only at someone’s command, and overzealous snobs trying to convince the larger society to be sad about an entirely new capitalism. It is being carried out in Depressing way.
In his book The One-Dimensional Man, Frankfurt School mainstay Herbert Marcuse characterizes technology as a “tool for control and domination” and mass media as an integral part of that process. (Well, at least he’s right about the questionable habits of the media apparatus.)
Marcuse frames this as the technological domination of our “advanced industrial society,” and is intent on unsettling the “new forms of control” that arise as part of this “one-dimensional society.”
It strikes me as a paranoid and stubbornly theoretical stance, one dimensional in itself. This obsession with characterizing technology as totalitarian is inconsistent. Instead, we have a society shaped by technocrats and bureaucrats, who certainly have special access to large-scale events. However, this is completely different from owning an iPhone.
Technology is precisely what dampens and even subverts all kinds of political jubilation.that To do Technology seems to have eradicated geography as a reality or obstacle. But in return, we now have unlimited access to the human code of thought.
Like the other anecdotes Pappalardo offers, this one is guided by an inquisitive mind.
In his book Future Possibilities, Italian philosopher Bifo Berardi writes: “Technology is not a chain of logical implications, but a field of inherent and contradictory possibilities.” These possibilities strengthen the cohesive power of his network of digital neural networks.
In a world where all network machines, including ourselves, and all the equipment we turn into accidents and failures are constantly in close proximity, only one of them will succeed regularly. The ship still belongs to both the expedition and the wreck.
Because methods, questions, and curiosity can soften the harshness of progress.
