I've never seen a more accurate application of this meme, honestly. The amount of grandstanding by the US on one achievement out of a hundred is impressive.
Not much to gain by going there. Wildly corrosive, too hot, too hard to terraform with present tech.
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Terraforming isn't on the table anywhere. We can't even stop fucking up this planet, let alone unfuck it, let alone apply much more advanced unfucking tech on planets without any of the environmental cycles we take for granted.
Space programs do science stuff and military stuff. Revisiting Venus would be for science stuff.
Space programs definitely do science and stuff. All I meant to say was that Venus might not be the lowest hanging fruit for scientific discovery.
It's really expensive to go there. Doesn't mean we shouldn't.
I see now how my post could read as an elon-fanboi type "colonize all the things" and that was not what I intended.
I do think Atmospheric sensor clusters on Venus would be pretty awesome. It could give us an interesting set of insights into a wildly different environment.
At 50km high it is literally the most Earth-like environment in the whole of the solar system (outside of Earth / the ISS / Tiāngōng obviously)
You wouldn't even need a spacesuit or a pressure suit to stand outside, just a respirator and some light protection against acid
One of the only places in our system where you could feel the wind of another planet in a cool 25C against your face without protection except for eye goggles (not for very long though, again, acid).
The idea of floating outposts there is at least 50 years old (and comes from a soviet scientist originally IIRC); balloons filled with breathable air - which is a nice reserve for the same as a bonus - would have enough buoyancy at this altitude to support relatively large outposts attached to them. Not only that, the cosmic ray protection afforded by the atmosphere at that altitude is basically similar to the one on Earth; and those balloons wouldn't need to be pressurized either, just filled, meaning if you get a leak you have potentially hours to fix it (or even days / more if you connect several such balloons together with some buoyancy margin).
I'd always assumed that floating Venus colonies were fun sci-fi nonsense. I'm kinda taken aback at how feasible it actually is
Jesus Christ liberals' brains are mush. the point of science is to learn things, not find new planets to ruin
Death to America
hard to terraform with present tech
What place isn't hard to terraform with present tech?
Hell, even terraforming Earth with present tech can prove a challenge at times.
I mean other than scientific discovery like what's up with the phosphine, we keep detecting it and debunking it sure would be nice to have something floating there to figure it out (or landed for however long they last)
BAHHHH I MADE AN ESSAY ABOUT THIS LIKE LAST WEEK CAN YOU PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP
Soviets are also the only country to have landed on Venus. Not just the first, the only one.
The images from Venus are absolutely fascinating. If I recall, the craft that took the first images burned up after a very short amount of time (like 50 or so minutes) because of the extreme heat.
It always comes across to me as maximum cope when Americans brag about "winning the space race". I mean, even if it was true, the US's economy was massively wealthier than the USSR's. This "race" was literally between the wealthiest country on earth and a very poor country. Even at the height of the USSR, its GDP was only about half that of the US's.
It really does not show the US's "strength" to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources. It's a sign of weakness to actually even be in a "race" with a developing country to begin with, which suggests they are actually competitive and have a chance of winning.
That's really what the whole "space race" shows. It does not matter who "won", the very fact a poor developing nation could compete with the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth in the first place demonstrates the extraordinary weakness of the capitalist system.
The US only placed a man on the moon because of NASA, which they founded as a direct response to the Soviets launching Sputnik. Meaning, the US literally only implemented this space program as a response to the Soviets, they were not a natural outgrowth of the US's system and would not have happened without the Soviets (as we have seen NASA massively defunded ever since). The fact the US even got on the moon in the first place only happened because of the USSR.
That was back in 1969, and we're now in 2022 yet, funnily enough, the capitalist private sector has not got a man that far yet.
—aimixin
It really does not show the US's "strength" to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources.
It really does show the US's strength when no country has nearly the same amount of resources.
"Everyone else being weaker than you does not show your strength" is a very odd take.
I'm not sure what you're arguing.
Yes, the US has a large amount of wealth. That is what makes them strong.
they ought to perform better
So you're saying they should be even stronger (than the strongest nation to ever exist)?
Or are you saying that "strength" is not about the total power one has, but about the efficiency with which one can convert resources into power?
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Where did they get all that wealth from?
Where did they get all that wealth from, motherfucker?
I never argued that they became strong using rightful measures.
But they did become strong.
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So if you agree that the US obtained its wealth through plundering and imperialism then what the fuck was your original point? I don't think you have one and you're trying to debate just to debate.
My first comment:
It really does not show the US's "strength" to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources.
It really does show the US's strength when no country has nearly the same amount of resources.
That was my sole point. Noone having nearly as much resources as the US does show the US's strength.
It does not matter how they aquired those resources or how strong they could theoretically be.
My point was simple and clear from the beginning on: USA = strong.
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There are different kinds of strength. One kind of strength is to be really good at colonizing and plundering the rest of the world. Another kind of strength is to be really good at dreaming of new horizons and using limited resources to reach them. America has more of the first kind of strength, the USSR had more of the second kind.
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I'm not sure what you're arguing.
Do you not understand what plundering is?
Wealth extraction from the global south into the global north via american companies involved in resource extraction - minerals, gases, etc etc. Rights to said resources gained at the barrel of the gun of the US military itself or a coup instigated by the CIA.
For the love of god read a book about modern imperialism and how it works and save us from your international political illiteracy. https://resistir.info/livros/imperialism_john_smith.pdf
You completely deviated from the original point.
Never did I claim that the USA gained their strength rightfully, so why are you arguing against that?
I only ever claimed that the USA having significantly more resources does show their strength.
You can discuss the bad things the USA does and has done, but I don't know why you're discussing them with me.
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You said you did not understand what the other person was saying. This can only come from not really understanding what imperialism is and how it functions.
I explained what they were saying.
You are now trying to divert away from that. Because it is not a topic you wish to engage in while you do this nationalist thing of engaging in apologetics and sly weasel-word half-hearted US support.
Is guess I could've said "I'm not sure why you're arguing" instead of "I'm not sure what you're arguing".
you do this nationalist thing
I'm not American, how would speaking well of a nation I've never even visited be nationalist? (I can already imagine you calling me a traitor to my own country)
half-hearted US support
As opposed to full-hearted US support? You don't have to be extremely against something or extremely for something (though I'm aware extreme leftists would like to see it that way).
I do recognize the negative things the US does and has done. But that does not mean that I'll unreasonably make up negatives (like the USA not being strong while being the strongest nation).
There are enough factual things to dislike the USA about, no need to make stuff up on top of that.
This isn't hard to understand. Either you're very dense or just another debate pervert.
Probably both.
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Politically illiterate dumbass posts a self-own.
This image depicts liberals and fascists being close to each other, while the far-left (hexbear) is far away from them.
Yes. And that's what "hexbears be like".
Because you call anyone not far left a liberal, therefore not differentiating between people who are not far left.
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Do you think fascism is something unique? Different from capitalism in some way?
Fascism is not unique or different from capitalism. It is capitalism converted into a format that allows the highest level of extreme violence to be carried out against its enemies. It occurs when capitalists feel threatened by socialists, gaining monetary support, media and backing from the bourgeoisie who recognise the need to use ultra-violence to exterminate the revolutionary threat to their existence. It is not a separate or unique thing to capitalism. It is still capitalism.
We only need to look at the places where fascism was not defeated to see proof of this. The fascists won in Spain and in Chile, they were not defeated like they were in Italy or Germany. What happened there? Did fascism ever become anything unique? No it did not. The fascists maintained and even increased capitalism, the term "privatisation" comes from Hitler himself. Over time in the countries where fascism won, once they defeated the left, exterminated them and their leadership, rendered them inert and no longer a threat to their bourgeoisie, these countries simply morphed back into liberalism which is a more efficient form of exploitation and extraction. Once the ultra violence was no longer required they morph back into "friendly" versions.
It is this that you are seeing when we discuss fascists and liberals in the same breath. They are allies in their support for capitalism and opposition to socialism.
And who exactly becomes the fascists? They don't simply spawn out of a spawning pool. They were liberals until the media, money and influence of the bourgeoisie backing the conversion of society to fascism successfully radicalises them to the cause.
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I just see *removed externally hosted image*
here's a link to the picture this person posted https://lemdro.id/pictrs/image/d6c8a45d-d579-48de-903b-6d7f5f885fe0.jpeg
maybe I'm daft but this picture makes no sense to me. So leftists are on the left, liberals are in the middle, and... I guess the point is that instead of continuing rightward it loops back around to liberal again? Are you mocking leftists for lumping liberals and conservatives together?
They are all liberals. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. They are all ideologically committed to capitalism.
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I never finished writing my response. ADHD and too many tabs :/
We lump them together because liberal and conservative politicians are unanimous on a lot of topics we care about.
off the top of my head, US politicians from both parties:
- do nothing about climate change
- want owners rather than workers to control production -- this is sort of a big deal to communists!
- serve (and often are themselves) business owners, bankers, and landlords rather than working people
- Clinton deregulated finance and contributed to the 2008 crisis, allowed huge corporate media mergers, and tried to privatize social security
- Obama let Citigroup pick his 2008 cabinet, did fuckall to help foreclosed Americans, and presided over the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history
- Biden has done next to nothing to protect American workers from COVID, and rail workers are still on-call 24/7 with only eight sick days a year
- 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare but it remains politically impossible
- support wars and coups
- Clinton bombed and sanctioned Iraq back to the stone age, causing around 1.5 million deaths
- liberal media helped sell the Iraq war, which caused over a million further deaths in Iraq
- Obama obliterated the once-prosperous country of Libya, and there are now open-air slave markets
- Biden continues to support the siege in Yemen, which has killed hundreds of thousands
- support massive wealth extraction from the global south
- IMF and World Bank loans that enforce austerity and depress wages
and on social issues, democrats are one half of a one-way ratchet: republicans make it worse, democrats do not make it better
:::spoiler some more thoughts I think there are two reasons democrats are ineffective on social issues, and maybe you'll find them too cynical: 1) as long as our basic rights are in jeopardy, we have no leverage to ask for progress, on things like universal healthcare, that the rich donors oppose, and 2) offering effective resistance would set the precedent that the government has the power to help people, and then people might ask for more improvements to our lives, which, again, the rich donors oppose. And for that matter, a lot of the politicians themselves have backgrounds as rich businessmen, bankers, executives, and landlords, so their own class interests oppose ours.
So, anyway, liberal and conservative politicians look similar to us.
But sometimes the voters also look similar, especially the well-off ones! I have heard so many disgusting takes about the homeless from well-off liberals. And no one seems to really oppose the massive wealth extraction from the global south. And too many support wars and coups at the time and then oppose them later when the lies come out, only to support the next one and believe the next lies. Too many liberals seem to support awful things, tolerate them, or have no knowledge of them.
Now this is me going on a petty tangent, but I also think there are some annoying cultural differences between certain liberals and socialists. Many liberals buy into meritocratic myths. They see liberal politicians as the adults in the room making the hard decisions, while ignoring the class interests of those politicians. They fawn over British royals. They watch shows about aristocrats and DC politicians. They watch game shows where working class people try to appease a panel of rich judges. And way too often, liberals seem to care more about civility and norms than about what actually happens in the world. As soon as Trump came to power, W. Bush was fucking rehabilitated in an instant. Never mind the wars, never mind 2008. At least he was civil.
Maybe I'm being too harsh, but this is the impression I get. :::
...But anyway, the bottom line here is that we're socialists. We want workers to control production. Liberals, and conservatives, don't.
you might disagree with the points I raised, and that's fine — just realize that we communists do have our reasons to lump liberals and conservatives together. It’s not just vibes. We have an actual coherent perspective lol.
It's like the tortoise and the hare, us caught the soviets sleeping
No one gives a shit who's first at the check points just who crosses the line first
That really depends on where you consider the "finish line" to be? Is it the Moon, Mars, Venus?
The Soviets have done things in space that the US has not, like sending a probe to Venus. That's why I bring up my first point. The Soviets were also the first to land a probe on Mars. The US has also done things the Soviets have not, like sending a man to the moon. So where do we define the end point for the "space race"?
The finish line is the most impressive thing America managed to do first, so I always win 
When it comes to contributions to the body of international science, putting space stations in the air and putting rovers on planets are a lot more important than the propaganda victory of a spacewalk. A person doing a spacewalk on the moon isn't even as efficient at collecting mineral and soil samples as a rover would be. It's also kinda irresponsible since it puts lives at higher risk than just doing standard space missions.
At the end of the day though, this is just a communist shitpost. Science has always been international collaboration and not a national chauvinist thing. Communists are the first to acknowledge that since communism is an internationalist ideology that upholds the working class.
No one besides the US wanted to put a man on the moon, because it was a pointless and dangerous stunt.
However, the Soviets shall get the last laugh, because 50 years later the American SpaceX company would copy the same concept for their super heavy lift vehicle design (Super Heavy used for Starship), which in many ways conceded that the Soviet design was a more viable one
This happens often in American industry, especially aeronautics . More promising designs are considered "ahead of their time" and often lose out to more conventional designs, only for the more promising designs to return later and be adopted. With regards to fighter jets, one just needs to look at the YF-23 vs the YF-22. The battle for the fifth gen fighter jet program. The YF-23 was faster, stealthier, more maneuverable in most common scenarios. The YF-22 ended up winning, and becoming the F-22, because it had thrust vectoring and was more appealing to conventional tactics. But now that the US wants to build a sixth gen fighter plane, and other countries want to build 5.5 gen planes, all the proposed designs look extremely similar to the YF-23. Almost as if it was the better overall design. Similar is happening with the Airforce's proposed replacement for the F-35, the replacement looks like a clone of an F-16XL. An experimental design that also lost out on a contract to the F15E if I remember correctly, but is now coming back.
I didnt expect even this one to make the federated libs mad because its just... basic description of the facts. But ok.
I don't subscribe to that one. Personally, to me, it seems to require too many people to stay silent to sincerely fake.
Especially at a time when tensions between Russian federation and USA are at an all time high. They have an extreme incentive to lie in the opposite direction and say America never landed on the moon. But they didn't say that.
would you rather send actual people with sapience in first? What's next, no labrats for medical technology?
You probably mean sapience and not sentience, because dogs and monkeys definitely can feel things.
I'm going to give an opinion that some may not agree with. The most ethical form of eating meat is from an animal that can consent. Since we can't ask a dog, monkey, cow, pig, etc. if they want to be consumed, the most ethical meat is humans who consent to it. If you disagree please explain how.
The same goes for sending things into space to die for us.
What if I just don't care. I'm against needless cruelty, but for the near future we will need some amount of meant (until correct substitutes are found). The things bred for centuries to be meat will continue to do so for the near future, until we have the time and effort to spare in order to change it.
As someone above pointed out to me, the testing nor space deployment of animals was not truly necessary for any data, its all needless cruelty that gives no results. That practice should be ended.
edit: and thank you for the correction
You'll probably get flak for this but I agree.
if humans can only progress into space by first kidnapping animals, then they don't deserve to see the stars.
Indeed; I'd have happily volunteered instead of a monkey or a cat for such an endeavour for the benefit of our species; and I'm sure I'm not the only one. There's something far more moral about testing such things with people fully aware of what they're doing and the risks compared to sentient beings not comprehending what's happening to them and likely being in a panic all along the way. There should be a word for it, really.
Oh wait, I think there is: consent
btw
Damn morally superior people always mentioning their moral superiority while making a morally superior argument. Let me eat my eggs in peace (I still eat eggs but I promise only from farms that have lots of space for their chickens, I'm almost there comrade)
Look, this is just cope. Once both nations had icbms, the space race was a propaganda and national prestige thing. The fact that most people say amerikkka won the space race means they did.
The fact that most people say amerikkka won the space race
in 
maybe. let's try getting poll data from outside the 
Also, no not everything comes down to propaganda victories lol. For example, in warfare, it's highly possible to win a propaganda victory at home among your indoctrinated population while losing the actual war. You can have all your citizens believe your army is killing 5161864681614 enemy combatants every day when in fact it's mostly killing civilians and getting bogged down in counter-insurgency. This is the form most US wars take, after all.
Most people think Uncle Sam won WWII thanks to decades of propaganda by Hollywood.
Rethink your thesis.
Why?
Why even is getting a man on the moon important?
And if it was important why did we stop?
The value of manned missions was propaganda which is why the Apolo mission was cancelled when it stopped getting TV ratings. Because getting humans on the moon didn’t actually deliver anything of much importance except those TV ratings.
“First game of golf on the moon” good job USA you did it meanwhile the USSR landed on Venus.
I wouldn't say putting a man on the moon isn't important. It's certainly very cool. But is it as important as satellites? Fuck no!
And if it was important why did we stop?
Like it’s cool in a “I’d like to take a submarine to visit the titanic” dare devil sense but why was it important?
How did it improve the world?
To be fair, we went back multiple times, and india just put a lunar lander on the south pole. Lots of valuable scientific data about our closest celestial neighbor has been discovered through these missions.
While I see what you mean, systematic scientific research about the moon, carried out over decades by multiple countries, however imperfect, is far different than the hubris of a bourgeois dipshit getting himself crushed at the bottom of the ocean, because he wanted to see a glorified cemetery and thought safety regulations were for liberal pinko cucks.
Fun fact: every crewed mission to the Moon in human history was done during the first presidential term of the Nixon regime.
You can't say it isn't copium and then go into a bunch of sour grapes about how the moon is dumb and who cares. The whole world was pretty psyched about it at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Space_Race
And it's not like someone who reads this meme is going to come away with an accurate impression of the space race. People in this thread are talking about how "the US did this one thing and that's' it"
Yeah people were “psyched” about it but when they stopped being psyched and stopped watching - when they lost the tv ratings - the Apolo mission was canned.
How is what you said even vaguely a rebuttal of the idea it was showy propaganda with minimal scientific value?
Playing golf on the moon actually wasn’t an important thing to do. It’s cool, I’d like to do it… but it’s really pretty superficial. It’s a vanity propaganda piece and nothing else that’s why we didn’t go back because it doesn’t matter.
How is what you said even vaguely a rebuttal of the idea it was showy propaganda with minimal scientific value?
Why is such a rebuttal needed? The fact that the space race was about propaganda first and scientific and engineering advancement second is baked into the conversation. Does it apply more to the moon landing versus other parts?
And they did science on the moon.
your comment reduces to “it was of minor scientific value but a propaganda win” which is exactly what I’m saying.
It's four sentences long, why are you reducing it? I was agreeing that this meme is cope. You're the one who moved to that framing.
minimal scientific value
The Apollo program lead to a ton of advancement in a bunch of different fields. So many spinoff technologies were created because of it. Also rovers go at a pretty slow pace, humans are more efficent for in-depth research.
let me use an analogy from software development. the soviets wrote all the foundational code libraries, and the american forked those libraries to build a shiny web application
Well with the only diference that they both used closed source code. So both of them were on their own.
they both used closed source code
USA/USSR(later RF)/PRC have all collaborated on space science, both during and after the 1945-1991 cold war.
Well then even better! Humanity achived all of that by mutual colaboration!! How great!!
Science has no political views still in the cold war! Cool.
The point is that national chauvinism in the US touts the moon landing as the ultimate victory, and that glosses over the accomplishments of the USSR, keeping people here ignorant of the potential of alternative political-economic systems, allowing propaganda to get away with lies like "communism means no innovation"
But you're obviously not ignorant of that, you posted "COPIUM" just to be an ass
It's kind of amazing only three people have died in actual outer space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
I'll point out, more people died in the US space program than the Soviet one.
Depends on how you count. The US had more astronauts killed in their space program while the Soviets had some rocket explosions that killed a lot of ground crew.
The worst disaster in space history was the Nedelin catastrophe which also took out some of the USSR’s top minds.
The second worst disaster was the Plesetsk disaster, also by the Soviet Union.
Not sure what metrics you’re using for that claim.
It's unclear if the Nedelin catastrophe should count. That was done by the military rocket program and not the Soviet Space Program. It did take place at the Baikonur Cosmodrome which is the same place the civilian space program launched it's rockets from. If you include the Nedelin disaster then you have to include the non-NASA/military rocket disasters of the US. I know the US had at least 2 ICBM disasters with heavy loss of life.
Plesetsk counts because for some reason everybody decided that launching spy satellites is the job of the civilian spaceflight programs.
Yeah, it was three cosmonauts during the Soyuz 11 mission. A valve broke open right before re-entry. The cosmonauts probably asphyxiated within 40 seconds. This all happened just above the Karman line (100km) which is what defines where space starts. The capsule finished the re-entry and landing process and they were found dead, they were still warm when the recovery team found them. After this the Soviets redesigned the Soyuz capsule, reducing the capacity to 2 people but allowing them to wear their spacesuits during re-entry and take-off.
I'm reminded of this hilarious copypasta describing how Laika started a race to kill the most animals in space. Wish I could find it again.
Celebrating that someone died on a groundbreaking mission into outer space because he was on the "wrong side" has got to be peak lib
This doesn't even make sense from a lib perspective. Even if I were a lib I would still call you a dumbass
I dunno. America was doing its best to ensure poor black kids couldn't eat. Thankfully the Black Panthers took it upon themselves to make sure kids didn't starve.
I, too, would like to know how the caloric intake of the average Soviet citizen was equal to that of American citizens when the soviets were depriving food from stores
Gommunism no food
On a serious note, what a childish retort. It's like when you get owned in kindergarten and you hit back with "your mom fat".
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The last famine in the USSR ended in 1947, so this smarmy line liberals love to repeat isn't even fucking true.