I flew for the first time on a plane last week and I’ve seen planes take off at the airport. It looks crazy. But being on one is totally different like holy shit. The thing just FLIES. It just… Soars… Through the sky! Like whoa man. Wtf… It’s crazy. With how much these things weigh, it’s insane to me the thing can just go up and bam, there we are, we’re flying now. Like wow… Dude crazy.
I hate that everybody’s like, it’s not that big a deal.
We only started doing it 124 years ago! Prior to that it was a very big deal indeed.
Everyone’s so fucking smart these days, there’s no room for a sense of wonder. It’s like being blasé and knowledgeable is cool. It’s really not.
You keep flying with your beautiful sense of wonder, Buttflapper!
That’s the thing though, what’s amazing about planes really depends on your knowledge base or what experience is specifically being enjoyed. If you don’t understand how planes work then the difference is moot because whether seeing or doing the entire thing is magical. If you do understand how planes work you might know that the crazy thing isn’t flight, we knew how to do that since approximately 1800 when the first gliders were built, the crazy part was generating enough power to make powered flight possible. If you understand how flight works and are still enjoying the experience of flight is where wonder still exists.
You know the wonder of flight still exists because some number of kids and adults would pick flight as a super power if given the choice.
I don’t need ignorance to feel wonder. I think things are cooler when I can marvel at the complex mechanics behind it all.
True. But I wasn’t arguing that.
What puts me in awe of things like flight isn’t the act itself, but the brilliance of the people who designed it to work. I look at the aerodynamic shape of an airfoil and think “we did that…humans”.
To be fair, we sorta knew it was possible because birds. I think it’s more impressive when we don’t know what can happen, like breaking the sound barrier or putting people in space.
Well fucking said. Smoke noodles rarely have room for curiosity, which is where new things often come from.
Edit: Not sure how smarmy know-it-alls became that, but I’m not changing it now
I’m pretty sure i can’t trust Arthur Vandelay, they are the kind of people that would pass off something they did as if it wasnt intentional
Some lady told me she read Atlas Shrugged while in the hospital for a long stay, kept alive by equipment she neither invented nor paid for. How oblivious people can be when we are all just barely something more than monkeys? Some of us manage to be passably unoblivious and I think that’s what makes us human; the potential to be more rational than a monkey. It’s no guarantee, though, as you so noted. You know there was a caveperson who just learned about fire and still went around and acted like he invented it straight up to the caveperson that did invent it. Monkey brain stuff.
Due to the nature of my work I’ve flown hundreds of passenger flights of all sizes and I still find myself in awe.
What a privilege to be able to actually see down from such a range of heights too. Where there is still lots of detail to be found, but you can also get an appreciation of scale. It’s honestly really amazing.
I’m a mechanical engineer and have a general understanding of how wings work. I’ve flown many times. That shit still feels like magic to me.
I was most impressed by the sheer amount of power those engines put out when you finally take off. The acceleration gave me a boost of adrenaline when I flew for the first time (it was a Southwest Boeing 737)
And I can only imagine how they feel when empty.
In fitting natural conditions your house can fly too, just not whole and not for long
I mean, it’s crazy, but I’m more fascinated with smaller airplanes. Imagine it, you can make something like a Piper Cub almost as easy\hard as 1000 years ago it was to make a good hauberk.
And for those mentioning computers - my feeling is the same about computers. It’s nice to have a laptop with Linux or FreeBSD (not counting corporate malware), but a machine much simpler, but one that can be produced entirely in an area of 10mln people, full chain, would be much cooler for me.
I’m in awe of distributed production lines being possible and allowed by today’s machinery.
I think that is something we have to rediscover. Centralization is stifling humanity’s advancement. At the same time in the real world rather unpleasant people’s power depends on it, so it won’t be quick or easy. But I think it is happening anyway, just very slowly. Evolution, not revolution. Surely I would be glad for it to be a revolution, to see it as a (yet) young person.
Not possible.
Most manufacturing of things like computer chips (just the chips themselves) require raw materials from all over the world. You can’t just use any sand. 10M people is just a little more than the population of NYC.
I would like us to be trying to change that and not to make things more and more centralized. Because that kind of civilization will fail.
Airplane engines have deceptively high thrust, imagine each one as a rocket and it’ll start to make sense. The a380 (the big double decker) each engine produces around 350KN. When that thrust is applied to an 80kg human they’ll experience almost 450Gs of force
In an extreme sense, imagine putting a little rocket engine on a paper airplane which will represent a high thrust to weight ratio
Your last description is essentially the idea behind the F-117a. That thing
isn’twasn’t flying,it’sit was achieving escape velocity.
I still look up whenever u hear a plane fly over. Heavier than air travel is treated way to casually
I think whoever doesn’t look up as they hear a plane or helicopter flying is insane. Ever since as a child I have looked up.
it works because we believe in it. if everyone would lose faith in airplanes, they’d drop out of the sky.
easier yet, if everyone crams to the tail, it will likely crash
Is this true? Sounds true but I feel like this should also be a test they do to ensure it doesn’t fail.
And will it fly higher if we have the Faith of the Heart?
WhhaaahhhHH!!!
Can I just lose faith in the private jets?
Relevant Louis CK video.
I used to think so until I realised that air and water are both fluids, except air is thinner.
To be clear to anyone with minds being blown: air is gas and gas is a type of fluid. Water is liquid and liquid is also a type of fluid.
… gas is a type of fluid.
that goes a long way in explaining some of those farts.
I would be equally amazed to see something denser than water swimming.
Like a submarine?
Submarines work by manipulating their density, don’t they? Then they just float at whatever level matches their density.
Yeah, they’re more like dirigibles than airplanes. But same as airplanes, people have had a hard time believing that something made of metal can float.
Mythbusters has an episode where they swim in non-newtonian fluid
Ok, you have my attention, going googling.
That was interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wiYtoG9kZE
Exactly. Ever skip a stone on the surface of a lake? It’s like that, except it’s a continuous skip, with air instead of water, and you’re inside the stone.
That’s a bad analogy.
That’s an awesome analogy.
It was a joke.
Turns out, the sky is pretty thick if you hit it hard enough.
Induced viscosity.
Glitch that’s going to be patched out eventually
Now there’s another shower thought.
What if one day airplanes just like…stopped working…
So there’s this neat thing in quantum mechanics where the state of something could change to a more stable state in what is known as false vacuum decay.
Then it causes everything else of the same type to decay/collapse to the more stable state in a wave travelling in every direction at nearly the speed of light.
Such an event could rewrite fundamental forces of the universe and… one day planes just stop working.
Probably other bad stuff happens as well like our cells stop working and we all die.
It’s like quantum tunneling, theoretically possible but not applicable to macroscopic objects. No matter how often you throw a tennis ball on a wall, it will never tunnel through even tho the calculated chance is non-zero and your amount of tries is infinite.
Wait until you find out about electricity! 🤯
Considering how we use it. It is absolutely fascinating. Same for magnetism
tomato tomato =P
or magnets!
Magnets, how do they work?
Does anyone actually know? We have laws and math that predict and model behavior but last time I checked know one knew why.
I mean, big magnets work because they are made of electrons that have their magnetic fields aligned so they don’t cancel each other out. Now, as for why electrons have magnetic fields in the first place, that we don’t know
Computers is teachibg rocks to think
By filling them with lightning
We grow flawless crystals, slice them into perfect disks, engrave billions of arcane runes onto them with magical potions and rays of light, animate them with lightning, and make them do our bidding.
And then we give them an “intelligence” that can’t even count the Rs in strawberry…
I think we’re doing pretty fucking well, all things considered.
engrave billions of arcane runes
Omg, you just made me love my job more.
Do you work in a fab? If so would love to know more about your work
Design, close to tape out now, but also post-silicon and bringup.
It’s fun as all fuck, never thought about it as incantations or runes, then the rock comes back and we cast spells to bring it to life I guess.
Takes a while but is just incredible.
Saw
this the other day, seems relevant to your commentTry looking at a die under a microscope
And telephones! Even en old-school analogue phone is pretty amazing how sound becomes an electrical signal and then is converted back to sound at the other end.
Modern digital phones are just pure magic compared to analogue phones.
Wait until you find out how far off you are at 60 ton…
737-Max10 has a max take off weight of 101 tons…damn
Don’t quote me- 747 max fuel of ~150 ton.
Cargo can carry just shy of 129t…
640 tons for the An-225
It’s magical, right? It’s what got me interested in aviation - the physics, the science, the engineering to make it work. And we’ve gotten so good at it, air travel is now available to most people, it’s safe and convenient.
I’ve flown exactly three times in my life: a hot air balloon, a helicopter and a DC3. Each was magical in its own way. I’ve also done a fair bit of plane spotting. Seeing an Airbus A380 landing right in front of you is amazing. It really is the size of a large apartment block with wings. Truly awe inspiring.
Aviation is fucking awesome!
I’ve only been in a helicopter once, but that was the coolest. Parasailing being pulled by a boat was also very fun.
I really enjoyed my helicopter ride as well - a sightseeing flight on vacation. That was on a Schweitzer S300; a small helicopter with a bench seat in the front. So you’re sitting right next to the pilot with an almost unobstructed forward vision. So cool. Definitely not something for people with a fear of heights.
You’ve flown or you’ve flown in? Presumable the former, but I know people from where I’m from use flown to mean flown in. If you’ve only been airborne three times, and all in separate crafts, that’s something special in and of itself.
Flown in, as a passenger. I’d have said ‘piloted’ if I was the pilot.
And yes, that’s an odd trio of aircraft, considering most people only really fly on airliners. I’ve been on a Boeing 747 in a museum, but have never flown in an airliner.
I am a avgeek (aviation) and I love all things planes. Got my PPL and made it halfway through instrument before bailing but damn it, flying is the best thing in the world and aviation itself is absolutely fucking beautiful.
Take up paragliding. Highly recommend (unless you have an addictive personality, social commitments, other hobbies, etc).
