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trekdaily

HAPPY CAPTAIN PICARD DAY! - June 16

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION 7.12 “The Pegasus”

#:)

hawflake

curtisretherford

Reminder: June 16th is Captain Picard Day.

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apas-95

People who act like Laika's sacrifice was some unique soviet cruelty are being silly and need to re-evaluate how history's been presented to them. Animal testing of flight exploration has always been the norm, and the reason has always been that it is dangerous and could easily lead to death. Two-thirds of the monkeys the US launched on its repurposed Nazi V-2s died. The dogs the USSR launched into space before Laika were recovered, and were in fact the first higher animals to be recovered from a spaceflight, as all the US's monkeys so far had died - not a single monkey would survive US spaceflight until two years after Laika's flight. These animals were all sent into space, but only briefly, in a ballistic trajectory. Laika was sent into orbit. Laika's ship was the second ever to reach orbit, after Sputnik 1. It was not possible at the time to recover anything from orbit. The next Sputnik flight with animal passengers, Korabl-Sputnik 2, successfully recovered the first ever animals from orbit. Laika was the one lone point at which recovery was not planned - the pivotal one, where we had finally been able to reach orbit, to be able to stay in space, not just pass through it; but could not yet bring anything back. If survival were impossible up there, it may not have been worth it to continue. Yes, they knew Laika would die - but, empirically speaking, so did the US for each and every monkey it had launched. Survival was not the norm, and was a feat achieved so far only a few times, by the USSR. It is sad, yes, and perhaps unethical - but it was in no way unique.

apas-95

Yeah 100%. And, honestly, some of the exceptionalism around her sacrifice comes down to how much Laika was honoured by the USSR posthumously - she was rightly presented as a hero of spaceflight.

And, like... When the Montgolfiers were developing the first lighter-than-air flight, it was completely unknown whether it would be survivable. They sent up a balloon, with three animals. A sheep, a rooster, and a duck. The duck was a control. It lived in the sky already - if it died, they knew the balloon was at fault. The rooster had avian physiology, but couldn't fly - whether it died or not would explain whether it was an issue of biology or adaptation. The sheep was the human-analogue. If it died, they would know manned flight was impossible.

At the conclusion of the flight, all three survived. But, the reason they were sent up was so they could die. After their demonstration, the first human flight took place. The king proposed sending convicts, as it was still unsafe, but the inventors demanded they be the first. It was stupid, as a thousand other volunteers existed that would be equally ethical, without risking a loss of expertise, but they demanded anyway. They considered it an honour.

For all the ways a stray dog could die, none of them really differ to the dog. But, among humans, this was the most respected and revered death she could possibly have had. And she was memorialised for it for decades to come.

effectiveresistance

Seen in "Vancouver" BC

the-lumpfish-queen

fictionkinfessions

i miss guinan. she was skeptical of me at first, but i don’t fault her for that. she was very kind after coming to the realization that i was no longer just a borg drone. ten forward was a place that i felt safe. not just because it logistically was safe, but because i had a friend there who i could trust. she helped me to explore food, and introduced me to many of my favorites. i’m very glad to have known her.

-hugh (star trek, fictive)

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a-tohmic

Schiaparelli for Haute Couture SS24

Paris Fashion Show 2024

#this is greebles. to me

rainreads-deactivated20250201

"Tired" by Langston Hughes.

papayajuan2019

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

derelicthousefootage

chilewithcarnage

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

wizardnuke

"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan

earnedmagic

What's the most interesting thing you've learned recently?

in one of my art history classes i learned about this guy, percival lowell, who was a dude in the late 1800s with too much money and too much time on his hands. he built himself an observatory because that’s what rich dudes did for fun back then

he had a fairly popular theory about their being purposefully designed canals on mars- 1800s europe was all about industry and what mankind could build, so it made sense that humanity would see similar formations in space. and so lowell was on trend when he charted these canals on venus:

except that no one else could reproduce his findings. most of his theories were discredited over time as we learned more about space, and it wasn’t until the early 2000s that someone posited a theory to what lowell had been seeing