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Why I’m in this flesh robot to begin with.
Yeah. This fantastic woman married me. I have no idea why.
Also, I really don’t understand rockets at more than a superficial level, but I saw one launch once.
I’m quite uncertain about jet airplanes, especially when you’re, like, driving in the same direction and there’s a strong headwind, and it almost looks like you’re going faster than them? They’re just hanging there, god knows how many tons of metal and 300 people. It’s creepy.
And I really think economics is proof that we’re in the Matrix, because the more I think about it, the less (functional, not ethical) sense capitalism makes, and everybody who talks like they know about it just sounds like stringing together a bunch of buzzwords. Also, there’s that truism that if you ask four economists a question, you’ll get five opinions. Plus nobody can reliably predict the stock market; weather - a highly chaotic system - is more predictable than the stock market. It’s like the programmers put it in, but when it got to the point where they had to make it explainable, they couldn’t without introducing recursive conflicting rules, so it’s just hand-waving, and people pretending or misleading themselves that they know how it all works.
Do you want explanations for the jets and rockets, and if so what is your current understanding?
Damn, you got here first! OP, if you don’t find their explanation satisfactory, reply to my comment and I’ll be sure to help.
Rockets are: put a bunch of flammables in a giant tube and light it on fire. That’s my understanding. Well, Ok. I know there are nozzles on gimbals, but… here’s a joke that represents what I’m talking about:
A brain surgeon goes to a party, and the host is introducing him to people.
Host: “John, this is Jack. He’s a software engineer.”
John: “Oh, that’s nice, but it isn’t brain surgery.”
Host: “This is Mary; she worked in industrial inorganic chemistry.”
John: “Oh that’s nice, but it isn’t brain surgery.”
Host (annoyed): “Maude, this is John. He’s a brain surgeon.”
Maude: “Oh, that’s nice, but it isn’t rocket science.”I think the big picture is deceptively simple. The practice of getting into orbit is far, far more complicated.
As for airplanes, yeah. I understand them well enough; I think with the right equipment and practice I could build something that flies. It’s just, sometimes seeing a behemoth in the air it’s just a bit astonishing, and unintuitive.
To be honest most of the basic physics behind rocketry actually isn’t too difficult. The matter of engineering it into reality definitely is very difficult, finding fuels that burn hard enough and figuring out how to contain them while they burn and the like. The nature of going so far and so fast also means that tiny errors add up to very big problems.
All rockets function on the fact that if you push something in one direction, you also go in the opposite direction by a proportionate amount. Lighting fuel on fire while it’s in a tube that only has one way out just happens to be a great way to push the burning fuel really, really hard and therefore get a really hard push back. The forces involved always have to cancel out the total momentum of everything involved; you chuck X kilograms of burning fuel out of the back at Y metres per second, you accelerate forward by however much you need to to make your momentum match that in the opposite direction. This is Newton’s third law of motion, the “for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction” one
Nozzles and the like can adjust which direction the way out is pointing. If the way out points left a bit, the momentum of the fuel is also going left a bit, so the reaction momentum you get goes a bit to the right, and now you have steering
I think the biggest conceptual block people usually have about orbits is that they’re not about going up fast, they’re about going around the Earth fast. If you point your rocket straight up and just keep going straight up, you won’t go into orbit around the Earth. Either you’ll crash straight back down when you run out of fuel, or you have a rocket with enough power and fuel to reach Earth’s escape velocity, in which case you’ll just continue travelling away from Earth forever until you find something else’s gravity. You know the kind of arc that a ball has when you throw it? Imagine that you’re superhumanly strong and can throw a ball literally however hard you want. You could throw it beyond the horizon without breaking a sweat. Once you’re throwing it that hard, the curvature of the Earth starts to become relevant, right? The ground is effectively dropping away underneath the ball as it travels forward, letting it fly farther before it hits the ground. Eventually if you throw hard enough, the curvature of the Earth turns away from the ball at the same rate as the ball is falling. The ball is now in orbit. The ISS (and anything else that wants to orbit at the same altitude) goes around the Earth so fast that it does 15 entire laps around the planet every day
Unfortunately for our rockets, the Earth’s atmosphere is very bad to actually move through that fast, so they go up first to get out of the thickest part of the atmosphere and then gradually turn sideways to achieve orbit
Once you start getting into things like how to get from Earth to other planets you’ve got to worry about some other stuff, but this comment is probably getting long enough by now and not many of our rockets do that yet
I totally get what you mean about planes not looking like they should work. The size of them and the fact that we’ve got basically nothing to reference them against for scale and motion when they’re in the air is really confusing
It’s easy to have inexplicable experiences when you are bad at explanation!
My grandfather came to me in a trip in the shower and told me I’m wasting my life. I puked up steams. Quit my “finance bro” job moved to New Mexico and became a farmer. He’s been dead 20+ years.
One time on a summer day as a teenager I went to the grocery store with my Mom.
We parallel parked the car a ways away from other cars. We secured the car as normal and went on a short shopping trip.
When we came back out after maybe 15 minutes, all of the cars windows were rolled down completely.
We both know for a fact all the windows were rolled up when we left, and even if we had them down, there would have been no reason to have the back windows down.
Nothing was stolen, no one was around, everything appeared untouched.
This was a Nissan Murano if I recall correctly - it did have power windows, but at the time there was no fancy stuff to remote control car features outside of having a remote starter installed, which we did not have.
There was only one set of keys.
We still have absolutely no explanation for this to this day.
Even back then some door lock remotes had the option to hold down unlock to roll down all windows. Not super useful feature and remember using it.
Seems you are looking for “supernatural” experiences however the following probably sounds supernatural to some:
Contentment in the serenity of what appears to outsiders to be a boring situation.
I’m not looking for anything, I was describing an experience I can’t explain per the thread which was probably mechanical or electrical in nature. Unsure how you got that impression.
Sorry, I thought you were OP. I should have made a top level comment.
Last year I was watching this show and and something odd happened. The camera turned to the fact of one of the characters and I don’t know why but it was like she was directly at me and she was talking about militias which was weird because I had just watched a video about one. As the vid went on I could have swore that one by one the characters just came out at me like that old Nintendo ad.
This happened about a year ago I still think about it. It wasn’t like I was tripping. I was a little drunk but that was about it.
