The relative size of the two bodies is a rarity unduplicated in our solar system. No other planet in the solar system has a moon with a diameter so large in proportion to itself. Luna’s diameter is 27% the size of Earth’s, the highest by far. No other moon’s diameter is even so much as 7% of their planet’s.
Luna would have to settle for second place if Pluto were still considered a planet. Charon is almost half the size of Pluto in diameter, a ratio so close that some astronomers think they should be considered a double planet (or, I suppose, a double dwarf planet).
Fair point on ‘far distances.’ One minor quibble of my own is that ‘I, Pencil’ was an essay written by Leonard Read. Every time I saw Milton Friedman discuss it, he always attributed it to Leonard Read.
In the past:
I teach this tomorrow. Economists mention four things that led up to the Industrial Revolution, or behind the Pre-Industrial Revolution.
1.Increased specialization was one of the direct factors, especially in terms of the traders and the merchants, but also the professional class which created the increased wealth that both led to the demand for more production and the bank lending that provided the money to meet this demand (the supply.)
2.Concurrently, or lagging slightly behind the increased production was the lending that went to finance into first upgrading and then maintaining the roads built by the Romans and then into creating the canals and other waterways that linked up all of England through its rivers. For some reason, some older British books or journals refer to this as ‘communication’ rather than transportation. Prior to the upgrading of the roads and the greater safety that the greater speed of travel allowed for, ‘bad guys’ would spend their lives at the side of the road waiting for slow moving horse drawn carriages to come along and then rob them. This is where the terms ‘highwaymen’ and ‘highway robbery’ come from.
3.Less directly in terms of specialization, the pre Industrial Revolution allowed for a class of people who could study math, science and engineering. This philosophical acceptance of science in England at that time unlike in Ancient Rome was likely the reason why Rome never had an Industrial Revolution. For all of Rome’s acceptance of science for war purposes, the Roman religion emphasized ‘manliness’, and, kind of ironically, outside of war, it was seen as unmanly to use labor saving technology. Using slaves was acceptable because those were the spoils of war.
4.It is almost certainly not a coincidence that the first steam engine was patented in 1695 while the Glorious Revolution in England occurred in 1688/1689. Although this civil war occurred for a number of reasons, one of the main ones, which Karl Marx wrote about, was the removal from dominance in governance from the wealthy landowners and the increase in power of the traders, merchants and professionals (who Marx referred to as the Bourgeoisie.) One of the things achieved in the Glorious Revolution (and not, as is mistakenly argued with the Magna Carta) was what people on the left like me refer to as ‘due process and equal protection rights’ and what people on the right here refer to as ‘property rights.’ Had Thomas Savery in 1695 believed that the government could simply have come along and taken his steam engine from him, it’s unlikely he ever would have invented it. (Technically he didn’t quite invent a steam engine, but it was a steam powered device.)
To expand on the point about Ancient Rome, although I don’t doubt that the military was a fairly large purchaser, because there was never any demand from either consumers and producers for ‘high technology’ inventions, there were no businesses that systematically invented ‘high tech’ products or sold ‘high tech products.’ So, Ancient Roman inventions, including those used by the military, were entirely random inventions.
The lack of use of inventions also meant that average Romans were extremely poor. This surprises many people, but economic historians are pretty much universal in the view that not even pre-Industrial Revolution, but Pre-Renaissance that the average Western European was wealthier than the average Ancient Roman. Had the Ancient Romans developed math, science and engineering in a more systematic way, it would have been impossible for the Visigoths to have sacked (Western) Rome, so it would have been very unlikely the world would have fallen into the Middle Ages.
Into the ‘future.’
The concurrent development of math, science and engineering is one of the ways to check for claims that are likely ‘bullshit.’ This use of knowledge is what is referred to in social science and most sciences as ‘triangulation’ which is the idea of using multiple independent lines of inquiry to attempt to determine how likely something is to be true.
So, for instance, if we look at the tic tac UFO videos (I don’t make any claim as to what they are but…) there are claims that they are the inventions of the U.S military. While I don’t dispute that there is some scientific information that he government prevents from publishing and classifies, and while I know that DARPA has invented some ‘future technology,’ DARPA’s inventions are basically a ‘command economy’ type system whereby a lot of very smart scientifically oriented people work to design one specific product (like night vision goggles.)
For DARPA (or branches of the U.S air force) to have invented the unidentified aerial phenomena seen in those videos, it would not just require unknown physics to have them move that way, but it would require them to invent things that would have protected the people flying the crafts to speed up that quickly without being ripped apart.
It’s simply not believable that government scientists, engineers and mathematicians could be so far ahead of private and public sector scientists, engineers and mathematicians.
The smarter conspiracy theorists recognize this. This is why, for instance, Richard C. Hoagland, the person most famous for claiming there is a ‘face on Mars’ says that there is a secret science that only the initiates are made aware of called ‘torsion physics.’ I’m not quite sure who Hoagland says some of these initiates are other than some of the ‘bad guys’ at NASA (not the publicly announced scientists at NASA who are not initiates and who are aware of this secret science.)
I think Hoagland is a fraud, but I don’t doubt that he’s smart enough to recognize the holes in the theories of many conspiracy theorists. He is after all, a self taught mathematician who found a mistake in a mathematics journal article.
Of course, he’s also loony enough/so brazen as a fraud, that he took a crystal with him to some mountain in Central America on December 21, 2012, and claimed that in doing this he personally prevented the catastrophe that would have befallen the world otherwise.
I knew Galileo Galilei was a brilliant Renaissance man. He may or may not have been the first to develop/invent a telescope. But I had no idea he had developed a video camera as well as a way to get that camera out beyond the moons orbit and then get the video back to Earth. That is even more amazing then the way Franklin J. Schaffner got apes to “act” like they were riding horses while he directed Planet of the Apes (1968). Was it the Catholic Church that made Galileo abandon his space program? I suppose he could hardly continue it while under house arrest. If he’d been allowed to continue it, we would have probably colonized the whole solar system by now. What a waste…
Apparently he found a way to make himself immortal inside a machine. His knowledge of robotics was also far ahead of his time.
Joking aside, the history of invention is an interest of mine, as I’m sure it is for many people.
1.The first person who received a patent for inventing the telescope is credited to Hans Lipperhey in 1608, there are other previous claims that go back a few years earlier. I did not know that until I looked it up on wiki, but I did know that the first telescopes were used by sailors for navigation. However, it only took a few years after that until Galileo put the telescope on a tripod to use it to look at the stars. Galileo’s telescope was very elegant in that the rotating part of the tripod looked like the earth.
The relatively late invention of the telescope is interesting in that the Renaissance had started nearly 200 years previously given that the Renaissance started with ships sailing on the Mediterranean, trading and picking up knowledge along the way. Not that the sailors went from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, but it’s interesting the length of sailing they did without being able to see far distances.
There are recent drawings of Christopher Columbus with a telescope ‘discovering’ America, these drawings are plain wrong, he did not have any kind of telescope.
To me, this gets to the idea of what people were able to do. Again, jokes aside, the notion that there were these handful of geniuses throughout history who thought far ahead of everybody else is likely wrong. DaVinci’s proposed inventions are well known, but what he really all that unique or did he simply draw things that some other people couldn’t be bothered to because they knew their drawings were impractical.
The economist Tim Harford, who writes an column for the Financial Times under the name ‘the undercover economist’ and who has written a book on the history of inventions recently wrote a column pointing out how relatively late it was for the bicycle to be invented. The bicycle was not invented until a few years before the automobile which seems incredible given how long ago the wheel was invented and how simple a concept the bicycle seems to be. But, as Harford pointed out, to make a bicycle that actually works it takes precisely designed ball bearings, and that took to the invention of more modern machinery that could make precise parts.
If I recall correctly, we had trains before bicycles, which kinda boggles the mind.
In England the first practical all non horse powered train was invented in 1815 while the first practical bicycle for getting around was invented in 1885.
It does kind of boggle the mind, but the first trains were basically steam engines on wheels with a carriage.
Here’s another crazy one: the fax machine was invented about 40 years before the bicycle.
Designs for escalators are also pretty old. Alas, the first working one wasn’t created until about 10 years after the first bicycle.
The history of inventions is so interesting in how haphazard it seems (in hindsight). Check out the history of gunpowder in China. It’s a myth that they never weaponized it: we have evidence of the first proto-guns, cannons, and bombs having already existed during the Middle Ages! From Wikipedia:
“Explosive weapons such as [iron] bombs have been discovered in a shipwreck off the shore of Japan dated from 1281, during the Mongol invasions of Japan”
A little Wikipediaing of my own revealed that it was in 1675 that Sir Isaac Newton reportedly said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
The Industrial Revolution was made possible because of the accumulation of human knowledge. But that wasn’t sufficient in and of itself. It couldn’t have happened without the increased productivity of farming that allowed increasing percentages of people to specialize in various trades. Economist Milton Friedman famously used a pencil as an example of a product that is impossible for one person to make on their own. I think the bicycle is similar. I suppose a blacksmith could attempt to make a bicycle frame and wheels out of iron, but I would hate to pedal a bike that was that heavy. I suppose it would be possible to make it mostly out of wood. But specialization and cooperation allows for much better bicycles to be produced at a far lower cost.
I have one small quibble about sailors seeing farther with a telescope. It certainly let them see more detail at a distance, but they couldn’t see farther than the horizon because of the curvature of the Earth.
That’s right. That’s how the ancients were able to figure out that the earth was round, and how the Renaissance confirmed it. When ships are a certain distance away, you can only see their sails, then the full ship emerges. After they had telescopes they could see the sails in more detail from the distance where only sails are visible to the naked eye, but could still not see the hull of the ship – all because of that pesky curvature.