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Comment by tempsolution | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing particularly impressive about the Apollo program, at least not these days. You are essentially comparing today's frontier of High-Tech research with 50 year old "needs to work reliably" technology, which had different requirements even back then.

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Humans went to the moon. I'm impressed.

Magic box I hold in my hand to communicate near-instantaneously with the other side of the world... somehow less impressive.

"Every now and again there is a moment that brings home how strange life in the twenty-first century can be. There I was in Brighton, England, holding a thin slice of glass and metal which was made in South Korea and ran American software, and which could show me the President of America threatening the Supreme Leader of North Korea."

John Higgs: Stranger Than We Can Imagine an alternative history of the 20th century, p. 5

Part of sending humans to the moon included the equipment to talk with them while they were there.

EDIT: And bring back live video.

It's amazing when you remind yourself that your web request is actually causing something physical to happen on the other side of the world. That blows my mind every time I really think about it. It's all so seamless most of the time that it's easy to forget that it's an actual physical process that happens in the real world, with real EM waves travelling through the real physical world.

We should be having plenty of both by today. Nobody is saying smartphones aren't impressive, but there's argument to be made that we messed up on the space exploration front.

Familiarity breeds contempt, huh.

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