http://gizmodo.com/spacex-just-dropped-these-amazing-retro-m...
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanet_travel_bureau
In any case, no need to ask SpaceX, the posters were released into the public domain.
If we're really lucky, the cities of the future will look something like those in Blade Runner (minus the part about people living offworld) or Dredd, or even the Mad Max movies. But more likely, things are going to look more like 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead, or the scene of the future in The Terminator.
It's hard to see how the cost and difficulty of interplanetary travel could in any reasonable (or just any) time frame beat other, new, forms of entertainment and relaxation that may constitute or replace tourism in the future. Completely realistic VR 'holidays' to anywhere, simulated or invented, comes to mind as an obvious alternative.
IKEA sells pretty cheap frames for stuff like this too: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/dec...
That said, if anyone here works at JPL, I can't be (but feel like I am) the only person wondering what the hell happened to memex-explorer.
We are talking about the obvious change in search. If you are not familiar, the memex-explorer project seemed to be the first company that realized an open source tailored version of google can ve assembled out of Apache open source projects. You define a crawl structure and save your data into silos you control while using your own parameters to search.
However, despite what appeared to be solid progress and the initial buzz of articles labeling the google killer- and to be clear this tech will evolve in 1-2 years and diminish googles adverts, the project has a simple commit that says:
Not actively maintained.
Why did JPL stop working on this? Darpa brought the world TOR so they do deliver projects that could potentially be problematic to the gov't, so I don't want to jump into conspiracy theories, but what the fuck.
Tl;dr super obvious hadoop, solr, dns and elastic search is pretty much google and the browser can never be decoupled from search. JPL got close to giving the user all 3 in unity under their control and then project was abandoned. I'll say it i guess, having 50% concentration in browsing and the only proper centralization of most peoples thoughts is a big loss to google, and if I am being honest I think the govt.
edit: email bounced to support. Since the email was a super autistic and sarcastic look at the ecosystem as I made a case for continued development, the support guy whose desk it bounced to from the lead dev, was forgiveably baffled.
Side note: Am I the only one that sees the No Man's Sky reference in the Venus poster?
$ sha256sum ALL_POSTERS.zip
b77b67acc0d1a74cfe79ad1c223ccf801da5651b407e60d7ce225cda31623354 ALL_POSTERS.zip
It's a 672'712'771 bytes file.
The single image downloads seems to be OK.
> Imagination is our window into the future.
Maybe. But the outlook is from the past, and is subject to the past's failures and to failures of the imagination that are due to the juvenile foible of nostalgia. These posters are, after all, riffs in the genre of travel marketing, which is designed to sell the experience of a place as more than it is; they push a particular and motivated hyper-reality. This betrays their appeal as a longing to be deceived, a longing that is all too happily filled by the marketing arm of JPL.
The very idea that "space travel" is anything like "travel" in the vacationing sense is mere wordplay. Who among us can take 4 years off to "vacation" to Mars? Or 3 for Venus, to stare at the clouds? Who among us wants to die of embrittled bones and radiation sickness in a tin can?
No proper vision of the future can come from the myopic eyes developed in the dim light of popular history. These posters are adolescent fantasy, and mature minds knowingly smirk at the naivete of those so stunted as to be taken in.
EDIT: FWIW, I expect the down-votes. Bringing reality into a discussion about space fantasy always brings down-votes. It's a measure of the quality of discussion on HN.
I think the point of these pieces is to make us think about the possibility that some day technology will have advanced so much that this is possible. Maybe we'll get there faster, or we'll develop a way to live longer so it won't matter.
Which is why there aren't travel posters for those journeys in that era.
> I think the point of these pieces is to make us think about the possibility that some day technology will have advanced so much that this is possible.
I agree. But my point is twofold. One, these journeys will never be possible in that way. (The energy requirements alone for that kind of fast travel is an insurmountable barrier, just due to the square term in .5mv^2, and anything of non-negligible mass that is moving that fast is an interplanetary doomsday weapon.) Two, these pieces draw a false parallel between the romance of steamer travel or early train/air travel and the harsh realities of space travel.
And, to forestall a cliche by doubling down, I'm siding with the people who say "it will never happen."
I have generally found that when people become art critics and try to describe why the like/don't like a certain piece, it tells more about them as a person then it does about the piece.
I think the best description of why the posters were created is:
> As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future.
They are simply trying to encourage people, probably younger people, to realize that things that are impossible today, don't necessarily have to remain that way. But who knows, maybe I just have a "stunted" mind.
For example, your comment reveals that you prefer casting aspersions on a person over addressing the substance of a remark, especially when that remark challenges a cherished belief. It also reveals that you feel you are unable to cope with the realities of the present without your unrealistic fantasies about the future.
I like this game!
Can I safely assume that you count yourself among those "mature minds"?
Truly mature minds don't need to diminish others in order to make themselves look better.
The deluded have no say in whether the serious are amused by them.
