Visions of the Future
jpl.nasa.govI love these and wanted prints of them for myself and thought others might too (and I own a printery), so: http://www.artfrom.space
You should ask SpaceX if you can print their retro space tourism posters from last year as well. You know... where these NASA artists probably got the idea from :)
http://gizmodo.com/spacex-just-dropped-these-amazing-retro-m...
As that article mentions, JPL's exoplanet tourism posters preceded SpaceX's posters:
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanet_travel_bureau
In any case, no need to ask SpaceX, the posters were released into the public domain.
Shipping to US only :(
Thank you! I'm working on a space-themed nursery and I was worried the baby would be here before the JPL Store got posters in stock.
Thank you so much for this! Now I just have to convince myself to only buy one... or two.... or three...
Lovely stuff. Reminds me of old British railway posters ...but in space!
I like looking at stuff like this, but it's a completely unrealistic view of humanity's future.
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.
Just on the off chance these are anything but tongue in cheek, I think at least wrt tourism it is completely unrealistic.
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.
For people interested in getting these printed as posters, you could probably use FedEx: http://www.fedex.com/us/office/poster-printing.html
IKEA sells pretty cheap frames for stuff like this too: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/dec...
$7/sqft? It looks like Costco is much cheaper: http://www.costcophotocenter.com/Help#/topic/pricing-shippin...
I have a lot of respect both for the artists that made this and for the scientists pushing boundaries forward in a way that was almost inconceivable a decade ago.
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.
Why don't you e-mail continuum and report back:
i emailed who I believe to be the lead dev.
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.
These are great. Something I've always found interesting is how often "looking to the future" campaigns harken back to decades-old iconic art styles. That's not a criticism. I love the juxtaposition of concept and style.
Side note: Am I the only one that sees the No Man's Sky reference in the Venus poster?
Am I the only one getting bad CRC errors when extracting the files from the zip with all the images?
$ sha256sum ALL_POSTERS.zip
b77b67acc0d1a74cfe79ad1c223ccf801da5651b407e60d7ce225cda31623354 ALL_POSTERS.zip
It's a 672'712'771 bytes file.
The single image downloads seems to be OK.
Level Frames is printing and framing these now! (Disclosure: I'm a founder) https://www.levelframes.com/collections/visions-of-the-futur...
As a fan of The Expanse the release of posters like this was very timely. While there is obviously no tie in I am just glad to have another very good scifi show on and interest in space not waning
Ah yes, the infamous photobombing Cowboys of Europa...
FTA:
> 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.
Intercontinental travel was once like this, too. Take several months to make a horrible journey that could very well kill you. Now you can do it in under a day, safely, for a very reasonable price, with just a mild discomfort.
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.
Or maybe not - the Grand Tour[1] was historically restricted a wealthy elite, after all. I guess it depends on the time scale of the perspective.
> Intercontinental travel was once like this, too. Take several months to make a horrible journey that could very well kill you.
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 don't think I have ever heard anyone say "juvenile foible of nostalgia" before in my life.
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.
> 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.
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!
Yes, because it's the hallmark of a mature mind to smirk at other people's fantasies.
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.
Anyone who faces the daunting complexity of space travel, its hazards, its complete and utter alienness, or even the unavailability of a convective environment for heat transfer, anyone who does that and then resorts to 1920s-era travel poster riffs should expect the occasional smirk.
The deluded have no say in whether the serious are amused by them.
Making fun of people doesn't become a mark of maturity just because you use dispassionate language and complex vocabulary.
But hey, if it makes you feel better about yourself, go for it.