A rocket carrying human beings going to space to live for a few days in zero gravity, viewed from an airplane carrying hundreds of humans 30,000 feet in the air, filmed on a camera that fits into your pocket.
Do we need any more proof that human beings are incredible?
Discovery doesn't use fossil fules. The main engines are powered by oxygen and hydrogen and the solid rocket boosters are made up of ammonium perchlorate, aluminum and iron oxide.
Hydrogen is a storage medium. Fossil fuels are used as the energy source to make the rocket propellant.
I can also guarantee you that fossil fuels were used in the production and distribution of the rocket boosters and that the airplane the video was taken from wouldn't be flying if it didn't have any jet fuel in it's tank.
Humans are smart creatures, but we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking we would be where we are at now if it weren't for a cheap, albeit limited, supply of highly concentrated energy.
True, with the difference being humans (and our predecessors) had to wait hundreds of thousands of years for the fossil fuels to form under the immense pressure (and additional energy input) of the earth.
And you believe that the value of this observation is what, exactly?
That we are wasting energy which has been stored and untapped for hundreds of thousands of years? Do we really expect that our ancestors will be better able to exploit this value than we are... without our given expliotation? Will this be true forever? Should we just let that stored energy remain forever?
Ceteris parabis, we will extract exactly as much value from our ancestors as makes sense. And our ancestors will do exactly the same. I do not begrudge them that any mire than I begrudge us this current state of affairs.
And yet despite all this amazing intellectual capability we seem somehow unable to balance a government budget, year after year after year. Hmmmmmm....
Perhaps we should just leave it at "there are humans that can do incredible things, but most humans just sit around and argue about who should be allowed to do incredible things, who should be allowed to allow these things, and who should get credit for those things if they ever happen to get done."
In that context, the technical wizardry isn't the miracle, the miracle is that the stupid monkeys could cooperate long enough to actually get it done.
haha, nice! yes the great Louis C.K. routine. "You're sitting in chair. But it's thousands of feet in the air and hurtling along at hundreds of miles an hour but you're perfectly safe. Yet we complain about the taste of the coffee not being just right." to summarize.
The specific device is irrelevant and so is your question.
The headline “Smartphone Films Final Discovery Launch From 30,000 Feet Up” would be just as good but complaining about the additional (albeit irrelevant) information in the real headline seems just strange.
The information in the headline that this was taken by a smartphone is certainly valuable – you immediately know that this is not about professional video footage for example from a NASA plane but amateur footage taken from a commercial airliner which is a lot cooler.
Does it really annoy you and all the people who upvoted you so much that the writer of the headline (not even the guy who took and published the video) went that small extra step and mentioned the specific model of the device used to capture the video and not just the general category? Why exactly?
You don't seem to understand people that suffer from gadget inadequacy. They look at their own and other people's choices in purchasing consumer electronics as a reflection of self worth.
As does pointing out that you could do this without an iPhone. Clearly these are the sort of thoughts which can only be described using a qwerty keyboard, right?
Depends where the flight left from - a friend flight was kept on the ground for an extra few min to catch the launch. Or at least that was his assumption.
Ya I was watching the launch on tv, then stepped outside and you could see it from the other side of Florida, I've seen a launch up in close once, to bad I was really really sick to enjoy it.
Yeah, I've seen two launches from Tampa (including the last night launch), and you can see things pretty well. This video blows it away though, I would have loved to be on that plane.
Do we need any more proof that human beings are incredible?