The ICBMs mostly just sat there in their silos. They may have prevented World War III from happening, but we just don't know. I think the Soviet Union may have started a war and collapsed much sooner if not for nuclear weapons and the missiles that delivered them. The ICBMs were much use in launching satellites, they were good for long term storage of missiles that could be launched at a moment's notice by they weren't very cheap for launching satellites as they were expendable and expensive to produce, relying on solid fuel rockets as they did.
@@thomaskalbfus2005 The Soviet Union could not have been more against going to war again after WW2. The Soviet Union was devastated after the war and was very much focused on rebuilding and *not* starting a new one.
@@topphatt1312 The same might be said about Germany after World War I, yet they started World War II. World War I ended in 1918, yet 21 years in 1939 Germany was ready to start another one. So if there was no Robert Oppenheimer, if Albert Einstein didn't write his letter to FDR, Germany was on the wrong track towards atomic bomb development, so if the USA did nothing and did not build the atomic bomb, then Germany would have lost without building an atomic bomb either, Japan didn't and since the Soviets stole the plans from us, they too wouldn't have had an atomic bomb. What this would do is probably prolong World War II for another year so the United States could invade Japan, and then the post war would world settle into shape. The Soviets wouldn't be ready to start another war in 1945, but by 1965 it just might, without nuclear weapons there would be less incentive to build missiles, so probably we would have short range missiles that deliver conventional explosives. These missiles would be used on the battlefield and to inflict terror on cities similar to the way the V2 rocket was used by the Germans. So probably World War III would have started in the 1960s when the Soviets had recovered and were ready to start another one, my guess it they would try to make a grab for the other half of Europe.
While the space program helped further development of ICBMs ICBMs actually jump started our space program. Early rockets for the space program were just modified ICBMs, also the ICBM program started under Eisenhower in the mid 50s
One of the tangential plot points that was such a divergence, was the fact that NASA was able to retain the royalty monies from all it's patented tech. Instead of going into federal general funds the organisation kept a real income stream independent of its traditional budget allotment.
And as would happen in real life the US Congress was desperate to get their hands on that revenue for their wars and (they SUPER SWEAR!) social programs (no really they swear!)
I don't see the connection between exploring the Moon and faster advances in nuclear fusion. I also don't see a role in a more aggressive space race preventing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, nor do I see it resulting in a lesbian woman being elected president of the United States, this may be just a butterfly effect, but there is no direct connection between one thing happening and the other. Also the race to Mars was a little immature, being portrayed as an actual race with astronauts risking their lives just to get there first and plant the flag, I don't think NASA would do that! I also don't think all this spending to plant flags on distant planets would necessarily have resulted in cheaper access to space, with governments spending billions, they would be happy to just have throwaway rockets, though Sea Dragon might be a big exception to that!
Well you just seem to have a piss poor understanding of what it takes to drive real innovation. We didn't see anything like reusability until the private sector and profits got involved. Energy production advancements coming out of something like a lunar base does make sense when you factor in that solar power can't supply a base, you can't burn coal, oil, or nat. gas and fission reactors need enriched materials sent up from earth. A fusion reactor burning deuterium and tritium or helium 3 could be fueled with resources found on the moon. And once something like a functioning fusion reactor is up and running you can build them down on earth without large fossil fuel entities getting their dick in the door and screwing everything up. Look at how much money has been wasted on ITER the world's largest fusion experiment, which was just delayed by another 10 years.
I feel the critical point in time which affected the space race was the death of Sergei Korolev on the 14th of January 1966. Korolev’s health was affected when he was sent to a gulag and he was lucky to be needed so he was released before dying, however it did affect his health. This was likely the cause of the need to have an operation which ended up killing him, due to bad luck. If he had lived he may well have got the N1 working and if that occurred he would have been able to land a manned craft on the moon before the US. It would not have been a woman, but with that occurring the US would of likely gone for a mars mission. While unbelievable dangerous the US did have the equipment to get to mars, in theory. If that was off the agenda, a moon base was also likely. It was Korolev that drove the soviet manned program, just like the way Wernher von Braun drove it in the US. When Korolev died the manned space race ran on momentum and eventually stopped. A race needs two side competing and with the Soviets out of the race, the US decided to stop as well, especially since Wernher von Braun died in 1977.
@@ReezeGoingSenseless The US may well have tried for a mars mission to counter any USSR moon landing, if the public forced the government. I suspect not, but it was a possibility.
I was born in the middle of the Apollo era and as a kid, fell in love with the space program. It was later i wondered why we didn't keep going, why we didn't have 'Moon Base Alpha' or 'Clavius Base', etc. Only decades later did it become clear that we did lose that vision, that it was just easier to muddle around in the mud, barely getting back into low earth orbit and only sending robot probes to do our jobs. =/
The Artemis Program is there but Idk if that will reignite the spirt, maybe until governments and companies realize the value of a space economy will then have space exploration rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
Are you a commie? Why would anyone want the USSR to beat us to the moon and stay around past '91 after doing that? The timeline of For All Mankind is dystopian, the Eastern Bloc nations never achieved their freedom in that timeline.
"There's a disconnect between the future we expect and the one we actually make." Yep. My hopes for the future are currently D-E-A-D. "For All Mankind shows us a reflection of ourselves as just a little bit better than we are." I've known that. And it's sad that I have to use past tense. Since 2016, I don't know who "we" are. I thought I did, sort of. But apparently not. Lots of people "out there" don't know WTF they want, and those sorts can be mind-bogglingly destructive.
@@feralhistorian There are more than a few reasons to be optimistic. Operation Warp Speed shows that groundbreaking science can be done cheaply and quickly. Billionaires, who now fund most of R&D, are rediscovering the importance of basic research. There seems to be a new realization that productivity growth has to start snowballing for people to progress in atoms and not just bits. However, there are many reasons to be pessimistic. For one, the cost of government keeps increasing. Health, Education, and welfare increasingly eat most federal dollars. Most countries have horrendous balance sheets.
@@PoliticalWeekly Space exploration and that whole scene is a pyramid scheme from top to bottom. With the demographic collapse of most of the developed world, with China halving their population in a couple decades. And the same happening in Germany, Russia, and many other places. With mass retirement removing investment from the economy while at the same time draining the tax dollars. Cost of capital going up. Taxes going up. Workers going down. Investment in these fairytales are going to end. From AI to space stuff.
Covid hysteria, trump hysteria, explosion of conspiracy theories because trust in govt has collapsed. It all comes down to tribalism and mass hysteria. These have happened before and we got past them. We will again. We just need to recognize the enemy is not the latest big thing x it's mass hysteria, groupthink and tribalism. If we don't realize that we will just keep making the same errors over and over in new forms. We have a great ability to bounce back. The nuts (which sometimes are us) never win.
Unfortunately, that math doesn't really add up. Apollo, for instance, spent twice as much money in 10 years as the B-2 program did in 40 years. Buying four F-117s that you got to use for 25 years set you back as much as one LEM that you got a couple days use out of. Even gutting the NASA budget to cover these programs would still have left NASA with a bigger budget than they had. The horrifyingly basic answer is that it was massively expensive with no real answer after "OK we landed on the Moon, now what?" Literally the only thing that they could come up with was using a LEM as an orbital telescope body (cheaper and more effective to use a Keyhole with different optics) or using a Saturn upper stage as a space station (Skylab! Which still requires the Shuttle to be built!). There was also a plan to use a Skylab body as a habitat for a Venus flyby, which may have been the most expensive plan to kill three people ever devised. For All Mankind uses the Egg of Columbus to get around all of that. The type of ISRU they use to keep the Moon race going wasn't really an idea at the time, so no one would have thought to use it. The US was going to buy and pay for stealth aircraft no matter what. Diverting the funding from NASA would still have left NASA as one of the largest budget items around. But there was nowhere to go and nothing to do that justified that much money.
It's always been a kind of feeling I had that the space race was always going to be something very much dictated by America, yes the Soviets started it with sputnik but after that point it wouldn't end until the American's came out on top, without constant American pressure and the pressure of a race the Soviets just weren't in a position to fund their space program that much after WW2 and all the other things the Soviets had to deal with. It is my belief that the Americans would have just kept funding their space program so long as 'the commies were still up there'.
@@Alxnick This. The Space Shuttle was also delayed (causing Skylab to crash prematurely... around Australia) and went over-budget. Multiple times. Because cryogenic engines are hard; the shuttle suffered from feature creep; and, in hindsight, the shuttle program was an engineering catastrophe. It accomplished a lot, and everyone loves it (including me), but airplanes in space? Probably not the best idea for a reusable space ship... I also can't help but point out NASAs legacy with their perceived technological regression, where the SLS rocket as compared with SpaceX's Starship, is underwhelming. SLS is an advanced rocket, but most components are recycled from the shuttle program, which were heavily borrowed from Apollo, all to maintain the same supply chains (the iron cross), causing a government space program to cost billions while a private space program costs millions, but NASAs still SpaceX's number 1 customer. And this is all discounting the political climate with the silent majority causing a political realignment towards the center-right (neoliberalism), which favored Milton Friedman's monetary philosophies of reducing government deficits by cutting taxes and growing the economy. Space and science exploration is a large cost program with indirect economic effects (at best), so NASA (and even Roscosmos) have been on the "big government bad, reduce deficits" chopping block for decades.
You might be right, although I think it was the Vietnam War and Oil Shock that did it. That led us to try and "save money" and design the "reusable" Space Shuttle, which, using solid rocket fuel that we can't throttle, is an objectively bad design. The predicted two percent catastrophic failure rate from that was just the final nail in the coffin that the Vietnam War and Oil Shock built. The 1970s were wild. OPEC cut off our oil; the economy wet the bed; there were food and gasoline riots in the First World; Nixon debased the US dollar. And we were fighting an unpopular, *conscription* war (forced deadly labor, friend) in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Under those conditions, the fiscal optics of playing golf on the Moon were simply unacceptable. By the time SDI was even announced, the damage had been done. The last Apollo mission was in 1972; F-117 and B-2 were not even designed yet back then and SDI was still a dream...to the extent it never got built, it still is. Just my opinion though.
LBJ and Nixon cut back the Apollo program when it was obvious we would reach the moon. With NASAs budget cut to 1/8th of its mid 60s peak the plans of a permanent space station and moon base were relocate to a shuttle with no where to go. Politicians and historians site public interest in space, and particularly the moon, waned but that’s not what happened. Public interest in space has remained constant throughout the years. The space race was meant to show American superiority and since we won (and the N1 rocket blew up on the launch pad) NASA wasn’t needed anymore. NASA was too popular to outright kill but l limiting it to half a percent of the budget (or less) was enough to give politicians a bipartisan platform to show progress and cooperation when it was deemed important to demonstrate for the masses. I seriously doubt events would have played out as on FAM if the Soviets had reached the moon first, with an ever increasing budget and warfare in space, much less He3 being so abundant that fusion power revolutionizes every aspect of society and allows orbital hotels and a literal race to mars. But that’s a game of what if and the creators of FAM are allowed to have their fun.
@@victorkreig6089 Nixon was hardly a beacon of technological progress, being your typically feckless and corrupt politician. Or perhaps you just have no clue what a luddite is...
Not sure if you can call it optimistic in any sense of the word. It's dark, bleak, cynical. Yeah we go further in space but it is only due to the cold war being much worse than it was here and escalating much further resulting in the increased spending on space and NASA, and in the increased militarization of the whole thing
1. the biggest mistake in s2 could have had a easy fix, was the mine site was giving off static that was messing with their comms. 2. wish had more time per episodes especially give Wayne screen time in s2.
As a late 60’s born Gen Xer, with a penchant for sci fi and history, I’m a fan of alternate history stories. After watching “For All Mankind” I feel more like Guinan in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Yesterday’s Enterprise that we’re in the “wrong” timeline. At the same time conflicted with the TNG episode Parallels, “we’re being hailed by 250,000 Enterprises.” Still I remain optimistic that our “timeline” will course correct.😎✌️
The show has a bit of main character syndrome. The same people are absolutely necessary for everything. As time passes they feel more wedged in. I like the forgotten ESA chump who shows in one episode.
When I was around 5 or 6 and was first learning about the planets and space travel, I was under the impression that we had astronauts on every planet in our solar system from Venos all the way to Pluto. So you can imagine my disappointment when I learned that not only did we only visit the moon, but that we only went there 5 times and then fucked off for the next 50 years.
*Dude walking in forest reveals future we could’ve had* That’s why I like the show. Could do without the whole incest plot that goes nowhere but overall great show.
For All Mankind is one of my favorite shows and I agree with almost everything you say except that the economy of For All Mankind would still be one of elites as Dev Ayesa is cleary the equivalent of our tech billionaires. Just because fusion and asteroid mining is possible doesn't mean that wealth distribution changes. Following the Expanse, which also seems very likely, it just leads to even greater wealth inequalities. Regarding gay issues the storyline was deliberately parallelling the Don't Ask Don't Tell debate of our 1990's. Finally Nirvana and grunge wasn't just a reaction to a wider cultural milleiu but also to overproduced music the 1980's.
The potential gain of asteroid mining must outweigh the cost of space travel to be a profitable enterprise. Which leaves two options, either its impossible, or they are already doing it and keeping it secret as to maintain artificial scarcity.
The alternate is way better. Lol. NASA being backed by an uber aggressive Gov't hell bent on matching the Soviet Space machine, made for an accelerated plan to put bases on the Moon. This series depicts a space race that never really ended. I love it. The scene in episode 7 of season 2 where the Moon Marines are strapped to the outside of a shuttle weaving in and around valleys armed to the teeth whilst humming "Flight of the Valkyrie" ...is pure sci-fi magic.
And the things what you describe make this show absolute shit to anybody who actually knows something about this space stuff. NASA already had proper plans for Moon base. You know the shuttle mission being referred as STS as in Space Transportation System. It was meant to be just the beginning part of it. Shuttle was meant to be just a vehicle to get to Earth orbit. You wouldn't use a shuttle to make trips to the Moon because of all the excess weight. But they put that in the show because of people like you. You know, looks cool but it's completely retarded. My biggest gripe with this show is that it isn't really alternative history which it's supposed to be. It's fantasy sci-fi.
It also has to make a LOT of leaps in logic, because it replies almost entirely on the soviets actually being competent and their space program not being held together by duct tape and wishful thinking
@@victorkreig6089 The jumping off point for the timeline in For All Mankind is that Sergei Korolev never died, and was able to get the resources needed to make the Soviet manned lunar program a success. The show does have to basically hand wave the actual economic state of the Soviet Union, and posit one that has a much more robust economy, but it's not like there isn't precedent for pretending the Soviets are stronger than they actually were. The Joint Chiefs and entire Military Industrial Complex did this during the 1980s as a way to justify US military spending, after all.
as someone who doesnt thoroughly understand the cultural shifts of the past, i feel this video illustrates very well bolth what happened to culture and that the real barrier to achieving things is societal will whilst cost is only secondary. if society somehow gained the will to do large transformative projects again with current technology they could build a tethered ring(like an orbital ring, but you build it on the ground and hoist it up with cables) and achieve all the space things people have written so much about.
It does definitely feel like we're seeing the timeline that actually should have happened when watching the show. Which, for all his personal flaws, is why i still respect Elon Musk. He's the only one who seems to have taken it as a personal insult that we haven't developed into that future For All Mankind has envisioned with the resources and power to do something about it.
The problem I have with Musk is he simply has too much power. When us normal folks have personal flaws, we don't affect geopolitics. He does. And lets say we get to Mars, will he becomes absolute ruler and turn it into a dystopia like in Total Recall? A huge chunk of what I find inspirational about the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions is that while the astronauts were exceptional people, they were decidedly middle class. I take no such inspiration from billionaires taking ownership of space.
@methos-ey9nf the only reason he has as much power as he does is by virtue of almost everyone else around him ceding the ground to him. Incompetence on everyone else's part shouldn't be a knock against his success. But all that being said, it's not like any of his potential competitors or rivals are any better and the majority of them are a lot worse. Not say that's any excuse but the fact of the matter is previous generations walked and voted us into a cyberpunk dystopia with no real way out. And honestly Musk's proposal of a human city on Mars doesn't strike me as any worse than the dystopia we already have here on Earth.
@@TheAndroidNextDoor Haha as somebody infuriated by the pay package the Tesla board has granted him, I very much agree with your assessment of how he's managed to get so much power. But I disagree with the idea of virtue by comparison. Musk has become a bad actor on the world stage, regardless of the good he might have achieved in the past or how bad other billionaires might be. Money and power are not things to be celebrated unto themselves.
@methos-ey9nf I disagree that he's a bad actor on the world stage. Is he perfect? No far from it. But he appears to have aimed his significant resources at goals designed to overall help humanity. And almost by proxy, a lot of bad people or people with extremely questionable motives hate him and oppose him and often make shit up about him. This isn't to say everything is good about him but if you only read news headlines you'd come away with the idea that he's literally the anti christ. And while I also don't like the idea of virtue by comparison, I also live in reality. There are no perfect solutions, only trade offs. And if we only acted in the world when perfect virtue was available, we'd still be in caves killing each other at best or extinct at worst.
Yeah FAM has what I like to call the Homefront effect which you briefly mention where North Korea replaces China. Like there is a bunch of stuff that makes infinitely more alternate history sense if you replace NK with the PLC For Example the game I name this after which is itself based on a old movie that later had a remake that switched China for North Korea the 2011 Homefront Video Game. It focused on North Korea but replace Korean Unification with Chinese Unification with Taiwan, Japanese surrender to North Korean influence to surrender from Chinese Influence granting full control of the island chain. Expansion across South East Asia due to the US withdraw by North Korea with China doing the same instead and eventually China doing what China has always done with their current government, turn our own technology and institutions against us with the EMP attack and very much the whole attacking, while talking about peace and doing their utmost to divide the USA and Europe apart with NATO unwilling and honestly lacking the strength economically from continuous economic intertwining with China or militarily to actually protect the USA against China due to the ever present issue of lacking European militarization, at least from a 2011 perspective.
I have a love/hate relationship with this show. FAM is really at it's best when it's showing us the future that was taken from us. But it often gets bogged down in petty, soap-opera interpersonal stories, or situations where you can see the writers grinding a political axe. In spite of the story beats and character arcs that grate, it's still one of the best tv shows going, especially in an entertainment landscape that's utterly bereft of anything that's interesting, or even competently written.
Has anybody noticed how by season 3, communism has spread to the Americas and covered pretty much all of South America and parts of southern North America?
I blame the Outer Space Treaty. If there was nothing to gain for mankind as a whole by claiming land and resources in space, we had no reason to continue till the Private Sector has the resources to try.
Rather blame public lack of interest because that was the real issue from American side. Publicly funded projects like NASA in general are depended on how they view it. If they see it as a waste of time and money then its obvious that the senators and such are less willing to give money to such projects. Lack of interest from general public is what killed the space exploration. On top of that, there was no REAL reason to continue space race since the Soviets couldn't keep up so there went the PR aspect also. For all mankind is a shit show but one of the few things it got right was the fact that the space race would have most likely continued if the Soviets had won the Moon and the Americans would have been able to keep up.
@@DrCruel That's only because people keep dumping billions into funding empty dreams and wishful thinking. It is literally a pyramid scheme for people with too much money and too little sense. There is nothing of value out there. And whatever stuff that are, are going to cost more to acquire and transport, making it entirely worthless.
"overweighting the significance of homosexuality in the 1990s political landscape" I'm just gonna say "citation needed". The 90s were, after all, when we got Don't Ask Don't Tell, but it's ALSO when we got the Defense of Marriage Act because there was a sudden and bipartisan freakout over the idea that there might be same gender marriages in Hawaii. The country was also still intensely homophobic. On the ground, Act Out was still very active, their protests showing up on national news regularly.
Sure, I didn't say it was irrelevant. But the show frames it as the pivotal issue of the day and it just wasn't. Don't Ask Don't Tell wasn't a landmark change so much as the military saying "fine, whatever." It was a compromise to align with where the culture was already going while mostly avoiding a divisive political stand. Kind of a cop-out, the path of least resistance. The slate of state laws excluding same-sex marriages were more about social conservatives "defending" marriage than an anti-gay crusade. The argument, as it was always presented to me at the time, was that if marriage can be redefined to include two men for example, it can be redefined to include anything. It's not a completely crazy argument, legal terms mean nothing if they can be redefined. I wouldn't even say the country was "intensely homophobic" at the time. Certainly there were, and are, individuals who are extremely hostile but that's not the baseline. I was in high school in the '90s and a couple guys came out as gay. They got razzed for it certainly, but I don't recall anyone who had been friends with them turning on them after that or any actual violence. It was a political issue in the '90s, but not the existential question of national character that For All Mankind sometimes implied.
@@feralhistorian I suppose I just disagree -- the politics of homonsexuality didn't seem to be particularly important to the show, outside of the characters who were actually gay. (If you think the response to the country learning an astronaut was gay was oversized, well, I guess we remember very different 1990s.)
@@feralhistorian, I don't think it's accurate to suggest For All Mankind makes homosexuality out to be a pivotal political issue of the 90's. Maybe I'm misremembering, but it only really becomes a major issue on the national level in the show when the President of the United States herself comes out as being gay to the whole world. That may not be very important today, but in 1994? Forget Bill Clinton and his affairs, that's the sort of scandal that can cause 1960's-level polarization. I will agree that America - and indeed, most of the world - wasn't particularly homophobic back then. It was however, much more taboo than it is today. Think of how polygamy is still viewed by most of society today.
Do you realize how "loud" this planet is? We shoot out all sorts of signals into space all the time from radio to lasers to some kid pointing a flashlight into the sky. We might as well make a moon size billboard saying Welcome to Earth.
I'm more than a little shocked that was your take from the show. Honestly, I thought it was one of the clumsiest, most heavy-handed pieces of aget prop I've ever seen. Season one especially sounded like it was written by a women's studies professor. It was a fascinating concept that Apple managed to ruin by inserting its oppressive brand of politics.
I gave the show a lot of credit for at least _trying_ to explain it. Yeah, it was contrived and anachronistic, but at least it wasn't hand-waved in out of nowhere.
"Maybe we need to broaden our vision and extend our reach. Maybe the only way to solve our problems is through growth and innovation, not through lowering of standards that so many of cultish political movements of today demand" This statement resonated with something deep inside me. People today who support the the environmental movement want to reduce their footprint and lower our energy use, but they don't know that close to 10k times the energy we use hits Earth as sunlight, and that's not even scratching the surface of sun's total output. It's such a wasted potential. We could use that energy to sequester carbon and turn it into fuel or building blocks, reclaim water, filter out toxic mineral leach, run a swarm of drones to clean the ocean and control invasive species and much more. Instead they want to huddle back into a shell and hope that nature heals itself. It's far too late for that.
@@mojrimibnharb4584 I thought we were talking about why FAM is like the last gasp of optimistic Trek. It's because one of the lead writers of Trek created it.
@@feralhistorian There's a good chance that the Soviet Union could very well collapse in Season 4. The teaser for season 4 at the end of season 3 implies a darker and more pessimistic tone, which is probably necessary since the first three seasons sometimes overdosed on the social democratic techno-optimism. One of the bugbears of FAMK is its lack of economic realism. Granted, this isn't important because it is escapism, but there's no explanation for WHY or HOW the economy is doing so well for an extended period. The show's writers also go to great lengths to show a prosperous socialist economy, but they don't go deeper. This is probably why I hope season 4, which will be focused on the USSR, will have some good elucidating moments.
@@PoliticalWeekly Regarding the global economy in the series, I'm going on the assumption that it's fueled by a combination of abundant energy (they do mention having fusion power) and the familiar process of debt-creation to fund new projects in the expectation that economic growth will outstrip the growth of debt. Sooner or later it falls apart. A depiction of the USSR's collapse with crews in space, on the Moon, on Mars; that has a lot of story possibilities.
I think it was in a Scott Manley Video i understood that the design margins of Rockets & Rocket Engines is 10%. I.e. You calculate/test were the material fails. Then they (for Rockets), add 10%. That is just nuts. For construction, you want 100% or 200%. We will never get into space on those 10%. (At least not me, keep me far, far away.)
Unless you invent a rocket engine with an Isp of 1,500 tomorrow, it's what we're stuck with. Nobody understands just how _deep_ Earth's gravity well is - and to think, according to pretty much every telescope we've looked through in the last 30 years, Earth is on the _small side_ as planets go. As such, there's a theory that this may be (one of) the Great Filter(s).
It feels like this is the point where a VPN sponsors the channel and I make a cryptic reference to the torrents on the high seas to avoid a RUclips strike.
Excellent presentation and analysis! As a model builder, I would love to spend an hour or so perusing a well-stocked hobby shop in this alternate timeline. I'm imagining the iconic Monogram "First Lunar Landing" model kit from our timeline being offered as the "US Lunar Excursion Module" - without the included diorama base since the Soviets made the First Lunar Landing and 'our' First Lunar Landing was somewhat . . . less than dignified. But never fear! The Monogram LEM kit would come with a "Tips for Building Dioramas" sheet where Shep Paine shows how to recreate the historical scene with the kit, and even how to accurately model the damaged landing gear . . . . Thanks for sharing this with us! 810th Like.
It also doesn't help that Humanity, as I recall, was looking towards Venus long before the space race. It was closer than Mars to earth bith in distance and size. But the Soviets discovered thst manned missions to Venus wouldn't be happening any time soon. The USSR put a lot of effort into making probes that would last even just a few hours before being destroyed by the Venusian environment. Colonies on Venus are not tenable unless, like, we build cloud cities like in Star Wars. And I think that was like a kick to the nuts for Humanity's space ambitions.
9:53 technology advanced so much society stuck to handheld flat screens to do everything. For all Mankind showed us an alt reality where we became an interplanetary species by necessity
There just was never the economic incentive for space travel, not while Earth has abundant easily accessible resources and energy, as in in there is no point expending the effort to leave a gravity well to do asteroid mining while Brazilian Iron mines and Congolese Cobalt can be mined by slave children. In our timeline Colonization of the Americas, and later Africa and Asia was only undertaken and successful because it could turn a profit, whether that come from Aztec gold, Virginia tobacco, or Congolese rubber. The moon and outer space in general has no analogue to make the endeavor worthwhile from an economic perspective and there's only so much wealth you can funnel into unproductive projects before it really starts to hurt the real economy. It's why you can't just fix unemployment by building 100 bridges to nowhere.
Every thing you say was mostly true, yet Space X and Star Link have shown that truths change. There is the very real possibility that the dreams of one man backed by the dreams of thousands of others will accomplish what every sci fi enjoyer has dreamed of for decades. 😮
@@jimmysaint8539I think the business of tech entrepreneurs is to hype up stock value. More so when that has surpassed other metrics. They can be eternal startups a lot longer.
One of these days I'll subscribe to Apple TV+ so I can watch this series. But already I find some of the drama overly contrived - such as space marines fighting cosmonauts. It just doesn't make any sense that we'd be in a cold war, training astronauts to go to the moon, but never teach them any Russian so they could deal with encounters without miscommunications leading to violence...
1:00 new horizons next door. Spatial Reality decades away. The grass is not greener on the other side if a light year is a 1000 years away at 0.001 percent of light speed.
I think North Korea was meant to be North Korea not China! China already has a successfull and televised space program in this timeline. Can't remember if it's shown in news clips within the show. Chinese in space is unremarkable. The North Korean's janky lowtech space mission is reminiscent of their real world nuclear weapons program trying to catch up and within the show space programs became more important than nuclear weapons programs.
The show is rather over-optimistic about human nature, basically from the start. One of its founding "departures from reality" is the idea that a command economy can adequately allocate resources and muster the strength to produce a lunar rocket. This is precisely the point on which Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative challenged the Soviets and hastened their system's end.
I feel like the diversity in this show feels way less organic than most modern shows. This is basically a timeline where everyone decided to be less racist because they didn't want people to think they were racist. Like in the show we get Black astronauts because NASA director Thomas Paine "doesn't want Jesse Jackson up [his] ass". But Thomas Paine was the real world NASA director, why didn't he care about that in our timeline? I love this show but I find the historical extrapolation feels like alternate history mad libs.
Agreed. The russians had females in combat roles throughout ww2, but that didn't change our own gender roles in the west. Why would a female cosmonaut suddenly turn NASA into a female dominated organization?
When we looked forward we thought we would have bases on the planets interstellar travel mining on the ocean floor Robots non came about but they did not see the rise of personal computers mobile phones and how that effects jobs and social relationships What will the future be like in 50 or 100 years
Being a science and history/alt history nerd, I really love For All Mankind. However I must admit some of the things like nuclear fusion being viable by the 1980's and having full on 2001: A Space Odyssey like space station by the 90's...yeah it's a bit of a stretch. And the gay president scandal storyline I honestly could care less for, honestly should be it's own show or movie.
The moon landing took 5% of GDP. We built a much bigger icbm and collected some rocks. Innovation and wealth is created by capital accumulation, not 'technology'. If science got the job done, Africa would be a paridise. And it certainly doesn't drive the materialist dialectic toward the trekkie internationale
Interesting, but just barely, i see no timeline in which a woman president doesnt end up triggering an attack from all enemies, just wait a few days and we'll see waht happens
Maybe the real space exploration program was the ICBMs we developed along the way.
This is the most perceptive of the comments.
The ICBMs mostly just sat there in their silos. They may have prevented World War III from happening, but we just don't know. I think the Soviet Union may have started a war and collapsed much sooner if not for nuclear weapons and the missiles that delivered them. The ICBMs were much use in launching satellites, they were good for long term storage of missiles that could be launched at a moment's notice by they weren't very cheap for launching satellites as they were expendable and expensive to produce, relying on solid fuel rockets as they did.
@@thomaskalbfus2005 The Soviet Union could not have been more against going to war again after WW2. The Soviet Union was devastated after the war and was very much focused on rebuilding and *not* starting a new one.
@@topphatt1312 The same might be said about Germany after World War I, yet they started World War II. World War I ended in 1918, yet 21 years in 1939 Germany was ready to start another one. So if there was no Robert Oppenheimer, if Albert Einstein didn't write his letter to FDR, Germany was on the wrong track towards atomic bomb development, so if the USA did nothing and did not build the atomic bomb, then Germany would have lost without building an atomic bomb either, Japan didn't and since the Soviets stole the plans from us, they too wouldn't have had an atomic bomb.
What this would do is probably prolong World War II for another year so the United States could invade Japan, and then the post war would world settle into shape. The Soviets wouldn't be ready to start another war in 1945, but by 1965 it just might, without nuclear weapons there would be less incentive to build missiles, so probably we would have short range missiles that deliver conventional explosives. These missiles would be used on the battlefield and to inflict terror on cities similar to the way the V2 rocket was used by the Germans. So probably World War III would have started in the 1960s when the Soviets had recovered and were ready to start another one, my guess it they would try to make a grab for the other half of Europe.
While the space program helped further development of ICBMs ICBMs actually jump started our space program. Early rockets for the space program were just modified ICBMs, also the ICBM program started under Eisenhower in the mid 50s
One of the tangential plot points that was such a divergence, was the fact that NASA was able to retain the royalty monies from all it's patented tech. Instead of going into federal general funds the organisation kept a real income stream independent of its traditional budget allotment.
And as would happen in real life the US Congress was desperate to get their hands on that revenue for their wars and (they SUPER SWEAR!) social programs (no really they swear!)
I don't see the connection between exploring the Moon and faster advances in nuclear fusion. I also don't see a role in a more aggressive space race preventing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, nor do I see it resulting in a lesbian woman being elected president of the United States, this may be just a butterfly effect, but there is no direct connection between one thing happening and the other. Also the race to Mars was a little immature, being portrayed as an actual race with astronauts risking their lives just to get there first and plant the flag, I don't think NASA would do that! I also don't think all this spending to plant flags on distant planets would necessarily have resulted in cheaper access to space, with governments spending billions, they would be happy to just have throwaway rockets, though Sea Dragon might be a big exception to that!
Well you just seem to have a piss poor understanding of what it takes to drive real innovation. We didn't see anything like reusability until the private sector and profits got involved. Energy production advancements coming out of something like a lunar base does make sense when you factor in that solar power can't supply a base, you can't burn coal, oil, or nat. gas and fission reactors need enriched materials sent up from earth. A fusion reactor burning deuterium and tritium or helium 3 could be fueled with resources found on the moon. And once something like a functioning fusion reactor is up and running you can build them down on earth without large fossil fuel entities getting their dick in the door and screwing everything up. Look at how much money has been wasted on ITER the world's largest fusion experiment, which was just delayed by another 10 years.
"The Moon Landing was a show directed by Kubrick, but we know the guy - he was such a hard-sss perfectionist that he required shooting on location".
Haha, nope
Yeah. The caterer was really upset he had to ship all of those supplies and kitchen equipment to Luna.
Good one 😂
You nailed it when you said our history feels like it's the wrong timeline and For All Mankind feels like the way it should have been.
See Mark fisher’s hauntology - where we are haunted by outr expected future which never happened
Genuinely so sad 😔
No point in worrying about what if. Learn from the past, live in the present and focus on the future
@dean_l33 Like any of us have a chance to effect anything at that level? 🤣
@@geographicaloddity2 You only got one chance to live
I feel the critical point in time which affected the space race was the death of Sergei Korolev on the 14th of January 1966. Korolev’s health was affected when he was sent to a gulag and he was lucky to be needed so he was released before dying, however it did affect his health. This was likely the cause of the need to have an operation which ended up killing him, due to bad luck. If he had lived he may well have got the N1 working and if that occurred he would have been able to land a manned craft on the moon before the US. It would not have been a woman, but with that occurring the US would of likely gone for a mars mission. While unbelievable dangerous the US did have the equipment to get to mars, in theory. If that was off the agenda, a moon base was also likely. It was Korolev that drove the soviet manned program, just like the way Wernher von Braun drove it in the US. When Korolev died the manned space race ran on momentum and eventually stopped. A race needs two side competing and with the Soviets out of the race, the US decided to stop as well, especially since Wernher von Braun died in 1977.
"would of likely gone" would have or would've.
@@ReezeGoingSenseless The US may well have tried for a mars mission to counter any USSR moon landing, if the public forced the government. I suspect not, but it was a possibility.
@@peterfmodel I'm not arguing about the substance of your comment. Merely that "would of" is not a thing. It's would have or would've. Not would of.
@@ReezeGoingSenseless Understood, yes you are correct.
Sometimes it's hard to envision a better future if we can't see it. I can't wait for season 4!
I was born in the middle of the Apollo era and as a kid, fell in love with the space program. It was later i wondered why we didn't keep going, why we didn't have 'Moon Base Alpha' or 'Clavius Base', etc. Only decades later did it become clear that we did lose that vision, that it was just easier to muddle around in the mud, barely getting back into low earth orbit and only sending robot probes to do our jobs. =/
The Artemis Program is there but Idk if that will reignite the spirt, maybe until governments and companies realize the value of a space economy will then have space exploration rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
So why risk human lives if you can study it simply with the help of robots?
for all mankind is the timeline we wanted to happen
not the timeline we deserve, but the timeline we need
Well other than the Soviet domination of Europe, Iraq owning the middle east and Mexico becoming a communist dictatorship
Are you a commie? Why would anyone want the USSR to beat us to the moon and stay around past '91 after doing that? The timeline of For All Mankind is dystopian, the Eastern Bloc nations never achieved their freedom in that timeline.
Probably not for NASA, though, considering half the people they choose are people who'd never get in the program in the first place.
Yeah, you might want to get another perspective from anybody who lived in any of the Eastern Bloc countries.
I love the way this guy talks about this stuff. Reminds me of the old documentarys from the early oughties
"There's a disconnect between the future we expect and the one we actually make." Yep. My hopes for the future are currently D-E-A-D. "For All Mankind shows us a reflection of ourselves as just a little bit better than we are." I've known that. And it's sad that I have to use past tense. Since 2016, I don't know who "we" are. I thought I did, sort of. But apparently not. Lots of people "out there" don't know WTF they want, and those sorts can be mind-bogglingly destructive.
I remain strangely optimistic. Within the confines of being a cynical old man of course.
No worries. For all of Antifa's and BLM's violent racism and stupidity, socialism is still on its way out.
@@feralhistorian There are more than a few reasons to be optimistic. Operation Warp Speed shows that groundbreaking science can be done cheaply and quickly. Billionaires, who now fund most of R&D, are rediscovering the importance of basic research. There seems to be a new realization that productivity growth has to start snowballing for people to progress in atoms and not just bits. However, there are many reasons to be pessimistic. For one, the cost of government keeps increasing. Health, Education, and welfare increasingly eat most federal dollars. Most countries have horrendous balance sheets.
@@PoliticalWeekly Space exploration and that whole scene is a pyramid scheme from top to bottom.
With the demographic collapse of most of the developed world, with China halving their population in a couple decades. And the same happening in Germany, Russia, and many other places.
With mass retirement removing investment from the economy while at the same time draining the tax dollars.
Cost of capital going up.
Taxes going up.
Workers going down.
Investment in these fairytales are going to end. From AI to space stuff.
Covid hysteria, trump hysteria, explosion of conspiracy theories because trust in govt has collapsed.
It all comes down to tribalism and mass hysteria. These have happened before and we got past them. We will again.
We just need to recognize the enemy is not the latest big thing x it's mass hysteria, groupthink and tribalism. If we don't realize that we will just keep making the same errors over and over in new forms.
We have a great ability to bounce back. The nuts (which sometimes are us) never win.
It's my belief that the Cold War, with stealth aircraft and SDI ate up the space program resources.
That's likely a big part of it.
Unfortunately, that math doesn't really add up. Apollo, for instance, spent twice as much money in 10 years as the B-2 program did in 40 years. Buying four F-117s that you got to use for 25 years set you back as much as one LEM that you got a couple days use out of.
Even gutting the NASA budget to cover these programs would still have left NASA with a bigger budget than they had. The horrifyingly basic answer is that it was massively expensive with no real answer after "OK we landed on the Moon, now what?" Literally the only thing that they could come up with was using a LEM as an orbital telescope body (cheaper and more effective to use a Keyhole with different optics) or using a Saturn upper stage as a space station (Skylab! Which still requires the Shuttle to be built!). There was also a plan to use a Skylab body as a habitat for a Venus flyby, which may have been the most expensive plan to kill three people ever devised.
For All Mankind uses the Egg of Columbus to get around all of that. The type of ISRU they use to keep the Moon race going wasn't really an idea at the time, so no one would have thought to use it.
The US was going to buy and pay for stealth aircraft no matter what. Diverting the funding from NASA would still have left NASA as one of the largest budget items around. But there was nowhere to go and nothing to do that justified that much money.
It's always been a kind of feeling I had that the space race was always going to be something very much dictated by America, yes the Soviets started it with sputnik but after that point it wouldn't end until the American's came out on top, without constant American pressure and the pressure of a race the Soviets just weren't in a position to fund their space program that much after WW2 and all the other things the Soviets had to deal with. It is my belief that the Americans would have just kept funding their space program so long as 'the commies were still up there'.
@@Alxnick This. The Space Shuttle was also delayed (causing Skylab to crash prematurely... around Australia) and went over-budget. Multiple times. Because cryogenic engines are hard; the shuttle suffered from feature creep; and, in hindsight, the shuttle program was an engineering catastrophe. It accomplished a lot, and everyone loves it (including me), but airplanes in space? Probably not the best idea for a reusable space ship...
I also can't help but point out NASAs legacy with their perceived technological regression, where the SLS rocket as compared with SpaceX's Starship, is underwhelming. SLS is an advanced rocket, but most components are recycled from the shuttle program, which were heavily borrowed from Apollo, all to maintain the same supply chains (the iron cross), causing a government space program to cost billions while a private space program costs millions, but NASAs still SpaceX's number 1 customer.
And this is all discounting the political climate with the silent majority causing a political realignment towards the center-right (neoliberalism), which favored Milton Friedman's monetary philosophies of reducing government deficits by cutting taxes and growing the economy. Space and science exploration is a large cost program with indirect economic effects (at best), so NASA (and even Roscosmos) have been on the "big government bad, reduce deficits" chopping block for decades.
You might be right, although I think it was the Vietnam War and Oil Shock that did it. That led us to try and "save money" and design the "reusable" Space Shuttle, which, using solid rocket fuel that we can't throttle, is an objectively bad design. The predicted two percent catastrophic failure rate from that was just the final nail in the coffin that the Vietnam War and Oil Shock built.
The 1970s were wild. OPEC cut off our oil; the economy wet the bed; there were food and gasoline riots in the First World; Nixon debased the US dollar. And we were fighting an unpopular, *conscription* war (forced deadly labor, friend) in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Under those conditions, the fiscal optics of playing golf on the Moon were simply unacceptable.
By the time SDI was even announced, the damage had been done.
The last Apollo mission was in 1972; F-117 and B-2 were not even designed yet back then and SDI was still a dream...to the extent it never got built, it still is.
Just my opinion though.
This show did give me a strange melancholy. This explains why.
LBJ and Nixon cut back the Apollo program when it was obvious we would reach the moon. With NASAs budget cut to 1/8th of its mid 60s peak the plans of a permanent space station and moon base were relocate to a shuttle with no where to go. Politicians and historians site public interest in space, and particularly the moon, waned but that’s not what happened. Public interest in space has remained constant throughout the years. The space race was meant to show American superiority and since we won (and the N1 rocket blew up on the launch pad) NASA wasn’t needed anymore. NASA was too popular to outright kill but l limiting it to half a percent of the budget (or less) was enough to give politicians a bipartisan platform to show progress and cooperation when it was deemed important to demonstrate for the masses.
I seriously doubt events would have played out as on FAM if the Soviets had reached the moon first, with an ever increasing budget and warfare in space, much less He3 being so abundant that fusion power revolutionizes every aspect of society and allows orbital hotels and a literal race to mars. But that’s a game of what if and the creators of FAM are allowed to have their fun.
Blaming Nixon is what luddites do
@@victorkreig6089 Nixon was hardly a beacon of technological progress, being your typically feckless and corrupt politician. Or perhaps you just have no clue what a luddite is...
This is a absolutely fabulous video essay. I love For All Mankind because it dares to be optimistic.
Not sure if you can call it optimistic in any sense of the word. It's dark, bleak, cynical. Yeah we go further in space but it is only due to the cold war being much worse than it was here and escalating much further resulting in the increased spending on space and NASA, and in the increased militarization of the whole thing
It's worth comparing and contrasting For All Mankind with the...content...that passes for Star Trek nowadays.
Hey man these are excellent. Happy to have found this channel.
Agreed
My dude, you are nail on the head about why we really stopped exploring space.
1. the biggest mistake in s2 could have had a easy fix, was the mine site was giving off static that was messing with their comms.
2. wish had more time per episodes especially give Wayne screen time in s2.
As a late 60’s born Gen Xer, with a penchant for sci fi and history, I’m a fan of alternate history stories. After watching “For All Mankind” I feel more like Guinan in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Yesterday’s Enterprise that we’re in the “wrong” timeline. At the same time conflicted with the TNG episode Parallels, “we’re being hailed by 250,000 Enterprises.” Still I remain optimistic that our “timeline” will course correct.😎✌️
The show has a bit of main character syndrome. The same people are absolutely necessary for everything. As time passes they feel more wedged in. I like the forgotten ESA chump who shows in one episode.
When I was around 5 or 6 and was first learning about the planets and space travel, I was under the impression that we had astronauts on every planet in our solar system from Venos all the way to Pluto. So you can imagine my disappointment when I learned that not only did we only visit the moon, but that we only went there 5 times and then fucked off for the next 50 years.
*Dude walking in forest reveals future we could’ve had*
That’s why I like the show. Could do without the whole incest plot that goes nowhere but overall great show.
wha?
im suddently more interested by this show
Karen and Danny were NOT related.
For All Mankind is one of my favorite shows and I agree with almost everything you say except that the economy of For All Mankind would still be one of elites as Dev Ayesa is cleary the equivalent of our tech billionaires. Just because fusion and asteroid mining is possible doesn't mean that wealth distribution changes. Following the Expanse, which also seems very likely, it just leads to even greater wealth inequalities. Regarding gay issues the storyline was deliberately parallelling the Don't Ask Don't Tell debate of our 1990's. Finally Nirvana and grunge wasn't just a reaction to a wider cultural milleiu but also to overproduced music the 1980's.
I predict avarice over asteroid mining as the big motivator to get us up there easily and affordably and remain reasonably safe*.
The potential gain of asteroid mining must outweigh the cost of space travel to be a profitable enterprise. Which leaves two options, either its impossible, or they are already doing it and keeping it secret as to maintain artificial scarcity.
The alternate is way better. Lol. NASA being backed by an uber aggressive Gov't hell bent on matching the Soviet Space machine, made for an accelerated plan to put bases on the Moon. This series depicts a space race that never really ended. I love it. The scene in episode 7 of season 2 where the Moon Marines are strapped to the outside of a shuttle weaving in and around valleys armed to the teeth whilst humming "Flight of the Valkyrie" ...is pure sci-fi magic.
And the things what you describe make this show absolute shit to anybody who actually knows something about this space stuff. NASA already had proper plans for Moon base. You know the shuttle mission being referred as STS as in Space Transportation System. It was meant to be just the beginning part of it. Shuttle was meant to be just a vehicle to get to Earth orbit. You wouldn't use a shuttle to make trips to the Moon because of all the excess weight. But they put that in the show because of people like you. You know, looks cool but it's completely retarded.
My biggest gripe with this show is that it isn't really alternative history which it's supposed to be. It's fantasy sci-fi.
It also has to make a LOT of leaps in logic, because it replies almost entirely on the soviets actually being competent and their space program not being held together by duct tape and wishful thinking
@@victorkreig6089 The jumping off point for the timeline in For All Mankind is that Sergei Korolev never died, and was able to get the resources needed to make the Soviet manned lunar program a success. The show does have to basically hand wave the actual economic state of the Soviet Union, and posit one that has a much more robust economy, but it's not like there isn't precedent for pretending the Soviets are stronger than they actually were. The Joint Chiefs and entire Military Industrial Complex did this during the 1980s as a way to justify US military spending, after all.
More is achieved by co-operation than competition.
@@victorkreig6089 NASA spent money on a pen that could write in zero G. The Russians used a pencil. Who is the idiot? 😜
as someone who doesnt thoroughly understand the cultural shifts of the past, i feel this video illustrates very well bolth what happened to culture and that the real barrier to achieving things is societal will whilst cost is only secondary. if society somehow gained the will to do large transformative projects again with current technology they could build a tethered ring(like an orbital ring, but you build it on the ground and hoist it up with cables) and achieve all the space things people have written so much about.
It does definitely feel like we're seeing the timeline that actually should have happened when watching the show. Which, for all his personal flaws, is why i still respect Elon Musk. He's the only one who seems to have taken it as a personal insult that we haven't developed into that future For All Mankind has envisioned with the resources and power to do something about it.
The problem I have with Musk is he simply has too much power. When us normal folks have personal flaws, we don't affect geopolitics. He does. And lets say we get to Mars, will he becomes absolute ruler and turn it into a dystopia like in Total Recall? A huge chunk of what I find inspirational about the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions is that while the astronauts were exceptional people, they were decidedly middle class. I take no such inspiration from billionaires taking ownership of space.
@methos-ey9nf the only reason he has as much power as he does is by virtue of almost everyone else around him ceding the ground to him. Incompetence on everyone else's part shouldn't be a knock against his success.
But all that being said, it's not like any of his potential competitors or rivals are any better and the majority of them are a lot worse. Not say that's any excuse but the fact of the matter is previous generations walked and voted us into a cyberpunk dystopia with no real way out. And honestly Musk's proposal of a human city on Mars doesn't strike me as any worse than the dystopia we already have here on Earth.
@@TheAndroidNextDoor Haha as somebody infuriated by the pay package the Tesla board has granted him, I very much agree with your assessment of how he's managed to get so much power. But I disagree with the idea of virtue by comparison. Musk has become a bad actor on the world stage, regardless of the good he might have achieved in the past or how bad other billionaires might be. Money and power are not things to be celebrated unto themselves.
@methos-ey9nf I disagree that he's a bad actor on the world stage. Is he perfect? No far from it. But he appears to have aimed his significant resources at goals designed to overall help humanity. And almost by proxy, a lot of bad people or people with extremely questionable motives hate him and oppose him and often make shit up about him. This isn't to say everything is good about him but if you only read news headlines you'd come away with the idea that he's literally the anti christ.
And while I also don't like the idea of virtue by comparison, I also live in reality. There are no perfect solutions, only trade offs. And if we only acted in the world when perfect virtue was available, we'd still be in caves killing each other at best or extinct at worst.
Well done, Sir! And thank you for this wonderful perspective
best video i've watched in a long time
Yeah FAM has what I like to call the Homefront effect which you briefly mention where North Korea replaces China. Like there is a bunch of stuff that makes infinitely more alternate history sense if you replace NK with the PLC
For Example the game I name this after which is itself based on a old movie that later had a remake that switched China for North Korea the 2011 Homefront Video Game. It focused on North Korea but replace Korean Unification with Chinese Unification with Taiwan, Japanese surrender to North Korean influence to surrender from Chinese Influence granting full control of the island chain. Expansion across South East Asia due to the US withdraw by North Korea with China doing the same instead and eventually China doing what China has always done with their current government, turn our own technology and institutions against us with the EMP attack and very much the whole attacking, while talking about peace and doing their utmost to divide the USA and Europe apart with NATO unwilling and honestly lacking the strength economically from continuous economic intertwining with China or militarily to actually protect the USA against China due to the ever present issue of lacking European militarization, at least from a 2011 perspective.
I have a love/hate relationship with this show. FAM is really at it's best when it's showing us the future that was taken from us. But it often gets bogged down in petty, soap-opera interpersonal stories, or situations where you can see the writers grinding a political axe.
In spite of the story beats and character arcs that grate, it's still one of the best tv shows going, especially in an entertainment landscape that's utterly bereft of anything that's interesting, or even competently written.
Has anybody noticed how by season 3, communism has spread to the Americas and covered pretty much all of South America and parts of southern North America?
Would prefer a series where all spacefaring nations had collaborated after the moon landings, maybe 2001 may have happened
This one earned my sub to the channel. Please keep the insightful videos coming.
I knew nothing about this show, thanks for alerting us.
I blame the Outer Space Treaty. If there was nothing to gain for mankind as a whole by claiming land and resources in space, we had no reason to continue till the Private Sector has the resources to try.
Rather blame public lack of interest because that was the real issue from American side. Publicly funded projects like NASA in general are depended on how they view it. If they see it as a waste of time and money then its obvious that the senators and such are less willing to give money to such projects. Lack of interest from general public is what killed the space exploration. On top of that, there was no REAL reason to continue space race since the Soviets couldn't keep up so there went the PR aspect also.
For all mankind is a shit show but one of the few things it got right was the fact that the space race would have most likely continued if the Soviets had won the Moon and the Americans would have been able to keep up.
Science and expanding knowledge is the reason.
@@ChrisPage68 Problem is that it's hard to pass that on a fiscal year budget. National defense or pride is much simpler.
Superb and thought provoking video, made me start to rewatch the series
space travel ended with Ford ... or the powers who supported Ford. then Carter wore a sweater... and here we are
No worries. Space is just going private. Governments dropped the ball, so entrepreneurs are taking over.
@@DrCruel That's only because people keep dumping billions into funding empty dreams and wishful thinking. It is literally a pyramid scheme for people with too much money and too little sense.
There is nothing of value out there. And whatever stuff that are, are going to cost more to acquire and transport, making it entirely worthless.
I hate that Carter's sweater was so discouraging to people.
Carter was the president of settle for what you have, don't dream. Dreaming is dangerous.
"overweighting the significance of homosexuality in the 1990s political landscape" I'm just gonna say "citation needed". The 90s were, after all, when we got Don't Ask Don't Tell, but it's ALSO when we got the Defense of Marriage Act because there was a sudden and bipartisan freakout over the idea that there might be same gender marriages in Hawaii. The country was also still intensely homophobic. On the ground, Act Out was still very active, their protests showing up on national news regularly.
Sure, I didn't say it was irrelevant. But the show frames it as the pivotal issue of the day and it just wasn't. Don't Ask Don't Tell wasn't a landmark change so much as the military saying "fine, whatever." It was a compromise to align with where the culture was already going while mostly avoiding a divisive political stand. Kind of a cop-out, the path of least resistance.
The slate of state laws excluding same-sex marriages were more about social conservatives "defending" marriage than an anti-gay crusade. The argument, as it was always presented to me at the time, was that if marriage can be redefined to include two men for example, it can be redefined to include anything. It's not a completely crazy argument, legal terms mean nothing if they can be redefined.
I wouldn't even say the country was "intensely homophobic" at the time. Certainly there were, and are, individuals who are extremely hostile but that's not the baseline. I was in high school in the '90s and a couple guys came out as gay. They got razzed for it certainly, but I don't recall anyone who had been friends with them turning on them after that or any actual violence.
It was a political issue in the '90s, but not the existential question of national character that For All Mankind sometimes implied.
@@feralhistorian I suppose I just disagree -- the politics of homonsexuality didn't seem to be particularly important to the show, outside of the characters who were actually gay. (If you think the response to the country learning an astronaut was gay was oversized, well, I guess we remember very different 1990s.)
@@feralhistorian, I don't think it's accurate to suggest For All Mankind makes homosexuality out to be a pivotal political issue of the 90's. Maybe I'm misremembering, but it only really becomes a major issue on the national level in the show when the President of the United States herself comes out as being gay to the whole world. That may not be very important today, but in 1994? Forget Bill Clinton and his affairs, that's the sort of scandal that can cause 1960's-level polarization.
I will agree that America - and indeed, most of the world - wasn't particularly homophobic back then. It was however, much more taboo than it is today. Think of how polygamy is still viewed by most of society today.
This was a wonderful tangent to listen to! Thanks.
Maybe we went to space and why we found is that it’s better to stay quiet on our pale blue dot than broadcast our presence even more to the cosmos.
Do you realize how "loud" this planet is? We shoot out all sorts of signals into space all the time from radio to lasers to some kid pointing a flashlight into the sky. We might as well make a moon size billboard saying Welcome to Earth.
I don’t think it’s that we gave up on fusion, but it’s just hard to do. I mean they are making progress, but not enough to power much anything yet.
you deserve 1 million subs keep up the work even if u don't get a lot of views enjoy these videos a lot 👍
I'm more than a little shocked that was your take from the show. Honestly, I thought it was one of the clumsiest, most heavy-handed pieces of aget prop I've ever seen. Season one especially sounded like it was written by a women's studies professor. It was a fascinating concept that Apple managed to ruin by inserting its oppressive brand of politics.
I gave the show a lot of credit for at least _trying_ to explain it. Yeah, it was contrived and anachronistic, but at least it wasn't hand-waved in out of nowhere.
Those who are used to privilege always find equality oppressive. 😉
"Maybe we need to broaden our vision and extend our reach. Maybe the only way to solve our problems is through growth and innovation, not through lowering of standards that so many of cultish political movements of today demand"
This statement resonated with something deep inside me. People today who support the the environmental movement want to reduce their footprint and lower our energy use, but they don't know that close to 10k times the energy we use hits Earth as sunlight, and that's not even scratching the surface of sun's total output. It's such a wasted potential.
We could use that energy to sequester carbon and turn it into fuel or building blocks, reclaim water, filter out toxic mineral leach, run a swarm of drones to clean the ocean and control invasive species and much more. Instead they want to huddle back into a shell and hope that nature heals itself. It's far too late for that.
The universe does not love us. Space wants to kill us. If we play this game, we'd better get real smart.
this is an excellent video essay, i agree completely
Gr8 show honestly rlly hoping season 5 gets made
The last gasp of optimistic sf, the ST sequel that never was.
Check who the creator of the show was, that's absolutely not an accident.
@@ideologybot4592 Of Orville? I know. That's part of my point here. McFarlane had to sell it as a comedy to get it produced.
@@mojrimibnharb4584 no, Ron Moore, one of the leading ST writers of the 90s.
@@ideologybot4592 Wait, what are we talking about?
@@mojrimibnharb4584 I thought we were talking about why FAM is like the last gasp of optimistic Trek. It's because one of the lead writers of Trek created it.
Seen my country and the rest of south america falling into comunist make me cringe really hard, I can only hope that by 2010's they got rid of them
Yes, I feel a bit ill at the thought of the Soviet Union surviving into the 21st Century.
Yeah but look at BRICS now, let’s be real. Latin America has many reasons to trust the USSR in this alternate history
@@boukm3n No they dont lmao
@@feralhistorian There's a good chance that the Soviet Union could very well collapse in Season 4. The teaser for season 4 at the end of season 3 implies a darker and more pessimistic tone, which is probably necessary since the first three seasons sometimes overdosed on the social democratic techno-optimism. One of the bugbears of FAMK is its lack of economic realism. Granted, this isn't important because it is escapism, but there's no explanation for WHY or HOW the economy is doing so well for an extended period. The show's writers also go to great lengths to show a prosperous socialist economy, but they don't go deeper. This is probably why I hope season 4, which will be focused on the USSR, will have some good elucidating moments.
@@PoliticalWeekly Regarding the global economy in the series, I'm going on the assumption that it's fueled by a combination of abundant energy (they do mention having fusion power) and the familiar process of debt-creation to fund new projects in the expectation that economic growth will outstrip the growth of debt.
Sooner or later it falls apart. A depiction of the USSR's collapse with crews in space, on the Moon, on Mars; that has a lot of story possibilities.
I think it was in a Scott Manley Video i understood that the design margins of Rockets & Rocket Engines is 10%. I.e. You calculate/test were the material fails. Then they (for Rockets), add 10%.
That is just nuts. For construction, you want 100% or 200%. We will never get into space on those 10%. (At least not me, keep me far, far away.)
Unless you invent a rocket engine with an Isp of 1,500 tomorrow, it's what we're stuck with. Nobody understands just how _deep_ Earth's gravity well is - and to think, according to pretty much every telescope we've looked through in the last 30 years, Earth is on the _small side_ as planets go. As such, there's a theory that this may be (one of) the Great Filter(s).
Wonderfully put!
What a great channel
I love you Mitchell and Webb reference 8:52.
If i had Apple TV+ i would have already watched it. :(
It feels like this is the point where a VPN sponsors the channel and I make a cryptic reference to the torrents on the high seas to avoid a RUclips strike.
If you have an account on one of the patronage website I'd be happy to sponsor the channel
i am lucky someoned shipped me season 1 on USB and im now watching season 2 at his house and preparing for season 3
I torrent it :)
Really liked the original documentary "for all mankind" especially when they recount the dreams they had sleeping on the lunar surface.
If we ever get to see the USS Curtis LeMay, then maybe our present isn’t so bad.
Excellent presentation and analysis!
As a model builder, I would love to spend an hour or so perusing a well-stocked hobby shop in this alternate timeline. I'm imagining the iconic Monogram "First Lunar Landing" model kit from our timeline being offered as the "US Lunar Excursion Module" - without the included diorama base since the Soviets made the First Lunar Landing and 'our' First Lunar Landing was somewhat . . . less than dignified. But never fear! The Monogram LEM kit would come with a "Tips for Building Dioramas" sheet where Shep Paine shows how to recreate the historical scene with the kit, and even how to accurately model the damaged landing gear . . . .
Thanks for sharing this with us!
810th Like.
It also doesn't help that Humanity, as I recall, was looking towards Venus long before the space race. It was closer than Mars to earth bith in distance and size. But the Soviets discovered thst manned missions to Venus wouldn't be happening any time soon. The USSR put a lot of effort into making probes that would last even just a few hours before being destroyed by the Venusian environment. Colonies on Venus are not tenable unless, like, we build cloud cities like in Star Wars. And I think that was like a kick to the nuts for Humanity's space ambitions.
9:53 technology advanced so much society stuck to handheld flat screens to do everything. For all Mankind showed us an alt reality where we became an interplanetary species by necessity
7:15 yes. It gave me the same impression of "what the hell happened"
you can go through the thin part of the belt that has no particles.
The space race was about giving science nerds a budget and building weapons.
There just was never the economic incentive for space travel, not while Earth has abundant easily accessible resources and energy, as in in there is no point expending the effort to leave a gravity well to do asteroid mining while Brazilian Iron mines and Congolese Cobalt can be mined by slave children.
In our timeline Colonization of the Americas, and later Africa and Asia was only undertaken and successful because it could turn a profit, whether that come from Aztec gold, Virginia tobacco, or Congolese rubber. The moon and outer space in general has no analogue to make the endeavor worthwhile from an economic perspective and there's only so much wealth you can funnel into unproductive projects before it really starts to hurt the real economy. It's why you can't just fix unemployment by building 100 bridges to nowhere.
*FDR has entered the chat. Throws down 'New Deal' card.*
Every thing you say was mostly true, yet Space X and Star Link have shown that truths change. There is the very real possibility that the dreams of one man backed by the dreams of thousands of others will accomplish what every sci fi enjoyer has dreamed of for decades. 😮
@@jimmysaint8539I think the business of tech entrepreneurs is to hype up stock value. More so when that has surpassed other metrics. They can be eternal startups a lot longer.
Space X makes most of its money through government contracts.
@@CarrotConsumer If the EU and India can run space programs, it's not a superpower symbol any more.
I can agree to show worth watching the Soviet Union doesn’t collapse in this universe.
Nice to know the fictional time line also includes the harmlessness of the Van Allen radiation belt.
There's one in every crowd...
@@Green_Tea_Coffee
Lemon Curry?
Well stated in all particulars.
And now we have hope for manned exploration with Elon Musk and spacex with the starship.
One of these days I'll subscribe to Apple TV+ so I can watch this series. But already I find some of the drama overly contrived - such as space marines fighting cosmonauts. It just doesn't make any sense that we'd be in a cold war, training astronauts to go to the moon, but never teach them any Russian so they could deal with encounters without miscommunications leading to violence...
Timeline we wanted but didnt deserve
1:00 new horizons next door. Spatial Reality decades away.
The grass is not greener on the other side if a light year is a 1000 years away at 0.001 percent of light speed.
What happened? Well not being able to crack the fusion problems by just saying we did doesn't help.
6:42 We Stagnated That's What Happened 🛰️🚀🛫🛬📉📉📉📉
Militarized space in the 60s with the Cold War (kind of) going hot.
Is this the closest adaptation of Battlezone we'll get?
well said
I think North Korea was meant to be North Korea not China! China already has a successfull and televised space program in this timeline. Can't remember if it's shown in news clips within the show. Chinese in space is unremarkable. The North Korean's janky lowtech space mission is reminiscent of their real world nuclear weapons program trying to catch up and within the show space programs became more important than nuclear weapons programs.
"safe and effective"
The show is rather over-optimistic about human nature, basically from the start. One of its founding "departures from reality" is the idea that a command economy can adequately allocate resources and muster the strength to produce a lunar rocket. This is precisely the point on which Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative challenged the Soviets and hastened their system's end.
I think what happened was corruption at the top. Watching the fate of humanity today is extremely depressing.
I feel like the diversity in this show feels way less organic than most modern shows. This is basically a timeline where everyone decided to be less racist because they didn't want people to think they were racist.
Like in the show we get Black astronauts because NASA director Thomas Paine "doesn't want Jesse Jackson up [his] ass". But Thomas Paine was the real world NASA director, why didn't he care about that in our timeline?
I love this show but I find the historical extrapolation feels like alternate history mad libs.
Agreed. The russians had females in combat roles throughout ww2, but that didn't change our own gender roles in the west. Why would a female cosmonaut suddenly turn NASA into a female dominated organization?
I hate the lesbian president
SM Sterling's Lords of creation for similar feel
2:56 this part aged well 😂😂😂
Nuclear fusion is hard. If it was easy, Lyndon LaRouche took the secret to his grave. 🤣
Conspiracy analyst… stealing that!
That should be the defacto reason for progress : *For all Mankind*
ah, Apple TV. Wondered why I'd never heard of it.
China has never changed it’s plans to carry on this vision
Growth and innovation are difficult to control. And the powers want control.
Bingo, whoever discovers nuclear fusion, the powers will either make it not available to us regular people or will at a heavy cost they determine.
8:53 as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, in order to make it convincing NASA decided to film the moon landing on location
A girl power tv show? Wow... I've never heard of this mind blowing concept. Pass...
When we looked forward we thought we would have bases on the planets interstellar travel mining on the ocean floor Robots non came about but they did not see the rise of personal computers mobile phones and how that effects jobs and social relationships
What will the future be like in 50 or 100 years
They invented fusion which is why the mine he3 from the moon. That’s they money behind Helios
Show doesn't get enough credit
Season 5 will probably be 2001 A Space Odyssey
I think in season 4 they are going to Venus and this could be a joint partnership between NASA Ross cosmos in the Korea space agency
I'm glad I watched this video. When I saw the previews with what looked like DEI astronauts, I gave this show a pass. Now I'll watch it.
Poor little white supremacy simp.
You can thank all the boomers that call us “lazy” now that were all about calling for a end of the Apollo program past 17
Being a science and history/alt history nerd, I really love For All Mankind. However I must admit some of the things like nuclear fusion being viable by the 1980's and having full on 2001: A Space Odyssey like space station by the 90's...yeah it's a bit of a stretch. And the gay president scandal storyline I honestly could care less for, honestly should be it's own show or movie.
How about you The Jestons as alternate timeline
The moon landing took 5% of GDP. We built a much bigger icbm and collected some rocks.
Innovation and wealth is created by capital accumulation, not 'technology'. If science got the job done, Africa would be a paridise. And it certainly doesn't drive the materialist dialectic toward the trekkie internationale
The forced diversity was the worst part of the show. They couldn't help themselves working in a lesbian couple too.
Interesting, but just barely, i see no timeline in which a woman president doesnt end up triggering an attack from all enemies, just wait a few days and we'll see waht happens