For All Mankind : Alternate History Better Than the Real Thing
Вставка
- Опубліковано 8 лип 2024
- Apple tv's For All Mankind is an alt-hist take on the space race, starting with the first Moon landing and currently runs through the mid-90s. It does a lot of things right, including how it plays with real history to serve its narrative. It also forces us to ask some questions about our own history of manned space exploration.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Setup
02:00 Light Summary
03:00 Timeline Drag
04:17 Faking History
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.
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.
This is a absolutely fabulous video essay. I love For All Mankind because it dares to be optimistic.
Sometimes it's hard to envision a better future if we can't see it. I can't wait for season 4!
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.
"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.
I love our withered space industry. I love having the pinnacle of human achievement starved of resources for national and corporate self-interest.
I love the way this guy talks about this stuff. Reminds me of the old documentarys from the early oughties
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.
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 last gasp of optimistic sf, the ST sequel that never was.
*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
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.
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.
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.
You give strongly similar vibes to my dad ngl, subbed
Hey man these are excellent. Happy to have found this channel.
Agreed
"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.)
This was a wonderful tangent to listen to! Thanks.
Well done, Sir! And thank you for this wonderful perspective
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.
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.
This one earned my sub to the channel. Please keep the insightful videos coming.
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.
you deserve 1 million subs keep up the work even if u don't get a lot of views enjoy these videos a lot 👍
Well stated in all particulars.
"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.
The only bad thing is the Soviets landed on the moon first
well said
you can go through the thin part of the belt that has no particles.
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.
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?
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.
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 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
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.
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 UA-cam 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 :)
It’s plan to have 6 seasons guess win the sixth season is going to take place 2025 present day
It's the welfare state that usurped the dream. Buying a huge segment of society was is way too costly. Private enterprise is the only hope for that future.
They invented fusion which is why the mine he3 from the moon. That’s they money behind Helios
I can agree to show worth watching the Soviet Union doesn’t collapse in this universe.
lunar territorial division certainly didn't help.
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
Commies won the space race in that timeline, that alone makes the timeline of For All Mankind horrible.
Yeah, there would t have been grunge in that timeline...
Timeline where pope JPII was shot but Lenon lives? Count me in!
And so my vote nulls yours
*For All Mankind* does introduce something worthwhile. By bringing in woke stupidity and drama, it makes the story much more interesting and deadly. Real NASA missions are very boring and much safer.
FAM generally makes fun of any woke shit it introduces on purpose to highlight the indifference of space in comparison to our stupid earthly concerns.
This show sounds great, but for now we literally have to wait for capitalism to collapse before anything like that happens
Define "Capitalism". And how would you organize society? By force and coercion?
Capitalism "collapsing" 😂. Keep wishing tankie.
@Hugebull thank you for asking! Most people just assume those things, and to answer your questions:
I go with the dictionary definition of capitalism which, in my own words, boils down to private ownership of certain types of property for the purpose of generating profit for the owners of said property, this is what is called "private property" meaning means of production/business/rental real estate property as distinguished from "personal property" which are things like your personal home, TV, toothbrush, personal vehicle, etc
That is the definition of capitalism, autocratic ownership of private (aka business) property for the purpose of profit at the expense of all else. Which is how it functions today under late stage capitalism and before anyone says "tHaT's nOt ReAL cApiTaLiSM" and say we are living under corporatism/cronyism those are just other ways of describing late stage capitalism, which is capitalism.
Now as for organizing post capitalist economic systems, as a libertarian I would say bring democracy into the workplace where it belongs, instead of lazy entitled "owners" or leechlords profiting off of other people's work and contributing nothing of their own (many owners/shareholders of businesses never set foot on the floor of the businesses they are profiting off of, let alone do anything anywhere close to what could be considered actual WORK.
Bring the businesses (most at least, not all, small ones of which there would be many more now since starting a business will be much easier.) Small businesses may not need to be co-operatively run/owned until the owner is no longer required to run the business and no longer chooses to work it, as is their right, but they don't have the right to take the money out of the pockets of those who do choose to work should they leave. They can start as co-ops from the beginning though too of course, but depending on the business at the small stage it may be useful, but one's the person designated "owner" is profiting from the business while not working at it, the workers shall become the new owners.
Also implementation of UBS (universal basic services) decent and ever improving basic stand of living garentee, Food, Housing, Healthcare, Education and Transportation services available to all and free at point of use, these services when tested individually and together and properly funded and implemented by professionals and with regard to material conditions of the community not only pay for themselves but exponentially so, which means they can constantly be improved along with funding UBI as well or whatever the community democratically decides to do with the generated revinue.
*I'm sorry this answer is so long but I'm happy to answer any questions and clarify any points that I may not have explained with proper clarity*
@@MrNpc81 haha tankie? I'm an anarchist my friend 😂😂😂
@@smileyp4535 eh, potay-to, potah-to.
amurican propaganda
This series is so poorly writen.