Monday, August 19, 2013
I promised
you an entry about this documentary… So here it is!
Recently I
watched a documentary called "Moon Machines", that is about how men
built the necessary technology in order to travel to the moon. If we consider
the Apollo mission was about de 60's, then we should analyze the technology
that was used.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was the machine that provided guidance,
navigation and control of a spaceship. All this functionality was made with a
few MHz of processing and a few KB of memory.
Let's think about this: What
would have happened if in the 1960's they had had our technology? We could have
been living in Mars, or we could travel across the universe at the speed of
light. All of this sound great, but let's analyze our situation: We have some
powerful devices in our hands (computers, smartphones, and etcetera). What are
we using these devices for? Apps? Games? 
If the Apollo Guidance Computer had the
capacity to guide and control a spaceship with less processing power and memory
than a Nokia cell phone, why don’t we take the power we actually have in order
to build something better? Maybe you are asking yourself “What is something better?” Well, we
have endless possibilities, like improve the Apollo Guidance Computer, making
it capable to locate the spaceship across the whole Universe (or a great part
of it, since the Universe is infinite), or make some calculations to travel to
an Earth-like planet.
Finally, what I’m saying is that if we have such powerful
machines, we should take advantage of this computing power… I don’t know, maybe
someday we will be capable to find the limits of the Universe.
I hope you
enjoyed reading this (or maybe you just said tl;dr… I don’t know). I do not
know when I will write my next entry, but it might be soon :)
