this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
-3 points (45.7% liked)
Asklemmy
55334 readers
233 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I agree, but ~~it's not a world-changing breakthrough. There had previously been humans extremely high up, but they just didn't cross above the synthetic threshold we randomly drew~~
EDIT
Nope, i was totally wrong. I did some reading and it's clear that Yuri's flight was absolutely world-changing
That's why I am asking what counts as "world-changing," as most people would consider the first man in space to be world-changing.
Especially considering that Yuri Gagarin's flight inspired generations of people all over the world after him to a probably immeasurable extent. If the OP wanted "global society-altering", then that certainly qualifies.
I did some reading and learned a bunch of stuff, and now i see that you're right and I'm wrong. Yuri's first spaceflight does in fact totally qualify, completely. I was under the misunderstanding thinking that he was the first to cross the synthetic goal line into space but i assumed that previous attempts were close-ish but not quite to the same altitude. Nope. I just learned that he DEMOLISHED the previous altitude record by an order of magnitude, 32 km vs 320 km, and that all previous flights were using atmosphere conditions to power their flight. You're totally right, Vostok1 was a totally world-changing achievement
And i just realized i have to remove my item from my own list, because the wright brothers flight was more than 100 years ago