The idea that human beings might not only fly to the moon, but land on its puck­ered sur­face and walk around, seemed like an absolute fan­ta­sy for near­ly all of human his­to­ry. In the exact­ly fifty years since that that very thing hap­pened, “moon shot” has become an almost com­mon­place ref­er­ence for grand, his­toric ges­tures. “Fifty years after Neil Arm­strong walked on the moon, plant­ed an Amer­i­can flag, and flew home,” writes Alex Davies at Wired, “the term moon shot has become short­hand for try­ing to do some­thing that’s real­ly hard and maybe a bit crazy.”

The prob­lem with this, Davies argues, is that the all-eggs-in-one-bas­ket approach does not apply today’s most press­ing, yet most neb­u­lous and glob­al, prob­lems. A “moon shot” cli­mate ini­tia­tive suf­fers from a lack of speci­fici­ty. What exact­ly would it tar­get? How would it mea­sure suc­cess or fail­ure in an unam­bigu­ous way when the prob­lem per­me­ates the econ­o­my, ener­gy, agri­cul­ture, man­u­fac­tur­ing, gov­ern­ment…? A very dif­fer­ent kind of think­ing is required.

Maybe the dualisms of the Cold War made some things sim­pler, in a way. In 1961, John F. Kennedy’s famous artic­u­la­tion of “the goal,” as he put it, could not have been more clear: “land­ing a man on the moon and return­ing him safe­ly to Earth.” You either achieve this, or you don’t. There are no half-mea­sures, and no con­fu­sion about what con­sti­tutes suc­cess. Which brings us to anoth­er prob­lem with turn­ing “moon shot” into a cliché for doing some­thing hard. We for­get just how damned hard it actu­al­ly was.

Land­ing Neil Arm­strong, Buzz Aldrin, and pilot Michael Collins on the moon required an expen­di­ture unthink­able today: “NASA spent $25 bil­lion on the Apol­lo pro­gram,” Davies points out, “more than $150 bil­lion in today’s dol­lars.” The U.S. may spend almost sev­en times that on its mil­i­tary in a year, but it’s unthink­able that this nation, or any oth­er, would invest Apol­lo dol­lars in a com­plete­ly unsure thing, with no imme­di­ate poten­tial for con­trol or exploita­tion.

The same might be said of major cor­po­ra­tions. The space­far­ing ambi­tions of today’s titans seem con­ser­v­a­tive by 1961 stan­dards: “More than 400,000 Amer­i­cans worked on [Apol­lo 11] in some capac­i­ty, near­ly all of them in pri­vate indus­try,” writes Davies. The project absolute­ly depend­ed on this coor­di­nat­ed, col­lec­tive lev­el of human inge­nu­ity and exper­tise because the total com­put­ing pow­er of NASA was sev­er­al mil­lions of times less than that of a smart­phone.

From the human “com­put­ers” who plot­ted Apol­lo 11’s course, to the astro­nauts who flew the craft, humans not only designed, mon­i­tored, and exe­cut­ed the mis­sion, but they also had to impro­vise when things went wrong. And they did, in some ter­ri­fy­ing, life-threat­en­ing ways. “The prob­lems began imme­di­ate­ly upon sep­a­ra­tion from the Com­mand Mod­ule in which Arm­strong, Aldrin and Michael Collins had rid­den to the moon,” explains Rod Pyle at Space.com—but, so too did the prob­lem-solv­ing.

To get a bet­ter sense of why the endeav­or was so earth­shak­ing, and how it almost didn’t hap­pen, watch the video above, “Apol­lo 11: The Com­plete Descent.” Part of NASA’s Apol­lo Flight Jour­nal col­lec­tion, the 20-minute nar­rat­ed doc­u­men­tary of the descent and land­ing pro­vides a “detailed account of every sec­ond of the Apol­lo 11 descent and land­ing.” It “com­bines data from the onboard com­put­er for alti­tude and pitch angle, 16mm film that was shot through­out the descent at 6 frames per sec­ond,” and audio trans­mis­sions from the astro­nauts and mis­sion con­trol.

“Most peo­ple knew that going to the moon was risky,” Pyle writes, “but few, very few, knew the scope of the dan­gers that the crew faced.” Fifty years lat­er, we can almost—with only the devices in our pockets—see and hear the orig­i­nal moon shot the way those first few did.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Apol­lo 11 in Real Time: A New Web Site Lets You Take a Real-Time Jour­ney Through First Land­ing on the Moon

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” and the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing Turn 50 This Month: Cel­e­brate Two Giant Leaps That Took Place 9 Days Apart

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Headaches num­ber among human­i­ty’s most com­mon ail­ments. The headache-relat­ed dis­or­ders known as migraines may be rar­er, afflict­ing rough­ly fif­teen per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, but they’re also much more severe. Besides a headache that can last as long as three days, migraines can also come with var­i­ous oth­er symp­toms includ­ing nau­sea as well as sen­si­tiv­i­ty to light, sound, and smells. They even cause some suf­fer­ers to hal­lu­ci­nate: the visu­al ele­ments of these pre-migraine “auras” might take the shape of dis­tor­tions, vibra­tions, zig-zag lines, bright lights, blobs, or blind spots. Some­times they also come in col­or, and bril­liant col­or at that.

Those col­ors jump right out of this 1870 draw­ing by Eng­lish physi­cian Hubert Airy, with which he sought to cap­ture his own visu­al expe­ri­ence of a migraine. He “first became aware of his afflic­tion in the fall of 1854,” writes Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s Greg Miller, “when he noticed a small blind spot inter­fer­ing with his abil­i­ty to read. ‘At first it looked just like the spot which you see after hav­ing looked at the sun or some bright object,’ he lat­er wrote. But the blind spot was grow­ing, its edges tak­ing on a zigzag shape that remind­ed Airy of the bas­tions of a for­ti­fied medieval town.” As Airy describes it, “All the inte­ri­or of the for­ti­fi­ca­tion, so to speak, was boil­ing and rolling about in a most won­der­ful man­ner as if it was some thick liq­uid all alive.”

To a migra­neur, that descrip­tion may sound famil­iar, and the draw­ing that accom­pa­nied it in the Philo­soph­i­cal Trans­ac­tions of the Roy­al Soci­ety in 1870 may look even more so. Called “arguably the most beau­ti­ful sci­en­tif­ic records of migraine aura ever made” by G.D. Schott in Brain, Airy’s draw­ings “record the progress and expan­sion of his own visu­al dis­tur­bances” over their half-hour-long onset. Apart from their stark beau­ty, writes Miller, the set of draw­ings “antic­i­pates dis­cov­er­ies in neu­ro­science that were still decades in the future,” such as the assump­tion that the hal­lu­ci­na­tions orig­i­nate in the brain rather than the eyes and that cer­tain parts of the field of vision cor­re­spond to cer­tain parts of the visu­al cor­tex.

“There’s still much we don’t know about migraines and migraine auras,” Miller writes. “One hypoth­e­sis is that a sort of elec­tri­cal wave sweeps across the visu­al cor­tex, caus­ing hal­lu­ci­na­tions that spread across the cor­re­spond­ing parts of the visu­al field” — an idea with which Airy’s ear­ly ren­der­ings also accord. And what about the source of all those col­ors? Elec­tri­cal waves pass­ing through parts of the brain “that con­tain neu­rons that respond to spe­cif­ic col­ors” may be respon­si­ble, but near­ly 150 years after the pub­li­ca­tion of Airy’s draw­ings, “no one real­ly knows.” Migraine research of the kind pio­neered by Airy him­self may have dis­pelled some of the mys­tery sur­round­ing the afflic­tion, but a great deal nev­er­the­less remains. Airy’s draw­ings, still among the most vivid rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the visu­al aspect of migraines ever cre­at­ed, will no doubt inspire gen­er­a­tions of future neu­ro­sci­en­tists to find out more.

via Greg Miller at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic and don’t miss his book: All Over the Map: A Car­to­graph­ic Odyssey.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

When Jean-Paul Sartre Had a Bad Mesca­line Trip and Then Hal­lu­ci­nat­ed That He Was Being Fol­lowed by Crabs

Hunter S. Thompson’s Per­son­al Hang­over Cure (and the Real Sci­ence of Hang­overs)

Free Guid­ed Imagery Record­ings Help Kids Cope with Pain, Stress & Anx­i­ety

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.