For All Mankind : Alternate History Better Than the Real Thing

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

[luthorcorp]

Maybe the real space exploration program was the ICBMs we developed along the way.

[wildtwindad]

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.

[stone-hand]

"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".

[geographicaloddity]

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.

[peterfmodel]

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.

[phillipleavenworth]

Sometimes it's hard to envision a better future if we can't see it. I can't wait for season 4!

[michaelbarton]

This show did give me a strange melancholy. This explains why.

[nektulosnewbie]

The 90s was a celebration period, of the liberation from history.

It wasn't just Fukayama, there was Jesus Jones singing of the waking up from history.

Then, as if she came down from Olympus, History fell upon the world, she toppled the Twin Towers and slapped us in the face screaming "Breaks over! I've got bunch of long, drawn out, and inconclusive wars in store for you, so get back to work!".

[padawanmage]

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. =/

[Varner]

I love the way this guy talks about this stuff. Reminds me of the old documentarys from the early oughties

[jorgeneliason]

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.

[mikebarham]

I don't know why it took me this long to find this channel, but I've been on a month-long binge. This is the best channel on YouTube.

[frankm.]

I think you hit the nail on the head with that line about our reality feeling like the alternate timeline. Something definitely went wrong in the last thirty years and we hopped the rails sometime around the turn of the century, if not before. Or maybe, even with the idiotic election results, its my growing up watching Star Trek as a kid and not wanting to believe that most people really are self sabotaging levels of stupid, petty, and cruel

[mugglescakesniffer]

This is a absolutely fabulous video essay. I love For All Mankind because it dares to be optimistic.

[antherthalmhersser]

Hey man these are excellent. Happy to have found this channel.

[Terra]

for all mankind is the timeline we wanted to happen

[lukesams]

8:53 as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, in order to make it convincing NASA decided to film the moon landing on location

[pootispencer]

I think this may be the first time I've witnessed someone online point out the difference between good, logical diversity and clunky, forced diversity without hardballing for or against 'diversity' in general. Feels odd that moderate and reasonable perspective is jarring and novel now.

[standhaftgarithos]

I've been focusing on your videos on things I have seen before (like Fallout and Star Trek), but even when you choose a topic that I don't know anything about (For All Mankind), you still make a really interesting video.

[deviantshade]

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