Movie: Rubikon to the Rescue, Maybe

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: IFC Films

With the fourth of July weekend upon us, we still lack a Hollywood blockbuster space adventure film. However, an Austrian space drama arrived this weekend – Rubikon. Here is the basic plot in the year 2056:

Following a catastrophe on Earth, the planet is covered in a toxic fog. The crew in the space station, must decide whether to risk their lives to get home and search for survivors, or stay safe in the station’s “algae symbiosis system”.

It sounds a lot like another film with George Clooney from 2020. Do you remember The Midnight Sky?:

This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine (George Clooney), a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully (Felicity Jones) and her fellow astronauts from returning home to Earth, where a mysterious global catastrophe has taken place.

Yes, astronauts are looking down on a dying planet, again. Didn’t Interstellar also having a dying Earth? Makes you kind of miss Star Trek with its hopeful story lines.

So far, Rubikon has 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, so don’t get your hopes too high. Some of the reviews are shown below. Yet if you need a space adventure film this weekend, you now have one.

Image (Credit): Comments on the film Rubikon. (Rotten Tomatoes)

Similar Sentiments About Our Place in the Universe

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Book cover of Olaf Staledon’s Star Maker. (Wesleyan University Press)

I was reading the 1937 science fiction classic Star Maker by British writer Olaf Stapledon when I came across this statement:

I perceived that I was on a little round grain or rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.

It reminded me of Carl Sagan’s famous statement from his book Pale Blue Dot:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Mr. Stapledon had only his imagination at hand when he pondered the role of humans. His book has been praised by numerous science fiction writers, including H. G. Wells, Stanisław Lem, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Mr. Sagan was fortunate to have an image from Voyager I that clearly made this same point. We need the combined powers of dreamers and scientists as we face this awesome universe.

Image (Credit): This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. (NASA JP)

Extra: For more background on the image above, visit NASA’s site 10 Things You Might Not Know About Voyager’s Famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Photo.

A Day In Astronomy: The Launch of the Mars Odyssey

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Source): The Mars Odyssey orbiter. (NASA)

On this day in 2001, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter was launched towards Mars to map and search the Red Planet for water. The mission itself took its name from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Mars Odyssey successfully discovered Martian water. Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the Odyssey mission, stated that “Before Odyssey, we didn’t know where this water was stored on the planet…We detected it for the first time from orbit and later confirmed it was there using the Phoenix lander.”

In addition to conducting its own studies, the Mars Odyssey was also used as a space satellite relaying data between Earth and Mars from other scientific missions, such as NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The orbiter is part of what is called the Mars Relay Network, currently consisting of five orbiters (see below).

The Mars Odyssey is now the oldest oldest spacecraft still working at the Red Planet. It should be able to continue its work through 2025. You can find more information about the mission from this NASA site.

Image (Credit): Five spacecraft currently in orbit about the Red Planet make up the Mars Relay Network to transmit commands from Earth to surface missions and receive science data back from them. Clockwise from top left: NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Mars Atmospheric and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN), Mars Odyssey, and the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). (NASA/JPL-Caltech, ESA)

Podcast: Joe Rogan and Brian Cox

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Source/Credit: The Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube.

While Joe Rogan has been in some hot water recently, I think we can agree that many of his broadcasts were less controversial and simply fun. He is a good host with plenty of though-provoking questions. I do not want to get into politics, but rather focus on science. And in that case, his two-and-a-half hour discussion on January 28, 2019 with Professor Brian Cox, English physicist and Professor of Particle Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester in the UK, was a terrific way to go over both astronomy and physics.

Some of the topics covered during their talk included the size and complexity of the universe, black holes, wormholes, time travel, the Fermi Paradox, unknown objects at the edge of our solar system, space travel, lasers in space, and the role of artificial intelligence in society. The forum provided plenty of time to cover a large range of topics. It is well worth dropping in and listening.

Some other discussions worth watching include Joe Rogan’s August 22, 2018 discussion with Neil deGrasse Tyson and his May 7, 2020 discussion with Elon Musk.

Recommended Reading: Kim Stanley Robinson in The New Yorker

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Source: Amazon.com.

The January 31st edition of The New Yorker has an article written by Joshua Rothman where he interviews Kim Stanley Robinson they hike through the Sierra mountains. The article,”Best-Case Scenario,” covers a lot of ground and has its ups and downs (sorry, I could not help myself). The Sierras offer a nice setting for experiencing the beauty of this strange planet while also scaring the reader about what may be lost as the hikers deal with the smoke of distant forest fires.

The two most prominent books discussed in the article are Mr. Stanley’s recent The Ministry for the Future and his 2015 novel Aurora, allowing the reader to appreciate both the uniqueness of this world as well as attempts by his characters to reach more distant worlds. I enjoyed reading both Aurora and Mr. Stanley’s Mars trilogy, but I should probably spend some time reading his works focusing on planet Earth. Mr. Stanley has made it clear that we need to preserve the one place in the universe that we know can host us. As he stated in BoingBoing back in 2015, “…there is no Planet B. Earth is our only home.”

With regard to expanding into our galaxy, in the same article he stated:

I’m not saying we shouldn’t go into space; we should. We should send people to the moon, and Mars, and the asteroids, and every place we can in the solar system, putting up stations and swapping humans in and out of them. This is not only a beautiful thing to do, but useful in helping us to design a long-term relationship with Earth itself. Space science is an Earth science. The solar system is our neighborhood. But the stars are too far away.

Mr. Stanley has spoken far and wide for some time about his novels, his views on space travel, and his concerns regarding our future. For more on all of this, you can try his Facebook page or this unofficial site. And you may want to check out some other articles in The New Yorker as well, such as this May 2021 piece, “Is Mars Ours?“