Day: June 24, 2008

NASA Cool Ranch?

“When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.” — Fight Club

Apparently, Chuck Palahniuk was right*:

It could be the longest commercial break in history. Over a six-hour period this morning, high-powered radars in the Arctic Circle broadcast an advertisement into space for the first time.The advertisement, for Doritos tortilla chips, was being directed towards a solar system in the Ursa Major constellation, just 42 light years from Earth. The solar system contains a habitable zone, and could host an Earth-like planet and extraterrestrial life.

Via Warren Ellis, who’s none too pleased with the idea.

* Lucy Ellmann must be hating that.

The Great Filter

Want to know why Nick Bostrom is “hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look”? Well then, read on.

It’s an interesting idea, this Great Filter (or what Chris McLaren, who posted about this way back in May, calls the “Doom Constant”), and it’s one full of scary implications for the survival of the human species. Bostrom suggests that if the emergence of intelligent life in the universe is not itself a rare event, then we surely have to wonder why none of it has been in contact with us. Is there a cataclysmic event waiting to kill off all advanced species, or have we already crossed that threshold and beaten the odds?

As McLaren notes, Bostrom “never gets near the possibility that the ‘Great Filter’ might actually be intelligent, outside action, rather than a self-destructive tendency.” (Having recently read Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space, I can totally get behind that idea.) But he also doesn’t get too close to the possibility that maybe advanced alien cultures have been in contact — not through alien abduction or even radio waves, but in exactly what Bostrom calls the likeliest method of space colonization.

“Even if [the aliens] failed a thousand times before they succeeded,” he writes, “they still could have arrived here hundreds of millions of years ago.”

My question is this: how do we know they didn’t? If “so-called von Neumann probes” indeed are the most likely means of colonizing other planets, how do we know they didn’t already colonize Earth? Maybe some species here — maybe humans, maybe even all life — is a direct descendant of that first probe.

Granted, this kind of exogenesis might not factor into Bostrom’s thinking at all, even if there was anything like credible evidence to support it. Regardless of where life on this planet began, the probability, one way or another of it, ending is of definite concern. But as a fan of science fiction, as someone who can’t help but wonder the “what if,” it’s an interesting thought.

And when you add in this (via Warren Ellis)…

Molecular “robots” have been developed by chemists to explore the unmapped chemical environments of living cells and transmit back the results.

…well, it just opens up all sorts of interesting scenarios…

“Rescue your own goddamned self”

Cherie Priest on Alien‘s Ellen Ripley:

It’s noteworthy to me that she’s not the captain. She’s not a princess. She’s not a mutant, a witch, or a vampire — and though any given one of these things is fine and dandy, it resonates with me that she’s not anybody special. Third in a chain of command that numbers merely seven, Ripley is resented for what little authority she wields and ignored when it serves the purposes of other crew members. She isn’t a force of personality or innate power. She’s not anyone’s romantic partner. She’s just some woman who happens to be on board when the shit hits the fan.

And she’s no spontaneous ass-kicking warrior.

She screws up a lot.

She takes the wrong tunnels, makes some wrong guesses, and loses her shit more than once — but she pulls her shit together, that’s the important thing. It’s okay to make mistakes, teaches Ripley, as long as you don’t let your failures paralyze you. It’s okay to be a compassionate survivor, and go out of your way to save the ones you can even when it isn’t particularly practical. It is fair and reasonable to cut your losses when no good can come of trying to salvage them. Pray if you think it helps, but don’t bet on rescue; because when the sun comes up on the distant planetoid and there’s an acid-blooded killing machine stalking through your galley, the time has come to rescue your own goddamned self.

And you know what? You can. You don’t have to be a fairy queen or a superhero; you can be just some woman who’s there at the wrong place, in the wrong time — and it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

I want to believe (in science fiction)

Creator Chris Carter discusses The X-Files with the AV Club:

But I never thought of it as a science-fiction show to begin with, even though it was labeled as science fiction, because I wanted it to be in the realm of speculative science, the kind of what-if, taking hard science and applying an unexplained quality.

And I can’t help but think, isn’t that science fiction, or at least one definition of it?

But I understand what he’s talking about. The “it’s not really science fiction” argument does tend to get old — really? spaceships, aliens, time travel…and it’s not science fiction? — but the genre label does still scare some people away. (Or scares away studios who think people will be scared away.) On the one hand, playing into those fears doesn’t do the genre any favors; it just adds another excuse for people to dismiss it, to go on fearing it. But on the other hand, you do want to rope in new viewers. And if the way to do that is to say, “this program is a little different than your preconceived notions of science fiction” — even if those notions barely scratch the surface of what science fiction actually is — well okay then.

I also like Carter’s response to whether or not there’s any hopefulness beneath the show’s paranoia and fear:

Yeah, I think the whole concept of “trust no one,” if that was a mantra of The X-Files, is basically a desperate cry for someone to trust. And I think the show has been exceedingly hopeful, and the idea that it’s not is, I think, not looking deep into what the heart of the show is.