Science fiction and the death of the sun
typebarmagazine.com
typebarmagazine.com
A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne!
Highly recommended, despite never satisfactorily explaining why they require a manned spacecraft to do the job rather than sending a robotic drone ship. Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission.
> When it first appears onscreen, the Event Horizon craft itself resembles a giant crucifix hovering over the surface of Neptune. "The spaceship was built on a cruciform, like all cathedrals are," Anderson explains. "We began the design process by literally scanning [photos of] the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the computer and then constructing the Event Horizon out of those Gothic elements. For example, the big thruster engines are an adaptation of the Notre Dame towers, repositioned on their sides. A lot of the iron and steel work of the superstructure is based on the cathedral's stained-glass windows. The ship also has a lot of triptych windows and big recessed crosses.
> "When Adrian and I first sat down, we said, 'Let's do something completely different,"' says Anderson. "Since we were going into outer space, I felt we had to have a really strong design concept; otherwise Event Horizon would have ended up looking like [a bunch of] other movies cobbled together. We spent a lot of time coming up with a design concept, which we called 'techno-Medieval.' When the lights are on, everything looks very technological and very spaceship-like. But when the lights go off and the haunting begins, you start looking at the shapes, and the architecture is actually very medieval. We extended that techno-Medieval design idea into as many aspects of the picture's look as possible, without rubbing the audience's nose in it."
1: https://theasc.com/articles/unearthly-terrors-event-horizon
Not only does the plot fit perfectly with the ship going through the warp, the Gothic design matches the aesthetic as well.
Even if not intended, it just works so well.
I agree so hard that I would upvote your comment a thousand times if I could. This fan originated ‘prequel’ to the 40k universe is absolutely perfect in both aesthetic and tone.
But I think, despite the wide support this concept has, it displays a really interesting view into some large tonal changes in the fandom and published materials and attitudes. Within the 40k fandom I think there are a group of fans (mostly older now and less involved in the hobby) that disagree with Event Horizon as a ‘prequel’. It is an interesting dichotomy between what 40k has been since the late 90’s and what it was at its start and during its early editions.
Early fans, in the discourse I have seen online and in older GW periodicals, really focused on the political satire and the somewhat eclectic humorous undertones (and often overtones). The tongue-in-cheek demonization of the human faction, via making them so crazily over-the-top authoritarian, WWII-type theocratic fascists, is clearly pitched as a caricature of the then super powerful right wing party, under Thatcher and her ilk. The other factions had less direct satirical targets, but, as an example, the Orcs power of ‘be stupid but believe and results will follow’ can be seen as a critique of the apparent lack of intellectual curiosity and focus on conformity present in the UK, or as a statement on the semi-‘Cargo Cult’ mentality around the rising hyper-consumerism that was beginning to be pushed on the public by plutocrats. There are plenty of other broad and specific satirical or openly political commentary throughout the 80’s material, especially in White Dwarf supplemental writing.
However, then there are the fans that came into the hobby in the late-middle and late 90’s and up til present day. 40k has been a cornerstone, forerunner, and standard bearer for Grimdark(tm) for nearly the last 30 years. This block of fans (by far those most active in the hobby, particularly the lore/fluff/art creation and discussion) absolutely sees Event Horizon as being a perfect fit for 40K. The days of satire are long past, now the factions and characters in the setting are nearly played straight as examples of their respective stereotypes and associated tropes in genre fiction. Granted, 40k established a good portion of the grimdark tropes, but it has remained steadfast in utilizing and somewhat revising those trappings of the genre without apology.
Where 80’s 40K would have by now been lampshading everything in the setting and potentially altering fluff to better satirize the current global political and societal milieu, the current fandom and GW itself are committing to playing the universe out.
I love 40K and think both perspectives have merit, but at the end of the day 40K is still my vibe no matter which side of this divide I may find myself.
It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.
This is why I'll pay Relic but not Talisman, the Talisman game is very silly, but Relic sets it in the 40K universe where it makes sense. Or rather, it makes no less sense than everything else.
Role-playing gothic sci-fi in a galaxy where the stars are dying.
Somehow knowing the secret to Murphy's acting in that scene (Boyle secretly got a crew member to sit on his back) and having that objectively hilarious image in mind while watching it doesn't diminish the effect appreciably, which is remarkable!
We spent the last few years watching robots with state of the art 21st century technology and software crash on the moon repeatedly, and yet, in the 1960s a few hot shot test pilots could stick a landing on their first try. Given the choice between robots and humans, I’ll take the humans.
The risk vs reward calculation for human-involved missions is necessarily higher than robotic missions.
Is that additional cost an order of magnitude higher? IE, we can afford one and only one human mission, but three robotic missions? Does the math work out in favor of the single high-success mission, or the three slightly lower success missions? Obviously depends on the expected success rate and cost of each.
But, probably why we haven't done a lot with human missions since the 60s.
It was built thin and tall to fit within the Falcon 9 fairing. It didn't have extending legs because these would have become possible points of failure. The crash happened because the altimeter wasn't working, which IIRC was due to a pre-launch assembly error. As a result Odysseus landed outside the safe operating parameters of the landing legs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9 ("Luna 9")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#M... ("List of missions to the Moon—Mission milestone by country")
You absolutely don't need sophisticated technology or giant budgets to accomplish this.
Ha you mean the most costly, engineering first and politicized science and engineering endeavor ever attempted, and even though it was some kind of little miracle ?
She was 45 or 46 when she made Sunshine.
I guess it just means that I'm oold for having that as a benchmark for Michaelle Yeoh's age rather than *Everything Everywhere All At Once"...
I personally found this specific film not deserving of being called a "great example" of anything. It's at best a plodding, uneven, middling example of something, IDK what. Yes, I know that your milage may vary, but this film's status baffles me and others https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917027
If anything, calling parts of it "good" and other parts "original" is generous. Most of it is neither. Perhaps if you just haven't seen or read that much, then some of it appears novel and good?
It is not trying to be the same genre at all as Marvel or Star Wars fantasy films - some of which succeed on their own terms. Unlike "Sunshine". So that straw man distraction question is irrelevant.
But I absolutely loved the story, tension and slow boil. The cast as you say was brilliant.
It's a B-Grade disaster movie /really/ well executed.
I cannot believe the number of people who have said that its a good movie, the entire movie required a suspension of disbelief far and away of what I am willing to give.
I guess people like sucking down wet farts for 2 hours. Who am I to stop them?
As a software engineer, this statement baffles my mind. like how could anyone in right mind trust software to make right choices in prod on first try?
Software can be tested for individual operation. But can't be relied for end to end co-ordination.
OP missed a good historical example before Thompson, however: Isaac Newton himself had a cosmology with the Sun being renewed by periodic comet impacts. Unfortunately, we would all die when the Sun flared up after impact, but at least aliens on other planets would get a renewed Sun: https://gwern.net/newton
"“So big, so red, and so cold.”
“It has always been so,” said Jadis. “At least, for hundreds of thousands of years. Have you a different sort of sun in your world?”"
A red giant expanding to the point of taking up much of the sky would not be 'cold', nor would it 'always been so...for hundreds of thousands of years'. (It would be hot, the world heating up at that close an approach, and the expansion quite visible on the order of millions of years rather than totally static and unchanging.) That only is consistent with the cooled-down prior version.
All in all, it makes for a very good series. Especially once you realize that you are reading about sci-fi world, as written about by a person living in essentially ancient society.
And also he's a pretty terrible person trying to make himself (unsuccessfully) sound a bit less terrible.
> In this far-future adventure, Captain Arflane leads his crew of the schooner Ice Spirit across the endless seas of ice covering Earth. To any survivors of this brave expedition will go the legendary riches buried beneath the ancient ice . . . the once-great city of New York!
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ice_Schooner.html?i...
>It was also adapted into a 2019 film of the same name and its sequel, and a 2021 graphic novel.
Main topic is the protagonist can make the important decision: sacrifice half of human to move earth. Other people were too hypocritical and supid to do this.
They read like endorsement of CCP authoritarian govt, with how often the themes are "Leaders are flawless, don't dare to even criticise them" (last wallfacer in Three Body Problem)
(i.e. he has determined the value of what is now called the constant of Avogadro, which is proportional to the inverse of the mass of an atom; there are various related quantities where knowing one determines all the others, including the constant of Avogadro and the concentration of molecules in a gas at standard pressure and temperature; knowing the mass of any molecule or atom allows the computation of the masses of all other atoms and molecules, using the chemical formulas)
Using the mass of an atom, various other atomic quantities could be computed immediately, e.g. George Johnstone Stoney has computed in 1874 the value of the elementary electric charge, based on the results of Loschmidt. The work of Loschmidt has also allowed James Clerk Maxwell to propose in 1873 a system of fundamental units for the physical quantities which was based only on reproducible atomic properties, instead of unique artifacts like the platinum standard meter and the platinum standard kilogram. (However Maxwell's system was not yet practical at that time, because the accuracy with which the atomic masses were known was too low in comparison with the precision of the weight scales.)
Before Loschmidt, the atoms were indeed just a hypothetical construct that could explain some properties of the chemical reactions and of the gases, but nothing could be said about them quantitatively.
After Loschmidt, the atoms became physical objects with precisely known properties, e.g. you could count how many atoms are in a pebble that you hold in your hand.
By the start of the 20th century, more than a human generation had passed since the last time when scientists wondered whether atoms really exist. At that time already atom beams were routinely manipulated with electric and magnetic fields and unexpected atomic properties like radioactivity and transmutation were already known.
I am looking for a short story about an astronaut conducting radiation measurements on the dark side of the moon (or maybe mars). The astronaut ponders the strange measurement results when it dawns at him that the sun must have gone supernova and earth probably scorched. He returns to earth as the last living human, but discovers that other lifeforms (I believe to remember it was about a butterfly) seem to have survived and despite the end of humanity, life was going to continue.
I read this story about 30 years ago in an anthology of short stories which my future wife brought from our local library. Unfortunately, I don't remember any of the other stories and authors, but I believe they were all well known names and not obscure pulp fiction authors.
Today it strikes me, how naïve the thought was, that libraries and books were for eternity and that everything I'd read would be effortlessly available for me in the library to read again when ever I wanted.
This is odd, as pulsars were not discovered until 1967, and not hypothesized prior to their discovery.
Variable stars have been known to science of since 1638, and an explanation for one type, eclipsing binaries, had been established by 1784.
Eddington brings up this issue in "The Internal Constitution of the Stars" (1920), and discusses at length why the eclipse theory doesn't hold up:
"There are certain stars, known as Cepheid variables, which undergo a regular fluctuation of light of a characteristic kind, generally with a period of a few days. This light change is not due to eclipse. Moreover, the color quality of the light changes between maximum and minimum, evidently pointing to a periodic change in the physical condition of the star. Although these objects were formerly thought to be double stars, it now seems clear that this was a misinterpretation of the spectroscopic evidence. There is in fact no room for the hypothetical companion star; the orbit is so small that we should have to place it inside the principal star. Everything points to the period of the light pulsation being something intrinsic in the star; and the hypothesis advocated by Shapley, that it represents a mechanical pulsation of the star, seems to be the most plausible. I have already mentioned that the observed period does in fact agree with the calculated period of mechanical pulsation, so that the pulsation explanation survives one fairly stringent test. But whatever the cause of the variability, whether pulsation or rotation, provided only that it is intrinsic in the star, and not forced from outside, the density must be the leading factor in determining the period. If the star is contracting so that its density changes appreciably, the period can not remain constant. Now, on the contraction hypothesis the change of density must amount to at least 1 percent. in 40 years. (I give the figures for 8 Cephei, the best-known variable of this class.) The corresponding change of period should be very easily detectable. For 8 Cephei the period ought to decrease 40 seconds annually."
You can find the article at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/6491
The novel is deep and mysterious, involving — among many other things — a far-future Earth in which aliens have placed a black hole inside the sun.
It's one of those books whose true meaning and cryptic clues are mined endlessly on mailing lists, forums, and podcasts (there are at least four that cover this book).
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[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_el...
(Also: the idea that we need to find other planets to live on if the Sun goes nova or if we screw up the Earth is another one. We'll probably be living in millions of large space colonies, not on planets.)
For one, why would we colonize the galaxy? We probably can't beat lightspeed. It'll take generations to get anywhere, plus a huge upfront investment, and for what? We can't send resources back, so it is not an investment. Terraforming would be extremely challenging, extremely slow, and would (if we were very, very lucky) still just get us a worse version of Earth. It just isn't a rational choice.
"Tweaking the sun" is probably unfeasible. We could crash our entire planet into the sun and it'd have little effect. The sun is really really really big and we are really really really small. Similarly, adjusting Earth's orbit would require a colossal amount of energy and reaction mass which we just don't have, and probably never will.
There's no reason to assume that humanity will inevitably advance through some exponential techno-apotheosis such that we'll eventually be able to do anything we want. Instead, it's much more sensible to assume technological growth will follow a sigmoid curve. Technological advancement has a ceiling determined by our resources and abilities, and that ceiling is almost certainly too low to accommodate a galactic civilization of stellar engineers.
To explore. Yes, it may take generations to get anywhere, and no, we probably won't be sending resources back.
> Terraforming would be extremely challenging
Yes. Terraforming is a bad idea. Much better to mine asteroids and build large habitats in orbit. When it gets too crowded, move to the next star. No need to terraform planets to spread out into the galaxy.
> "Tweaking the sun" is probably unfeasible
We've got millions of years to work out how. I doubt it would be something as crude as crashing planets into it.
> Similarly, adjusting Earth's orbit would require a colossal amount of energy and reaction mass
Yes, but you'd have a colossal amount of time to move it. Light sails maybe — they use energy/mass from the sun itself.
> Technological advancement has a ceiling determined by our resources and abilities, and that ceiling is almost certainly too low to accommodate a galactic civilization of stellar engineers.
I don't know how you can know that. It's only a couple of hundred years since the scientific revolution — how can you possibly know what the limits will be over millions or billions of years?
But then why start a colony? If you're just looking around, then the massive investment to build a comfortable habitat isn't worthwhile. I think the incentives just don't line up; that's my Fermi paradox answer. I especially think it's unlikely that anyone would set off on an exploration where they were going to die of old age before ever seeing anything.
> We've got millions of years to work out how.
What if it isn't possible? The sheer scale involved suggests there's nothing to be done. It is a bonfire exponentially larger than all the mass we can conceivably bring to bear upon it in any way. When it burns out, it burns out. Moving the planet is a little more feasible [1], but doing it with solar sails would take about a billion years, even if the sail was 19x the diameter of Earth. An ion drive would be snappier, but we'd have to have effectively unlimited energy to make that happen, and we'd have to eject about a sixth of the Earth's mass from outside of the atmosphere on some sort of planetary gimbal.
[1]: https://www.sciencealert.com/this-rocket-scientist-explains-...
> how can you possibly know what the limits will be
Oh I can't. But there are limits, and we'll hit them eventually. The most obvious limits are energy and mass. We obviously can't do anything that would require more mass than exists in the solar system, and the ceiling for practically accessible mass for any given purpose is likely much lower. Some elements are quite rare. There may not be that much energy to go around. There are also likely soft time limits: A project that takes ten thousand years might simply be beyond us politically. Some tasks, like full comprehension of the human brain, might simply be too complicated to ever be realized. The longer you think about it, the more plausible limitations materialize.
If things are universally good on Earth, then sure. Bear in mind that many of the European colonies that would become the United States were built by people fleeing situations in their home country.
Of course, replicating that scenario still requires a lot of technological advancement and I agree that level of sophistication is not a given.
Bear in mind that the choice is between living on Earth vs spending the rest of your life in an extremely cramped spacecraft with the hope that, after several generations of spacecraft life and many more of terraforming, your great-great-great-to-the-nth-power grandchildren will have a nice home.
Bear in mind too that destitute people will never be able to make this call; you'd need to be quite powerful to start this sort of program.
As an aside, I took a while to roll with the narrative about the heat death of the universe in Outer Wilds. It's too sudden: you go from a healthy yellow sun to a red star in the blink of an eye. Even if you accept that timeframes are accelerated in this game, same reason the planets are smaller, it should still happen in a timespan comparable to the sun's entire lifespan, not a single event.
Still, best game, would erase my memory to play again.
What did he do?
You can make up your own mind - there's a collection of his Astounding/Analog editorials in this book: https://archive.org/details/collectededitori0000john
And then there's this, Jeannette Ng's acceptance speech for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award: https://youtu.be/sQ58zf0vzB0?feature=shared
(She began by calling him "Joseph Campbell", with the audience cheering the rest of her increasingly incoherent speech... Derision from people who really don't understand science fiction.)
Yes, on things like (checks notes) segregation. Huh.
He made arguments, and encouraged counter-arguments. Without that, there would be blind consensus, and at worst, societal stagnation. It's his relentless urge to shake things up that made him one of the most prominent figures in science fiction.
It's very telling that there wasn't some kind of disagreement with Jeannette Ng's shockingly ignorant outburst, or the delighted applause of her equally ignorant audience.
uhh...
Dying Earth is a fantasy series by the American author Jack Vance, comprising four books originally published from 1950 to 1984.
The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983, 1987) is a four-volume science fantasy novel[2] written by the American author Gene Wolfe.
I've read both series within the past few years and they're still worth a a read. Vance's works inspired lots about D&D (including the older "Vancian" spell casting system) and have a lot of humor. The Book of the New Sun is a challenging read, written by an unreliable narrator. They're kind of interesting if you just take them at face value but to really appreciate them you have to go down the rabbit hole of what's really happening here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth
> The Songs of Distant Earth is a 1986 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, based upon his 1958 short story of the same title. He stated that it was his favourite of all his novels. Clarke also wrote a short step outline with the same title, published in Omni magazine and anthologised in The Sentinel in 1983.
> The novel tells of a utopian human colony in the far future that is visited by travellers from a doomed Earth, as the Sun has gone nova. The Songs of Distant Earth explores apocalyptic, atheistic, and utopian ideas, as well as the effects of long-term interstellar travel and extra-terrestrial life. The story is set in the 39th century and follows the journey of a spaceship called the Magellan as it carries a group of colonists to a distant planet, Thalassa. Thalassa is one of the few habitable planets discovered by Earth’s automated spacecraft, and it becomes a refuge for humanity facing the impending destruction of Earth due to a massive solar flare.
I can't imagine how he's overlooked in this article.
Reading further on Wikipedia though, she might have picked a bad/already taken name for her category. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Earth_(genre)
> The dying-earth genre didn’t vanish on the spot, but it transformed into a stock setting for sword-and-sorcery stories set in the far future where modern civilization’s technology has long since been lost
which for me is a fair characterization of Vance although not of Wolfe who's Book of the New Sun while having these undertones is much more complex and could be said to transform the setting into something different altogether.
This happended more than 2,000 years earlier. The author seems to miss basic knowledge in the history of philosophy and science.
From the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space Zeng Heng, who codified a long held belief that most certainly predated 0 AD
That doesn’t imply a glorious present. Just a qualitatively different one from any period before the modern era.
A discipline emerges, when a specific body of systematic knowledge becomes so specific that it typically requires specific expert knowledge and training (polymaths aside). In the European history of ideas, the first such body of knowledge was mathematics, but many others evolved already in Antiquity and were refined during the Middle Ages, such as astronomy, medicine, botanics, ... By the way: music theory in this times was the study of harmonic intervals and predominantly mathematics.
And the conflict between religion and science avant la lettre was as old as all of this (see Sokrates or Abelard to mention just the two most famous from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, respectively).
What changed gradually in the 17th and then had a break through in the 18th century was the adoption of the experimental method. This was not completely new, but from then on become the standard that makrs modern science.
Not particularly: in both the Medieval and Islamic worlds, the writings of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) introduced this concept. And, then as now, it depended on an irrationalism about religion (or a view that religion was a sort of noble lie for controlling the masses) that was widely rejected by the medievals who tended to prefer a harmony model of natural reason and revelation.
That isn't "the scientific method replac[ing] religion as the explanation for physical phenomena," it isn't a society being organised around the principle of scientific supremacy, it's a single leading thinker being ahead of their time. The Almoravids were a conservative Islamic society.