Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]
vimeo.com
vimeo.com
Even the title has multiple meanings to it:
In ancient times, astronomers noted how certain lights moved across the sky in relation to the other stars. Ancient Greeks called these lights πλάνητες ἀστέρες (planetes asteres, "wandering stars") or simply πλανῆται (planētai, "wanderers"), from which today's word "planet" was derived.
For me, Carl Sagan's voice is incredibly inspirational. He knows just what to say and how to say it to elicit a beautiful and optimistic feeling of wonderment.
And the visuals were stunning. A tantalizing glimpse into the next century or two of human exploration and experience.
Thank you for this.
Edit: Reddit thread at http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2nseb3/wanderers...
My favourite part: BASE jumping from Verona Rupes - the tallest known cliff in the Solar System - somewhere from 5km to 20km vertical:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110404.html
By comparison the tallest vertical drop on Earth is on the surreal Mount Thor at 1250m:
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/mount-thor-greatest-ver...
[Some great details - like the Earth coastlines used in the asteroid interior (mentioned on the film's website) and the Taijitu in the crater at 1:54].
We already collaborate for the exploration of the solar system, via robotic probes and giant telescopes. That's good enough. Colonization is an all different matter, and a weird one if you ask me. Earth is the largest place with a solid ground in the Solar system, and it's by far the most hospitable. Settling on an other planet like mars would cost an insane amount of money[1] and would at best double the available real estate for our species. It's not so sure it would be worth it, especially considering that a lot of people would end up having contributed for something that other people will benefit from.
Not quite. Having the technology to live on Mars or on the Moon would enable us to settle pretty much anywhere in the habitable zone of the system. Just imagine how much real estate can be built in the form of rings or tubes with materials mined from the Moon or the asteroid belt.
Planets are nice for mining, but going up and down deep gravity wells is not something an interplanetary species would want to do regularly.
Also, keep in mind there are a lot of global catastrophes that could easily wipe out our civilisation.
To build something you don't just need raw materials. You need tools, man power, basically you need an industrial complex which currently only exists on Earth. The idea that you can mine raw minerals on an asteroid and somehow turn them into a house with a full life support is not realistic, to put it mildly.
> Also, keep in mind there are a lot of global catastrophes that could easily wipe out our civilization.
If you want to save the scientific and technological knowledge that makes a civilization, there are certainly cheaper and more efficient ways to do it than spending hundreds of billions in order to have a few people living in an hostile environment. It could even be argued that such a boondoggle might trigger the fate you were trying to avoid in the first place.
A very good point - which is exactly why we should do it. Depending on our industrial complex on Earth means that in case of a global natural or man-made disaster we could loose everything our civilisation has achieved so far, even if Earth stays perfectly habitable after the dust settles down. Encapsulating and packaging our civilisation also means creating a backup of our knowledge, both in science and arts - something that could become invaluable one day, even back on Earth.
You don't need to go to space to do that. It is much, much easier to build such "backups" on Earth, in the form of underground bunkers or something. As a matter of fact, such facilities already exist, for instance the Svalbard Global Seed Vault[1], or any of the secret bunkers built during cold war[2]. Survivalism is a terrible reason for colonizing space, for space is a very hostile environment in the first place, so it makes very little sense to consider it as a place to rely on for survival.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
2: http://io9.com/the-secret-world-of-underground-bunkers-51160...
I hope you will acknowledge that this applies to some of the most sinister parts of this history, though.
I'm personally baffled by the desire to focus all our resources on the short-term. The questions of the long-term future of humankind and our place in the universe, make the immediate issues like pollution and disease look petty and irrelevant by comparison.
Also, from the practical angle, we're already spending a huge amount of money on solving our local, short-term problems here on Earth. Adding ~$2 trillion would be an increase, but not a game-changer. OTOH, humanity spends under $50 billion/year on space [1]. Adding $2 trillion would constitute 4000% increase! This might be enough to transform humanity from a precarious single-planet species into an interplanetary civilization in a few generations.
Another important point is that a lot of our problems here on Earth are entirely self-inflicted (e.g. inequality, pollution, global warming) and so they can't simply be fixed by throwing money at them: they need political transformation.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_space_agenci...
I am afraid that if we invest in space exploration and colonization, we would shift priorities from saving this world to escaping it. Only a few would be able to escape it - those who have the resources.
(It is kind of what the movie Interstellar is about.)
We need to save this world first, before we can allow ourself to "infect" other worlds. If we cannot sustain on this planet, e.g. stop global warming in the next years, we are doomed and it becomes impossible to even think about shooting a single human into space again. If we need to test things in space for that, I'm fine with that. But lets not lose track of our short term problems.
Really? What about all the inventions discovered during the space race...The biggest impact inventions being integrated circuits, satellite communications and GPS, but there were so many others like Corningware[1], Tempur foam [2], LEDs, Freeze Drying Technology, etc [3] that one could argue provided many short term benefits and enabled discoveries of countless others.
[1] http://www.corning.com/about_us/inside_corning/did_you_know/...
The only reliable way to argue for space exploration is by explaining how important the long-term benefits are.
It is a gamble. Gambling is nice as long we have the resources. Global warming can eat those easily.
Yes, but so long as global warming is a threat then the notion of humanity expanding to the stars is a pipe-dream. If the planet becomes incapable of supporting advanced social structures -- or, worse, complex lifeforms whatsoever -- then no one is going to be going anywhere: there will be no one left to travel.
Queenie: "Sorry. We've got poverty and people who are hungry here, you'll have to wait."
(400 years later)
Descendant of that Explorer: "Can we go now?"
Queenie: "Sorry, still haven't solved that poverty stuff. Go do some farming or something."
----
A lot of the "poverty and hunger stuff" is caused by corruption and unworkable politics and ideologies. Another big factor is simple human nature. "The poor will be with us always." It's a wicked problem that will probably never go away. We shouldn't use it as an excuse. (I would be quite happy trading military and secret-police spending, which is basically out of control).
Oh, we can try to address poverty. But putting everything else on hold doesn't make sense. A rising tide floats all boats; more resources and better technology will help everyone, at least a little.
[I'm actually not a big fan of manned exploration any more; it's expensive, and robots can do way better than we can, for the foreseeable future. Oh, putting men on other planets has undeniable poetry and significance, but if you want to do science or mining or whatever, you're better off with metal than monkeys].
Populations will always grow, even if there aren't enough resources for the next generation. As a result, some catastrophe must happen to keep the population in check: war, disease or famine.
These days we like to think that we've escaped the malthusian limit, as first world nations tend to have a naturally shrinking population.
Of course, we haven't solved any other of our philosophical vices, I'm inclined to think this isn't any different.
Ugh, that's not how we escaped Malthus' predictions. We escaped precisely thanks to scientific discoveries and technological advancements.
We die not only because we can't seem to solve our immediate problems (I bet global temperatures will cross the +6 Celsius in this century) but we die the next big space rock hits Earth or the next time Yellowstone erupts, or the next time some weird highly energetic phenomenon we are absolutely clueless about roasts our high atmosphere just enough it starts letting the sun's UV through.
It's stupid to colonize other worlds and ignore our current problems because they'll kill us before we get there, but it's equally stupid to ignore the long-term problems of putting all our eggs on a single planetary basket around a single star. While I'm quite sure the Sun will not blow up on the next quarter or before the next couple elections, I'm quite sure it'll not last forever and really think it'll eventually misbehave in some deadly fashion. There are several mass extinctions in fossil record and I'd much prefer our species would not end up as a museum curiosity for the following civilisation.
Earth is unsustainable in the long run. No one is willing to accept euthanasia, birth limits, basically efforts to maintain population caps. People might say its a good idea others should implement, not them personally :)
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...
I seem to remember some funny back of envelope calculations that put energy needs of earth in 100 years (assuming current growth) at _full output_ of our sun.
Pedantry aside, factors that contribute to Terra's apparent lack of long term sustainability are easy to spot, and there are plenty of options to try before having to resort to birth limits, euthanasia etc.
Insufficient reproductive education, lack of birth control, local scarcity through international inequality (i.e. exploitation), patterns of use and consumption, low food production efficiency, pollution from energy usage (non-alternative forms) and population density/distribution are all things that can be altered, upon which the constraints of viability rests.
Of course, none of these would be particularly easy to change, but I suspect many of us would find attempting to do so preferable to the alternatives.
These nations (good health care, slow population growth) [1] tend to be highly developed countries [2], with relatively high average education of its citizens [3] and high life expectancy [4]. Many of them also have high social equality and high cost of living because of higher taxation (e.g. the cost of social programs and universal healthcare) [5].
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality...
I like sci-fi, but this is the real world we're talking about here.
That dude floating in that debris belt (ring of Saturn?) -- that looked a bit dangerous. Hopefully he had a force field around him.
There's so much out there, just waiting for us to get off our duffs and explore. We have much of the technology; if we could just stop spending trillions on machines of war and instead spend it on machines of exploration....
I agree with this 100%. But while we're moving outward, however slowly, don't forget Sagan's Caveat:
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand."
Absolutely, go see what's across the street. But make sure your house is clean and safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot#Reflections_by_S...
Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
I often reflect on this sentiment and have half-convinced myself that the current definition of 'life' we use in this sense to be far too limited to capture the infinite diversity of existence.
In other words, our explorations will never reveal any creature like us (or other known forms of life on Earth) because the life that develops in other environment will be uniquely suited and predicated on existing in that environment exclusively.
I would add to what Sagan said: the whole universe is alive in ways we have not yet even conceived or be capable of conceiving.
http://www.insaturnsrings.com/watch/
http://www.insaturnsrings.com/home/ (with another teaser video not on the "watch" page)
----- arguably the movie is already spoilt, but spoilers -----
And seriously, NASA couldn't find astronauts apart from a farmer?
Someone falls into a black hole and SURVIVES.
Is given the power by 5 dimensional light beings to alter time?
The list could go on.
1. It was clearly established he was an ex-pilot for NASA. To describe Coop as just a farmer is horribly misleading.
2. We don't actually know what happens in a black hole. There was certainly some questionable science in the movie, but given that they gave an explanation for what happened in the black hole, and we don't know what really happens to contradict the movie's explanation, this seems like a valid use of artistic license.
3. I'm not even sure what this means.
>As Mars' diameter is about half of the Earths, the elevator cable wouldn't have to be as long to reach geostationary orbit and due to the lighter gravitational pull it wouldn't suffer as much stress from its weight.
Mars' diameter has nothing to do with the distance to stationary orbit, which is a result of gravity (and thus its mass).
Mars spins once every 24 hours 37 minutes. If the diameter was twice as large, it would have to be moving twice as fast to maintain that length of day.
Interestingly, since you orbit faster the closer you are to the surface, a decreased diameter actually pushes geosynchronous out away from the planet. This effect is, of course, very much negated by the absence of mass. Still, two equally massive planets with the same rotational period but NOT the same diameter will have different geostationary altitudes.
I'm glad to hear it's being made into a tv series, but I worry that you really need a high budget to make it come alive (like Game of Thrones)
You might be interested to learn that Erik Wernquist is also the person who created Crazy Frog some ten years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_rover#mediaviewer/File:Ma...
See also gallery here: http://www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers/gallery.html
People dropped by and asked where I took the picture. I loved to explain to them the picture was taken by a robot on Mars.
There is also another one, with a small Earth shining above the horizon. That too was my wallpaper, and that too caused countless people to be amazed.
Inspiring people is important.
> There is also another one, with a small Earth shining above the horizon.
Do you mean a shot on Mars? Can you link to it please?
Youtube-dl is my first choice though (and is how I viewed this video).
Since I'm already here, no way do I want to leave!
Send some machines to gather some data and transmit it back to us here on earth? Fine. Maybe terrific. Go there, in person? For me, no way!
Do I think human space travel is feasible or even necessary at least at this point in time? No, not by a long shot. Machines can do a better job and will probably always be able to do it better if technology keeps advancing. Machines don't need air, water, food, living space, and that's some of the stuff needed just to keep us alive in an hostile environment, all resources can be instead focused on the mission itself.
I think that people tend to forget that we don't just happen live on planet Earth, we where born by it, molded by it :)
If we'd evolved anywhere else then that place would probably be by far the best possible habitat for us too.
Although If we could somehow get rid of the human body, just take a brain, equip it with a neural interface of some kind and put it in a water tank ...
But with the realities, as you outlined, of visiting, really I wouldn't want to do that, either.
Mars? Okay, send a lot of robots. Let the robots get a good base going. Let the robots mine Mars to get fuel for return trips. Let the robots come and go until it all seems highly reliable. Go to the trouble to get enough mass for cosmic ray protection. Let some high risk takers go and return. Then, maybe, maybe, maybe I'd consider a visit! But that whole scenario is not nearly realistic at all soon.
The universe has a history of destroying the majority of life on Earth. It would be naive to think that statistics don't apply to the human race.
Wouldn't it be nice if Erik Wernquist was in charge of the filmatization of "2312" (the novel that inspired his "Iapetus Ridge" scene).
Also, I also loved his book Antarctica which is effectively "White Mars" - at least there is a chance of visiting incredible places like the Airdevronsix icefall - arguably the largest waterfall on this planet (5km wide and 400m high):
http://www.wondermondo.com/Countries/An/Antarctica/Antarctic...
The reason I think of this is that I recently came across this animation from New Horizons showing a 330km-high eruption that recently happened on Io:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_(moon)#mediaviewer/File:Tvas...
It's utterly captivating, at least to me, and I can't help but wonder what effect it would have on the public's imaginations to be able to see images like that every day, in high definition, from all over our solar system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY59wZdCDo0&index=1&list=PLF...
And of course, Cosmos, which is where all the audio is from in all these videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dADUBcoEEHw&index=1&list=PLB...
> This video contains content from eOne, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.
It looks like this film uses a limited number of shots (no cutting rapidly like action films), takes advantage of a lot of nasa and other imagery/data (no army of matte painters), limits characters to simple walking movements (no Pixar gesticulating), and probably keeps the particle effects and physics sims minimal (no computational fluids sims for glorious explosions).
Seriously. How are Hollywood CGI films so poorly made when this is possible?
Often we forget how far we've come, and how far we have to go. It's easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of regular life. When I listen to Carl Sagan sometimes I feel like I've glimpsed a bigger perspective.
I especially like the world play here. Latin Planetes (as in planets) means wanderer. The name of this film can be understood as Planets.
'A planet (from Ancient Greek ἀστὴρ πλανήτης (astēr planētēs), meaning "wandering star")' > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet
I went for the more similar sounding one.
I've finally gotten into some of Philip K Dick's works, as well as adventuring in the game Eve Online.
Both make me question how far we could be in technology, medicine, civilization, if we all could work together and not have schisms divide us.
I suppose it's the same as wishing for a utopia, though.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wonderful quote by Sagan.
Deleted comment
Peace on Earth is not going to come from going somewhere else and proclaiming "Look at us!" It's not a side effect.
Or, as the Quakers say, "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."
Just like I said.
>any simulation more convenient and less dangerous than the exploration of the universe in person
We have been risking our lifes to explorer our world for millenniums. Why would it be different for space?
I'm just saying the audacity to suggest to "fix" mortality is stunning. The implications are unforeseeable, on so many levels. People might not be as idealistic as you make them out to be.
Well, not everyone needs to be "idealistic". There are a lot of people willing to risk their lifes just to see a little further behind the horizon. You are not one of them. And this is ok.
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...