[The Lizard of Oz]

The Washington Post's foreign policy hack David Ignatius wrote a column which is mostly about the new film Gravity. Here are some relevant excerpts. There are no spoilers, not that it would matter.

Quote:

“I hate space,” says the character played by Sandra Bullock in the new movie “Gravity,” and you can understand why: It’s an empty void, filled with the wreckage of failed satellites and derelict space stations, a beautiful nothingness where human beings float helplessly, praying for some way to get home.

Quote:

I won’t spoil the plot by telling you what happens to Bullock and the other characters in Alfonso Cuarón’s marvelous film. But let’s explore the dark vision this film captures so well: the terrifying sense of drifting untethered in the cosmos, tumbling out of control, turning desperately to support systems that fail, one after the other. The astronauts keep calling “Houston,” but the reassuring voice of control that brought space travelers home in “Apollo 13” isn’t there.

“Gravity” is a talky film, but as New York Times critic A.O. Scott has noted, the garrulous characters are really just trying to fill the terrible reality of silence.

Quote:

What sparkles in this shutdown season is the prominence of foreign-born directors in making the few memorable Hollywood films that break through box-office formulas to create real art. Cuarón, a Mexican director who earlier made “Children of Men” and “Y Tu Mamá También,” is an obvious example

*************************

How terrible.

Imagine being a 15 year old kid. Not really a geek or a nerd, but a normal kid of above average intelligence and maybe some mechanical/mathematical ability, growing up somewhere in Colorado, who -- correctly -- thinks space exploration is amazing, and who maybe fantasizes about being an astronaut or a spaceship engineer, even if he wouldn't come out and admit it. Now he's really looking forward to seeing this new movie in 3D. He doesn't know exactly what's in it but he knows it's about space travel so it has to be cool.

So what happens is that he goes to the theater with his buds, and for an hour and a half or two hours or however long this nightmare lasts, this freak Cuaron shits in his eyes and in his soul.

He gets treated to a female -- the most meaningless possible creature in all that relates to space, having no possible interest or relation to it -- saying "I hate space".

He gets treated to a vision of space as a terrifying physical emptiness that embodies the despair and emptiness that are the essence of all life, according to the deepest conviction of the monsters responsible for this.

He gets treated to a "talky" film where the characters "are really just trying to fill the terrible reality of silence". Seeing a hoary imitation of a Beckett play is not what you bargain for when you're this kid out to get a little space treat, but it is what you get.

And of course this fool Ignatius and others like him think all of this is "marvelous". They think this is what "real art" is all about.

What does this kid feel when he walks out of the theater? He can't put it into words, maybe he says, yeah it was cool, pretty weird. Really makes you think. What is he going to say? But what he feels is that something is wrong. He feels strange. Maybe he loses some morale. It seems that space and space travel, which he knew, in the purity of his masculine mind, to be the most amazing thing in the world, are not all they're cracked up to be. After all the people who made the film are intelligent adults who understand the world, and clearly they know something he doesn't.

*************************

The sci-fi films that America produced in the 1950's were incredible, some of the strongest, most beautiful, and innocent creations of the human spirit of any time. If you haven't seen any, you should. "Forbidden Planet" (1956) is a great one to start with.

The love of space and space exploration is maybe the single purest and most hopeful expression there is of the masculine spirit -- maybe more essentially masculine than the love of ass, and I'm not joking. In the imperative to explore and conquer space using science and technology the masculine mind sees the perfect embodiment of the voyage of the human mind through the material world, the endless and endlessly enticing perspective of progress and victory.

But to the nihilists that have come to dominate the intellectual and spiritual life of this time, space is of course the perfect embodiment of the emptiness that they know to be the truth. Its endless and to them self-evidently pointless extension is just an added insult to the injury of the knowledge of "meaninglessness" here on the warming earth. And so in their hatred, they put a woman there and make her chatter.

And now that has to be your entertainment for the night.

*************************

I understand why this is, and I know it won't always be this way. But in the meantime, I wish I could slap this freak Cuaron's mug, and destroy all digital and physical copies of this wretched film so that it wouldn't poison the hearts of good space-loving kids in this and other countries.

[MrLemon]

Well you missed a rather obvious alternative explanation.

Maybe in fact, space exploration is *not* amazing. Maybe it is just as shitty and dangerous as the Female in the movie said.

Maybe that's why, after Apollo, the US essentially abandoned all the aggressive space exploration. Maybe that's why we haven't gone to Mars. Maybe that's why we have only a puny Space Station that hardly *anybody* on the planet earth cares about. Maybe that's why, when private parties volunteer to go to Mars, they will be politely but firmly quashed by every spacefaring nation.

Maybe, space is a shitty worthless place. There are no starships zippping around so that Captain Kirk can have sex with hot green alien chicks. There are certainly millions of advanced civilizations in the universe and NONE of them are colonizing or exploring, because as soon as they are advanced enough to explore space, they are also advanced enough to realize that it's totally not worth the effort. Millions of civiliazations, all forever isolated by the insanely deadly radiation and dust of outer space, combined with the impossibliy long distances between stars. Maybe they talk by super-lasers. But that's it.

Have you ever considered these concepts? Because that is most likely going to be the long-term prognosis for space travel.

[Therapsid]

The sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson talks about the shift in the genre from the optimism of science fiction's so-called "golden age" of the 50's and 60's to the pessimism of contemporary dystopian science fiction.

Back then, whenever a scientist came up with a new discovery or an inventor developed something cutting-edge, the public was receptive and curious about it. Particularly in the immediate post-war era, people had faith in the future and in the power of science to improve our lives.

But by the end of the 60's something began to change - the Apollo program was right on the cusp of that change, with the moon landing taking place even as Woodstock signaled a new anti-technological, back to nature mindset. Ever since then, any new invention outside of computers is greeted with immediate suspicion by the public and by our hyper-regulatory government. Science fiction reflects this new risk-adverse bias, and doesn't project an optimistic vision of the future anymore.

For that matter, I don't believe our culture even has much of a conception of the future today. When I was growing up, people still had some sense of what the future - the 21st century - would look like. I don't think people do so much anymore.

It sounds like Gravity is definitely in keeping with the current zeitgeist.

Check it out:

[TheBulldozer]

Perhaps sci fi of the 50's and 60's is looked back on as the golden age because they predicted today so accurately.

[The Lizard of Oz]

MrLemon -- the immediate practicalities of space travel are not really the point here. They are certainly not what this film and others like it are concerned with. Space is only a (natural) vehicle for expressing two very different visions of life: a hopeful and forward looking one, or an empty, fearful and despairing one.

However: one of the symptoms of the philosophy of nihilism that I talk about in my post is that, being convinced of the meaninglessness of life and therefore of all effort, it is always in a rush to claim that it knows everything all the way to the end of the line. I feel that there is some of this in your somewhat far-fetched certainties about the necessary futility of space travel now and for all time. I really don't know if there are millions of civilizations talking to each other using super-lasers, wouldn't it be better to be more modest and admit that we know nothing about this? Just as man walking on the moon is not something our ancestors could very easily predict, I think we don't have much understanding about what the technologies of the future will or will not allow us to do; the only thing we know is that our powers are very likely to be infinitely greater in the future than they are today. I think that the rush to foreclose future possibility in something as vast as space is based not on any particular insight, but on an emotion that needs to be examined.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Therapsid, thanks for the link.

Yes, something has changed since the golden age of sci-fi of the 1950's in particular -- and it was a true golden age, no scare quotes needed.

This has to do with the gradual spread of the philosophical view of the world I referred to as nihilism. As with other powerful ideas, it crystallized in the thought and work of one man -- Nietzsche -- and was adopted first by a small intellectual and literary elite, and then gradually by wider and wider circles. It was not yet dominant -- thank God -- in the Hollywood of the golden age of sci-fi, but it was about to enter the bloodstream. Now, of course, it is in the air we breathe and indeed in the very stock of these films.

If you know that life is "meaningless", you hate the idea of progress more than anything else, because you know it to be a lie -- you know the truth of futility all the way to the end of the line, and the idea of progress pretends that not everything can be known and that things can change. That is why, while emotional art about the past or the present can still validly exist under nihilism, all artistic or literary discourse about futurity necessarily becomes a form of torture. That is why any "sci-fi" under nihilism is necessarily a dystopia. The mind must be tortured until it admits that there is no progress, there is no future. There is only the truth of "meaninglessness" now and evermore.

[MrLemon]

(10-12-2013 08:54 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

MrLemon -- the immediate practicalities of space travel are not really the point here. They are certainly not what this film and others like it are concerned with. Space is only a (natural) vehicle for expressing two very different visions of life: a hopeful and forward looking one, or an empty, fearful and despairing one.

However: one of the symptoms of the philosophy of nihilism that I talk about in my post is that, being convinced of the meaninglessness of life and therefore of all effort, it is always in a rush to claim that it knows everything all the way to the end of the line. I feel that there is some of this in your somewhat far-fetched certainties about the necessary futility of space travel now and for all time. I really don't know if there are millions of civilizations talking to each other using super-lasers, wouldn't it be better to be more modest and admit that we know nothing about this? Just as man walking on the moon is not something our ancestors could very easily predict, I think we don't have much understanding about what the technologies of the future will or will not allow us to do; the only thing we know is that our powers are very likely to be infinitely greater in the future than they are today. I think that the rush to foreclose future possibility in something as vast as space is based not on any particular insight, but on an emotion that needs to be examined.

Philosophy doesn't determine the ultimate outcome of the space exploration. Physics and engineering determine the ultimate outcome of space exploration.

You said:

"The rush to foreclose future possibility in something as vast as space is based not on any particular insight, but on an emotion that needs to be examined."

Yes, in fact I do have "insight" -- it's more commonly called "technical skill in the field". Yes, based on that skill, I do foreclose possibilities. That's what real engineers and scientists do. We get very tired of hearing people complain that we're not "dreaming". We dream about real things, real possibilities, not the vague childish crap that is promoted by science fiction.

[soup]

(10-12-2013 08:54 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

MrLemon -- the immediate practicalities of space travel are not really the point here. They are certainly not what this film and others like it are concerned with. Space is only a (natural) vehicle for expressing two very different visions of life: a hopeful and forward looking one, or an empty, fearful and despairing one.

However: one of the symptoms of the philosophy of nihilism that I talk about in my post is that, being convinced of the meaninglessness of life and therefore of all effort, it is always in a rush to claim that it knows everything all the way to the end of the line. I feel that there is some of this in your somewhat far-fetched certainties about the necessary futility of space travel now and for all time. I really don't know if there are millions of civilizations talking to each other using super-lasers, wouldn't it be better to be more modest and admit that we know nothing about this? Just as man walking on the moon is not something our ancestors could very easily predict, I think we don't have much understanding about what the technologies of the future will or will not allow us to do; the only thing we know is that our powers are very likely to be infinitely greater in the future than they are today. I think that the rush to foreclose future possibility in something as vast as space is based not on any particular insight, but on an emotion that needs to be examined.

I agree when you cut off space you really just cutting off you imagination.

The truth is that where there once was nothing, we found something. Look at dark matter- you actually can't see it, but it exists.

There might be other things that exist that we can't see.

For better or for worse.

I think it might be good for us to know what is out there- could be an meteor coming our way..

[The Lizard of Oz]

MrL, your "technical skill in the field" might -- might -- be useful in helping make some decision about the feasibility of this or that specific engineering project right here and right now, if it happens to lie within your narrow area of expertise. That's it, at best.

But if you think it can allow you to predict, let alone foreclose, the future possibilities of space travel with any degree of confidence, you're operating way above your pay grade, and I don't care if you were the director of NASA. The possibilities of future technology are unpredictable by definition, and "experts" have a notoriously poor record in forecasting them.

You slander the "vague childish crap that is promoted by science fiction" as if some sort of mincing accuracy were the point of art, yet you yourself seem to have the utmost confidence in outlandish just-so stories of "millions of advanced civilizations" that have despaired of space exploration and are reduced to the apparent drudgery of communicating with super-lasers (lol). Why is it that you are willing to entertain these, actually vague and childish, fairy tales only when they support your churlish conviction of everlasting futility?

Just as I said in my earlier post, the rush to make, and then insist on, categorical claims that are far beyond the scope of your or anyone else's possible expertise betrays above all a strong emotion that you should examine more carefully.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

I personally think that the Fermi paradox is the most likely state of the universe, and can be explained by almost anything from this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_parad...thetically

That said, I don't think it would be sad and depressing. Life can be wonderful in small quantities and in unusual places. It's not a prerequisite that the entire space is filled with green, communication, energy and evolution for me to consider it a happy place in general. The only unhappy thing about is the eventual heat death, but that is some 90^1000000000000000000000000000000 years away, so I don't think I can really consider it like that. In that sense, everything would be meaningless, not just space.

But space in particular? It seems awe-inspiring to me, not dread-inspiring.

[Icepasian]

(10-12-2013 08:00 PM)MrLemon Wrote:  

Well you missed a rather obvious alternative explanation.

Maybe in fact, space exploration is *not* amazing. Maybe it is just as shitty and dangerous as the Female in the movie said.

Maybe that's why, after Apollo, the US essentially abandoned all the aggressive space exploration. Maybe that's why we haven't gone to Mars. Maybe that's why we have only a puny Space Station that hardly *anybody* on the planet earth cares about. Maybe that's why, when private parties volunteer to go to Mars, they will be politely but firmly quashed by every spacefaring nation.

Maybe, space is a shitty worthless place. There are no starships zippping around so that Captain Kirk can have sex with hot green alien chicks. There are certainly millions of advanced civilizations in the universe and NONE of them are colonizing or exploring, because as soon as they are advanced enough to explore space, they are also advanced enough to realize that it's totally not worth the effort. Millions of civiliazations, all forever isolated by the insanely deadly radiation and dust of outer space, combined with the impossibliy long distances between stars. Maybe they talk by super-lasers. But that's it.

Have you ever considered these concepts? Because that is most likely going to be the long-term prognosis for space travel.

Sounds like those millions of alien civilizations are full of pussies. Space is the final frontier and there will be incredible sacrifices made in the pursuit of human exploration and development but to say it's pointless is to be fatalistic. We leave the Earth or we stagnate and die as a species. Just because no other civilization that we know of is doing what we thought doesn't mean we can't.

I believe JFK said it best: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

TL;DR This is an honorable and manly endeavor.

[The Lizard of Oz]

HCE, it's very appropriate that the "Fermi paradox" is literally the product of physicists shooting the shit with each other when they had nothing better to do with their time. When mob guys sit around the social club with nothing to do they wonder what they can steal next, but physicists in the same situation might set to wondering where all the extraterrestrials are.

If you multiply enough completely unknown probabilities just for the fuck of it, you can get any number from zero to an alien in every coffee mug. It's harmless enough as long as no one takes it too seriously. The truth is that no one has the least idea.

[Sp5]

(10-12-2013 08:22 PM)MaleDefined Wrote:  

Perhaps sci fi of the 50's and 60's is looked back on as the golden age because they predicted today so accurately.

Very droll. Hey, we're only 12 years late for the Jupiter Mission (2001)

[Veloce]

All of the nihilists and atheists that can't take their mouth off of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's cock for two seconds might be absolutely dismayed to know that Carl Sagan was a huge proponent of space travel and space colonization.

MrLemon we can all appreciate someone with behind-the-scenes knowledge, but even with that there's no excuse to quash imagination. That's what being human is all about. There were times, in relatively recent history, where we thought the world was flat and that everything revolved around the Earth. It was the unquenchable curiosity of great scientific men that sought to answer the unanswerable and pioneer new observation methods and calculations to explain our place in the universe.

Our Sun will die someday and with it, the solar system. It is 99% more likely that humans will be long gone before that happens, but there is that 1% chance that perhaps not. It is a certainty that this solar system will die. It is not a certainty that humans will be wiped out by an extinction event; either natural or man-made. So we must act on certainties here and constantly be aware of the possibilities of our own survival as a species.

What made Carl Sagan so great and appealing was his technical qualifications and masterful knowledge of the Cosmos, without losing his almost child-like wonder and imagination.

I haven't seen Gravity yet; I probably will because of the high ratings and because I love space flicks, but based on what Lizard has posted I'm quite sure I'll come to the same conclusions.

We currently treat space as commodity as it relates to satellites, communications, military applications, etc. Somewhat limited to anyone with an ounce of imagination. In a certain light, you could draw a metaphor regarding Europe before 1492: miserable and rife with famine, pestilence, plague, and death. That might be Earth one day, and what then? Even now there is a lot we don't know even about our own solar system. What's going on beneath the ice crust on Europa? It's likely there's a fluid ocean underneath, which is fucking mind blowing to me. The idea that there could be fluid water oceans elsewhere just in our own universe should be enough to warrant a fully funded space program.

[Screwston]

Check out Europa Report.

[LoveBug]

going to see this tomorrow

[MrLemon]

(10-13-2013 01:49 PM)Icepasian Wrote:  

(10-12-2013 08:00 PM)MrLemon Wrote:  

Well you missed a rather obvious alternative explanation.

Maybe in fact, space exploration is *not* amazing. Maybe it is just as shitty and dangerous as the Female in the movie said.

Maybe that's why, after Apollo, the US essentially abandoned all the aggressive space exploration. Maybe that's why we haven't gone to Mars. Maybe that's why we have only a puny Space Station that hardly *anybody* on the planet earth cares about. Maybe that's why, when private parties volunteer to go to Mars, they will be politely but firmly quashed by every spacefaring nation.

Maybe, space is a shitty worthless place. There are no starships zippping around so that Captain Kirk can have sex with hot green alien chicks. There are certainly millions of advanced civilizations in the universe and NONE of them are colonizing or exploring, because as soon as they are advanced enough to explore space, they are also advanced enough to realize that it's totally not worth the effort. Millions of civiliazations, all forever isolated by the insanely deadly radiation and dust of outer space, combined with the impossibliy long distances between stars. Maybe they talk by super-lasers. But that's it.

Have you ever considered these concepts? Because that is most likely going to be the long-term prognosis for space travel.

Sounds like those millions of alien civilizations are full of pussies. Space is the final frontier and there will be incredible sacrifices made in the pursuit of human exploration and development but to say it's pointless is to be fatalistic. We leave the Earth or we stagnate and die as a species. Just because no other civilization that we know of is doing what we thought doesn't mean we can't.

I believe JFK said it best: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

TL;DR This is an honorable and manly endeavor.

Look guys, I have great admiration for imagination and mankind's quest for knowledge and all that. I'm in that business myself.

The problem is simply one of misunderstanding. Space is simply *not* the final frontier. That's a great line from Star Trek but ultimately its about as realistic as Harry Potter flying around london on a broomstick. It's *fiction* people. Not reality.

The reason space is not a frontier is very simple: Frontiers (by definition) are areas of undeveloped potential, rich with life and growth. Space is nothing like this. Space is a black, deadly vacuum. Nothing there of any value to humanity. Simply nothing. OK a few space rocks with ore, but hey, we have TONS of ore right here on earth much easier to get.

"Space as the final frontier" is a fallacy created by a TV show writer. People at NASA pay lip service to it, but nobody with any experience or credibiilty believes it for on nanosecond. It simply isn't true.

I knew a 8 year old girl once who read all the Harry Potter books 2 times over, then asked her mom "Can we go to London and try to find Daigon Alley?" Her mom had to painfully explain to her, that Harry Potter was make believe and that there is NO SUCH THING as magic wizards. The girl kept saying "well, how can you be sure? Maybe it's really true?" because she simply could not separate truth from fiction.

That's the same problem we have in the space exploration debate.

Meanwhile, this is what will happen: we will keep sending robot explorers. and those will be wonderful. Human exploration...maybe Mars but unlikely. Otherwise, don't hold your breath. There's not much more that's ever going to be worth it.

[LoveBug]

solid movie, especially 3d

[Teedub]

Saw it today, the cinematography and effects are brilliant. The long technical scenes with no cuts are also pretty bloody impressive. Sandra Bullock also really impressed me. But to the OP, it certainly put me off space travel!

[Wutang]

You guys ever read the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulu stories? It expresses a viewpoint of space and the universe that's pretty similar to the nihilistic one being portrayed in current sci-fi - namely that human beings are trapped in a meaningless universe and surrounded by vast cosmic forces that will be forever beyond the understanding of any being with our mental limitations. It's in very stark contrast to stuff like Star Truck and also the pulp sci-fi from a few decades ago.

[Vicious]

(11-07-2013 02:36 PM)Wutang Wrote:  

You guys ever read the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulu stories? It expresses a viewpoint of space and the universe that's pretty similar to the nihilistic one being portrayed in current sci-fi - namely that human beings are trapped in a meaningless universe and surrounded by vast cosmic forces that will be forever beyond the understanding of any being with our mental limitations. It's in very stark contrast to stuff like Star Truck and also the pulp sci-fi from a few decades ago.

Used to love HP Lovecraft when I was younger. These days I admire his stuff more for the concept than the prose. He truly was a trailblazer in that regard and frightenly enough his view of cosmic forces is far more realistic than the rosy picture most adventure sci-fi paints. I remember Stephen Hawkings writing some article last year about how meeting extra-terrestial life forms is likely to be the end of mankind as we know it.

[SirStephen]

Saw this very bad movie last week and was very disappointed. The cover of MIT Technology Review December 2012 with a cite by Apollo-11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin issue sums it all up.

[void]

The moon landing was a political statement. As long as there is no financial gain, or survival of the species pressure - not much will happen with space exploration. Money is the equivalent of energy/resources. If the earned resources from space exploration are lower than the costs, it will probably not happen on a greater scale.
If nuclear fusion takes of, there are already plans about mining the moon for deuterium.