I was contacted recently by Vanessa Bendetti for the Mirada production company, asking for permission to show the Future Cities book jacket shown above. Mirada's film work is truly excellent, so I'm pleased to report that Future Cities will soon be on display, as part of a special exhibition starting later this month at the Lincoln Center in New York.
Reactions are rolling in for Apollo 18, which gets some knocks from the Rotten Tomatoes website, only 23% of whose approved reviewers give a positive comment.
However, last time I looked, ordinary movie-goers were rewarding Apollo 18 with a 76% like-rating. Make of that dichotomy what you will. Maybe an example of sniffy reviewers? Or a case of too-easily pleased punters? Or perhaps a bit of both?
Either way, Apollo 18's central premise is a neat one that explains why the US abandoned the Moon, just when the technology was there to make it the 51st state.
Apollo 18 reminds me of so many 1950s-era sci-fi magazine shorts - however good or bad the prose, the core ideas were almost always interesting and worthy of discussion.
After quite a buildup, and a teasing campaign declaring that it's a factual movie, the (fictional) real thing hits the screens.
The plot, based around events that supposedly happened to the real-but-cancelled (thanks to Trick-Dick Nixon) Apollo 18 (and 19 and 20) is a nice premise actually, so full marks to the makers for that.
But whether it's a killer movie or not is a decision that's up to the reactions of the great cinema-going audience.
This seems worth a look even though there's only this teaser trailer to see.
Mind you, Hollywood aside, it's an ongoing cultural tragedy that the US gave up our neighbouring world. With von Braun's plans as a template, we should have been on Mars by 1980 (I drew his Mars ship design for The Observer newspaper at the time) and the Moon... well, the Moon should be the 51st state by now.
As it is, the next humans there may well be from China or India, as their leaders and peoples recognize the importance of the outward urge for growth and leadership.
It looks like 2011 kicks off with a tasty looking alien invasion shocker ("Rio's gone... We've lost New York") and let's face it, Hollywood really prefers aliens-as-nasties: ET was definitely an exception rather than the rule.
Stephen Hawking warned us
Still, when the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking thinks it's worthwhile pointing out that aliens just might not be friendly, let's not be sniffy about a movie like the upcoming Battle: Los Angeles. Actually, it looks pretty good - let's x-fingers that the feature lives up to the promise of the trailer!
Release of Battle: Los Angeles is due in March 2011.
Seventh graders in a Cottonwood, California, school have been studying lava tubes, a common volcanic feature both on Earth and on Mars. The students were studying Mars-orbiter images and chanced on a small, round, black spot on the 14 km (8.7 mile) high Pavonis Mons, a volcano near the Martian equator whose name means ‘Peacock Mountain’ (top pic).
Skylight on Mars
Experts reckon the students have found a ‘skylight’, a place where the roof of a sub-surface cave has collapsed, and only the second of its kind found on this particular Martian peak.
Big cave
Caves like these are caused when hot lava punches through rock on its way to the surface during an eruption. The middle picture shows such a lava tube at Lava Beds National Monument, California. The Pavonis Mons cave is reckoned to be a biggie, estimated at some 115 m (380 ft) deep and perhaps 190 m (620 ft) wide. If such caves are common on Mars, and in some areas it’s highly likely, then they could make superb underground bases for future human missions.
Protection from the Sun
The advantages of using natural features like these are massive, not least of which is good protection from the elements. By spraying rock with plastic sealant and installing a suitable airlock, such a cave could be made into a warm, airtight, and comfortable environment. It would also be dust-free, and give the Marsnauts inside excellent protection from the effects of solar radiation on the surface.
Domes first, caves later
While the first Mars explorers (bottom pic) will almost certainly use the familiar dome design for a temporary base, any long-term habitation would be better served by reworking existing Martian natural features.
For most of us, the universe of Hollywood science fiction movie-making is a secret world, revealed only at showtime to display the auteurs’ efforts after they have done their job. However, sometimes a door opens directly into that universe, and for Jaron Pitts from Texas, the key was his YouTube movie ‘trailer’ for Green Lantern, cobbled together from lots of different movies. The trailer made Jaron a viral star, with more than 2 million views of his incredibly well-crafted Green Lantern superhero mashup (top video above).
The real Green Lantern movie, due for release in 2011 will have to work very hard indeed to come near the spellbinding authority of the Pitts edition - so let’s hope all on board the production will ‘make it so’. Apparently, most of the production crew rate the trailer highly, so that’s a good omen.
Better yet for Jaron - a Dallas church media director - his YouTube fame led to a commission to produce a teaser-trailer for the proposed movie Technotise (bottom video above) which may hit the silver screen if Jaron’s work persuades the money men to pony up funds for production. It certainly looks terrific, with a plot that comes from a successful graphic novel, based in the Serbian capital city of Belgrade in 2074.
OK, there are just two things for you to do now - crank up your speakers to flatten your ears with oh-so-solid techno-rock soundtrack, and, just for fun, see how many niblets of different movies you can spot while you watch.
This nano-scale model of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise measures just 8.8 nanometres long, a nanometre being a 'rather small' size - just one-billionth of a metre. It was made by Takayuki Hoshino and Shinji Matsui of the Himeji Institute of Technology, one of three campuses at Japan’s University of Hyogo.
Hoshino and Matsui used a 30 kV (kilovolt) Ga+ (Gallium arsenide) focused ion-beam that works with individual atoms to etch patterns and models on a submicroscopic scale. Equipment like this is widely used in the semiconductor industry - for example, your computer would not be possible without similar machines in computer chip production.
As for the model’s scale, there are various estimates for the size of the movie Enterprise, but one we found quoted several times is around the 760 m (2494 ft) mark. So that makes this invisible-small ion-carved replica somewhere in the region of 1:684 billionth scale! Yikes!
