Holy Crackers! I have a theme!

I know, right? That’s super unusual.

Anyway. Earlier this week I blogged about legos washing ashore along Cornwall and Devon. And it’s probably no coincidence the BBC also did a piece on what those islands of plastic are up to in our oceans. I’m sure they have just as much fun searching for content as I do.

Could you tell that was facetious?

Anyway. The standard saying is that we know more about space than we know about what happens at the bottom of our own oceans. I don’t know if that’s true. I think it might be, humans have an incontrovertible attentiveness to what’s happening up there in the sky over us, and we’re generally just–probably rightfully—afraid of deep water.

But, along with the random lego octopi, and a travelling hoard of rubber ducks, and the kind of plastic that’s working its way into the geologic record, we get things like a message in a bottle sent in 1914 that just found its way to someone. Think about that. Someone wrote a message to his family, in the early days of WW1, and it’s spent the last hundred years doing cheese knows what in the ocean.

And reading that, I can’t imagine what else is floating around down there, waiting for us to find it.

I feel like this Sci-Fi Friday needs to be audience participation. Given the amount of content I've managed this week, I'm allowed to be a little lazy.

So, write me a tagline for the picture. Make it as silly or as serious as you like.

Unclear on what a tagline is, look at some of these. Even if you know what a tagline is, go look. Just trust me.

My son keeps asking me when we're going to have flying cars. "When will it be the future?" suddenly became a question, somewhere about halfway through first grade. 

And I can't tell you how disappointed he is, when I tell him they've been promising me things like flying cars since I was his age and it hasn't happened yet. That being said, given the way I see other people act in parking lots and on clogged roads, I'm not particularly on the band-wagon for flying cars. 

Any more than I'm on the band-wagon for those things down there.

Those nifty, idyllic things are called an O'Neill Cylinder. Basically, back in the seventies a Princeton genius theorized these designs for space colonies built from materials on the moon and harvested from asteroids, rather than dealing with the exorbitant cost of firing things into space. Two cylinders connected by a manufacturing center would spin and cause their own artificial gravity. The massive windows into space would make it easier to always be pointed at the sun, and he was sure, in the seventies, it could be done with modern methods and materials. 

The British Interplanetary Society has picked it back up, as of last year. They've named it Project SPACE (seriously, Study Project Advancing Colony Engineering) and they recon with the new lower cost shuttle replacements hopefully on the horizon it's only a matter of time. 

And my response to this? 

Not if you paid me. 

I get that we need to get into space. Maybe not for all the reasons people usually espouse (I don't buy we're killing the planet, actually. I figure it'll kill us long before we get there. I don't believe we'll over-populate it either for a whole host of reasons), but I still think we need to go. We need to go because the worst things in our history have happened when we stopped wondering what was over that hill way over there. When we stop striving and looking and dreaming all we're left with is what we are. I think sometimes we don't like ourselves very much.  

Which is sad, and symptomatic of a whole other list of problems that spring from this massive human tendency toward negativity we've never quite managed to shake. 

So why don't I want to go into space? Let's just say the Fermi Paradox has been the boogeyman in my mental closet since long before I knew what it was. I more or less own the fact I'm afraid of the dark.

I have a fever alright? And it was grocery shopping day, and then my husband wanted to go out for a date and...

Do you need more excuses, or does that cover it? Can I talk about Malefecent now?

I know technically it's not Sci-fi, and even if it were it wod be better suited to Wednesday... It's 10:28 on a Friday and I'm an I'll person. Take what you can get.

Which isn't going to be much. There's no adequate way for me to tell you about this movie without a seriously epic amount of spoilage. Just go see it, it's worth the ticket price. 

So...um...tie in. Right. 

Somewhere back a ways I talked about the "boo-hiss-man evil" trope in science fiction. Apparently I forgot it was a thing in Fantasy too. Or I think maybe I internalized it in fantasy. So much of that revolves around how precious the earth is I don't notice the correlations so much. Which makes me wonder if there's a more nuanced accounting in Sci-fi and I just havent found it yet. Any suggestions?

Okay, the sicky is going to bedfordshire now. Leave your comments/suggestions/fever dreams down in the thingy.

I love science. Probably because it's generally a challenge to me--my brain is very good at language and creative enterprise, but I've always had trouble with math and science--and I like to beat my head against things I don't understand once in a while. I like the things science can tell us about our history just as much as the things it can tell us about our future. 
But very rarely do I come across something new that doesn't make me think of that moment in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm looks at the scientists and the man behind the dinosaurs and asks if any of them thought about whether or not they should have created dinosaurs while they were so all-fired busy figuring out if they could. 
And I'm not talking about the likelihood of the Large Hadron Collider ending the universe, or new vaccines creating super-germs, or whoever happens to be building SkyNet this week. I'm talking about this.

You should totally go read the article, even if it gets a little science heavy in some places and a little strangely quasi-religious in others, it's interesting. The gist of it is there's a seventy-some year old scientist out there who's been obsessing over his need to stop aging for fifty-some years, and he thinks this spectacularly low number of people born with a incredibly rare genetic disorder might be his answer.

So, skating over literally half of what I just said there--like how his life's gone for the last fifty years while he's been freaking out about getting old, and how he's basically capitalizing on someone else's pain and in my reading anyway doesn't feel all that sorry about that (reminder, I am one of the least sentimental people in the universe most days so if I think you're being callous that's something to think about)... Dude wants to stop aging.

Like how does that even work? Do we get a magic pill at 27 and stay young and perfect (assuming you won the genetic lottery in the first place and you're young and perfect)? And even if we could choose to stop aging, does that mean immortality? Does that mean Facebook--or whatever comes after it--fills up with family pictures, comments hanging around at the bottom like 'Spent spring-break in Cabo with Gram, she always picks up better looking guys' or 'Me Mom and Grandma belly-dancing, I'm the one in the pink' where everybody's indistinguishable from each other? 

Okay, scratch that one, that sounds cool.

Anyway. I'm not a Luddite, I don't think modern technology is ruining us all and everything is scary. But when you start looking at big changes, not better cosmetics or disease control, when you're just in it to live forever maybe it's time to step back and think about whether or not you should. Sometimes that's more important than can.

That picture has absolutely no relevance to the thing I just wrote, but I like it. It's from here under this license. 


PS. Wrote that entire thing and then thought "Gee, that sounds a little like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the fifty pages I read anyway..." Yeah. That's still on the too-read list. More-so now.

We do all this talking, about planning for the future of our planet. We talk about what to do when we run out of fossil fuels, and what to do when we run out of fresh water (the answer to that one is die or mutate, sorry to tell you). 

Nobody ever talks about what we'll do when we collide with our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. 

Arguably that's because we're not going to do it for around another 5 billion years, but still. Early planning is key with these things people. 

Don't ask me why there are mountains in this picture. Even when you can really see the 'Milky Way' from earth (I don't quite get how we're seeing it when we're in it, but that's a topic for another day) it's not that clear. 

My biggest beef with our lack of planning, for this possibly earth-shattering event? Who in the name of all things sciency and stellar decided our new combined galaxy should be named Milkomeda? Did they all sit around and go 'No, Andromeda Way actually sounds cool, so we can't use that one...'

Meet Messier Object number 104, better known as the Majestic Sombrero Galaxy.

Can we just take a minute to bask in that name? The Majestic Sombrero Galaxy. I know they don't name Galaxies the way people name planets (I'm not sure we even name planets like that anymore). Frequently they get named for the constellation they're in, or other identifying factors. But not that beauty up there. Nope, it's known as The Majestic Sombrero. 

If you happen to be interested, it was discovered by this guy on May 11, 1781. It's apparently possible to see it using an amateur telescope, which makes me want to drag the telescope back on the deck and look. I don't do this, because there's a high-school behind my house, the parking lot of which apparently needs to be visible from space, and I grew up in the mid-west where you don't borrow other people's fields without permission.

But somewhere, over our heads tonight, there is a Majestic Sombrero. I'm pretty okay with that. 

If you'd like more stats on Lovely M104, you can find them here.

I promise eventually Sci-Fi Fridays will get back to having science content (as much as I ever had science content, shush you).

For tonight I'm being simple and rambling on for a bit about something I've noticed in Sci-Fi (particularly the movies) and then giving you an update on the Marianas Trench Contest. 

Why is 'the humans are a**holes' a genre? Every time I see one of these I want to punch something small and fuzzy. It's like some ridiculous nod to the 'noble savage' novels that used to be so popular, where the native peoples on a planet are peaceful and nature loving and then the big, corrupt, evil humans come along and ruin everything. 

I'm not in any way saying I don't think we'd do this, any more than I'm saying it's not turning a legitimate historical precedent into a futuristic setting. Mostly I'm saying I'm tired of watching Pocahontas In Space. It's lazy, one dimensional story-telling. And it sells us short. 

Do I think, if we ever start colonizing space (basically it's a numbers game, imo, it's gotta happen some time) we're going to do everything right? No. Because we're human, and for good or ill forethought isn't always our most used trait. But fiction is fiction for a reason, and seeing ourselves as horrible wastes of life isn't the only way to make us question our behavior.

Okay, rant over.

So, update about the Marianas Trench Contest. I've decided on a prize, for the winner. I'd post a photo, but I don't have one that I have rights to, so it'll have to wait until I'm finished. So, whoever submits something to me by April 20th will get a hand-knitted plot bunny. I'll make it long before then and post a picture for inspiration.

I'm lazy, and it's my anniversary this weekend, so you're getting flash fiction instead of a post. And yes, I realize how close to not-friday-anymore it is. Shush.

Jaegar Deep Sea Class PerSub, Marianas 
Twelve years. 
Twelve years, three girlfriends, three missed weddings, one Christmas his mother still wouldn't let him forget, three diplomas, and more student debt than he could count. 
Thirty eight million dollars he'd begged, borrowed, and done everything but steal for. 3 million hours designing an entire class of personal submersible. Six test dives. Two late-stage redesigns. Three grant re-fillings. 
One hiatus due to Giant Squid attack. 
All for this. Because there was a door at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and he needed to know what was behind it.
None of it had prepared him for the truth.

Today's Sci-Fi Friday post is all about audience participation (I'm lazy, three times a week is harder than it looks).

So, it's the internet and rumors abound, and apparently every time I'm hard up for a blog topic we're going to hit one. Don't question. Today's rumor, spurred on by a certain XKCD comic, is that James Cameron found a door at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. 

I'm going to just stare at that for a minute, and bask in the fact it's under this license and I'm totally allowed to do that. Also, if you click on the comic it'll take you to the xkcd website where there are so many other comics and I don't even know where to start. 

Anyway, here's the audience participation part. Tell me a story (in summary or whatever) about what Mr Cameron found behind that door that I'm about ninety-percent sure wasn't there. I'll devise some sort of prizey thing for the one I like the best.

Edit: I'm not sure how legal this is, but I'm claiming it anyway. Anything down there in the comments belongs to and is the responcibility of the poster.