Saturday, November 10, 2007

Sunrise, Mars


I'm not sure why I made this... I guess I was inspired by this Spirit photo of a Martian sunset. And I always liked those early twentieth century 'cigar' shaped rocket ship designs so often used on pulp space novel covers and in Bugs Bunny cartoons. 

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

The Muck Knows

Knowledge flows up from the muck, not down from on high. We know what we know because we earned it, through hard work. Not because it was whispered in our ears by angels. We earned what we know individually and collectively. 

Science has reduced religion to a kind of 'insert god here' proposition whenever the remaining faithful are confronted with a scientific mystery. And since science has effectively pushed that insertion point back to the beginning of the universe, the only remaining place a believer can put god is behind the big bang itself.

The only thing we'll find behind nature, is more nature. 

Friday, September 21, 2007

Wormholes


The wormhole journey as portrayed in Contact is a cheap thrill ride unworthy of the material.

OK... So the pod drops through the center of the popcorn machine and into a wormhole aperture. Great, with you so far...  But the red flashy-crap, followed by a star-field, followed by being sucked into some kind of funnel/vortex/tunnel thingy doesn't work.

Here's how it should have gone... The machine should have been more like the one in the book where a stationary pod is surrounded by a device that generates a pucker in spacetime to which an awaiting wormhole nozzle can attach. The wormhole itself is an invasive sphere which envelopes a local area of spacetime; the space enclosing the pod when the machine reaches full power. Through a window, a passenger would see her surroundings instantly change from departure point to destination without ever experiencing a tunnel. 

Yes, Sagan used tunnels in the book. But I think he included the tunnel adventure more for entertainment than scientific value. I don't know.

In the book the pod is completely encased, which conveniently doesn't allow an outside observer to see anything. But the popcorn machine works around this problem by having the walls become transparent within Ellie's line of sight? What the hell? This only adds too the notion that she's nuts. 

The 'Popcorn' Machine


I’ll give the producers credit for one thing... representing the Machine as a large open air device was a good idea. It was visually interesting, and it implies a technology that was extra-worldly. But the details are all wrong and it is too complicated.

The novel states that the Machine is not a wormhole generator, it doesn't have to be. The Aliens already have wormhole generators. They can fashion a hole through to us easier than transmitting the means for us to go to them. All they need from us is the destination, a specific time and place through which they can enter our space. All they need from us is a 'here,' and a 'now.'

The Machine is the last piece of the wormhole puzzle, the final and simplest link in the functionality of the wormhole network. Its only purpose is to make a small dent in spacetime to which an awaiting wormhole nozzle can attach. The Machine is only a spacetime marker.

It could have been anything, but for proper dramatic reasons Sagan chose a device that has 'weighty energy' for his novel. And because international cooperation was a major theme in his life he also made it hard to build, forcing humanity to work together, more or less. The movie Machine satisfies these goals in some ways, but not in others.

I like the rings. They have power through sheer size, and I like the way they resemble an electron shell. But the other more dangerous elements of the Machine are a transparent effort to manipulate the audience. For example, the fireworks display when the Machine fully activates is just a lot of noise. Maybe it's there to distract us from the complete lack of interesting dialog or a satisfying ending.

The drop/catch mechanism, the needless conflict over the inclusion of a chair, the goofy thing where Ellie's face peels itself off her head, the pod becoming transparent in her line of site and the child-Ellie face substitution have no intellectual justification. They are a discontinuous assemblage of unrelated nonsensicals. 

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Scriptology


I've discovered a version of the Contact script dated September 8, 1995, credited to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, among others. This script is essentially what appeared on film.

So… I guess I can no longer pin all my dislike on the director/producers. It pains me to say this, but my problem with this movie is Carl Sagan.

Many artists have difficulty translating their work from one medium into another. If you enjoy reading Sagan’s books you know this guy simply could not touch lightly on any subject. It just wasn’t in him. He had to explore everything inside and out and three days from backwards. Of course he had to make certain concessions for the popular media, but he always managed to do so with clarity and effectiveness. In the bookish freedom from practical constraints on length he could be concise in message. In book form Sagan was finite, yet unbounded.

Film, however, is very different. Extraordinary films require extraordinary screenplays. The screenplay format forces you to do one of two things: write a condensed book, or write a movie. A screenplay is its own species, related to a book in DNA only. Where the book is the fossil, the screenplay is its living, animated descendant.

I think the screenplay, as a process, was fundamentally at odds with Carl Sagan. The physical limitation of a hundred and twenty pages must have felt suffocating to him. He couldn’t fit that big brain of his into that small a space. So instead of translating his work into film by penetrating its internal bureaucracy, Sagan simply gutted it.

He touched on the religion v. science conflict too lightly and with no rebuttal. He removed most of the dramatic potential by simplifying Ellie’s family structure. He took out all the good stuff: the wit, the skepticism, the cosmic perspective, and worst of all, the conclusion.

The inescapable irony is that Sagan probably would have been much more comfortable writing Contact as a television mini-series as it was originally conceived by he and Francis Ford Coppola. It could have been ten hours long. It could have been another Cosmos, and me and a hundred million other people would have loved every minute of it. 

Of course Sagan was not a filmmaker. The filmmakers, however, are filmmakers, and they should have known better. They made a film based not upon Sagan’s wonderful book, but on his wholly inadequate screenplay.

I doubt Foster (didn't have to), or Zemeckis (did have to) ever read the book.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

The God of Hollywood


Contact, the movie, is a thing where the only standard of evidence worth noting is human emotion. Contact, the movie, is a courtroom drama, where ones embarrassing moments count as empirical evidence. Contact, the movie, is a place where anecdotal evidence and conjecture will get you laid... Not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it shouldn’t be the end product of this story.

Contact, the movie, is a bouquet of pretty flowers, that smell bad.

Contact, the movie, is a one-hundred and fifty-three minute long version of 'The Price Is Right.' You want an actual ending? I'm sorry, you've overbid. 


OK, that was a cheap shot. Let's class it up a little bit. Why not 'Carl Sagan's Contact ~ The Fragrance?'


Bzzz, wrong. How about something in between... 'Carl Sagan's Contact ~ The Musical?'


(October, 2009: Yeah, they really did it.)

The book is filled with intrigue, history, genuine human emotion and grand motives by inscrutable, yet entirely real higher powers. It soars. It has a social conscience and a reason for being. It releases energy and comes to more than the sum of its parts.

This movie, on the other hand, comes to nothing. 

The most glaring absence is of course the wonderful book ending where Ellie finds scientific proof of an intelligence that predates the universe. One might argue that this is too complicated for a movie. And I agree, but only insofar as it is too mathematical in nature. This concept only needed to be translated into the more visual medium. But instead it was simply dropped. And I do not think this is merely a case of expedient story telling. There is a more insidious force at work here.

The faithful hijacked this film and made it theirs. This movie celebrates the peculiar religious notion that the unknowable is a form of pure knowledge. What is wrong with this film is what is wrong with religion, where the meaningless question becomes an argument from authority. 'But who made the pretty flowers?'

So instead of discovering proof of a higher level of existence, our impotent heroine, Ellie (a.k.a., the poor little atheist girl) is left floundering in self-doubt. This is because religious people hate proof. They hate it to such a degree as to disallow evidence of their own argument.

In the end the protagonist becomes a thinly veiled TV evangelist complete with very public and tearful appeals to belief. She might as well be wearing a pink, cotton-candy wig and Spackle makeup. The producers of this film have cloaked ignorance in sentiment.

And that's not all they did. Crimes against art have here been committed. In the hands of these filmmakers the term 'science fiction' has taken on a completely unintended, and loathsome meaning. It has become an oxymoronic, grotesque parody of itself. One might as well classify this movie as 'religious fact.'

'The world is what we make of it.'

Yes, it is. When we are children. But adults are not permitted the childish luxury of making it up as they go. To paraphrase Sagan, at some point we must abandon our most cherished beliefs in favor of cold hard reality. The universe is no fairy tale. Sagan never pandered to children the way this film panders to the childish adults who still believe the universe is just a metaphor for a struggle between quarreling super beings. He gave it to us straight without appeals to mysticism.

Science and religion are not equal partners. There is no common ground between them, with the possible exception of using science to deconstruct the evolutionary imperative for religious belief. Beyond that science destroys religion. It kicks its ass. Sagan knew ancient fairy tales and modern science can never be reconciled, although he hedged his bets in public. But this rotten 'movie' gives the same weight to miracles as it does physics, perhaps more. It panders to the mob in the name of salted butter and soda pop.

I often hear people say that a movie can never be as good as the book. Boloney. Kubrick, among others, could do it because he knew the formula. Here's the formula: a movie is not a book. It doesn't have to be and it shouldn't ever be. What it does have to be is original to its own unique medium. Find an element of visual interest within the story and let that be your guide to translate the entire work.

In this regard Sagan handed the producers the key to this particular enterprise on a silver platter, and they missed it entirely. Within the last chapter of the book lay the movie. And again, the reason they left out this proof is because the truly faithful despise proof. To prove god exists negates faith.

The subtitle, instead of 'A Journey to the Heart of the Universe,' should have read, 'Don't Confuse Me with Facts.' This film is terrible. It is a complete surrender to abject unthink.

It abandons science. It embraces religion.

It's a betrayal.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

2 is yellow


The Brave One


Jodie Foster is a fine actor. She is not responsible for her performance in Contact. She was given a terrible script and worse direction. She was strapped into a useless chair, within a gilded cage, and shot into space. 

Foster was handed a character who apparently has undiagnosed multiple personality disorder, completely unfitting for the story. One minute she's a powerful, independent feminist, the next she's wallowing in self-pity and pandering to the stupidity of the mob.

And why the hell is this bitch crying?

Did you see the 'final statement' scene in the wonderful film, 'The Contender?' Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) wins because she is unyielding in her principles. Hanson's statement should have been Ellie's statement, practically verbatim, before the machine selection committee in Contact. 

Instead... whimper.

Ellie is embarrassed by her atheism. Why? Because the last thing this movie wants is a strong nonbeliever with the courage of her convictions. The point of this movie is not science, or even skepticism; it is to buttress the weird religious idea that doubt and uncertainty are where god live.

He's there. He's waiting for you. You just have to concede his unknowability. At the end of this fucking movie reason and evidence and truth are suppressed by the inquisition. The bad guys win. And we lose.

Extraordinary movies require extraordinary screenplays.

What's a fine actor to do with a screenplay that isn't worth the paper it's written on? Answer: Cash your check and move on to something better.

Who are we?


Within the story of Contact is a framework for understanding our place in the grand scheme of cosmic evolution. But in this particular work I don't think Sagan took some of his previously established ideas far enough. I'm talking specifically about our impending 'singularity.' Now before you get that look on your face, I have no idea if such a thing is even possible. But I think the concept could be very useful in this story. 

The term singularity is borrowed from astrophysics, where it defines the center of a black hole; a point between relativity and quantum mechanics where our understanding of physics breaks down. But the newer definition I refer to is in the context of the evolution of intelligence.

Singularity is a massive discontinuity in history, a point in our near future where prediction breaks down due to the acceleration of change in our world. In other words, as the rate of technical evolution accelerates to infinity our ability to predict the future drops to zero. Super intelligence is one possible result. Death is another.

It amazes me that even before there was a word for it, Dr Sagan sensed intuitively what is now termed the singularity. The word was coined (applied?) in 1981 by retired San Diego State University professor Vernor Vinge.

"Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding."
-- Vernor Vinge, True Names and Other Dangers, p. 47.

It's a great idea. One ready for exploration in science fiction. Sagan touched upon the notion of the emergence of a global consciousness in The Persistence of Memory (Cosmos, episode XI). So he was certainly aware of this idea when he wrote Contact. But he left it out. The concept of ultimate life v. death was a recurring theme in his public work, especially in the context of nuclear war. But maybe the specific idea of singularity hadn't quite congealed in his mind, and so he couldn't connect it to his story. At any rate, I think this is a loss that can be corrected postmortem. Singularity theory provides a motive for the aliens to contact us. (More later...)

For a far better explanation of the singularity I refer you to Staring Into The Singularity by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, (click on Overview). These guys are bent on making it happen as soon as possible. 

OK, back to us...

If you consider singularity theory carefully you will understand that humans are the end product of natural selection, but not of evolution as a whole. Natural selection has taken life as far as it can, to intelligence. We can probably evolve farther through natural selection, but the point is we don't have to. 

Agent Smith from The Matrix was right in comparing us to a virus. But this demeaning insult doesn't take into account our macroscopic (compared to a virus) brains. Sure we reproduce like crazy and run riot over our environment, just like a virus. But our brains, not our sex drive allowed this to happen.

Because our brains give us a huge advantage, other large organisms simply cannot compete with us. Micro-organisms are still a legitimate threat, but we're gaining on them fast. A virulent outbreak of Ebola may yet have a chance to get us, but not a pack of wolves. In fact the only large animal we still have to fear is ourselves.

So we are not in equilibrium with the rest of life on Earth. We kill other species and whole environments on a par with the greatest mass extinctions. And any means we posses of destroying ourselves will almost certainly take a big chunk of the biosphere with us. Natural selection would never, by itself, allow a species to proliferate to the point of endangering all life. So what did?

Right now on Earth 'Externally Self-Optimizing Selection' is the name of the game. With our large brains, eSOS created a global civilization. Our brain and its ability to manipulate the world outside our bodies has no equal on Earth. Wagon wheels, fishing poles, computers (especially computers), cars, airplanes, frozen foods, nukes, mousetraps; all are evolving at a previously unheard of rate. The key point being that none of them are having sex.

Of course eSOS begs the question... What happens when 'external' becomes 'internal?' When Internal Self-Optimizing Selection, iSOS, begins to recursively self-improve our genes and our very minds (or the surrogate minds we create), singularity may be knocking on our door.

In the real world, as in the fictional world of Contact, we humans occupy an extremely narrow, and highly volatile zone between the invention of radio astronomy and super-intelligence. The way I see it there are only two possible outcomes... Give me singularity or give me death.

Does anyone else see the potential for a great movie? 

Friday, September 7, 2007

The God of Contact


Let's face it, uber-atheist Carl Sagan's only novel contains a god.

There's nothing wrong with exploring the idea of god in a work of fiction; look at the Bible. And as much as the fundies want it to be, this doesn't make him a true believer in his heart of hearts. It's not an admission of anything except that he wanted to consider how such a being, if she/he/it exists, might reveal themselves to us. It's a thought experiment.

But the good scientist must also ask the obvious question... Where did god come from? In Contact, Carl Sagan, more the writer than the scientist, finds an answer. Between 'god always existed' and 'god never existed' is a vast middle ground that is ripe with story potential.

At first glance, the god of Contact seems more a god of Einstein in that he's the disinterested, non-interfering initiator of the universe. He set up the parameters and the speed limits. And then he said... so long. But Sagan added an element of true revelation to his story. Before god took off for parts unknown, he left a clear, unambiguous sign of himself; an artist's signature. He hid it in the very simplest form in nature, the circle, where it waited to be discovered. God knew that someday someone would emerge to find it. Or maybe he didn't know. Maybe he's performing an experiment of his own.

This entity, whatever he is, must reside completely outside the substrate of the universe as we know it, in a place where the most ubiquitous form in nature, the circle, is a construct. We can't imagine such a place. But to paraphrase Sagan, why should we expect our experience to have any relevance in this area. Our senses evolved in here, not out there. We just need to recognize the signature as a unique, nonrandom sign of intelligence. And to do that all we need is a moderately large brain and an imagination; the clear tools of our future upward mobility.

The god of Contact poses some interesting questions. Sagan stated in the book that the circle is not merely a signature, but the beginning of a message from the same extra-universal being. So I ask... if he can communicate with us, may we someday be able to communicate with him?

The Vegans sent a message down to us. In doing so they pointed the way up to a higher level of being. They gave us access to the larger universe, and a way out of our selfish fatalism. The entity who wrote the message in pi did something similar to the Vegans it seems to me. He sent a message down to them pointing the way up and out of the universe into an even higher level of reality. So as information flows down, scientific advancement flows up.

If humans can evolve up to the level of the Vegans, and then up again to the level of the pi-being, do we not then become that which created us? In this fictional universe, do we create ourselves every time we contemplate the circle?

When discussing religion I think the only useful way to approach god is to embrace paradox; but only as art, never as science. The truth is our existence is not owed to paradox. This god is no more real than any of the others.

Carl Sagan wrote a work of fiction. In fiction he could roam the universe and imprint whatever conjectures he wished upon it. His manuscript was submitted to a publisher for sale to the public for the purposes of entertainment. It was not submitted to a scientific journal for peer review. In Contact, Sagan could answer the question of where god came from in a very circular way. He combined both western and eastern religious motifs with a very original flare.

Contact is an origin myth. 

Thursday, August 30, 2007

The Invasion

Nicole Kidman is very pretty and certainly talented, but I think I like her mostly because she was in a Kubrick film. That always rates special appreciation for me. Then again I'd give Slim Pickens a foot massage for the same reason.

I'll give Kidman this, she's a whole person in this movie. And that makes her completely unlike the split personality, spineless panderer portrayed by Jodie Foster in Contact. 

The use of all that current news footage of Bush, Iraq and whatnot in The Invasion didn't bother me nearly as much as the use of President Clinton in Contact. There's a huge difference between a relevant real life addition and a gimmick. The moment Zemeckis saw real-life Clinton's Mars microbe news conference he just had to have it in his movie. Don't bother asking whether it actually enhances the story. Who cares? It steals importance and credibility through association with some other important event. Use it!

The Invasion added a suitable, current events background that enhanced the story. This is global invasion after all. We need a sense of the before and after. The use of current media creates a viable alternative history within the film. In Contact, Clinton is just so much Gump.

I do wish this movie had taken the time to slow down a little. They started out fast, and that's fine. But I needed more breaks, a little more emotional closeness between the principles. The dinner table conversation foreshadowing the conflict felt very fresh and smart. It definitely helped the ending and the film as a whole. But I think the period right before Dr. Bennell pulls the trigger should have been longer, more reflective. The entire movie was logistically set up for that scene, but it felt too rushed to me. More emphasis was placed on the following chase scene. A proper rest will always naturally enhance a crescendo. It just didn't have quite the emotional climax I needed.

I have an idea. In the final chase scene Bennell could have plowed through a city block long mob of changelings. It would have been a better contrast to the lone woman in the tunnel and would have emphasized her cross-over to the darker side of raw animal instinct. It could have been an admission of guilt, as it were.

And please, more Law&Order, and less CSI. If they'd left those stupidass red corpuscle close-ups out I might have been happier with the happy ending. 

The Invasion did get under my skin a little. My natural facial resting state has never been so stoic.

And regarding the dismay I hear on those horrible, vapid morning talk shows over how serious it is... it's serious... it is. It's the serious, smart side of scifi. What's your problem? You mentally retarded, fucking hairdos on 'Good Morning Ameriduh' didn't complain about the much darker 28 Weeks Later being 'too serious' for a summer flick. Did ya? Huh? No!

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Orange


I got one fairly decent, low-res photo out of last nights light show.

Eclipse


We had a great view of the lunar eclipse from Denver this morning.

It was raining
around eleven when I walked home from work, thinking I might miss it. But the night turned out cool and clear a few hours later, just in time for the show. I even woke up without an alarm. I got out my camera and snapped a few pictures.

After totality there wasn't much to do but wait for the moon to reemerge, so I opened Photoshop and started playing. Thinking
earth might look even more bazaar than the moon during a total eclipse I imagined this series of pictures.

Ambient light during such an event is the name of the game. The earth is much larger than the moon, and so will completely obscure the sun. I think the solar corona would also be blotted out if one were dead center of the shadow, but I'm not sure.

I think the most interesting feature would be a bright ring caused by the bending of sunlight through our thick, movable feast of an atmosphere, into the shadow zone. Unlike the rough, airless horizon of the moon the atmospheric ring around earth would be like a smooth reddish halo.

During such an eclipse one could observe
every sunrise and every sunset on our tiny little planet, simultaneously.

I think the stars and city lights might still be visible, depending on the relative brightness of the ring.
And the background stars might be very bright as well, or not. I've never been shot into space, so I don't know.

I modeled this fake picture, minus the rings, after this amazing photograph
taken by our collective robot, the Cassini space probe, in the shadow of Saturn.

As the sun reemerges, a 'diamond ring,' similar to that seen during a solar eclipse on Earth, would appear.

The solar corona would rise first...



...followed by the ultra-bright disk of the Sun.


Friday, August 24, 2007

Contact Movie Review: Ten Years...


It has been ten years now since Carl Sagan’s death and the release of the movie Contact, and I remain unhappy about both.

It's some kind of Greek tragedy that Sagan died right before his message was about to reach the largest possible audience. But worse is that the message itself was distorted, diluted and made minor.

I first became aware of Sagan on public television, Channel 39 in Fort Wayne, Indiana; that weird science/puppet show channel from beyond the moon. I loved the way his multi layered teaching style put physical science into historical and social context. Before Sagan, at least on television,
the stars were separate from the earth; removed from everyday life. But after Sagan everything got connected and became interrelated in the most intimate way. In the very first episode of Cosmos, in contrast to our usual earth-centric way of thinking, he starts his cosmic journey not down here, but out there, at the edge of the universe. He better showed us our place in the scheme of things by putting us between immensity and eternity, and then showed exactly what those limits ought to mean to us.

Sagan opened my eyes to a much larger world, and changed me for the better. We need people like him to appear among us poor dumb apes more often. And as an atheist I will say this much 'For Carl'… In Cosmos, Carl Sagan elevated my soul.

That said… There is something seriously wrong with this movie.

I watched a few episodes of Cosmos again the other day and was amazed how relevant it remains, nearly thirty years after it’s initial release. But I am sorry to say that Contact has not improved with age. In fact it is now painfully dated.

The most glaring absence for me is of course the wonderful book ending where Ellie finds
, hiding in the infinite permutations of pi, scientific proof that there is an intelligence which predates the universe. This proof is represented as a simple, elegant signature, a circle of ones written out on a field of zeros. It is an unambiguous sign that on some higher level our universe is somebody else's construct.

The key to this fine film that never was lay in the last chapter of the novel.

For this reason I have entitled my blog... The Artist’s Signature