by Paul Gilster | May 15, 2009 | Culture and Society |
by Jon Lomberg
I had no idea when the week started that I would be publishing not one but two essays on Star Trek. But Jon Lomberg was inspired by Athena Andreadis’ take on the new movie to write down his own reflections on the series in its many forms. Lomberg’s name should be instantly recognizable to this readership. Jon was Carl Sagan’s principal artistic collaborator for many years, illustrating Sagan’s books and serving as chief artist for COSMOS. He storyboarded many of CONTACT’s astronomical animations and designed the cover for the Voyager Interstellar Record, which is now pushing into the heliosheath and bound for true interstellar space. In addition to regular lecturing, Jon is the creator of the remarkable Galaxy Garden in Kona, Hawaii and remains an active astronomical artist in many media. Herewith his thoughts and recollections of Star Trek, Sagan, Roddenberry and more.
I wasn’t a fan of the series when it first came out. The first episode I recall seeing was in the summer of 1967. It was the episode was about a Shakespearean actor in some murder mystery. I was staying with some hippie friends at a beach house on Long Island. I got bored after 10 minutes and returned to the beach to smoke a joint and admire the real stars.
2001: A Space Odyssey—now THAT was science fiction. Clarke’s cosmic view of human destiny captured what had always obsessed me about space exploration. The cheesy effects and cheesier writing of that episode of Star Trek did not whet my appetite for more.
Image: Artist Jon Lomberg with the black hole fountain he designed for the center of the Galaxy Garden.
A few years later, when I was beginning to show my art at SF conventions, I couldn’t help but absorb some of the excitement of fans, and eventually started watching the show in reruns. But it was a guilty pleasure. Reading the Shklovskii/Sagan’s book “Intelligent Life in the Universe” was much more congenial to my own developing visions of space. Carl himself was contemptuous of Star Trek. Bad stories and bad science did not represent the space program in the most positive light, nor did a galaxy filled with humanoids of roughly similar technological development follow his own sense of what Galactic Civilization might be like. He did like the diversity of the crew, which itself was a cultural breakthrough, even if the sexism had the women as little more than nurses, phone secretaries and coffee deliverers.
I met Gene Roddenberry in 1976, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on the night Viking 1 landed on the surface of Mars, about which I was making a documentary for CBC radio. Roddenberry and Nichelle Nichols were in attendance, along with Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and other luminaries.
Not yet 30, I was brash enough to alienate Roddenberry with the following question/observation: most Star Trek fans of my acquaintance were less interested in missions to Mars than in trivia like the name of Kirk’s brother. Gene bristled and defended his fans as believers in the space program, and he and Nichelle did end up giving me some usable quotes.
(I do stand by my assertion 30+ years later, and it is born out by the recent movie, which is completely character driven and self-referential. The excellent casting found actors who plausibly play the crew in the film version of an Origin Issue in superhero comics. The film is really not about space at all —there’s no exploration, no interesting aliens, no sense of wonder. Fans who loved the characters will love seeing how everybody met. Fans of the slash fanzines [amateur stories of a sexual nature with all possible couplings, including gay Kirk/Spock storylines] will love seeing the heat between Uhura and Spock. But it’s really just soap opera with better effects).
Image: Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Credit: Paramount Studios.
I was working on COSMOS at KCET in Hollywood when Star Trek:The Movie was in production. Those of us making the animations for COSMOS were worried that a big budget movie would make our sequences look awful by comparison. Then we started hearing horror stories about the sad fate of SFX creator Robert Abel, who lost his shirt and his company when the effects for ST:TM ran into trouble. There were lots of problems with that movie, including weak depictions of space itself, but the film’s most redeeming quality was its incorporation of the Voyager Record into the plot. It closed the circle of real and imagined space exploration in a way that I found very satisfying, having worked on the real Record myself.
When Star Trek:The Next Generation came out, it won my heart. Everything was better — the stories, the acting, the imaginary technology, even the uniforms. And space itself looked good — finally. A lot of the credit for that went to my COSMOS colleague Rick Sternbach, who along with Michael Okuda acted as art and technical advisors. Besides designing the look of all the technology, their role went something like this: a writer would call and say “We need something to go wrong with the engine.” Rick and Mike would come up with something like “tachyon pollution of the dilithium crystals.” The writer would respond “Great, now how do they fix it?” and Rick and Mike would describe how reversing the polarity of the anti-matter flow would solve the problem (reversing the polarity being the all-purpose sf equivalent of smacking the TV set on the side to eliminate the static).
In 1989, my wife and I were at JPL for the Voyager spacecraft’s encounter with Neptune. Rick invited us to visit the ST:TNG set, which was wonderfully memorable. We toured the bridge, sat in 10 Forward, and learned some backstage truths about, for example, how budget determined whether the Enterprise used warp drive or stayed at impulse power: impulse drive only required stagehands to slowly roll a painted starfield past the viewports; warp effects out the window required more expensive blue-screen compositing. If an episode was going over budget, they had to drop out of warp and make do with impulse.
Best of all, ST:TNG presented a positive view of the future. We have always been much better imagining hell than heaven — and readers of Dante’s Inferno must outnumber readers of his Paradiso by orders of magnitude. For the most part sf films deal with horrors of the future of the killer computer, homicidal robot, devilish alien, post-nuclear apocalypse variety. Exciting movies, but who would want to live in any of those futures?
But ST:TNG presented a future that was positive in every respect, with humans who had somehow surmounted all the problems that currently beset our world. Sagan finally came around to seeing the series as a positive contribution to public attitudes about space exploration, and Gene Roddenberry was an active supporter of the Planetary Society, the organization Carl founded to demonstrate public support for NASA science programs. (Majel Barrett Roddenberry later narrated a Planetary Society video in which these contrasting sf futures were compared).
The Star Trek franchise developed more TV and film projects and retained a strong bond with NASA, to the point where the prototype Space Shuttle was named Enterprise. The Star Trek universe became a common reference point for science fiction fans and space science buffs. Even the “science” of Star Trek could be used to sweeten the teaching of real physics.
In this sense, the new movie, enjoyable and nostalgic to old fans (but perhaps incomprehensible to newer ones) represents a backward step. I couldn’t recognize in the credits any names from the Paramount crew that had guided the development of all new additions to the Roddenberry canonic universe. Even the technology seemed all wrong. ST:TNG‘s solid-state, no moving parts engine room, where never a grease spot appeared, was replaced with what seemed like a petrochemical facility, with miles of piping, valves, and lots of sloshing liquids labeled “reactant” (and shouldn’t that be “reagent”?) It just did not feel right, even allowing for the fact that it was a century earlier than Geordie LaForge’s spotless engine room.
Since this movie seems to have opened the possibility of subsequent adventures of Kirk’s crew, we can only hope that the films-to-come will return to the trajectory of boldly going someplace other than to a battle.
My own connection with the Star Trek universe is now on Mars, part of the Planetary Society’s Visions of Mars DVD carried aboard NASA’s Phoenix lander, presently somewhere in that cold desolation of sand, rock, and (yay!) ice. This disk is a gift to the future human inhabitants of Mars. It represents the important symbiosis between sf and real space science. It reminds those who live on Mars that it took the dreams of visionaries to have gotten there.
Image: The Mars DVD aboard Phoenix. The DVD is mounted on the deck of the lander, which sits about one meter above the Martian surface, visible in the background. Credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona.
As Director of this project, it seemed important to me that Star Trek be part of the package — and it is. There is an image of the (never seen in close-up) plaque on the bridge of ST:TNG‘s Enterprise, giving the ship’s commissioning date and the fact that it was built in the Utopia Planitia shipyards on Mars (bet you didn’t know that). A section of the disk containing Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast is introduced by the voice of Patrick Stewart, the actor who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Also in that section is part of that radio documentary I did in 1976, including the voices of Gene and Nichelle. Gene said, “The real space program provides the science, we supply the dreams that keep people interested.”
Amen to that. Let’s hope future Star Trek vehicles return to that mission.
by Paul Gilster | May 14, 2009 | Exoplanetary Science |
With the Herschel/Planck telescopes now on their way — the successful launch took place at 1312 UTC from the European Space Agency’s launch pad at Kourou, and the two spacecraft are now on separate trajectories — we can take a breather to reflect on what a busy time it’s been of late for space telescopes. The ongoing Hubble repairs are a fascinating story in and of themselves, but we’ve also got Kepler to think about as its hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars now gets underway.
Shaking out the instrumentation has taken some time, but the Kepler operations team slowed the pace of communications about a week ago to eighteen hours per day, a number that will drop to six as science observations now proceed. For the balance of the mission, according to JPL project manager Jim Fanson, communications will occur only twice per week as Kepler sends home precious data.
“Now the fun begins,” said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “We are all really excited to start sorting through the data and discovering the planets.”
Expect the first discoveries to be gas giants close to their stars, easiest to spot and confirm using Kepler’s transit methods. Then things get even more interesting. This is a mission that should be able to find terrestrial worlds in the ultimate sense; i.e., planets that not only approximate ours in size but are also roughly at the distance required for liquid water to exist at the surface. We still call that distance the ‘habitable zone’ even though it’s becoming clear, as witness the case around Jupiter, that tidal forces can provide immense energies that could extend a different kind of habitable zone much farther from its star. And then there’s Enceladus…
Given my own predilection for small, red stars and the chances for life around them, I’ll be fascinated to see what we learn about the number of potentially life-bearing planets around M-dwarfs. Remember that these account for something like 70 percent of the stars in our galaxy. Kepler’s take on this after completion of its three and a half-year mission should give us some sense whether such planets are commonplace, or whether we’re more likely to find life around G- and K-class stars more similar to our own Sun.
As to Kepler itself, having read Alan Boss’ book The Crowded Universe (Basic Books, 2009) recently, I’m still amazed that the mission ever got into space. The agonizing politics of funding top-end science have put the brakes on such powerful options as the Space Interferometry Mission (now shrunken to SIM Lite) and the Terrestrial Planet Finder. How Kepler made its way through the maze of review panels and budget cuts to get on the launch pad makes for absorbing reading, but not nearly as absorbing as what we may find in its final report.
by Paul Gilster | May 13, 2009 | Culture and Society |
by Athena Andreadis
This morning I have the pleasure of introducing my friend Athena Andreadis, who will give us her thoughts on the recent Star Trek film. Dr. Andreadis is Associate Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek. In her basic molecular neurobiology research, she studies the fundamental gene regulatory mechanism known as alternative splicing. The long-term goal of her research is to understand how the brain works, and contribute to the struggle against mental retardation and dementia. When not conjuring in the lab, Athena writes essays on science and science fiction, while writing her own SF/F fiction, some of which appears at the site Starship Reckless, which she founded.
We Now Interrupt Our Regular Programming…
… so that, stepping into Paul’s hospitable parlor, I can hold forth on the Star Trek reboot (henceforth ST||, for parallel timeline). I assume that anyone not in a silently running nuclear submarine has seen it by now, so I won’t be coy about spoilers. My first impression was positive: I felt that it captures and renews the essence of its source without servility or campiness. It’s playful, energetic and based on a reasonably clever conceit. It eschews the tiresome snarkiness and angst of contemporary SF, retaining instead the original ST’s brightness and optimism. It’s an alternative universe fanfiction, in the best sense. Last but not least, Uhura is a bit less of a prop and Spock a bit less of a prig, of which more anon.
Alas, after the euphoria subsided, several problems became obvious besides the standard-issue bogus science – which includes the dreaded, dreadful red matter and (yet again!) a leaky black hole horizon. I think that I, like many of the old(er) cognoscenti, was so relieved that ST|| is not the disaster it might have been that I was willing to overlook a lot of asteroid debris.
The original Star Trek generally opted for civility and diplomacy, employing violence only as a last resort. However, today’s Hollywood, along with several other segments of US society, seems to have firmly convinced itself that negotiation is not for real men. As people increasingly become beleaguered cubicle drones and deracinated couch potatoes, their tastes have reverted to the primitive: men and women are reduced to no more than the presumed primary attributes of their genitals. Besides, ST||’s almost exclusively male cast is in the high-testosterone age bracket. As a result, ST|| adopts the standard stance: maximum force as the first and only response to conflict. Even the nominally restrained Vulcans are bullies in this re-imagining.
My other quibbles were that the villain is a stale, boring cross between an orc and a Matrix goth and his evil drill might as well be called the Death Star; the new Kirk is even more annoying than the old one and the director must be aware of this, since he denies him the lone eligible woman’s favors; Spock Prime’s expositions and exhortations flagrantly violate the prime directive of Show, Don’t Tell, diminishing the Kirk-Spock friendship in the process; and the fist- and sword-fights look silly when the characters have phaser guns.
For me, the greatest loss was that of Vulcan, because this turn of events precludes the opportunity to explore that culture in depth. The last ST series, Enterprise, became truly fascinating when it started delving into that aspect. The decisions to destroy Vulcan and to make the Federation more prone to shoot from the hip make ST|| less unique, less nuanced, less adult, closer to the usual action flick geared to pre-adolescent boys of all ages. Destroying Vulcan was also probably a way to make this Spock’s feelings be permanently closer to the surface — but I hope that they will at least allow him a wider emotional palette than just anger. Certainly the embrace on the transporter pad gives him borderline snacho status.
Which brings me to ST||’s women, all two of them. Amanda meets the classic fate of every good mother in Hollywood: a death that gives her son an excuse to go on convenient rampages. Uhura fares marginally better, at least on paper. She’s a gifted linguist and assertive despite her tutu – er, uniform. Even so, she is still carefully excluded from all the action, whereas each of her male peers is given at least one major scene of derring-do.
ST|| is an odd-numbered film in the series, so I’ll give it a long space tether. However, if Uhura degenerates into the Angel in the House or if the certain-to-come sequels become more generic, I will put ST|| permanently in the same category as Star Wars. Those who have read my essay on Star Wars know how dire a fate this is. And though my wrath may not equal that of Khan, if enough of my ilk get disaffected we may abandon all the old lumbering dinosaurs and manage to relaunch the real McCoy — the Firefly-class starship Serenity, with its true love of endless skies and its persistent aim to misbehave.
by Paul Gilster | May 12, 2009 | Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes |
While we’re thinking about space telescopes like the aging but potentially repairable Hubble, let’s not forget the launch now scheduled for Thursday from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou. The European Space Agency’s Herschel instrument will be lifted into an orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, stationed at the second Lagrange point (L2) so that Sun, Moon and Earth can all be hidden behind a sunshade to afford the instrument a clear view without disturbance from its celestial neighbors.
Image: About 0.5 hours after launch, Herschel separates from the launcher upper stage and starts its cruise to L2 (the second Lagrangian point), situated at about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Credit: ESA/D. Ducros, 2009.
Along with Herschel goes Planck, also scheduled for the L2 point (the two satellites will separate shortly after launch and reach L2 independently). Herschel is the largest infrared telescope ever launched, with a 3.5-meter primary mirror made of silicon carbide that is almost one and a half times bigger than Hubble’s. Herschel’s ability to see into the early universe should be unparalleled, but for those of us thinking about future missions to the outer system, the telescope has uses much closer to home.
As close as 30 AU and beyond, in fact. The space beyond Neptune is offering us new chances to fill up our catalogs of astronomical curiosities, with some 1300 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) now known. These are cold objects that have changed little since the beginning of the Solar System, and are of considerable interest as we interpret what they mean about our own origins and what happens around other stars. Thus Thomas Muller (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics):
“The Herschel sample comes up to about ten percent of the currently known objects on the far side of Neptune. For the first time we can gain statistical information on the whole population, which then can serve as a reference for the interpretation of discs and remains of discs in other star planet systems.”
As to Planck, its 1.5-meter instrument will measure temperature variations in the early universe, monitoring the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang. This gets into all kinds of fascinating questions, such as the expansion of the universe and the nature of its acceleration. Computer simulations at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have been able to show how the CMB is influenced by the gravitational field of dark matter, which means that analyzing Planck data with statistical methods can help us learn more about the structure of the cosmos.
Image: This simulation was created with software developed at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. It shows the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) sky as Planck will see it at a wavelength of 3 mm. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.
How galaxies form also comes into play through study of the Sunyaev Zel’dovich effect, the heating of CMB photons caused by their encounter with galaxy clusters. Both Herschel and Planck are powerful enough to guarantee deeper insights into such issues. Simon White, a colleague of Sunyaev’s at the MPA, calls the satellite “…the most powerful tool ever developed for studying the Cosmic Microwave Background.” Good fortune to both instruments on Thursday as they head into the black.
by Paul Gilster | May 11, 2009 | Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes
With all eyes on the mission to service the Hubble telescope, it’s fascinating to see that technology created for the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be used to enhanced Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The particular Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, or ASIC, design in question mirrors that of the Webb instrument and also equipment recently installed at the 2.2-meter University of Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea, where it is part of the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) detection system.
An ASIC is a small, specialized integrated circuit, and the one about to go into Hubble could be transformative. That’s because new spectrographic instruments going into Hubble will work with the repaired and upgraded ACS instrument in the study of dark energy and distant galaxies, a truly enhanced imaging capability for the aging workhorse. The ASIC next goes into space on the Webb telescope, leading one to ponder what a repair mission to that instrument would look like. After all, Hubble orbits 350 miles up, while the Webb instrument will work a million miles out.
Image: The planetary nebula K 4-55, a last image from the soon to be decommissioned Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. A planetary nebula contains the outer layers of a red giant star that were expelled into interstellar space when the star was in the late stages of its life. Ultraviolet radiation emitted from the remaining hot core of the star ionizes the ejected gas shells, causing them to glow. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
With the flurry of Hubble news, though, we shouldn’t forget that the remarkable Spitzer Space Telescope is also marking the end of an era as its liquid helium stores become exhausted. The so-called ‘warm’ mission that follows offers a new lease on life, says Spitzer project manager Robert Wilson (JPL):
“We like to think of Spitzer as being reborn. Spitzer led an amazing life, performing above and beyond its call of duty. Its primary mission might be over, but it will tackle new scientific pursuits, and more breakthroughs are sure to come.”
Spitzer’s liquid helium has kept its three instruments chilled to -271 Celsius, which is less than three degrees above absolute zero. The new, ‘warm’ Spitzer operates at -242 Celsius, frigid by any standards, but a large enough temperature rise to render two of its instruments incapable of detecting cool objects. But Spitzer’s two shortest wavelength detectors, mounted in its infrared array camera, should continue to function, and that means further looks at, among other things, planet-forming disks and gas giant planets around distant stars.
Image: The primary mission of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope is about to end after more than five and a half years of probing the cosmos with its keen infrared eye. Credit: JPL/Spitzer Science Center.
In other words, while we lose the multiband imaging photometer and infrared spectrograph, we still have the infrared array camera working with two infrared channels capable of doing good science. And doubtless we’ll be seeing more examples of the secondary-eclipse method that has allowed researchers to study temperatures and atmospheres on gas giant exoplanets. Spitzer will team up nicely with Kepler as new data come in. Another major task: The hunt for potentially hazardous asteroids. More on the new Spitzer mission in this Spitzer Science Center news release.
Addendum: Thanks to Jeremy Whatley for a clarification on the ASIC discussed above.
