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Science fiction and the death of the sun

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Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#21

Post by hackable_sand »

Reason077 wrote: post #18

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film Sunshine is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it. A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne! Highly recommended, despite never satisfa…

I thought they did explain why they needed humans, but I bet we can hand-wave that away with some radiation technobabble.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#22

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Supermancho wrote: post #12
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll bite. What are you referring to?

> the predominant scientific belief was that the universe and the bodies within it were endless From the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space Zeng Heng, who codified a long held belief that most certainly predated 0 AD

Nobody claimed there was no science. Just that there was no scientific method, nor the supremacy of scientific over religious explanations for the natural world.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#23

Post by throwup238 »

Reason077 wrote: post #18

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film Sunshine is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it. A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne! Highly recommended, despite never satisfa…

Event Horizon is a great movie to watch after Sunshine

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#24

Post by amenhotep »

Reason077 wrote: post #18

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film Sunshine is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it. A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne! Highly recommended, despite never satisfa…

Every now and then I listen to the music for Capa's jump, then I have to watch the video, then I get all emotional. And the ending never fails to bring a tear to my eye. Amazing film.

Somehow knowing the secret to Murphy's acting in that scene (Boyle secretly got a crew member to sit on his back) and having that objectively hilarious image in mind while watching it doesn't diminish the effect appreciably, which is remarkable!

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#25

Post by Mtinie »

xjay wrote: post #19
sircastor wrote: post #16

I recall back in 7th grade I mapped out a sci-fi story about people having to abandon the Earth after it suddenly transitioned into its red giant phase. I didn’t ever get to writing the story, but I was captivated by the concept of the need for sudden evacuation.

In some 1990s sci-fi series, an alien race played the long game by directing some (invisible) energy beam at the sun, accelerating its transition into becoming a red giant, a process which would have otherwise taken billions of years.

Which only made sense if you wanted to conquer a frozen, iron/oxygem-heavy planet[0]. Or, I guess, if you are a Krytonian.

——-

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_el...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonian

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#26

Post by cratermoon »

Animats wrote: post #3

> "Now-disgraced sci-fi patriarch John W. Campbell..." What did he do?

"In 1949, Campbell worked closely with L. Ron Hubbard on the techniques that Hubbard later turned into Dianetics. When Hubbard's therapy failed to find support from the medical community, Campbell published the earliest forms of Dianetics in Astounding."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell#Views

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#27

Post by gwern »

I never realized I had misread _The Time Machine_ or _The Magician's Nephew_ as being about red giants, rather than heat-death! Goes to show how easy it is to seriously misunderstand aspects of 'science fiction' when the science changes...

OP missed a good historical example before Thompson, however: Isaac Newton himself had a cosmology with the Sun being renewed by periodic comet impacts. Unfortunately, we would all die when the Sun flared up after impact, but at least aliens on other planets would get a renewed Sun: https://gwern.net/newton

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#28

Post by Vecr »

gwern wrote: post #27

I never realized I had misread _The Time Machine_ or _The Magician's Nephew_ as being about red giants, rather than heat-death! Goes to show how easy it is to seriously misunderstand aspects of ' science fiction' when the science changes... OP missed a good historical example before Thompson, however: Isaac Newton himself had a cosmology with the Sun being renewed by periodic comet impacts. Unfortunately, we would al…

The The Magician's Nephew is about red giants, or at least the expanding phase of a star like the sun. It's from the 1950s, and C. S. Lewis wrote science fiction earlier.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#29

Post by megiddo »

Apocryphon wrote: post #5

> For while the dying-earth genre came to an end in the 1940s uhh... Dying Earth is a fantasy series by the American author Jack Vance, comprising four books originally published from 1950 to 1984. The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983, 1987) is a four-volume science fantasy novel[2] written by the American author Gene Wolfe.

Stunning that Vance isn't mentioned.

I can't imagine how he's overlooked in this article.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#30

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #22
Supermancho wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the predominant scientific belief was that the universe and the bodies within it were endless From the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space Zeng Heng, who codified a long held belief that most certainly predated 0 AD

Nobody claimed there was no science. Just that there was no scientific method, nor the supremacy of scientific over religious explanations for the natural world.

This is a case of “Whig History” that refuses to die
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