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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

#71

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jawngee wrote: post #69
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…

> a young Michelle Yeoh She was 45 or 46 when she made Sunshine.

Cillian Murphy was also 31 by then, still relatively young I suppose but not young like the poster seems to imply.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#72

Post by Cthulhu_ »

entrox wrote: post #58
0x38B wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These two articles in American Cinematographer (1 and 2) give some interesting background on the movie; concerning the ship they write: > When it first appears onscreen, the Event Horizon craft itself resembles a giant crucifix hovering over the surface of Neptune. "The spaceship was built on a cruciform, like all cathedrals are," Anderson explains. "We began the design process by literally scanning [photos of] the N…

It‘s fun to imagine that Event Horizon is actually in the same universe as Warhammer 40k. Not only does the plot fit perfectly with the ship going through the warp, the Gothic design matches the aesthetic as well. Even if not intended, it just works so well.

I'm not into 40K as much, but did play a space combat game in the 40K universe and ships looking like cathedrals was definitely a thing.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#73

Post by PoignardAzur »

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…

... Man, I didn't remember this at all. The Magician's Nephew had a red sun in Jadis' world? It went completely over my head.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#74

Post by PoignardAzur »

nunodonato wrote: post #64

Science compels us to explode the sun

Or wait for a few billion years.

As an aside, I took a while to roll with the narrative about the heat death of the universe in Outer Wilds. It's too sudden: you go from a healthy yellow sun to a red star in the blink of an eye. Even if you accept that timeframes are accelerated in this game, same reason the planets are smaller, it should still happen in a timespan comparable to the sun's entire lifespan, not a single event.

Still, best game, would erase my memory to play again.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#75

Post by megablast »

whoisstan wrote: post #68

The Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is magnificent. Set in a contemporary setting, the sun and stars are replaced by projection shield that simulates them, and as the topic suggests it’s because the sun has died, but who did it??? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863

Magnificent?? Uh, no.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#76

Post by rasz »

Reason077 wrote: post #37
throwup238 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Event Horizon is a great movie to watch after Sunshine

Yes! And then I'd follow up Event Horizon with Pandorum . Perhaps not quite as good or as well-known as the other two, but still clever and worth watching.

If we are at waking up with no memory I highly recommend Eden Log (2007).

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#77

Post by perihelions »

oceanplexian wrote: post #43
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…

> Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission. We spent the last few years watching robots with state of the art 21st century technology and software crash on the moon repeatedly, and yet, in the 1960s a few hot shot test pilots could stick a landing on their first try. Given the choice between robots and humans, I’ll take the humans.

You're reading history in reverse. The Soviets landed a robotic probe on the moon years before the USA succeeded with human pilots,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9 ("Luna 9")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#M... ("List of missions to the Moon—Mission milestone by country")

You absolutely don't need sophisticated technology or giant budgets to accomplish this.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#78

Post by Archelaos »

bandrami wrote: post #41
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific method didn’t exist before the Enlightenment. We had tolerant societies before the present. But the notion that science should trump religion is modern. That doesn’t imply a glorious present. Just a qualitatively different one from any period before the modern era.

I'd rather say that the distinction between disciplines of learning is an anachronism before the early modern era (and even through much of it). "Philosophy" included what we now call medicine, natural science, theology, astronomy, astrology, and even music theory. There wasn't a question of "trumping" in the sense that they weren't thought of as different things.

This is primarily a terminological issue, what is used as a general term: "Philosophy", "natural philosophy", "Science and scholarship" (the German "Wissenschaft" always means both together -- "science" in particular is "Naturwissenschaft").

A discipline emerges, when a specific body of systematic knowledge becomes so specific that it typically requires specific expert knowledge and training (polymaths aside). In the European history of ideas, the first such body of knowledge was mathematics, but many others evolved already in Antiquity and were refined during the Middle Ages, such as astronomy, medicine, botanics, ... By the way: music theory in this times was the study of harmonic intervals and predominantly mathematics.

And the conflict between religion and science avant la lettre was as old as all of this (see Sokrates or Abelard to mention just the two most famous from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, respectively).

What changed gradually in the 17th and then had a break through in the 18th century was the adoption of the experimental method. This was not completely new, but from then on become the standard that makrs modern science.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#79

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

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…

"adding humans to the mix" is not the most unrealistic thing by far, in that uneven film. The basic premise (suns do not forget to shine one day) and proposed fix (any human efforts would be of insignificant scale compared to a sun) take that honour. The third act of the film is a runner-up.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#80

Post by ignoreusernames »

clarionbell wrote: post #60

New Sun by Gene Wolfe is a great example of that genre. Also of the unreliable narrator, as the protagonist is writing his autobiography, is not well educated and suffers from rather interesting neurological divergence (he forgets nothing). All in all, it makes for a very good series. Especially once you realize that you are reading about sci-fi world, as written about by a person living in essentially ancient societ…

Great series. If I'm not mistaken, there's an additional layer to the unreliable narrator part because the book is supposed to be a translation of that biography. So, when certain words are used, the reader knows that they don't necessarily represent the literal meaning and it's only an approximation for the actual thing in the book universe (for example, a "horse" is not actually a "horse" as we know it). It certainly helped me digest the more outlandish ideas.
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