Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Science fiction and the death of the sun

typebarmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 144 posts

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#101

Post by slfnflctd »

entrox wrote: post #81
throwaway17_17 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR — I agree wholeheartedly and thanks for the chance to blather about a fictional universe I really enjoy, also a huge wall of text about Event Horizon as a ‘prequel’ showing an interesting division within the 40K fandom. I agree so hard that I would upvote your comment a thousand times if I could. This fan originated ‘prequel’ to the 40k universe is absolutely perfect in both aesthetic and tone. But I think, des…

Thank you for the interesting write-up. It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.

I thought Don't Look Up was pretty solid satire. It's not quite so obvious at first, but by the time of the post-credits scenes they really hammer the point home and I found it very funny.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#102

Post by ivandenysov »

generalizations wrote: post #100
perihelions wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except, Luna 9 was soft landing attempt no. 12 - the point is the humans pulled it off on landing attempt no. 1.

Counter point: first unmanned US soft landing attempt succeeded 3 years before first manned attempt. Surveyor 1 - 1966 Apollo 11 - 1969. I bet that NASA learned a lot from 7 unmanned Surveyor missions and that contributed to the success of Apollo 11.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#103

Post by hobs »

beAbU wrote: post #84
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…

Sunshine is one of my favourite sci-fi movies for all the wrong reasons. The premise and setting is total bullshit handwavium. But I absolutely loved the story, tension and slow boil. The cast as you say was brilliant. It's a B-Grade disaster movie /really/ well executed.

Let me just say that I fully disagree, the movie was plodding and preachy and boring up until the "twist" when it got TERRIBLE.

I cannot believe the number of people who have said that its a good movie, the entire movie required a suspension of disbelief far and away of what I am willing to give.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#104

Post by strogonoff »

alistairSH wrote: post #98
strogonoff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human ingenuity aside, I wonder if sending humans on missions can offer higher success rates due to higher stakes for all involved (the cost of human life). When we send humans to the Moon, the pressure to get things right is higher and consequences of failure are very dire. Sadly, of course, not a guarantee of success.

Which then leads me to wonder... The risk vs reward calculation for human-involved missions is necessarily higher than robotic missions. Is that additional cost an order of magnitude higher? IE, we can afford one and only one human mission, but three robotic missions? Does the math work out in favor of the single high-success mission, or the three slightly lower success missions? Obviously depends on the expected suc…

I am not sure such utilitarian math is the true solution, attempts to put a number on the value of human life seem all silly. I would rather say that the failure of a robotic mission costs an amount X, while the failure of a human mission intuitively has infinite price.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#105

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

hobs wrote: post #103
beAbU wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sunshine is one of my favourite sci-fi movies for all the wrong reasons. The premise and setting is total bullshit handwavium. But I absolutely loved the story, tension and slow boil. The cast as you say was brilliant. It's a B-Grade disaster movie /really/ well executed.

Let me just say that I fully disagree, the movie was plodding and preachy and boring up until the "twist" when it got TERRIBLE. I cannot believe the number of people who have said that its a good movie, the entire movie required a suspension of disbelief far and away of what I am willing to give.

Agreed. The premise was astoundingly silly, and the plot was "both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good". I really do not know why some people rate this film so highly.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#106

Post by throwaway17_17 »

entrox wrote: post #81
throwaway17_17 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR — I agree wholeheartedly and thanks for the chance to blather about a fictional universe I really enjoy, also a huge wall of text about Event Horizon as a ‘prequel’ showing an interesting division within the 40K fandom. I agree so hard that I would upvote your comment a thousand times if I could. This fan originated ‘prequel’ to the 40k universe is absolutely perfect in both aesthetic and tone. But I think, des…

Thank you for the interesting write-up. It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.

Don’t look up is in position 3 on my ‘to-be-watched’. I’m holding out hope that it is good. I know it is supposed to be a comedy, but I haven’t seen someone fully commit to it being hard satire.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#107

Post by gwern »

Vecr wrote: post #28
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.

No, I think OP makes a good case that Lewis did not mean an expanding red giant in _Magician's Nephew_, even if he could have used the most recent science at the time to choose to do so:

"“So big, so red, and so cold.”

“It has always been so,” said Jadis. “At least, for hundreds of thousands of years. Have you a different sort of sun in your world?”"

A red giant expanding to the point of taking up much of the sky would not be 'cold', nor would it 'always been so...for hundreds of thousands of years'. (It would be hot, the world heating up at that close an approach, and the expansion quite visible on the order of millions of years rather than totally static and unchanging.) That only is consistent with the cooled-down prior version.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#108

Post by ardel95 »

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…

So that xkcd “daylight savings time” meme was an actual movie?

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#109

Post by Borrible »

throwup238 wrote: post #23
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

Just in case you don't know 'Fading Suns'.

Role-playing gothic sci-fi in a galaxy where the stars are dying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading_Suns

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#110

Post by PopAlongKid »

weinzierl wrote: post #95

Since it fits the topic and my efforts to find this story have been unsuccessful for years, I'll give it a try: I am looking for a short story about an astronaut conducting radiation measurements on the dark side of the moon (or maybe mars). The astronaut ponders the strange measurement results when it dawns at him that the sun must have gone supernova and earth probably scorched. He returns to earth as the last livi…

Plot sounds similar to Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven from the 1970s, but the protagonist is on the night side of Earth, not an astronaut on the moon.
Post reply on HN