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

Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

vimeo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 133 posts

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#21

Post by erjiang »

ogig wrote: post #7

All these visuals made by just one guy? I'm impressed. It has higher quality than many hollywood fx products.

hollywood blockbusters have many shots that are very labor intensive, and they can be pretty cavalier about throwing money at a problem. For example, films with a lot of mixed live action and CGI can take a lot of manual frame by frame work, and anything involving realistic character animation is a huge time sink. Not to mention huge server farms.

It looks like this film uses a limited number of shots (no cutting rapidly like action films), takes advantage of a lot of nasa and other imagery/data (no army of matte painters), limits characters to simple walking movements (no Pixar gesticulating), and probably keeps the particle effects and physics sims minimal (no computational fluids sims for glorious explosions).

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#22

Post by a3n »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #4

Wow; that was incredible. I wish it were three hours long. That dude floating in that debris belt (ring of Saturn?) -- that looked a bit dangerous. Hopefully he had a force field around him. There's so much out there, just waiting for us to get off our duffs and explore. We have much of the technology; if we could just stop spending trillions on machines of war and instead spend it on machines of exploration....

> There's so much out there, just waiting for us to get off our duffs and explore. We have much of the technology; if we could just stop spending trillions on machines of war and instead spend it on machines of exploration....

I agree with this 100%. But while we're moving outward, however slowly, don't forget Sagan's Caveat:

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand."

Absolutely, go see what's across the street. But make sure your house is clean and safe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot#Reflections_by_S...

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#23

Post by a3n »

[deleted] wrote: post #6

[deleted]

We went to the Moon, and yet we're still killing each other, or getting rich off of other people's poverty.

Peace on Earth is not going to come from going somewhere else and proclaiming "Look at us!" It's not a side effect.

Or, as the Quakers say, "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#24

Post by agrona »

yogrish wrote: post #14

Awesome creation. Image Gallery and Explanation: http://imgur.com/a/Ur5dP

Art and source photos aside, this link is sort of disappointing. For example,

>As Mars' diameter is about half of the Earths, the elevator cable wouldn't have to be as long to reach geostationary orbit and due to the lighter gravitational pull it wouldn't suffer as much stress from its weight.

Mars' diameter has nothing to do with the distance to stationary orbit, which is a result of gravity (and thus its mass).

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#25

Post by pjungwir »

agrona wrote: post #24
yogrish wrote: post #14

Awesome creation. Image Gallery and Explanation: http://imgur.com/a/Ur5dP

Art and source photos aside, this link is sort of disappointing. For example, >As Mars' diameter is about half of the Earths, the elevator cable wouldn't have to be as long to reach geostationary orbit and due to the lighter gravitational pull it wouldn't suffer as much stress from its weight. Mars' diameter has nothing to do with the distance to stationary orbit, which is a result of gravity (and thus its mass).

I assumed he was thinking of mass as a function of diameter, which for a rocky planet makes sense to me. I thought his comments were pretty amazing myself!

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#26

Post by frinxor »

Check out Reid Gower's videos as well, the Sagan Series, a collection of videos he did that also used Carl Sagan's voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY59wZdCDo0&index=1&list=PLF...

And of course, Cosmos, which is where all the audio is from in all these videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dADUBcoEEHw&index=1&list=PLB...

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#28

Post by airlocksoftware »

In the same genre, I watch this when I need a touch of inspiration. They're quotations from The Pale Blue Dot, again with the Sagan voiceover.

http://vimeo.com/2822787

Often we forget how far we've come, and how far we have to go. It's easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of regular life. When I listen to Carl Sagan sometimes I feel like I've glimpsed a bigger perspective.

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#29

Post by alexbecker »

dmix wrote: post #11

"As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." - Herman Melville Wonderful quote by Sagan.

Well, it's not quite fair to call it a "quote by Sagan".

Re: Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]

#30

Post by mturmon »

Ygg2 wrote: post #19

Amazing video. I especially like the world play here. Latin Planetes (as in planets) means wanderer. The name of this film can be understood as Planets.

Nice observation. They got that name, of course, because the stars are fixed but the planets "wander" among them.
Post reply on HN