Newton Place Knicknacks

I didn't live in Newton Place for long, but it's where I watched the last season or so of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I remember hardly anything about the layout of the apartment, and I have very few photos of my time there. This is one of them. 
 

Blue Moon

Damien Chazelle's First Man (2018) can be summed up in just a few words:

Sad astronaut goes to the Moon and sighs.

What a disappointment. 

Superman vs. Apollo

Many years ago, Jeff and Susan and Ron and Tony came over to make some silly stop-action movies with me. Here's a screenshot from one of them, "Superman Gets Drunk:" Superman assaults an innocent Command/Service Module (CSM) from the Apollo program. I really need to digitize the video and post it on YouTube. 

Apollo 11 Soars

That men in fragile ships crossed the gulf from the Earth to the Moon in an era when computers the size of bedroom closets could do little more than basic math seems astounding today. Apollo 11, the new documentary by Todd Douglas Miller, captures the awe and wonder of that incredible journey, 50 years in the past this summer and still, to my mind, the single greatest human achievement.

Using glorious high definition footage left neglected for years in storage, Miller covers the mission from launch to recovery--not only the ships and the astronauts, but the ground crew, and in some ways most compellingly, the vast audience of ordinary people who came in their multitudes to line the beaches of Florida for launch day. The excitement on these faces is palpable; they know they are witnesses to history, that they are watching a moment that will, if we are fortunate, live on in our collective memory for as long as our species lasts.

Miller thankfully eschews voiceover narration; he lets the images, the astronauts, the ground crew and the rumble of rockets speak for themselves. Music is used sparingly at key moments--the launch, the landing, the return to Earth--with superb effect.

Even though the mission went without a hitch, there are still many moments of high drama, particularly during the landing on the moon, when a countdown clock shows the lunar lander is rapidly running out of fuel and a computer program alarm goes off multiple times in the last seconds before landing. There are a few moments of self-effacing or near-gallows humour here and there--my favourite is probably when Buzz Aldrin reminds himself not to lock the lunar lander door on his way out to the Moon's surface.

Watching Apollo 11 now, especially on a giant IMAX screen that provides some of the scope and scale necessary to give audiences a sense of the magnitude of the story, is necessarily bittersweet. As a human being, I'm proud that hundreds of thousands of people worked together to make possible the exploration of a strange new world, an astonishing feat that proved what human beings are truly capable of. And yet, I struggle to name an accomplishment of the same spirit-lifting grandeur. Perhaps we'll find it if we manage to save our civilization from our own folly in the fight against climate change.

On the other hand, even if our species destroys itself before its time, we can remain proud of those shining days in 1969 when we took our first steps beyond the cradle of Earth and, ever so briefly, explored the universe beyond.

Apollo 11 Trailer

I just heard about this: a new documentary about Apollo 11, created from 70mm footage of the original event. The few shots in the trailer look absolutely spectacular, and I cannot wait to see the entire spectacle. 

Always and Never Coming Home

Jack McDevitt's two future histories portray stable interstellar societies that envision humanity at peace with itself and the universe around it. The Alex Benedict stories take place over 9,000 years from now, and people are comfortable, either living lives of leisure of pursuing employment if they feel like it. FTL travel is routine, and AIs are both helpful and personable. Some people create holographic avatars of themselves just in case relatives want to check in on them after death, though everyone involved knows these avatars are nothing more than sophisticated simulations.

Against this backdrop, Alex Benedict and his pilot Chase Kolpath search for artifacts of humanity's past, which they sell to private collectors. Their adventures typically involve chasing down particularly juicy pieces of history.

In Coming Home, the latest Benedict novel, there's an artifact and a cruise liner trapped in warp space, awaiting rescue. But what's most interesting about this book is McDevitt's world-building. In greater detail than ever before, the author fills in the blanks of his future history, and in doing so reveals that his characters are woefully ignorant of most of it, for the sheer weight of years has erased much of our legacy.

The people of the future know of Armstrong and Aldrin and the first moon landing. But the site itself lasted only a thousand years before a Dark Age lasting centuries resulted in panicked historians bringing what they could back to Earth for safekeeping, only to have it lost in society's centuries-long collapse.

Here's one passage that hints at what's been lost:

Alex thinks the worst disaster in the history of the human race occurred when the internet shut down, apparently without warning, early in the Fourth Millennium. "The breadth of the loss," he said, as we went in through the museum's front doors, "is best illustrated by the fact that we don't even know what disappeared."

The vast majority of books, histories, classic novels, philosophical texts, were simply gone. Most of the world's poetry vanished. Glimpses of Shelley and Housman and Schneider survived only in ancient love letters or diaries. Their work doesn't exist anymore. Just like almost every novel written before the thirty-eighth century. We hear references to the humor of James Thurber, but we have nothing to demonstrate it. Unfortunately, there was no equivalent this time to the monasteries that salvaged so much during the first dark age. Within a few generations of the electronic collapse, a few people knew Pericles was important, but hardly anyone knew why. And Mark Twain was only a name. 

...

The Albertson Museum, apparently, had locked down its reputation when it recovered a copy of The Merry Wives of Windsor. That had given us a total of six Shakespearean plays.

...

They had a theater where you could watch one of the movies from Hollywood's early years. Hollywood was where they manufactured most of the films when the technology was just getting started. Only seven have survived from that era...If anyone's curious, they are High Noon, South Pacific, Beaches, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Casablanca, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

...

Tarzan swung through jungles in a series of books that, in their time, are supposed to have outsold everything except the Bible. The search to identify him - it's assumed he is a male - is still on.

...

Superman and Batman got their start, we think, during the twenty-fourth century. Except for a brief period during the Dark Age, they've never gone away.

It's clear from context that there are whole cities and even nations that the future has forgotten, though Canada still exists in a sense; indeed, Winnipeg is Earth's capital, and it's described as a beautiful place. But most of the sports my friends follow are gone, except for soccer. In the future they think Dracula was a famous physician known for extracting blood. They know there's an asteroid in the solar system named Spock, but they have no idea what the word signifies.

(There's a clever reference to McDevitt's Priscilla Hutchins novels, his other major future history: at least one of those novels survives, and Chase Kolpath muses that she liked the main character. So in the Alex Benedict universe, the Priscilla Hutchins universe is fictional.)

As a lover of culture, I found the book pretty harrowing. What price Utopia? Apparently, most of our good works. And yet I can't deny that McDevitt's future seems all too plausible. Hang on to your paperbacks and photo prints.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appalling Apollo Art

45 years ago this week, Apollo 11 made its historic voyage to the moon. A couple of decades after that, I drew and coloured this. I think it speaks for itself, but thankfully in space no one can hear you scream.