Thanks, my galactic overlord.

In reply to this comment by mintbbb:
Coooool! *promote

>> ^mintbbb:

Yay, thank you all! I am blushing now because of all this attention


Just doing my small part to push mintbbb's hue to a red befitting that of a galactic overlord.

Congratulations on this galactic achievement! You have now sifted more videos than there are stars in the sky. Fact.

HOLY SHIT! DARTH VADER IS REAL! HE'S GOING TO CLAIM THE EARTH FOR THE GALACTIC EMPIRE!

EVERYONE RUN FOR THE HILLS!

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

But to care about SF, it has to be about how it relates to human beings. In some sense we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who are experiencing the wonder. Otherwise it's dry and boring.

When I think about SF movies without good character, I think of Transformers. Style over substance.

Contact on the other hand had a great central character that let you feel the wonder of what she was experiencing through her eyes. That's vital.

>> ^gorillaman:

>> ^dag:
Hmmm. Examples? I guess Dave Bowman was pretty flat, but HAL as a character definitely wasn't. Deckard in Bladerunner was not flat, very tortured nuanced performance by Harrison Ford. I think I'd have to disagree with you gorillaman. The best SF, like all stories, is character driven.
Well there's Rama, where Clarke correctly focuses on the ship. I feel like people who complain about the humans' characterisation just aren't reading the book right. I read Schild's Ladder recently - the characters have intellectual disagreements but not much else, to the point of lacking differentiated sexes, and it still paints a compelling portrait of future civilisation. I hesitate to mention Ayn Rand's Anthem, but she understood if you detail your protagonist too explicitly then you lose your universality of meaning.
It's not often an author can write SF in its purest form and still get published, so it's easier to find examples where too much emphasis on the human elements detracts from the work. Like Asimov's Foundation, one of my favorites. The characters in that book are downright intrusive on what's otherwise an exploration of events on a galactic scale. After the reader gets his introduction to the wonderful concept of psychohistory, the characters start to drive the plot and everything falls apart. The rest of the book and the subsequent books in the series become just Some Stuff That Happens. Well stuff happens every day, I don't need to read about stuff. Just like Rama's sequels, no good can come from watering down high literature with narratological cliches.
Good SF communicates to the reader a single idea as clearly and elegantly as possible then ends. Characterisation, even plot, are distractions.
It's an educational experience. How would you feel if your maths textbook gave the number two a quirky personality, and the equals sign a terrible secret to hide? That's fine if you just want to be entertained, but not if you want to learn something. I use SF as a kind of zen meditation, projecting my consciousness into a construction of a future I won't visit in person, in order to become enlightened.

>> ^dag:
Hmmm. Examples? I guess Dave Bowman was pretty flat, but HAL as a character definitely wasn't. Deckard in Bladerunner was not flat, very tortured nuanced performance by Harrison Ford. I think I'd have to disagree with you gorillaman. The best SF, like all stories, is character driven.

Well there's Rama, where Clarke correctly focuses on the ship. I feel like people who complain about the humans' characterisation just aren't reading the book right. I read Schild's Ladder recently - the characters have intellectual disagreements but not much else, to the point of lacking differentiated sexes, and it still paints a compelling portrait of future civilisation. I hesitate to mention Ayn Rand's Anthem, but she understood if you detail your protagonist too explicitly then you lose your universality of meaning.

It's not often an author can write SF in its purest form and still get published, so it's easier to find examples where too much emphasis on the human elements detracts from the work. Like Asimov's Foundation, one of my favorites. The characters in that book are downright intrusive on what's otherwise an exploration of events on a galactic scale. After the reader gets his introduction to the wonderful concept of psychohistory, the characters start to drive the plot and everything falls apart. The rest of the book and the subsequent books in the series become just Some Stuff That Happens. Well stuff happens every day, I don't need to read about stuff. Just like Rama's sequels, no good can come from watering down high literature with narratological cliches.

Good SF communicates to the reader a single idea as clearly and elegantly as possible then ends. Characterisation, even plot, are distractions.

It's an educational experience. How would you feel if your maths textbook gave the number two a quirky personality, and the equals sign a terrible secret to hide? That's fine if you just want to be entertained, but not if you want to learn something. I use SF as a kind of zen meditation, projecting my consciousness into a construction of a future I won't visit in person, in order to become enlightened.

But she put DS9 behind Voyager... that is as bad as not liking Firefly... I can see debating if Voyager is better than Enterprise or not, but DS9 is clearly in the top 2 Star Treks and the gap between it and Voyager so vast that you need to measure it on a galactic scale. Not that I would say no if she wanted to go out, just would over the years show her how wrong she was.

While I agree that it is wonderful to have a unifying goal like the space program sometimes provides, this is one of the places where the free market might be able to take over and do it better. It certainly could not have done it back during the space race, but now there are lots of market driven reasons for investment in space, so it might work.

And we just don't have the political will during this economic climate to invest in the big ideas, like a Moon base or mission to Mars. Maybe in another decade or two, when the economy has recovered and people are bored with Virgin Galactic's low earth orbit.

So true.

And other than that... it gave us all something to look at and think "Look at what we can do". We can send a spaceship up into space and it can then come back down and land on a runway, that's just darn cool.

Yeah, it had problems, yeah it had a couple of catastrophes, yeah it never met the initial goals of cost of flights and number of flights that it was supposed to reach.

BUT.

It has given a generation of us a program of ships that looked like spaceships dammit... these looked like our science fiction fantasies, these looked like what we wanted spaceships to look like, not just a capsule on top of a rocket.

So yeah, it has been a success.

It's sad that it's quite some time before something as inspirational as that will fly into space again, it really is.

It's also sad that it's left up to private enterprise and some billionaires (SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo) to push forward in this regard, a unified, cross country effort would be do far more good for the soul of the planet at the moment I think.

I've always wondered if you would not just pop up in the middle of empty space if you time travelled without compensating for the fact that the earth is moving through at what like 1500 M/s through the solar system? And the solar system is orbiting the galactic centre. And the galaxy is moving away from all other galaxies (or vice-versa) as spacetime itself apparently expands. It all depends on how you think about frame of reference WRT your model of time-travel.

Like in Back to the Future, they travelled 30 years at a time. And they appeared to "portal/shunt" as opposed to "tunnel". It seems to me on a gut level like a portal or shunt would probably just dump you into empty space a fraction of a light year behind or ahead of the solar system if you jumped 30 years. A wormhole (Doctor Who or Bill and Ted style) is easier to imagine as being connected to the same "place" (according to what frame of reference I can't mentally peg down) in both times.

>> ^MichaelL:

>> ^cosmovitelli:

Man so much fakery on this planet they could send the galactic display team over now and no one would be able to believe it..


It's a conspiracy! *tinfoil hat*

Man so much fakery on this planet they could send the galactic display team over now and no one would be able to believe it..

That's how the galactic federation keeps us isolated.. for now.

Music from Galactic Civilizations II!

Gods own backyard..

to see the milky way, and realize you're just this tiny blip on a spiral arm..staring into the center of the galaxy..and imagine that galactic engine, sagitarrius a* whipping around stars 10,000 times larger than the sun like they were toys..gives you a little perspective