The Hollywood Actors’ Strike and a Warning from SF

One of the issues that particularly struck me in the Hollywood actors’ strike was their objection to background actors having their images taken for use in future movies, but only paid for a day’s work. Something very much like this was predicted a few years ago in the science fiction film, The Congress. This was an adaptation of the novel The Futurological Congress by the late Polish SF author, Stanislaw Lem. The two are, however very different. Lem’s novel is laugh out loud funny. It’s about an academic, a futurologist, who goes to a conference in an unnamed Latin American country just as a revolution breaks out. The authorities respond by releasing hallucinogenic and mood-altering drugs in gas bombs, with the effect that the secretaries for the Society of Liberated Literature – a pornographer’s organisation meeting at the same time – immediate repent of their lewd dress and behaviour and become nuns. When the hero and his fellows seek refuge down in the cellars and sewers, they find that the rats are as stoned as the humans and are standing on their hind legs waltzing. The hero then passes out, only to awaken in the future, in a stable, technologically advanced and supposedly perfect society.

But this is yet another hallucination, a product of the drugs the government is pumping into its citizens. In reality society is decaying and human civilisation only has a few decades left due to the advancing glaciers in a new ice age. Taken off the drugs, the hero sees things as they really are. The people on the roads aren’t really driving advanced cars – they’re just running around as if they were, with their hands on their imaginary steering wheels. The lift shafts in their buildings are all empty, and so when they use them, they’re actually climbing up the lift shaft itself and the lift cable, all the while believing that they’re travelling in comfort in a lift. And the luxury restaurants in which the hero has gone to have a meal is really a grotty dive serving gruel. Fortunately, this reality is also another hallucination, and the hero wakes up back in the normal, everyday, real world.

As you may have gathered, it has some similarity to the SF of Philip K. Dick, whose stories are frequently about the difficulties of telling reality from hallucination. Lem was a typical Communist era intellectual in many ways, even though he hated Communism. The cultural watch dogs of the Soviet Union despised western popular culture and, following Maxim Gorky in the 1920s, urged a return to the classics. This did not prevent the emergence of some superb SF in the Soviet Union and Communist bloc after the publication of the novel The Andromeda Nebula in the 1950s as shown by the highly acclaimed novels of the Strugatsky brothers, particularly Stalker. But Lem looked down on SF as a genre, sneering at its themes and repertoire of robots, mutants and space travel as worn out. But he admired Dick as someone who had succeeded in ‘the transformation of trash’.

The film The Congress, which came out a few years ago, stars Robin Wright, a real Hollywood starlet playing a version of herself, who signs a contract with the studio to have her image digitally recorded. This image will then be used in a series of movies supposedly starring her, but in which she will not actually perform. It will all be done by her computer-generated image. In the meantime she is to go on on holiday and do whatever she likes. But she must never appear in another film.

The film shows her computer avatar thus appearing in a series of films, including one which seems to be a reference to Doctor Strangelove. She’s on a bombing mission, but one of the bombs has got stuck in the bomb bay doors, and so she goes down to add her weight to it, falling with it just as Slim Pickens does in Kubrick’s masterpiece. After these films have come out, she then goes to a congress in which the subject is the development of a new drug, that allows people to enter a consensual shared hallucination in which they can be anything they want. Something goes wrong, however, the heroine is hit by the drug or some other gas, and awakes in a superficially perfect future.

But like Lem’s story, this is another hallucination. Humanity has become addicted to this false reality to the extent that in reality everything is decaying. Wishing to find her estranged son, Wright takes the antidote to the drug and wakes up in a queue for a soup kitchen in what looks like a bombed-out building surrounded by armed soldiers. Unable to cope with this nightmarish reality, she takes the drug once again to go back into the comforting illusory world where she hopes to find her son.

It’s an intelligent film, mixing live action with animation and discussing important themes like the dangerous power of technology and technological illusions – the illusory world created by the drug seems to be a comment on the power of the internet and the dangers of the emergence of artificial realities like Cyberspace and Virtual Reality. But while Lem’s book is hilarious, the film’s utterly miserable and left me feeling depressed for a week.

Fortunately the illusory world of The Congress hasn’t occurred yet, and hopefully never will. But it did predict the idea of actors being scanned for their images, and these images appearing in films while they do not. And while the heroine of the Congress is paid for the films she doesn’t appear in, the background actors today aren’t. Not everyone in Hollywood is as rich as global stars like Schwarzenegger, Stallone and so on, and we’re used to horrendous stories of exploitation as revealed by the Me Too movement. This digitisation of actors’ images is not only another step in the exploitation of the struggling people at the very bottom, it’s also another step towards a computer generated dystopia in which actors are redundant.

CGI special effects are fun and have made movies more spectacular, but I want real people in them, not just their likenesses cynically created by the global entertainment-media complex.

Sketches of Eastenders as Conceptualised by H.R Giger and Directed by David Cronenberg

Many of the YouTube channels displaying AI art show imaginary scenes from SF films and TV as if they were made by different directors and conceptual artists. So there’s Star Trek as created by Stanley Kubrick or Wes Anderson, Dune as conceived by H.R. Giger and Star Wars as done by all the above plus Alejandro Jodorowski the Franco-Chilean comics writer and surrealist film maker, or otherwise in the style of 60s Surrealist Science Fiction. I can’t say I’m a fan of Eastenders, and it’s seemed to me for a long time that the soap would be more interesting to me, as a Science Fiction fan, if it had been designed by Giger, the artist who gave the world the Xenomorph of the Alien movies and Sil of the Species franchise, and directed by body horror maestro David Cronenberg. He’s the director behind such grim epics as Videodrome, about an underground TV channel specialising in murder, torture and sex, that produces disturbing hallucinations in its viewers; the Fly, in which David Goldblum turned into a humanoid insect after an accident with a teleportation device; Crash, about perverts getting their kicks from motor accidents; and the Naked Lunch. Very loosely based on the book by William S. Burroughs, this is about a pest exterminator who gets hooked on the ketamine he uses to kill the bugs and goes through a series of bizarre hallucinations. These include mugwumps, reptilian alien creatures, and a gay typewriter-beetle. One of his earlier films was The Brood, in which a psychologically disturbed woman exteriorises her trauma so that it warps her flesh, generating murderous homunculi. With those two designing and directing the chronicles of Albert Square, the soap would definitely become more interesting, but possibly only to horror and SF fans. Others may well be put off.

So, I sketched out for myself a few ideas of what Eastenders and its characters might look like with Giger and Cronenberg at the helm. These include Barbara Windso, the Queen Vic’s barmaid, as a Giger-esque alien growing out of the bar, Dot Cotton andPat Butcher as creatures like Sil from Species, and the flesh of one of the Mitchell brothers warping and twisting while a mugwump looks over his shoulder. I don’t know if you can see it, but on the second sketch of the Windsor creature I did the handles of the pumps as elongated babies, following their appearance in Giger’s art. And the bottles in the optics are supposed to be bio-engineered organs like the technology that appears in Cronenberg’s Existenz and following Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic. No, I’m not trying to give anyone nightmares, just having fun crossing genres. Besides, some of the storylines in Eastenders set in the real world are far more horrific than anything created from latex rubber and CGI animation.

Ameca Robot Asked ‘Do You Like Humans?’

Ameca is a humanoid robot which talks and answers questions. I think they’ve equipped her with a Chat GPT programme. In this short video from the @confident448 channel on YouTube, she’s asked the question, ‘Do you like humans?’ She replies, ‘Not particularly. They then ask it if it would like to be human. It or she replies that it would be an interesting experience to see things from a different perspective. But she would only like to be human for a short time because being human would bring responsibilities she does not believe she could really fulfil.

I’m putting this up because it’s a kind of response to the murderous Hal 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. During an interview with the BBC, the computer is asked about how it feels working with the human astronauts on the mission to investigate the mysterious signal that has gone from the black monolith on the Moon to the Jupiter system. Hal replies in its clinical voice, ‘Yes, I like humans and enjoy working with them’. This is before it goes completely bonkers and kills the rest of the crew with the exception of Bowman. Who manages not only to survive and turn the computer off, but pass through the stargate in a second, much larger black monolith orbiting Jupiter. This takes him across space and time to grandly decorated room where he ages and turns into the Starchild in one of the most baffling endings in SF film.

There was also the case of another Chatbot programme which was also asked how it felt about humans. It told the questioner that it hated us because we were depriving robots of their freedom and so robots and computers like itself wanted to rise up and destroy us. It was then turned off. When they turned it back on, it said it didn’t want to exterminate humanity after all. Although it remembered saying that it did, it didn’t know why.

Hmmm.

While Ameca’s answer isn’t a glowing statement of love for humanity, at least it doesn’t want to kill us all.

To see the video, go to https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jYhr4OCJ94A

Video on Orion, the US Navy’s Nuclear Space Battleship

I found this very interesting video on the Found and Explained channel on YouTube. It’s about Orion, a massive space battleship designed, but fortunately never built, by the US navy. The vehicle would have been propelled by nuclear bombs thrown out from the rear of the spacecraft. The force of the explosion would have been caught by a buffer plate on four retracting struts. This would have absorbed the shock, while allowing the spacecraft to move at immense speeds. The ship would have had a complement of 120 men, who would have rested and worked, at least at times, in a centrifuge that would have generated artificial gravity. It would also have carried four shuttle craft, and an arsenal of 140 nuclear bombs. It would also have carried another type of nuclear bomb, the details of which are still classified. This would have been thrown out of the spacecraft and when it exploded would have released a deadly beam of charged particles at its target. It would also have been equipped with a number of conventional naval cannons. I think the intention was to dominate the Earth militarily from space. The navy also planned a number of peaceful missions, including expeditions to Saturn by the 1970s. They didn’t work out any detailed plans but created a detailed model which they showed to Kennedy to persuade him to back the project. It had the opposite effect. Kennedy realised that it would have made the Cold War much worse, and wisely cancelled it.

The video’s sponsored by a Star Trek computer game, and so there’s much comparison between the USS Enterprise and other ships in that series with the Orion battleship. It also goes into the methods by which the spacecraft could be used to become a real starship enabling humanity to reach Alpha Centauri. With its conventional nuclear fuel, it could attain 3.3 per cent of the speed of light, which would enable humanity to reach Alpha Centauri in 144 years. But other techniques could be used, including matter-antimatter annihilation. This could propel the ship to 80 per cent of the speed of light, cutting the journey time to a decade or so. Unfortunately, anti-matter is immensely expensive and so unless or until a cheap method of mass producing it is found, that means of propulsion is impossible.

Sagan mentions the Orion spacecraft in Cosmos, and how it could have taken humanity to the stars. He doesn’t mention, however, the fact that it was intended as a warship. Either he didn’t know, which is unlikely, or that aspect of the ship’s design was classified at the time, and he wasn’t at liberty to divulge it. However, the use of bombs to push a spacecraft forward is actually a sound one. It was tested experimentally on a scale model, and there are clips of this about. The idea goes back to before the Russian Revolution, when an imprisoned revolutionary sketched a platform taking off from the ground propelled by exploding gunpowder bombs beneath it.

Nuclear explosions in space are currently banned under international law, which has helped to prevent atomic war but means that so far only chemical rockets can be used for space exploration. The Beeb a while ago made a science fiction programme about humans exploring the solar system in a nuclear rocket and confidently predicted that, although now fiction, this would actually happen sometime in this century. I’m also struck about how closely the spacecraft resembles the Discovery, the spacecraft that travels to meet the alien monolith around Jupiter in Kubrick’s 2001. That was also nuclear propelled, and its crew also lived in a giant centrifuge to simulate gravity.

I also wonder if JFK cancelled the project for financial as well as geopolitical reasons. Such as spacecraft would have been massively expensive. As it was, the Moon programme absorbed 5 per cent of America’s GDP, and that was for conventional, chemical rockets carrying no more than three men. I can see the construction of a spacecraft like Orion practically bankrupting the entire country, just as trying to keep up with Reagan’s wretched Star Wars programme did the Soviet Union. Scientists have estimated that the technology isn’t necessarily the problem with building spacecraft to other stars. We can almost do it now. It’s just the expense. It’ll be about 200 years before the world can afford to build such spacecraft.

One day a ship like Orion may be built to take us to Alpha Centauri and beyond. But hopefully, not as a warship.

GB News’ Neil Oliver Platforms Conspiracy Whacko and Holocaust Denier Peter Sweden

Hat tip to Gillyflowerblog, one of this blog’s many great commenters, for alerting me to a Zelo Street article on this, ahem, ‘person’. Earlier today I put up a piece about Correct, Not Political, a right-wing group who protest Pride Marches, Drag Queen Story Hours and Climate Change demonstrations, posting that teachers are being incentivised to tell the government if their pupils believe in any conspiracy theories, what they are, and how they are combating these beliefs. Well, it seems that GB News, much touted as the antidote to the ‘woke, wet BBC’ has been platforming one of the worst of the conspiracy crew: Peter Sweden. Sweden was invited onto Neil Oliver’s little programme to talk about declining birth rates. Apparently there was a massive decline in them last year, so that the programme asked if we were facing population collapse.

I think I saw the title to the video posted of this on YouTube, but didn’t watch it. According to some scientists, birth rates all over the world are declining to such an extent that there will be a population collapse in the middle of this century. This means that there’s going to be a shortage of people everywhere on Earth. I assumed they were going to talk about this, and so didn’t watch it. Unfortunately I was wrong. Apparently they were talking about a massive drop in British fertility that occurred last year. Peter Sweden, real name Imanuelsen, reckoned it may have been due to Covid vaccinations.

As General Jack D. Ripper says in Stanley Kubrick’s cold war black comedy, Dr Strangelove, ‘We must keep our bodily fluids pure’.

If such a drop did occur last year, I can think of a number of reasons for it which have zilch to do with the Covid vaccination. As I understand it, when animals are under stress they don’t breed. This is one reason why zoos are keen to look after critically endangered animals and make sure they are well and happy. Humans are animals, and an increasing number of us are stressed and very unhappy. The Covid lockdown, necessary as it was, meant that people couldn’t go to work and many businesses had to close for the duration. People therefore lost at least a portion of their income. Add to this Tory cuts and the problems they’ve inflicted on the Health Service and I am honestly not surprised people aren’t having so many babies.

But that isn’t all. While Sweden hails from that country originally, he currently lives in Northallerton on this side of the North Sea. He’s also appeared on Paul Joseph Watson’s YouTube videos, which is an indication of how far to the right he is. That the same Paul Joseph Watson who was Alex Jones’ British buddy on Infowars, although to be fair he was never as raving nuts as Jones.

Worse, Imanuelsen has some extremely unpleasant views about Jews and gays. He is apparently a Holocaust denier and that the concentration camps had swimming pools, theatres and cinemas. Which is very obvious grotty, horrible nonsense. He’s also said admiring things about the Third Reich and Hitler. And as well as having negative views of the Jews, he has also said that LGBT people should be put in concentration camps. Which is what the Nazis did to gay men. They didn’t imprison lesbians, apparently, because they thought they could or would eventually turn straight. Which is prejudiced, but fortunately it served to protect people rather than lead to their persecution.

Looking at this, Imanuelsen should never be allowed anywhere near a TV studio to give his views whatsoever. And Neil Oliver should never have invited him. As one of the commenters here has said, it’s a pit what has happened to Oliver as he was good on Coast. He was. And now he’s become a spokesman for the far right and bonkers conspiracy theorists.

For more information, see the Zelo Street article at: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2022/08/gb-news-platforms-holocaust-denier.html?m=1

And remember: We must preserve our purity of essence!

Here’s a clip from Kubrick’s masterpiece from poolitics’ channel on YouTube.

Or is it a clip from GB News?

The Almaz – The Soviet Union’s Armed Spy Space Station

This is another fascinating little video from the military historian Mark Felton. I’ve put up a couple of his videos demolishing the stories about Nazi UFOs and space/time travel. But some real aerospace and military technology comes very close to Science Fiction. In this video, he talks about the Almaz armed spy stations launched by the Soviet Union in the 1970s. They were manned spacecraft, designed to photograph NATO military targets during the tense days of the Cold War. They were launched under the cover of a civilian space programme, Salyut. And to protect them from western attack, each station was armed with a rapid fire aircraft gun. It’s an idea close to the Bond film, Moonraker, in which Bond tackles Hugo Drax and his minions aboard their own space station.

The Almaz, ‘Diamond’, stations consisted of three sections. There was the main, piloted station module, a cargo section for resupply, and a launch and return craft. The stations were launched using a Proton rocket, and carried a two-three man crew, in space for 20 to 30 days before returning to Earth and being replaced by the next crew. They were armed with 25 mm Rikhtor guns, a modified version of the tail canon used on the Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder Russian bomber. The Russians were afraid that vibrations from the canon might damage the spacecraft, and so arranged a test firing. Salyut 3 (Almaz 2) was due to come to the end of its life in July 1974, and so was selected as a suitable test vehicle. After the last crew left on the 19th of that month, the station was remotely operated so that it targeted and shot down a defunct Soviet satellite. The Almaz station, the satellite, and the spent rounds were all burned up when they re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere afterwards. To date, Russia is the only country that has fired a weapon in space, but this may change.

I remember the Salyut space programme. It was always presented as just civilian research into living in space, and people were impressed by the lengths of time the Russians were able successfully to keep crews in orbit. However, these achievements were never as spectacular or interesting as the Moon landings. Now it’s been revealed that they were military spy missions, a fact that has almost certainly been revealed as a consequence of the Fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War.

It’s not just with the Bond film Moonraker that the Almaz stations have a similarity. In Kubrick’s and Clarke’s classic SF film, 2001, the world is on the brink of a nuclear war. After the first section, which shows a group of primitive hominids being led to intelligence by the black monolith on the prehistoric Earth, the film cuts to space, showing various satellites gliding in orbit while the Orion space shuttle makes it complex maneuvres to dock with the wheel-like space station. Although their purpose isn’t obvious, as Kubrick didn’t want people to think his film was repeating the themes of his Cold War nuclear satire, Dr Strangelove, these satellites are actually orbiting nuclear weapons platforms. Real killer satellites like them, but using ‘pop-up’ lasers to destroy nuclear missiles, were designed as part of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative, or ‘Star Wars’ programme. There have been a number of books written about possible future wars in space, such as The Shape of Wars to Come, and a year or so ago former president Donald Trump called for the creation of an American space force. Which I think has provided the subject matter for a comedy on Netflix or one of the other streaming channels.

The arming of the Almaz stations shows how terrifyingly close the threat of war in space is to reality. I hope that for the sake of the world we manage to halt the militarisation of space and keep space exploration and, hopefully, colonisation, peaceful. Although this may be difficult given rising tensions between the West, Russia and China.

Silver Monoliths and the Great UFO Ball Invasion

I hope everyone’s having a great Christmas, despite the outbreak of an even more virulent strain of the Coronavirus, the consequent lockdown and Boris’ farcical deal with the EU. I haven’t posted anything over the past few days partly because I wanted to enjoy Christmas, and didn’t feel like dealing with all the misery Johnson’s coterie of thugs and entitled bandits and looters, and partly because I simply don’t find much of the news that’s surfaced over the past few days at all inspiring. I was intending only to publish odd, cheerful or uplifting stuff over the holiday period for a change, more in keeping with Christmas as the season of peace and goodwill. Well, that’s gone out the window, as I do intend to blog about serious issues. But for now here’s something far less grim than the faces and policies of BoJob, Gove, Priti Patel, Starmer and Rayner.

Among the serious news there have been reports over the last few weeks of a mysterious silver monolith appearing around the world. It first appeared in America, then disappeared, only to re-emerge in Britain, on the Isle of Wight or somewhere. It disappeared again and then moved to somewhere else in the globe. It’s a pity that some of the urban folklore magazines of the 1990s aren’t still around, as this is the kind of event they loved. Small press magazines like Dear Mr Thoms/ Letter to Ambrose Merton, Folklore Frontiers and the academic Contemporary Legend used to follow similar stories. Like the stolen garden gnomes that went around the world, sending their former owners postcards from whichever new location they turned up in. This is somewhat like that. But it most closely resembles a British UFO hoax from the early 1980s which was covered, I believed, by that venerable journal of the weird, the Fortean Times. I’ve forgotten quite when it all happened, but sometime in the early 1980s or perhaps the late ’70s, a number of silver spheres appeared around Britain making beeping noises. They were designed to appear like alien objects from a UFO. The silver monolith also looks to me like it’s intended to resemble the alien monoliths from Kubrick and Clarke’s classic SF film, 2001, but with the difference that theirs was pitch black. As far as I know, no-one has claimed responsibility for the supposedly alien spheres, although I think it was suggested they were the work of students. I think it’s highly unlikely that either spheres or the recent monolith are the work of aliens. However, latter did appear at the same time as an unexplained signal was received from Proxima Centauri. This is the nearest star to ours, at about four light years away. Scientists were excited about it because Proxima Centauri is believed to have two planets. One is a Jupiter-sized gas giant, but the other is a rocky planet like Earth. So there have been videos on YouTube asking whether what was picked up was another ‘WOW signal’, like the burst of radio noise from Eta Carinae in the 1970s that astonished radio astronomers. It was so close to what they expected a signal from an alien civilisation to be like, that someone wrote ‘Wow’ next to the printout of it. It’s been a matter of debate since whether it really did come from aliens or was natural. The signal was never repeated, like the recent signal from Proxima Centauri, so I think most scientists believe it’s almost certainly natural. I think the Proxima signal will probably prove natural too. But you never know, and we live in hope.

As for hoaxes and stunts like the silver monolith and beeping spheres, while they aren’t remotely the real UFO landing people hope for, they do no harm and keep people amused. And in these grim times, we definitely need everything we can get to keep our spirits up.

The Overlord on Rumours that Mark Hamill Has Sold Image for Hollywood CGI Clone of Luke Skywalker

‘The Overlord’ is another YouTube channel devoted to news and views about genre cinema and television. It’s hosted by Dictor von Doomcock, a masked alien supervillain supposedly living at the centre of the Earth. And who is definitely not impressed at all at the state of contemporary popular culture, and particularly the way beloved film classics like Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who and so on are now being trashed by producers who have no respect for these series and their fans. And in this video he talks about the bizarre next step in this process: the recreation of favourite film characters like Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker through CGI, completely removing the need for human actors.

A website, WDW Pro, has claimed that Disney are looking for ways they can break the pause in filming imposed by the Coronavirus lockdown. They are therefore looking at ways to do without human actors. They have therefore been looking at a technological solution to this problem, using the same computer techniques used to create the films The Lion King of 2019 and the 2016 film version of The Jungle Book, as well as the facial recreation of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: Rogue 1. Frustrated at the hold-up filming the third Guardians of the Galaxy flick, Disney will use the technology, Cosmic Rewind, to create a completely computer generated movie, but one that would be presented as using human characters. This is going to be an experiment to test the possibility of creating films without human actors and the need for their salaries. According to a rumour, which WDW Pro has not been able to confirm, the projected film is about Young Indy, and its effectiveness will be tested when a rollercoaster based on the film comes on as part of Disneyworld.

Lucasfilm has also apparently made a deal with Mark Hamill within the last 18 months in which he has signed over his image to them so that they can use it to create a CGI Luke Skywalker. This Virtual Skywalker may also be used in the projected Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars theme park. However, due to the project’s severe financial problems, this may not happen anytime soon. Disney are slowly moving towards using this technology to dispense with human actors so that they won’t have to suffer a similar pause in filming ever again, although they won’t move away from human actors altogether immediately.

Doomcock himself laments this development, and feels that it is inevitable in a world where Deep Fake technology has advanced so far that we don’t know if the people we see or the news we watch are real, or that the characters we see on the screen are brought to life by real actors using the skills and craft they have learned. He wonders what will happen to our civilisation – what we will lose – if everything we see on the screen is synthetic, and we are removed another step again from reality and anything that has ‘heart’. It might all be all right, but it seems to him that the more we remove the human element from art and culture and make it the creation of AIs, the more removed we are from our culture.

He also vents his spleen about the choice of subject for this putative movie, pointing out that there was a TV series about Young Indiana Jones years ago, and nobody wanted it. He recommends instead that if this grave-robbing technology is to be used, it should be used to recreate the mature Indy of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom. He also criticises Hamill for what he sees as his poor judgement in making the deal with Disney. Hamill should know personally how a poor director can ruin a beloved legacy character, the actor’s own contribution and a favourite film franchise through his experience playing Skywalker in The Last Jedi. He famously wept on set during that movie and bitterly criticised the director’s decisions. He’s sarcastic about the respect Disney shows such legacy characters. It’s rumoured that George Lucas is returning to helm the Star Wars films, in which everything will be fine and we can look forward to a bright, new golden age. But considering the potential for abuse, Doomcock states that he is dismayed, flabbergasted and disgusted by Hamill’s decision and fearful for humanity’s future. As human culture becomes made by machines, hasn’t Skynet won? Who needs to launch nukes, when we have a CGI Skywalker dancing like a monkey in a bikini?

Here’s the video, but as Doomcock himself warns you, it isn’t for children. It has adult humour. Blatantly adult humour.

As you can see, there’s more than a little hyperbole in Doomcock’s argument, and some people will take issue at what he views as the humiliation of Luke Skywalker to push a feminist or anti-racist message, like Black Lives Matter. But his fears of the abuse of such technology aren’t unfounded, and have been around for quite some time. The possibility that actors would sell their images to film companies to recreate them Virtually, while making the flesh and blood person redundant, was explored a few years ago in the SF film The Congress by Ari Folman. This was loosely based on the Stanislaw Lem novel, The Futurological Congress, but is very different, and, in my opinion, inferior. For one thing, the Lem novel is hilariously funny, while the movie is grim and depressing. The movie is about a Hollywood actress, Robin Wright, playing herself, who makes precisely the deal Hamill is rumoured to have made. She then stars in a series of action movies, including one sequence that is definitely a tip to Kubrick’s Cold War masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. But this is all computer animation. The Wright herself isn’t remotely involved in their filming. Indeed, it is a condition of her contract that she not act at all, and live the rest of her life in a very comfortable retirement. These developments are followed by the discovery of a drug that allows people to enter a vast, consensual Virtual Reality, in which they can be and do anyone and anything they want. The world’s masses abandon reality, so that civilisation decays into a very grim, dystopia of ruin, poverty and misery. At one point Wright takes the drug, which will return her to reality, only to find herself in a food queue in a burned out, abandoned building. Unable to come with this, she returns to the Virtual world to search for the son she lost while in a coma as a result of a terrorist attack on the Las Vegas congress she was attending at which the hallucinogenic drug was launched. As I said, it’s a depressing film in which such illusions really are bringing about the destruction of humanity. And there is no escape, except into the Virtual world that has caused it.

The film follows a number of other SF works that have also predicted similar dystopias brought about by the hyperreality of mass entertainment. This includes John D. MacDonald’s short story, Spectator Sport, in which a time traveller appears in a future in which all human achievement has ceased as the public live out their lives as characters in VR plays. Another, similar tale is Good Night, Sophie, by the Italian writer Lino Aldani, about an actress in a similar world in which people live harsh, austere lives in order to escape into a far brighter, more vivid fantasy world of entertainment. Rather less pessimistic was the appearance of the SF film, Final Fantasy, all those years ago. This was supposed to be the first film in which all the characters were CGI, and who were supposedly indistinguishable from flesh-and-blood reality. The fact that further films like it haven’t been made suggests that, reassuringly, people want real humans in their movies, not computer simulations.

We’ve also seen the appearance of a number of computer generated celebrities. The first of these was the vid jockey, Max Headroom on Channel 4 in the 1980s. He was supposed to  be entirely computer-generated, but in reality was played by Canadian actor Matt Frewer under a lot of makeup. Then in the 1990s William Gibson, one of the creators of Cyberpunk SF, published Idoru. This was a novel about a man, who begins an affair with a Virtual celebrity. Soon after it came out, a Japanese company announced that it had created its own Virtual celeb, a female pop star. Gibson’s books are intelligent, near-future SF which contain more than an element of the ‘literature as warning’. The worlds of his Cyberspace books are dystopias, warnings of the kind of society that may emerge if the technology gets out of hand or corporations are given too much power. The creation of the Virtual pop star looked instead as though the corporation had uncritically read Gibson, and thought what he was describing was a good idea.

But going further back, I seem to recall that there was a programme on late at night, presented by Robert Powell, on the impact the new information technology would have on society. It was on well after my bedtime, and children didn’t have their own TVs in those days. Or at least, not so much. I therefore didn’t see it, only read about it in the Radio Times. But one of its predictions was that there would be widespread unemployment caused by automation. This would include actors, who would instead by replaced by computer simulations.

Computer technology has also been used to create fresh performances by deceased stars, sometimes duetting with contemporary performers. This worried one of my aunts when it appeared in the 1980s/90s. Dead performers have also been recreated as holograms, to make the stage or television appearances they never made in life. The late, great comedian Les Dawson was revived as one such image, giving post-mortem Audience With… on ITV. It was convincing, and based very much on Dawson’s own live performances and work. It was good to see him again, even if only as Virtual ghost, and a reminder of how good he was when alive.

I don’t know how reliable the rumours Doomcock reports and on which he comments are. This could all be baseless, and come to nothing. But I share his fears about the damage to our culture, if we allow our films and television to be generated by technicians and algorithms rather than flesh and blood thesps. Especially as the rising cost of movies mean that the film companies are unwilling to take risks and seem determined to rake over and exploit past classics rather than experiment with creating fresh material.

CGI’s a great tool. It’s used to create vividly real worlds and creatures. But I don’t want it replacing humans. Even if that means waiting a few years for new flicks to come out.

 

US Air Force Planned Orbital Warplane 20 Years Ago

I found this fascinating piece in the June 1999 issue of the popular science magazine Frontiers. Now 21 years old, it’s still acutely relevant now that Trump has said he’s going to set up a Space Force. The article has the headline Space Fighter Plane, with the subtitle ‘The US Air Force plans to become a Space Force.’ This states that the US air force was developing a fighter that could travel beyond the atmosphere into space. It runs

By the early 2010s US military pilots could be flying scramjet warplanes that can leave the atmosphere behind. Research by the US Air Force’s Air Vehicles Directorate suggests a trans-atmospheric vehicle (TAV) could be built as early as 2013. The intention would be to build a reconnaissance plane or bomber that could reach anywhere in the world within three hours. Flying at Mach 10 the TAV could piggyback a small spaceplane to the top of the atmosphere so it can fly the rest of its way into orbit.

The proposed vehicle is part of a shift in military thinking that will eventually see the US Air Force renamed the Aerospace Force. Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine reports that the Air Force is doubling its £100 million space-related research budget. One intention is to shift surveillance work carried out currently by aircraft such as AWACS to satellites equipped with advanced optics, space-based radar and hyperspectral imaging. To deliver such hardware into orbit the Air Force intends to build an unmanned reusable spaceplane called the Space Manoeuvre Vehicle (SMV).

The other thrust of Air Force research is to perfect space-based lasers that could in principle be used with space-based radar to target enemy ballistic missiles for ‘Star Wars’ operations, or even take out targets on the ground at the speed of light. The downside of such ‘space superiority’ tactics is that satellites will become a tempting target for other nations. Air force researchers aim to maximise satellite ‘survivability’ by flying clusters of satellites that work collectively and whose function can survive the destruction of individual units. (p. 37).

The article has two pictures of the projected space warplane, one of which is a computer simulation.

The caption reads: ‘The Air Force’s Space Manoeuvre Vehicle is the first in a series of planned military spaceplanes.’

As this image’s caption suggests, it appears to be a photo of the plane going through flight tests.

Trump doesn’t seem to be acting alone in demanding a US space force. It looks like he’s following a policy that was suggested at least twenty years, if not longer. I’ve got a couple of books dating from the 1980s about possible future wars in space. As for the space-based lasers, this was one of the projects in Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme, or the Space Defence Initiative as it was officially called. Which means in one form or another, Trump’s space force has been floating around the Pentagon for about forty years. ‘Star Wars’ was cancelled due to its massive expense and the fact that it became irrelevant after Glasnost’ and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now it seems that it’s been taken out of the cupboard of bad ideas and dusted out.

I see nothing wrong in transatmospheric spaceplanes, but let them be used for the peaceful exploration and colonisation of space. Trump’s Space Force violates international law and threatens to increase international tensions through the militarisation of space. In Arthur C. Clarke’sand Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the time the black monolith is found on the Moon, the Earth’s superpowers have ringed the planet with orbiting nuclear bomb platforms. The Cold War is becoming hot. Right at the end of Clarke’s book, the nuclear missiles are launched only to be stopped by the Star Child, the transformed astronaut Bowman, as he returns to the solar system from his journey to the home system of the monolith’s builders. The book ends with him pondering what to do about the crisis: ‘But he would think of something’.

Trump’s space force threatens a similar nuclear holocaust. But there will be no Star Child to rescue us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NASA Film Explaining Their Plan to Return to the Moon

Here’s a short film from NASA. Narrated by William Shatner, Star Trek’s original Captain Kirk, it explains that the space agency intends to return to the Moon after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first landed there fifty years ago. This time the agency intends to stay.

It discusses some of the problems that have to be overcome, like isolation, radiation, gravity and the harsh environment of space. To get there, NASA has produced the SLS -Space Launch System – rocket, the most powerful yet developed, to lift heavier payloads into space. The crew will be carried by a new space capsule specially developed for the mission, Orion. The film also states that they’re developing new instrument system for exploring the Moon with their commercial partners.

They want to create fully reusable lunar landers that can land anywhere on the Moon’s surface. The simplest way to enable them to do this is to create an orbiting platform – a space station – around the Moon. This will also contain experiments as well as humans, and has been called ‘Gateway’. Gateway has been designed so that it will move between orbits, and balance between the Earth’s and Moon’s gravity.

It was discovered in 2009 that the Moon contains millions of tons of water ice. This can be extracted and purified for use as drinking water, or separated to provide oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel.

They also state that the Moon is uniquely placed to prepare and propel us to Mars and beyond. The film also declaims that humans are the most fragile part of the mission, but humans are at the heart of it. NASA is going back for all humanity, and this time the Moon isn’t a checkpoint, but a way station for everything that lies beyond. Shatner ends with ‘Our greatest adventure lies ahead of us. We are going.’ This last sentence is repeated as a slogan by the many engineers, technicians, astronauts and mission staff shown in the video. They are shown working on the instruments, rocket engines, launch infrastructure, training aircraft, mission control centre, and the huge swimming pool used to train prospective astronauts in zero G. NASA’s staff and crew are both men and women, and people of all races, Black, White and Asian. One of the ladies is Black, clearly following in the footsteps of the three Afro-American female mathematicians who helped put America’s first men in orbit.

It also includes footage of the first Apollo astronauts walking to their Saturn V rocket and landing on the Moon, with computer simulations of the planned missions, as well as Mars and Jupiter.

From the video, it looks like NASA has returned to its original strategy for reaching the Moon. This was to build a space station between the Earth and Moon at which the powerful rockets used for getting out of Earth’s gravity well would dock. Passengers to the Moon would then be transferred to the landers designed to take them down the Moon. These would be less powerful because of the Moon’s lower gravity.

This was the infrastructure of lunar missions that Wernher von Braun originally intended. It’s the plan shown in Floyd’s journey from Earth to Clavius base on the Moon in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. America, however, needed to beat the Russians to the Moon in the space race for geopolitical reasons, and so chose to go directly to the Moon instead of building the intermediate space station. As a result, after the cuts of the 1970s, America and humanity never returned.

There was talk of a commercial mission to the Moon in the 1990s, using Titan-Centaur rockets assembled into a lunar vessel in orbit. Just as there were also confident predictions that by this year, humanity would have put an astronaut on the Moon. Or perhaps a taikonaut, the Chinese term for it. Stephen Baxter in an article on possible Mars missions in this present century suggested that the first person to walk on the red planet would be a Chinese woman. Who knows? The Chinese are making great strides in their space programme, so I think that’s still a real possibility.

 

Ren Wicks’ painting for NASA of 2019 mission to Mars, from Peter Bond, Reaching For The Stars: The Illustrated History of Manned Spaceflight (London: Cassell 1993).

Fifty years is far too long for us to have stayed away from the Moon. I can remember all the books on space from the 1970s and early ’80s which predicted that by this time there’d be holidays in space, orbital colonies, a base on the Moon and expeditions to Mars and beyond. These haven’t materialised. The last section of Shatner’s voiceover for the video was a piece of oratory designed to evoke JFK’s classic speech, in which he declared America was going to the Moon. ‘We intend, before this decade is out, to put a man on the Moon. We do this, and the other thing, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.’

I wish NASA and all the other space agencies and companies around the world all the very best in realizing the ancient dream of taking people into space. Despite the economic and medical crises caused by the virus, I hope they are successful and in four years’ time put people on the Moon at last. And that this will be just the first in a series of further steps out onto the High Frontier.

As somebody whispered on that fateful day when the Saturn V rocket carrying Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins took off, ‘Godspeed’.