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The Death of the Space Opera?
Has anyone else out there noticed that one of the staples of science fiction in the serial visual entertainment medium until recently known as television and the dying form of the motion picture, the Space Opera, is — how to put this delicately — older than grandpa’s snuff? To be less delicate, if the Scripted Visual Media Space Opera were a humanoid (let’s not be speciesist), it would be looking for its second duranium hip replacement and popping kidney regeneration pills like they were candy. Bendii syndrome could not more than 20 years off, at the outside.
If we just look at the some of the genre’s best-known representatives for a minute, we find that there are at present, a “new” iteration of the Star Wars (date of birth, 1976) films and a “new” Star Trek (date of birth, 1964/66, depending on when you start counting) film in the works. The franchises are, in movie/TV terms, antiquated, and both of these original franchises are themselves derivative from even earlier models of visual-medium SF, the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials of the 1940’s.
This summer movie houses were dominated by Guardians of the Galaxy, which is a film version of a 1970’s comic book written to cash in on the success of the original Star Wars, which means that its source material is not exactly Young Republicans material, either. Battlestar Galactica? Again, its origins are in the attempts of television writers and executives to cash in the success of Star Wars and the 1970’s pop-culture obsessions with “ancient astronauts” (don’t suppose the name “von Däniken” rings a bell?). Japan’s successful 2010 revival of Space Battleship Yamato was also a revival of a property nearly 40 years old.
My wife and I were talking about this over a coffee porter and we quickly came up with a list of “newer” Space Operas that had been successful enough to have penetrated — at least a little — outside of nerd culture: Babylon Five; Stargate, which also derives its key plot conceit from the Erich von Däniken craze of the 1970’s; Farscape; and Firefly, which only got in by dint of the determination of its fans. The youngest of these, Firefly, is now over ten years old. None of them is currently in production as a regular series, either.
What about Dr. Who, you ask? It strains the definition of Space Opera, it’s central conceit being time travel, not space travel per se. And if I were to grant it for the sake of argument, it would just be one more example of a dated franchise chugging on into the present day.
What has been recently been in production in the film/tv sci-fi world? The Walking Dead; Fringe; Warehouse 13; Z Nation; handful of superhero shows on Warner Brothers’ network that act as feeders for its coming movie series. Ten years ago, the scene was entirely different, with the series named above all in production or in heavy syndication.
So what happened? Is the Space Opera dead? If so, what killed it?
Scientific Discoveries
It’s Kepler’s fault. No not the Protestant father of modern astronomy, talented layman in religious matters who occasionally dabbled in theology, defender of a heliocentric view of the solar system and discoverer of the laws of planetary motion that now bear his name. Not Hans. But the space telescope that was named after him. Since its launch in March, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has discovered 1,763 planets in orbit of stars other than our sun. In these five years and seven months, there have been repeated discoveries of so-called “Super-Earths” and “Earth Twins” that have, on further examination have proven — as far as the received data can tell — to be completely uninhabitable. Which is distressing, since the telescope’s mission statement was to:
- Determine the abundance of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars;
- Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets;
The findings so far are summarized briefly in a paragraph on the mission statement, with the key sentences being:
There is now clear evidence for substantial numbers of three types of exoplanets; gas giants, hot-super-Earths in short period orbits, and ice giants.
For the Space Opera question, the important category of planets discovered is: hot super-Earths. Not habitable planets, but rocky planets 1.25 times the size of earth and larger that have orbital characteristics that exclude them as candidates for possible abodes of life. That is to say, each new Kepler discovery since 2009 has only served to strengthen the ‘Rare Earth’ Hypothesis put forth by Ward and Brownlee in the book of that title.
Now, science fiction worth the name is always downstream from science. When Gene Roddenberry conceived of Star Trek and Glen Larson first thought up Battlestar Galactica, it was still possible to imagine that there were hundreds of habitable worlds out there waiting to be discovered. It was also still possible to think that there might be ways to engineer supra-luminal travel that could credibly leave the passengers on a supra-luminal space vehicle alive (c.f. Dan Simmons’ idea of ‘raspberry jam speed’). And, no, the Alcubierra Warp Drive does not work without positing the existence of Impossibilium, by which I mean some form of exotic matter that has the ability to bend space time in such a way as to enable a vessel with human passengers and crew to traverse interstellar distances in human lifetimes.
Maybe, after a century of revolutionary technological changes in the maximum travel speeds available to humans, we have hit a limit that we can never exceed and the popular imagination is only now catching up with that fact. Larry Niven has posited that there were two basic preconditions for stories involving galactic civilizations, of which Space Operas are a sub-set: 1) economically feasible, reliable, faster-than-light travel and 2) the existence of multiple habitable planets. At the moment, it looks like science speaks against the former being possible and the latter existing. The sinking of that realization into the public imagination may be one explanation.
Cultural Pessimism
One other key element to stories involving galactic empires that Niven failed to mention is that the civilizations on other worlds and ours would have to want to build empires. Or maybe Republics; at least least Federations. A civilization must have some cultural drive to expand and plant itself on new territory in order for us to have a Space Opera, pitting the brave heroes of, say, New Texas, against the rapacious inhuman monsters from Chl’zhul’hagz’va’dozha. Or at least pitting them against the cyborg goons serving the Master Bureaucrat of The Beltway Collective.
In the U.S. and the West in general, we’ve come to denounce that drive to expand and conquer as uncouth imperialism and colonialism. We are not supposed to want to set up shop on the marsh-world inhabited by primitive spear-wielding frog people much less want to draw them into our cultural sphere. And that mentality, common to cultural studies and literary theory, has had its tentacles in lit crit dealing with science fiction for years. A case in point would be Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, by John Rieder. See also Black in Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, Science Fiction, Imperialism and The Third World, and, for a very quick read, this piece from the Atlantic.
Rather than glorify or re-imagine the 19th Century imperialist legacy, newer film sci-fi has tended toward attacks on that legacy and the body of thought that drove it, a la Avatar or District 9, or to focus inward and use expansion into space as an expression of class warfare, as in Elysium. This seems only to reflect the inculcation of a mindset skeptical of the kind of civilizational confidence that was the soul of earlier generations of science fiction. The thought that the culture who brought classical liberal democracy and capitalism to the world should continue that project beyond our planet is one that a generation raised on distillates of Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, and Said simply can’t take seriously. No, they can’t even abide it in their sci-fi, one of the most escapist of film and television genres.
One Too Many Trips to the Well
There is a much more prosaic explanation for the absence of new space operas in the last decade: fatigue. The period from the mid-1990s to 2009 saw all of the series referenced in this essay rise, reach their respective apexes, and end their production runs. That’s a total of six major space opera franchises that were competing for their slice of the target audience’s leisure time and attention for a most of two decades. Perhaps the target audience has simply grown bored with the genre or comfortable with the exponents of the genre they have grown up with and is unwilling to admit new explorations of the theme.
That said, Star Trek and Star Wars still sell tickets and so they will chug on and suck up oxygen (money, time) from any new property that might be developed. This may be the best explanation, but it’s certainly the dullest. I’d like to think that what people imagine their future could — or ought to — be provides some insight the aspirations that their culture is engendering in them. The lack of new space operas can be read as a troubling sign of cultural pessimism, while the unwillingness to part with the “legacy” Space Operas of Star Trek and Star Wars can be read a wistful desire to hold on to the fundamentally optimistic view of life that underpins them.
Now, your turn. Is the Space Opera dead in story-driven visual media or not? And, yes, I have deliberately excluded online gaming from this discussion, focusing only on scripted media with defined storylines unchangeable by the viewers. Of these three explanations, which do you find most convincing? Do you have another?
Published in Culture, General
I think you mean Titius and not Titus? Minor quibble, I realize, but I have always loved Petr Beckmann’s analysis of the orbits of the planets in our solar system and the moons of both Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Beckmann says, in Einstein Plus Two (and yes, I do have to mention this book again and try to do so every 6 months or so on the slightest provocation) in chapter 3 (3.3), on the Titius series:
I am not trying to show you up because I am not up to date on the results you are talking about and would love to know more. But, Beckmann is surely on to something. What gives? Why would this progression happen here in disparate bodies and not in other systems? I am perplexed. Please elucidate.
Right, Titius-Bode. Bad example on my part–I guess it is more controversial than I suggested: some say the exoplanet orbits shred the Bode law; others say they match the Bode law; still others say “insufficient data.”
I only wanted to say that for the purposes of a fiction there is plenty of leeway to placing a human habitable world at the Goldilocks orbit regardless of what the Bode law says.
Better example, maybe, would be the whole “hot Jupiter/Neptune” class of exoplanets. Previous to their discovery, this would have been howled out of the astronomy classroom and the science fiction genre, for all sorts of well thought out reasons: and yet, there they are. NOT that such a world could have habitable moons or whatever, just that they are so weird–stranger than fiction.
I agree. Knowing that there is definitely not large or intelligent life on Mars does not diminish the fun of reading old stories by Robert A. Heinlein or Edgar Rice Burroughs that feature intelligent native Martians. Scientifically literate people already knew that FTL transportation is almost certainly impossible when Star Trek first came out.
One would think with all of the TV networks that we have now there would be more space-based science fiction. But I suppose it’s a lot cheaper to produce stupid “reality” shows and contemporary police and doctor shows. And perhaps the general public just doesn’t care for science fiction as much as many of us do. Frankly, sometimes when I think that it would be cool if this or that novel or series of novels could be turned into a movie or TV series, I’m worried that they would botch it.
The Earth. Yup.
I saw Silent Running on T.V. when I was a kid. I like the scene where he tries to play poker with the robots. And those robots were pretty cool — they came off as harmless and rascally; they deserve more than their cameo in the Star Wars’ sand crawler. Someone should bring them back.
Asimov’s Foundation was good stuff. I don’t see it working as a movie. Perhaps as a T.V. mini-series. But please, keep Peter Jackson away from it.
Guardians was fun and genuinely enjoyable, but in terms of story and memorability I don’t rate it any higher than Battle Beyond the Stars (albeit with vastly superior effects).
The Black Hole still has a following and still looks good. Outland is one of my favorite movies and I own it on Blu-ray. Flash Gordon is classic, as is the soundtrack by Queen (and I still have a crush on Princess Aura).
The first season of Space 1999 was good, as was the series that spawned it, UFO. The Starlost suffered from primitive visuals, but had a great premise. A reboot with modern effects could easily fix that (ditto UFO and Space 1999). Buck Rogers was supposed to be campy and had no illusions about what it was supposed to be (and I still have a crush on Princess Ardala…there’s a theme here I think). Battlestar Galactica was good but was killed off before they could really develop the story (and we’ll just pretend the sequel series where they find Earth never happened).
Some responses, starting with Mithiocracy:
Yeah, actually, I am old enough to remember the various movies and TV shows of which you speak, and several that you left out, including Saturn Three and Space Rangers. That you and I an 5,000 other people in a country of 200 million might remember them is rather my point. There have been no new Space Operas that have captured significant and lasting audiences for over a decade now. Neither was I asserting that there never were any SF Eco-Parables before James Cameron’s Avatrocious , but rather that seems to be the type of science fiction that Hollywood and its related branches is most interested in producing right now. Interstellar looks interesting but it does not look like a space opera at all. It looks to more to be more of a man v. nature than a man v. hostile alien empires story, and hostile (or at least rival) alien empires are what the Space Opera is all about.
Another point that I would make however is that it would be right to call the late 90s to 2009 the “Golden Age” of the Space Opera in television if not film. Of the six serials with any staying power- Star Trek, Stargate,Babylon Five, Farscape, Firefly, and Battlestar Galatica– three originate in that period and the rest were in production for some/most of it.
Scott Abel:
No, you are most probably wrong as a matter of math. Here is the description of the most earth-like planet yet found from NASA’s Kepler website, key sentences in bold for emphasis:
Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four companion planets, which orbit a star half the size and mass of our sun. The star is classified as an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
“M dwarfs are the most numerous stars,” said Quintana. “The first signs of other life in the galaxy may well come from planets orbiting an M dwarf.”
Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130-days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset.
“Being in the habitable zone does not mean we know this planet is habitable. The temperature on the planet is strongly dependent on what kind of atmosphere the planet has,” said Thomas Barclay, research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at Ames, and co-author of the paper. “Kepler-186f can be thought of as an Earth-cousin rather than an Earth-twin. It has many properties that resemble Earth.”
Or to re-state it in non-press-release language: Kepler 186f is to Earth as a used Yugo is to a new McLaren. There’s both cars, at least when we look at Kepler 186f from a distance of 500 light years, it looks like it might be a car, anyway. But we have no idea if it runs or how well.
The Link: http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-discovers-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star/#.VERsrfnF9ic
As for why tidally-locked planets can be ruled out as possible abodes for life:
And it’s not just the extreme temperatures. Permanently devoid of the heat of the star, the atmosphere on the dark side would first turn into a denser gas, then condense into a liquid, and then perhaps further condense into solid form. Meanwhile, air that is constantly exposed to light — or that is heated by a ground that is constantly exposed to light — will heat up and expand.
Although it is doubtful whether the atmosphere on the dark side of the planet would get to solid form, it would certainly keep condensing and leaving a vacuum to suck in the expanding hot air from the other side.
See the article at length, here: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.1025.pdf
And also a brief summary of the work of Edwin Kite: http://www.space.com/13950-habitable-alien-planets-tidal-lock-life.html, which was the basis of Singal’s thought experiment.
He entertains the possibility of life on a tidally locked planet as a thought experiment but does admits it would be unlikely. Other
What we have then is a sample of 1,763 known planets orbiting stars of which exactly one of which meets two bare-bones criteria for possible habitability. Planets on which the Kepler scientists- in some cases working with other observation teams- have confirmed the existence or at least likelihood of water vapor are all drastically different from Earth in one way or another (size, mass, orbital distance from parent star, etc.). And we have no idea if any of them has that most essential characteristic for life: A magnetic field protecting any organic life that might be on it from the radiation emitted by its parent star.
“I’m not dead yet! I feel happy, I feel happy!”
Well, this is my hope for the genre, too. I do think we are in a lull like that seen in Westerns in the late 70’s.
Thanks — I get what you are talking about. There is so much new data streaming in now, isn’t there? I need to get up to date. I wish I had more time for this. But, at least you have given me some starting points.
When I was projecting films on Times Square, I thought I noticed something odd: “Battle Beyond the Stars” and “Space Raiders” had the same music. I was right.
Sixteen years later, I was moderating a discussion with Roger Corman, the producer of the two films, as part of the US presentation at the Moscow Film Festival. I figured I’d left the projection booth behind me at that point, but off camera I couldn’t help asking Corman: did he use the soundtrack twice?
Of course he did. It was James Horner’s first Hollywood score. Roger bought it, he owned it, and he was damn well going to squeeze every penny out of it. That also went for the models and miniature work, done by a low paid unknown named James Cameron, mostly because his wife Gale Ann Hurd already had a job with Corman. Roger told this story as a tribute to the free market, in a way: despite Hollywood’s well known nepotism and cronyism, Cameron had no connections, no relatives in the industry, and no political or ideological “pull”; he was just talented, and it was enough to get him a career.
Space opera is first and foremost a literary genre. And that genre is still kicking with great stuff like “The Expanse” series by James S.A. Corey (a nom de plum of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.)
And, Guardians of the Galaxy…
:P
So why wasn’t the Lensmen series not made into a movie?
Film and TV producers want westerns in the stars or horror movies with aliens. They want to dress up the “tried and true” with spacesuits and call it science fiction. Current TV and movie products are expensive and complex, studios don’t want to risk their money on anything but tried and true formula.
I believe the future of real space opera lies with fan produced films. Films like “Iron Skies” will become more plentiful. Heck, with the computer power available today, I wouldn’t be surprised to see John Wayne staring in new movies.
I’d love to see the Honor Harrington universe or Lazarus Long’s stories brought to the TV as series. I miss Eureka and Warehouse 13.
Hollywood today would only invest in a (new) space opera story if they could guarantee making a franchise out of it. Short of that, they won’t bother.
The best Space Opera I’ve experienced lately (albeit one that is now 13 years old), is Dalek Empire from Big Finish. It’s an audio drama set in the Doctor Who universe (obviously) but without any time-traveling cosmic hobo in sight (except for a single crossover episode that wasn’t part of the main series and wasn’t that good anyway).
The production is outstanding (like a movie playing in your head) and the story is fantastic. There are four “series” of it, of which I’ve heard the first three. (David Tennant starred in the third series, just before he took on the iconic role of the Doctor.)
It’s dark, tragic and except for the fact that the aliens are Daleks, wholly original.
Can’t recommend it highly enough. (And because it’s audio, you can just stick it on your ‘pod and listen while you’re doing other stuff.)
………………
Big Finish audio dramas have replaced television and movies for me, I think, because as mentioned above, I can be listening while doing other stuff, and some of their series definitely tip over into Space Opera.
Vienna (with Chase Masterson) is only four episodes so far, and while officially a Doctor Who spin-off, there’s little evidence of that in the series. It has a very Philip K. Dick feel to it.
Charlotte Pollard also started as a Doctor Who character, and her backstory with the Eighth (and then Sixth) Doctor is pretty relevant to where her own series kicks off. But it’s, so far, a pretty good yarn. The four episodes of the first series follow her attempt to escape from an alien species which is using her to eradicate viruses from the universe. (Again, a good bit of backstory there comes from Big Finish’s Doctor Who stories.)
And while Doctor Who itself might not technically qualify as Space Opera, the newer Dark Eyes series of audio dramas might, as they are a long story arc focused around a couple main areas of conflicts with Daleks and an enemy known as The Eminence.
Big Finish has also brought back the genuine Space Opera Blake’s 7, and did a series of Stargate audio dramas a few years ago, too, with Michael Shanks and Claudia Black. (I’ve heard three of them, and they really feel like lost episodes.)
Of course, their Doctor Who audios are far better than what the BBC has been coughing up on television lately. (Although I haven’t seen much of Capaldi’s Doctor yet, but Smith’s Doctor kind of put me off that series.)
And there’s also an ongoing series called “Gallifrey” that was originally conceived as “The West Wing with Time Lords.” I’ve heard the first three series of that, and it’s good, full of backstabbery and intrigue, if a bit talky.
Anyway, that’s my recommendation for new Space Operas. Unfortunately, no movies. Just audio dramas. But that’s what I’m into these days.
(Remember, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started as an audio drama, and look how it developed.)
So, don’t ask, don’t tell. Gotcha.
It was. They called it “Green Lantern”.
;-)
There was an anime Lensmen film that circulated here in the US back in the early nineties. I remember seeing it, and hearing people complain how much they stole from Star Wars. I also remember thinking, “Philistines! Lucas stole from Lensmen!”
As for the state of Space Opera in visual media …
I think a lot blame can be put on the business as well. Movies are in a bad place right now. Box office receipts are tanking. Every summer seems worse than before for returns, which is compounded by the immense cost of making a movie. Creating a new Space Opera is hard given the effects required nowadays. Production houses are more likely to stick with tried-and-true titles like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Marvel, then to stick their neck out on something different.
Again, effects come into play. People expect a lot more from effects nowadays. Oddly, I think the surfeit of special effects are detrimental to the imagination. In a sense, our ability to create more “realistic” and/or eye-popping effects has taken away from our ability to create a believable story.
Finally, one of the primary and key aspects of the Space Opera is the spirit of adventure. Right now, the Superhero films are filling that niche. To truly tap into the essence of Space Opera, you have to nurture and cultivate that spirit. I think the Pessimism mentioned in the original posting hinders that. The visual media in question has to overcome or address that pessimism in order to succeed.
I think Guardians of the Galaxy will do a lot for Space Opera. Although it has all the trappings of a superhero film, it’s set in space and so has the feel of Space Opera. Of the aforementioned lackluster year in Summer film, Guardians was one of the big successes and shouldn’t be dismissed. With that and the arrival of a new Star Wars series, I suspect Space Opera will receive some much needed oxygen.
I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy immensely, but the world-building was remarkably lazy.
As for the lack of “Earths”, I suspect that won’t be a problem for a while until we see more in the concrete. For the time being, we might understand that Earth is quite possibly a rarity, but that knowledge remains abstract. It wasn’t until we could see and land unmanned craft on Mars that it ceased to be a strange world with possibilities and just became a rock.
Until we see that we are relatively unique, I think most audiences will take for granted that space is filled with worlds we can walk on and survive on and that these worlds will be people with creatures we can eventually cooperate and relate to, or fight as the case may be. In a sense, we’re still reading of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville and imaging the oddities of the unknown even though such oddities may soon be proved mere fantasies – but isn’t that again a key element of Space Opera?
Note to self: When I write a short story, my character’s starship will be the “Sir John Mandeville.”
C’mon! A space-station made out of the hollowed-out skull of a dead alien from an ancient god-like race? That’s awesome sauce!
But seriously, the real reason there’s no Lensman series is the same reason John Carter didn’t make any money (and also the reason nobody’s made any decent Cthulhu Mythos movies).
The classic stories have been retold so many times via homage (rip-off) in all the other sci-fi and space opera movies like Star Wars, Dune, etc, that they no longer seem original.
It’d be like trying to make an Agatha Christie movie in the 70s, when every detective tv show based nearly every episode’s plot on one Agatha Christie story or another.
The book series I’d REALLY like to see made into movies is The Stainless Steel Rat, because the idea of an inter-galactic criminal and con-man hadn’t really been done before … up until Firefly and Guardians of the Galaxy, that is.
Still, I think Jim DiGriz would make a great central character for an HBO series…
I don’t know if I liked Babylon 5 more than I liked Farscape but I certainly enjoyed both immensely. JMS, the author of B5, had two spin-offs, neither of which did much more than 13 episodes each (Crusade and Rangers), and I was enjoying Crusade when they winked out. (I did read that JMS learned that the SciFi Channel, owned by Turner, wanted something like WWE in space and wasn’t interested in that kind of effort.)
I don’t know that Henson, responsible for Farscape, had plans for anything else, but if Henson did, I’d look forward to that.
The revitalized Battlestar Galactica was confusing probably because I did not always watch to be maintained in the plot. It wasn’t always interesting to me.
I really liked the movie Stargate but thought that the series, which seemed relatively popular, was employment Richard Dean Anderson, who left before its final collapse.
I hardly ever watch SyFy as SyFy hardly ever does sci fi anymore. What it does is pitiful at minimum, wretched at worst.
Given the number of channels, one might think that there would be a place for those of us who really enjoy space opera but, given that no one is standing up and writing the checks to get it produced, maybe not.
Stargate Universe was a really good show. It subverted the idea of a ship’s crew all working together by stranding a bunch of folk with vastly different backgrounds (and agendas) onboard a ship they didn’t have full control over.
Plus, I’ll watch pretty much anything with Robert Carlyle in it (with the exception of Once Upon A Time).
On the last family vacation we took before our parents’ divorce my brother and I read The Stainless Steel Rat for President aloud in the backseat. That and the visit to the Huntsville Space and Rocketry Center were the highlights of the trip.
I read several of the Stainless Steel Rat books entirely out of order. That I could enjoy them thoroughly speaks to the strength of the writing to hold well.
Actually, I read a lot of Harrison in the late 80’s and 90’s. Several of his books would hold well in visual media.
I wish there were more sci-fi and fantasy stories in the vein of Alien, Predator, or Outland, that aren’t about saving the galaxy. Not every story needs a Death Star.
Prometheus
MOON
Sunshine
Event Horizon
Riddick
Predators
Dredd
Super-8
Cloverfield
Outlander
Gravity
Elysium
Edge of Tomorrow
Oblivion
After Earth
Ender’s Game
Starship Troopers
Avatar
The Fifth Element
Serenity
Interstellar
Europa Report
Apollo 18
Deep Impact
Armageddon
Contact
Mission To Mars
Red Planet
Etc…
Not to mention all the straight-to-streaming, straight-to-cable, and straight-to-DVD movies made annually that only hard-core addicts know about.
You know the real reason they “don’t make movies like when I was a kid”?
It’s because you aren’t a kid any more. The movies you remember as being awesome when you were a kid seemed awesome because you were a kid.
Kids today have their own movies, and in 20/30 years they’re going to be complaining that Hollywood doesn’t make those sorts of movies anymore either.
Let me give you a glimmer of hope on the exoplanet angle, since I do a little work on that subject. The Kepler mission’s “discovery space” (what kinds of planets it could find, plotted by their parameters) is, like all exoplanet searches, easiest for the so-called “hot Jupiters”—high mass planets very close to their stars. It also extends to high mass planets up to moderate distances from their stars, on the one hand, and smaller planets very close to their stars, on the other.
In order to find earth-mass planets at earth-like distances from their stars, Kepler would have had to have survived for an additional…maybe two years. But it had a mechanical failure before that time, limiting the search. Nevertheless, the number of likely planets (about 3,000 of them!) increases the closer you get to the Earth-like edge of this envelope, hinting that there may be vast numbers of Earth-like planets out there to be discovered.
I’ve got to get back to work now, and I’ve got to renew my membership *today*, but I will follow up with a better description of this and why the discoveries work this way, when I get a bit of time.
He was “insanely” good in Hitler: Rise of Evil (the whole thing is on Youtube).
Dr. Rush was the main reason to watch Stargate: Universe. A man genius who they actually took the time to give some nuance to.