Because Curiosity has no passenger seats. Ruby and I checked this out this morning, and on a screen that’s more than big enough to make it way cool. I couldn’t think of a better way to teach your kid about planets: bring them there.
So I watched Limitless for the second time last night and was mightily impressed by the trippy ‘frame games’ it plays. It has a number of mise en abyme effects going on, mostly decorative, but very pretty nonetheless. It struck me, yet again, the way place can be plugged into place, the way the ‘view from Mars’ can be plugged into your den or office cube or what have you. Perspective is portable, which is what makes it so powerful. And this, if you think about it, has to be its signature structural feature, the way it is, as Heidegger would say, something continually thrown, constitutively blind to its functional origins, and so as easy to toss across the room as a postcard.
Poof! You’re on Mars. You’re not, but you are. What does it matter how long the lines of communication are?
This, once again, shows just how out-and-out antithetical the first-person view is to natural explanation: the very information that is the grist of scientific understanding has to be absent as a condition of its possibility. You have to be nowhere to be anywhere, as hidden as a photographer. Like someone suffering transportational narcolepsy, we simply pop from place to place, frame to frame, the ultimate informatic end-user, thinking we see all there is to see.
Morra has nothing on Kellhus.
Hi-Res of another planet should be pretty mind-blowing. So long as doesn’t become just another show. This one of Curiosity descending on the skyhooks really got to me: http://gizmodo.com/5932166/spectacular-image-of-mars-curiositys-descent-from-space … Really have to learn to imbed links on wordpress.
Also, I might as well take this opportunity to plug the Slog of Slogs: PON Edition over on the Second Apocalypse. We’ve created a subforum and have decided on a thread and five days a chapter – until we’re done or TUC comes out, whichever comes first. We’re debating the issues of spoilers and timing here – http://secondapocalypse.forumer.com/forum-re-read-t1234229.html, though I invite anyone to simply sign up and lurk – http://secondapocalypse.forumer.com/index.php
It’s not pretty but its home. Cheers.
Does this help?
Thank you, good sir.
I sit and stare at the pictures coming from Mars and I’m convinced that it’s really somewhere in the middle of the Sahara desert or something…OK, not really…It’s just really mind boggling to me that we have little robots running around the surface of another planet. I never thought sand and dust could be so…beautiful/awe inspiring.
The rover clearly startled them, but the sand people will soon be back, and in greater numbers.
That website has a collaboration between Schwitzgebel and Alan Moore of all people. Bookmarked.
Alan Moore, just not THE Alan Moore. Still interesting. He also cross-posted it on his blog.
A theory I’ve been mulling for a while is that as great as all this virtual exploration (via robots) is for getting the layperson excited about space and other worlds, the descendent-of-a-NASA-engineer in me can’t help but wonder if the ability to virtually “be there” is creating a sense of sufficiency, if this will actually DISCOURAGE rather than encourage a future in MANNED space travel. Movies and television with enough visual effects to transport you there probably aren’t helping either.
I suppose it probably doesn’t matter. As technology gets more advanced and complex, necessitating longer lead times for any project like this, It’s become next to impossible to sustain public enthusiasm for a project long enough to keep it publicly funded. Until space can be made profitable on a large scale, the amount of direct interaction we have with it will always be limited.
Unless we exploit it and gouge it up and leave even more tyre tracks all over it, we wont be able to explore what other planets have to offer us…which is essentially their pristine state?
Indeed, what is the point of going to another planet if you’ve shitted it all over like you’re current one? How is that actually going anywhere?
Well, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, eventually if you shit over your own planet enough, you’ll need to move on to others provided you haven’t Great Filtered yourself (as a species) out of existence. For that matter, even if you keep your home planet as pristine as possible, eventually Mr. Asteroid or Ms. Gamma Ray Burst will come trundling along and ruin your species’ collective day.
Manned space travel is considered a “nice to have” now, but eventually, if we live long enough (certainly not a guarantee or even, necessarily, a likelihood) it will move into the “essential for the continuance of the species” category, even if by then it amounts to little more than uploading our digital selves into some starship’s memory and hurling it spaceward.
I presumed when you raised manned space travel, you wanted to explore what they are. Perhaps somewhat like seeing a new painting in an art gallery (am I way off in that interpretation). I’m not talking shitting up in a practical sense, but an aesthetic sense.
What commercialisation tends to do is scribble all over the artwork. So what’s the point of looking at a new artwork when it’s a mess of commercial scribble like your old one? Tyre tracks everywhere and more. Pave Martianise, put up a parking lot.
I think Futurama beat me to it with an early episode where they head to a commercialised moon.