And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one of how he had awakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious echoing in his brain:
The Ramans do everything in threes.
Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
Here we sit, poised on the edge of another new year. Horrifyingly, the coming year may mark the last new year that our parochial little planet is allowed to celebrate. Astrophysicist Craig Kasnov, who is part of the SETI* group, has announced the discovery of three large "objects" that are headed for Earth at a high rate of speed, with an estimated arrival date of December 2012. Now, to be fair to Mr. Kasnov, he's not quoted as actually saying that these are spaceships, but when you identify something as an unidentified flying object....
The prospect of an invasion involving a trio of gigantic starships rings all sorts of bells in the science fiction community. Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama deals with an oddly similar situation to the one described above: the discovery of a mysterious object approaching at high speed, the revelation that said object is artificial, and the ensuing reaction by humanity. In the case of Rama, the enigmatic worldlet described by Clarke, an expedition is dispatched to explore this 50 kilometer long visitor to our solar system.
Rama is discovered to be hollow, a silent, uninhabited cylindrical world, but as it nears the Sun Rama comes to life in a limited manner, quite literally turning on the lights, and producing a variety of biological robots. And then, strangely, Rama activates its engines and leaves the solar system after apparently refueling from the Sun.
Rendezvous With Rama is a very typical Clarke novel in its portrayal of humans interacting with mysterious alien artifacts - the Monolith in 2001 is a similar example. I suspect that Clarke didn't originally plan a sequel, but as with more than one aging science fiction author, several followup novels were written "with" a younger writer. These frankly inferior sequels reveal that the builders of Rama do, in fact, do everything in threes - which includes building massive intersolar spacecraft.
For fans of pop culture rather than science fiction, the current discovery ties in all too conveniently with the oft-referenced end-of-the-world-in-2012 as per the Mayan calendar, and as such it's bound to get a certain amount of press. However, that same press seems to offer contradictory accounts regarding the alien spaceships: for example, in one version they're approaching the southern hemisphere and won't be visible from the northern hemisphere, but in another version they were discovered by an Alaska-based search system. Size seems to vary as well, with one reference to the objects as being in the "tens of kilometers" and another article confidently saying that they are in excess of 240 kilometers in length.
Presumably SETI is making every possible effort to contact the alien fleet in an attempt to establish peaceful communications - after all, if their mandate is to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, they must have some idea of what to do after finding it. On the other hand, we only have two years. Should we not be dedicating every second of the next 23 months to stocking Earth's arsenals in preparation for a possible invasion? Come on, fellow Terrans, let's not forget the lesson taught by Independence Day.
But when it comes right down to it, I have to side with geek goddess Felicia Day on this one, as per her Twitter account:
I saw the pix; those are smudges/reflections/image defects on the pix. We're being invaded by bad emulsion!Happy New Year, everyone. One more step into the future...
Hey, scratches on an emulsion, I've done that. Well I didn't intend to do that but stuff like that does happen. It's a wet process after all and things are susceptible to damage. You should see the damage I did to a roll of film because when I was hanging it up to go into an E6 processor (dip and dunk) I inadvertently hit the little light switch on my watch.
ReplyDeleteIn a largely digital age you have to wonder who is using film (in whatever form, sheet or roll) anymore, after all they canned the last Kodachrome machine. Still it must be out there somewhere, and any unfortunate processing accidents open for misinterpretation.
And speaking of Kodachrome, does that mean that future listeners to the Paul Simon song of the same title won't know what he's talking about? Gives you nice bright colours...
Oddly enough, I can point at a recent media example regarding the ongoing use of film. One of the last things that Jared Loughner did before starting to shoot people at the Gabrielle Giffords rally in Tuscon was to pick up prints from a roll of 35mm film. Perhaps not the most comforting endorsement of traditional photography...
ReplyDeleteThe Kodachrome reference is of interest, because it's exactly that sort of anachronism that pops up in science fiction. I guarantee that someplace in my collection, there are references to explorers of the future loading film into cameras as they climb out onto the surface of an alien planet.
- Sid