“There’s no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse.”

 “What’s the most dangerous thing that you’ve ever done?  And why did you do it?”

Chris Hadfield, TED 2014

If you want to get a really good idea of what’s it’s like to climb into a rocket and leave the planet, I strongly recommend that you watch Chris Hadfield’s TED Talk from TED 2014, held here in Vancouver.

Commander Hadfield evocatively describes watching the Earth “roaring silently with colour and texture as it pours by...” while holding onto the outside of the International Space Station with one hand – and then going blind during his spacewalk. It’s an intimate window into the experience of being in space, and into the relationship between danger, fear and preparation.

For viewers who can’t imagine watching something as long as 18 minutes on the internet, you may prefer to read his book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. It’s a readable combination of autobiography, motivation, and insight into the nuts and bolts of space exploration.

- Sid

"Would you ever sign up for a trip to Mars?"

The arching sky is calling

Spacemen back to their trade.

All hands! Stand by! Free falling!

And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,

Far drives the thundering jet,

Up leaps the race of Earthmen,

Out, far, and onward yet--

We pray for one last landing

On the globe that gave us birth;

Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies

And the cool, green hills of Earth.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth 

It used to be that I depended on television for weather reports, but thanks to the Internet I just check online with The Weather Network whenever I need information more explicit than what I can determine by looking out the window. The Weather Network website does its best to be more than just a list of temperatures and weather predictions by adding in things like trivia, photos from users, videos of extreme weather, and surveys – which often have nothing to do with weather. As an example, a recent survey asked visitors to the site if they would be willing to “Sign up for a trip to Mars” with four possible answers.

I was pleased to see that 31% of the respondents would be willing to go into space, but a little surprised to see that 3% would sign up exclusively for a one-way trip. (Just for the record, I fall into the “Sure!” group, and I honestly can’t say that I thought about it in terms of whether it would be impossible to return.) I realize that this small percentage probably viewed the Martian odyssey as a chance to leave behind the petty concerns of earthbound existence for a life on the frontier, without ever looking back.  That aside, would Martian colonists have to accept that it was a one-way ride with no chance to return to Mother Terra?

Depending on the relative orbital positions of Earth and Mars, and how much fuel you’re willing to burn on the trip, going to Mars could take as little as 130 days or as long as 300. Let’s pick a median and say 210 days, or about seven months. That doesn’t sound like a one-way trip to me. It’s a long haul, admittedly, and 130 days sounds a lot better, but provided that there’s adequate living space, entertainment, and perhaps even work of some sort to fill the time, not a deal-breaker in terms of a round trip.

However, this is the sort of schedule that NASA has used for pieces of technology not bothered by boredom, claustrophobia or lack of gravity. If we do a one-G burn to midpoint and then decelerate at the same rate for the second half of the trip, apparently the trip could come in at less than a week. (With some variance in the exact times - see above re: relative orbital positions.) You need a lot of fuel to pull this off, but I’m willing to bet that there’s some kind of compromise between the two extremes of zero and one gravity* that would make this practical in terms of both time and fuel.

This solves two problems - keeping the trip time to a minimum, and reducing the effects of extended exposure to zero gravity.  Given the various health issues suffered by astronauts returning to Earth after 146 days in the zero-G environment of the International Space Station, anything that either reduces the time line or creates the illusion of gravity through acceleration is a good thing.

In the short term, astronauts get their “earth legs” back fairly quickly, but the long term effects will not be known until, well, the long term – retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield will probably be the subject of regular medical scrutiny for the rest of his life in order to determine whether or not his natural span was reduced by his extended exposure to lack of gravity.

As it turns out, we may have already begun the process of colonizing Mars in some small way, albeit accidentally. A recent study conducted by the American Society for Microbiology revealed that there are 377 strains of bacteria that can make it through the sterilization process used on the Curiousity Mars rover before its departure.** This is probably a non-issue: between exposure to vacuum and high UV levels on the Martian surface, it would be a very determined organism that survived the entire process. On the other hand, there are bacteria that thrive in a wide range of environmental conditions, so it wouldn’t take a lot of shelter for a bacteria to make it to Mars alive.

Hmmm…do bacteria mutate? Anybody remember The Andromeda Strain?  Now that I think about it, maybe it is a good idea after all if no one comes back from Mars - just in case.

- Sid

*And if you do a 2-G trip, I bet you can bring it down to a day or two, but first, that would be really fuel intensive, and second, it may not be a great idea to subject the human anatomy to two gravities for that long.

** There is actually a mandate in the UN Space Treaty that stipulates that space missions "shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.”

The bad news is that it's a non-speaking part.

One of the best things to come out of the Internet is the concept of crowdfunding.  Looking for working capital for that new indie game that you want to develop?  Trying to put together enough money to record your first album?  Need some money to shoot a new season of your YouTube series?  Pick a platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, assemble your sales pitch, create some incentives for contributors, and away you go.

But when it comes to incentives, it's hard to beat the one that director J. J. Abrams - or perhaps more accurately Disney Inc. - is offering to supporters of its new Force For Change UNICEF charity:

Yes - a chance to be in the next Star Wars movie, currently in production.

Seriously, how cool is this?  The joke is that on paper, it's actually pretty cheap as prizes go - two round trip tickets to London and a hotel room for two nights. But in reality, it's spectacular if you're even slightly a fan of the Star Wars universe.  You and your guest get to go backstage for filming at Pinewood Studios and meet the cast members, and the winner will appear as an extra in a scene for the movie.*

The system is very simple.  Contribute ten bucks, get one entry in the contest and the title of Star Wars: Force for Change Founding Member.  Contribute $50,000, get 5000 entries and an advanced private screening of Episode VII for you and 20 guests.**  Obviously there are some levels in between these two extremes.  You probably won't be surprised to hear that I've made a contribution at the hundred dollar/ten entry Advocate level, which is the most popular category for contributors (most likely because you get a t-shirt).

So, if you're at all a fan, or just want to help a good cause, you can enter here. In fact, you don't even need to contribute - A Force For Change is happy to accept entries from non-contributors via snail mail.  But let's face it, ten dollars isn't a lot, and hey, it only takes one entry to win. The campaign is running until July 18th, 2014.

And may the Force be with you.

- Sid

*  There's a small print disclaimer that acknowledges the unfortunate fact that not every scene filmed makes it into the final cut of a film, but which also says that "the Star Wars Team is taking every measure possible to ensure that your scene makes it into the movie!"

** This is not as crazy as it sounds.  I can easily imagine 20 hardcore fans chipping in $2500 each for an advanced screening.

Ordinary effects?

So far I've seen two of the big summer comic book movies:  Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, with Guardians of the Galaxy and X-Men: Days of Future Past still to come.  (To be honest, I'll probably skip Guardians of the Galaxy simply because they're not "my" Guardians - when I think of this particular Marvel team, it's the version from the 60s and 70s that was led by Major Vance Astro, who coincidentally ends up wielding Captain America's shield in the team's intergalactic encounters.)

But I digress.  I really enjoyed The Winter Soldier - Chris Evans repeats his perfect performance as Steve Rogers from the first film, and this time they really showcase Captain America's physical prowess and fighting ability, while cleverly dealing with his position as a man displaced from his own time. The script does a great job of showing the slippery slope of surveillance as a tool of freedom, complete with Robert Redford as an advocate of the new world order of pre-emptive strikes and "getting the job done".  Previous knowledge of the Winter Soldier plotline from the comics meant that one of the film's big revelations wasn't much of a surprise for me, and the dénouement isn't as good as Cap's Times Square revival scene from the first movie, but overall I found it to be an entertaining and eminently watchable movie.

After having such a positive reaction to Captain America, I was primed for an equally impressive second film in the Spider-Man series, but to my disappointment, it almost completely failed to capture my interest.  I didn't quite start yawning during the show, but it was a damn near thing.

But why I didn't enjoy Spider-Man more?  There's some good acting:  I'm a fan of Tobey Maguire's portrayal of Peter Parker, but Andrew Garfield's version of the character is starting to grow on me.  Sally Field is quite good, Emma Stone is suitably plucky, and I liked what Dane DeHaan did with the role of Harry Osborn.  There's some very good bits of Spider-Man dialogue that, for the first time in any of the movies, really evoked the wise-cracking webslinger from the comics, and Aunt May gets to show herself as a person rather than a cardboard cutout that says, "Oh, Peter" every few minutes.

Admittedly, there are some unfortunate script problems*, but they shouldn't have been deal-breakers.  Why didn't I care when Gwen Stacy's life was literally dangling by a thread - or more accurately, a web?  Why was I more emotionally invested in the short scene where a ten-year-old in a home-made Spider-Man costume decides to confront the Rhino than I was in the entire climactic scene of the film?  How did that happen?

I think the problem is that the special effects are more special than effective.  An awful lot of the action in Spider-Man 2 looked like the trailer for a really really impressive video game. I KNEW that they were special effects, albeit really good special effects, but still effects, still "fake" rather than real.  When it comes right down to it, I watched a big fight scene between two sets of computer code.  Why would I have an emotional reaction to that?

Intellectually, I know that there must have been a lot of digital effects in The Winter Soldier.  However, the skill with which they're blended with the live action, and the degree to which Chris Evans does his own stunt work, made me believe completely that I was watching Steve Rogers take out a SHIELD gunship with nothing but a tin shield** and his bare hands, or steel himself for a 150 foot fall after fighting an elevator full of HYDRA agents. 

Maybe this explains why Tobey Maguire kept losing his mask in the other Spider-Man 2:  it gave the audience an opportunity to see him as a person rather than a collection of well-rendered and shaded pixels.

- Sid

* I really hate to say this, but I thought that Jamie Foxx's character was right out of Batman Forever in terms of being a sort of over-the-top camp cypher, and the writers had Spider-Man manage to stop two airline flights from colliding at the last minute - which would be impressive if he'd actually known that the clock was ticking.  As it is, it came across as a weird coincidence rather than a win.

** Yes, I know, it's vibranium, but work with me here, I'm trying to make a point.