Okay, 59.9 years, really.

 I don't know what the rest of you think about while doing cardio, but my mind goes off in all sorts of directions.  Today's session on the recumbent bicycle led me to the following train of thought.

(There's a bit of a spoiler here, but bear with me.)

In Tron: Legacy, part of the plot is a plan by Clu, Kevin Flynn's digital doppelganger, to take over the physical world.  In order to accomplish this, he has assembled an army of "repurposed" inhabitants of Tron's computer world that he plans to transfer into the real world, presumably by reversing the process that brought Flynn, and later his son, in.

Okay, so far so good.  Now, as we all know, the great debate regarding Star Trek's transporter is exactly how the damn thing would work in practise.  After all, if it converts the people on the transporter pads into energy, e equals mc squared tells us that you end up with the equivalent of a pretty good sized atomic bomb going off down there in the heart of the Enterprise, which has to be a bad idea.

In this case, we're looking at the opposite problem.  Would it not take all of the energy in the Los Angeles power grid to create the mass of a person?    Let's see...Los Angeles uses about 3.9 million KW a year...that's about 10700 KW a day...1 KW equals 3,600,000 joules, so that's 38,465,753,424 joules a day...one pound of mass is about a 10 megaton atomic explosion*...one megaton is 4,184,000,000,000,000 joules...a two hundred pound man would be about 836,800,000,000,000 joules...divide by joules per day in LA...divide by 365 to convert days to years...no, I'm out of my depth here, that can't be right.  I end up with 60 years of the entire electrical usage of Los Angeles to create just one person from scratch, let alone an entire army.

Remember the cascade failure that shut down electricity for the entire North East area from New York to James Bay in 2003?  Imagine Clu's digital forces making their way up the datastream to the basement of Flynn's arcade, as breakers across the state - and the country -  flare white hot and explode under the stress of attempting to feed the creation of physical forms for the invasion force...

But, let's be honest here.  Higher math isn't my strong suit - in fact, after a couple of pints, I sometimes have trouble figuring out the tip for dinner.  If any mathematically inclined readers of this posting would like to take a shot at calculating the energy involved, I will be happy to correct my figures.

- Sid

* There's some fuzz factor there, I found different kiloton yields for a pound of mass online, but ten made the math easier.

Virtuality 1: Tron 2

Wi-fi?  What's that?

Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy

I went to see Tron: Legacy last week, and I was surprised by my reaction:  I thought that it was a bit old-fashioned. 

This is an odd reaction to a cutting-edge 3-D CGI extravaganza, and so I came home and watched the original Tron, a comparison which I was certain would establish Legacy as the visual masterpiece that it must be.

Surprisingly, even with its 28 year handicap, I found Tron to be a better movie in many ways, especially when viewed in context.  In 1982, Tron was a groundbreaking state of the art special effects movie, although obviously state of the art has moved on since then, as it always does. But at the time it presented a unique and original view of a digital world, a view which in many ways offered the first metaphor for a visual representation of the world of bits and bytes.

But let's give some perspective to this picture.  In 1982 we were sitting in front of monochrome green CRTs and 8-bit colour displays, listening to the click and whir of single-sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. There were only primitive graphical user interfaces:  the first Mac had not yet been released, and the first version of Windows was three long years away.  Tron's special effects were created using systems with 2 MB of RAM and 330 MB hard drives - you can get a smart phone with more processing power now.

In spite of the limitations of hardware - in the end, only a very small percentage of the movie was actual computer graphics -  Tron showed us a world that none of us had ever imagined, or perhaps the world that we'd all imagined.  It represented an important landmark in our first fumbling attempts to establish a metaphor for the digital universe that was beginning to develop. 

So why doesn't Legacy represent an extension of that metaphor?  What's changed?

We have, or rather society has. People grow up in cyberspace these days.  Millions of people spend most of their free time on the game grid, people who operate digital avatars for hours every day.  Most of us neither know nor care what the physical location of anything on the internet might be - for example, I haven't the least clue where this blog is actually stored, nor do I need to.*  We work online, we shop online, we talk online, we date online - let's face it, we live online.

On that basis, Legacy left me with a bit of a "Yes, and...?" feeling.  It's a bit like one of those movies where explorers find a long-lost plateau in Africa which is teeming with dinosaurs.  Technically speaking, Legacy takes place in a closed single-portal system which has been churning away in isolation for over 20 years, 20 years of technological development in the outside world.  The prospect of the denizens of that system attempting to take over the real world is almost comical, like the idea of being attacked by a basketball-sized 8-bit Pacman while walking down the street.

Now, I don't want to make any claims that Tron is the virtual equivalent of Gone With The Wind in terms of moviemaking.  Even at the time, I doubt that anyone considered it as a nominee for Best Movie at the Oscars.  But visually, conceptually, it did what science fiction is supposed to do:  it showed us a "what if" world, a world that didn't exist, but which could exist, which might exist.

Legacy?  I don't mean to suggest in any way that the effects in Legacy aren't well done (or that it's any more deserving of a Best Movie nomination), but their representation of cyber-reality certainly didn't offer a unique view of a digital universe, just a more expensive view of the universe that Tron had already shown us. In fact, the combination of lighting, sets and costumes made it look like nothing more than an extended commercial for the next really big male body wash of your choice.

- Sid

*  Have you ever wondered where Google™, Facebook™ or eBay™ actually are, in the real world?   

Happy New Year, but.

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...

 - Sid

* Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.