Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.

Mark Watney, The Martian

Until I saw the trailer for The Martian, I was completely unaware of the best-selling self-published 2011 novel by Andy Weir that provided the original story for the movie. Intrigued by the concept, I took the book with me as vacation reading on a long weekend getaway, and found myself completely caught up in the trials and tribulations of American astronaut Mark Watney, left for dead on Mars after a piece of debris knocks him out and disables his suit telemetry during the evacuation of his mission team due to a dangerous dust storm.

When Watney regains consciousness, he finds himself alone and stranded, faced with the very basic challenge of staying alive, followed by the longer term project of contacting Earth in hopes of being rescued before he runs out of food. Watney's first person mission logs detail his ingenious solutions to the obstacles that he needs to overcome in order to successfully meet these two challenges.

Weir stacks the deck in Watney's favour in a couple of ways.*  First, the marooned astronaut is an engineer/botanist, the perfect combination for the situation – there might well have been a completely different outcome if the stranded crew member had been a psychiatrist/pilot.  Second, NASA has conveniently provided a few raw potatoes for the crew’s Thanksgiving dinner, which gives Watney immediate access to something that he can cultivate in the mission's habitat in order to extend his food supplies.

I found it to be a fun, entertaining read, although not terribly deep (any book which relies heavily on jokes about 70s television shows is not going to challenge Crime and Punishment in terms of psychological depth) and completely enjoyed it.  Oddly enough, I'm not sure I’d recommend the book to everyone, although I suspect it’s going to work very well as a movie, especially with Matt Damon providing the voice - and face - for Watney's narrative.

Why wouldn’t I recommend the book to all and sundry?  The plot of The Martian is made up of an extended series of scientific solutions to the problems of survival, solutions that are heavily based in math, chemistry and physics.**  Weir does an excellent job of making the science comprehensible, but even so, there's an awful lot of discussion of caloric units, wattage, surface areas, molecular composition and so on.

I've always been more interested in the more scientific side of science fiction, and as such I found Watney's solutions to be ingenious and interesting, but I know a few people who would blink a few times and then abandon the book in favour of less technical narrative.

However, the real question that The Martian raises is one that we have yet to face in our limited exploration of space:  how far would we go to rescue an astronaut marooned in space?  Space travel relies on a limited supply of resources and hardware which are incredibly expensive and time-consuming to assemble and construct.  Would we spend millions of dollars and jeopardize other missions in order to stage a rescue effort which might not even succeed?

Regardless of the manner in which that question is answered in The Martian***, I'd like to think that we would.  In my mind, there's an unspoken covenant between humanity and the people that have chosen to be our pathfinders into the universe, a covenant that says that if they find themselves in peril, we will do everything in our power to rescue them - it would be a betrayal of their dedication and courage to do anything less. 

- Sid

* This is surprisingly common in castaway stories. The original Robinson Crusoe has an entire sailing ship full of supplies to draw upon:  guns, gunpowder, tools, wood, clothing, canvas, and so on. The astronaut in the 1964 movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars miraculously (and improbably) discovers open water, edible aquatic plants, rocks that release oxygen when heated, and an alien man Friday.  Tom Hanks gets the contents of random FedEx™ packages – including a volleyball.

** I spent about thirty minutes looking for an official name for the physics trick involving lateral pressure on a taut cable that Watney uses to get a flipped Mars rover upright again, without ever finding the right search terms to get the results I wanted. If anyone finds out what it's called, please leave a comment!

*** No spoilers here, Dorothy.

Planet Earth.

As an artist, I am inspired by the element of perspective within my paintings. I approached my earlier series “Sea Change” from a dramatic vantage point. The infusion of colour and texture expressed a wealth of emotions projected onto a landscape. While nature was the departure point, the series Sea Change (coined by Shakespeare in The Tempest) explored romantic illusions in life.

In the last couple of years, I have become more of a realist. I’ve seen great changes politically, economically and socially within our world. On an environmental level, we are seeing the impact of our civilization. There is a transition happening on every level of our society. It is because of this that I am compelled to paint my new series, Planet Earth.

Norah Borden

In 2010, my friend Norah Borden started to see the world in a different way - literally.

Norah is an accomplished artist, who, until that point in time, had been painting interpretive, ethereal landscapes and seascapes. But in 2010, she saw a world in a global crisis, a world that was being shaped and changed by political and economic forces that sharply emphasized the divisions between countries and cultures.  Norah's response to these changes was to begin seeing our planet from a higher perspective, looking at the world as an interconnected whole that ignores the lines between countries and ideologies.

Photographs don't do justice to Norah's work - the art is incredibly textural and conceptually developed, and the large canvases that she has chosen for Planet Earth emphasize the detail and artistry that has gone into the creation of her work.  The swirling colours combine with the thick layering of medium to create a perfect artistic interpretation of our world as seen from orbit, while at the same time evoking a microscopic view.

If you'd like to get a good look at Norah's art in person, her work is currently on display at Telus Science World here in Vancouver.  She's doing a show in cooperation with Urthecast, a Vancouver-based company that provides access to data from high definition cameras mounted on the International Space Station.  If you get a chance, I strongly recommend that you take a look at her show - everyone should have an opportunity to see the world the way that Norah does.

http://www.ourplanetearth.ca/ - on display until September 14th, 2015.

- Sid

*Norah, who is a tiny perfect blonde person, works on her large canvases in an equally tiny perfect studio space - I've never seen her painting, but I imagine it as the artistic equivalent of building a ship in a bottle.

The Secret of the Ninth Planet.

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.

Mary Roach, Packing for Mars

On July 14th, NASA's New Horizons probe did a flyby of Pluto, which resulted in a treasure trove of information about the erstwhile ninth planet and its five moons, and is considered to have been a resounding success in adding to our limited catalogue of data for the outer reaches of the solar system.  But, you know what my first thought was when I heard about the flyby?

I wish we were doing this with people.

Yes, people are not the ideal tool for space exploration.  As per the opening quote form Packing for Mars, people are a problem when it comes to life in space, and I can't deny that NASA is doing a brilliant job of expanding our scientific knowledge of the solar system with automated probes and robotic rovers that are indifferent to the difficulties involved.  But ultimately, space exploration has to include the goal of having human beings travel to the same destinations – otherwise, we’re just watching it on TV.

- Sid

P.S. The title of this posting is an homage to a 1959 young adult novel by Donald A. Wollheim which was part of the science fiction selection at my grade school library. I don't normally provide the sources for the blog titles (and most of them do reference other genre material) but Wollheim's novel has a bit of a special place in my heart, and I felt that it deserved a bit of recognition.

Shouldn't Star Wars have been an option?

 "I don't need a doctor, damn it, I am a doctor!"

Leonard McCoy, Star Trek

The head of my company's skateboarding department* asked me a question this morning about a meeting on Friday, and I explained that I hadn't been in attendance, I'd been moving furniture.

"Oh, did you move?"

"No, my girlfriend moved in with me."

"That's great!  Which one is she, Star Trek or Doctor Who?"

I laughed and said neither, but it's an interesting question when you consider the two options.  My girlfriend Karli is fully aware of my interest in Doctor Who, and I've suggested that we watch a couple of episodes** at some point so that she can get an idea of how the show works.  (In return, I've kept track of what's been going on in The Bachelorette, it's important to share things in a relationship.)

It would never occur to me to make a similar suggestion about Star Trek. Whether or not someone has watched any episodes from the original series or seen either of the reboot films, the characters and concepts are inextricably embedded in the pop culture matrix - why would it be necessary to introduce anyone to Kirk and the Enterprise at this point in time?

Doctor Who, on the other hand, may be one of the last remaining bastions of pure geekdom.  It's very much a revered institution in the United Kingdom, but outside of the broadcast zone of the BBC, it's still a niche show, one that would never be shown during prime time on CBS, for example.  Similarly, I've revealed a couple of pivotal plot spoilers from Doctor Who to Karli without even thinking about it, because I don't really expect that she'll decide to catch up on the last nine seasons of the Doctor's exploits, let alone sit down with 50 years of the show.

But who knows, perhaps I'm doing both Karli and the Doctor an injustice.  For all I know, she'll be intrigued enough by a sample of the adventures of the last Time Lord to watch some more episodes.  But she certainly doesn't have to - I think she'd agree with me that emotional compatibility is far more important to our relationship than whether or not she knows why the damn thing looks like a police box.

- Sid

*  Yes, my company has a skateboarding department, which occupies a pivotal role in our marketing and community relations strategy.  It also has a small skate park in the lower parking area at our head office if you're looking for a spot out of the rain to do some lip tricks or grinds.

**  I'm thinking Blink and The Doctor's Wife, if you're curious.  Blink because it's such a good episode, in spite of the fact that the Doctor doesn't play a huge part in the plot, and The Doctor's Wife because Neil Gaiman's treatment of the relationship between the Doctor and his TARDIS is so well written and acted.  However, I'm open to other suggestions.

I thought that the Dark Side had cookies, not cupcakes...

It's touching to find out that your co-workers will always take your interests into account when randomly picking up cupcakes.  Thanks to Christi and Wendy!!

- Sid

Tatooine Gothic.

Looking at the display of Sandpeople costumes that were part of the Star Wars and the Power of Costume exhibit at Seattle's EMP, I was irresistibly reminded of the classic painting by Grant Wood.

- Sid

Rebel, Jedi, Princess, Queen.

The Star Wars saga has its flaws: there are issues with dialogue, the science is doubtful, there's the whole unfortunate Phantom Menace/midi-chlorian thing, and really, it's hard to deny that the movies have gone downhill a little bit more with each iteration in the series.*  However, it's impossible to ignore the artistic brilliance of the films, the visual creativity that illuminates and informs George Lucas' epic tale of good and evil.

The Star Wars and the Power of Costume exhibit, currently on display at the EMP in Seattle,  explores and explains the large part of that visual storytelling which dedicated to the costuming for the films.  The exhibit features costumes from all six of the films, and clearly illustrates the crucial role played by the wardrobe department in the creation of the Star Wars universe.

The iconography established in the first film is classic and simple from start to finish.  The faceless Stormtroopers; Darth Vader's black armour and sinister helmet; Luke's simple farmboy garb; Obi-wan's monastic robes; Han Solo's morally ambiguous black-and-white gunslinger outfit; Leia's elegant white costume; each one contributes to a clear visual guide for each character's place in the story.

This fundamental symbolism continues for the next two movies:  Luke never returns to the innocence of his original costume, and over the course of time, his clothing indicates that he may be getting closer and closer to inheriting his father's dark legacy.  Leia's costumes confirm her position as a leader of the rebel forces, she dons an all-concealing disguise in an attempt to rescue Han from Jabba the Hut, is displayed in a degrading slave girl costume to emphasize her role as a captive, then symbolically uses her chains to strangle her captor.

The costumes of the second trilogy are more ornate and decorative, with only the robes of the Jedi retaining their simple design.  We are shown a more developed palette of colours, and it is no longer a simple matter to determine a character's allegiance based purely on their clothing, which enhances the more duplicitous turns of the plot:  Amidala appears as both Princess and handmaiden, Senator Palpatine's true nature is concealed then revealed, and Anakin Skywalker undergoes a slow transition from Jedi to Sith, with the final change to the dark trappings of his new persona as Darth Vader.

I visited the show during a recent weekend trip to Seattle with Karli, and it is fascinating to see the costumes in person - the degree of detail and craft is astonishing, and each display is accompanied by explanations and footnotes regarding various aspects of the costumes, their creation, and the influences behind their design.  It's on display at the Science Fiction section of the EMP until October 4, 2015, and if you're visiting Seattle, I'd say that it would be well worth your time to pay a visit and get a closer look at the costumes of a galaxy far, far away.

- Sid

*  Although I think we all have high hopes for the upcoming seventh film.

An Unearthly Child.

"In England, Doctor Who has always been considered a children's show, at least by children.

Alex Kingston

I noticed that the 10-year old girl who was part of this morning's brunch group was wearing this ring, but I didn't get a chance to ask about favourite episodes - there were too many grownups talking.

- Sid

Valar Morghulis.

Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

On my very first date with the wonderful and gorgeous Karli, it was established that I enjoy being surprised, and since then she's managed to come up with an interesting selection of enjoyable geek-oriented evenings out.*

The most recent outing was to Throne and Games, a Game of Thrones improv show at the Improv Centre on Granville Island. Hosted by an edgy spot-on Petyr Littlefinger as performed by Graeme Duffy, the show was an entertaining series of riffs off the GOT lineup.**   The show is on until August 1st, and if you're a fan of improv comedy and Game of Thrones, I strongly recommend it.

However, one word of warning:  there's a point in the evening when Littlefinger asks the audience to vote for their favourite character.  No spoilers, but what do you think happens to the audience favourite in a show based around George R.R. Martin's approach to storytelling?

- Sid

* I'm told that this is a daunting challenge, but so far everything has been spot-on - full points to Miss KT.

** With a couple of rough spots, but such is the nature of improv.

Florida 6: Vignettes.

A selection of photos from the Kennedy Space Centre:

They were told how to put their hands on their hips (if they must).  The thumbs should be to the rear and the fingers forward.

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Legends.

PA announcer:  "Of course, the Smithsonian doesn't have one of these..."

How the mighty are fallen:  a fern grows in a Titan rocket engine.

Mercury capsule seat.  To my eye it looks crude and unfinished - but someone sat in this chair, on
the top of a controlled explosion, and successfully made it to Earth orbit.

The Apollo 11 capsule.  It looks roomier than the Mercury capsule, until you realize that three men
in bulky spacesuits were wedged into that space like sardines in a can.

The six million pound crawler-transporter used to transport rockets to the launch pads.  Frankly,
I expected to see a bunch of jawas jump out and offer to sell the tour group some droids.

Counting down in the Apollo Saturn V Control Room.

President John F. Kennedy:  "We must be bold."

The business end of a Saturn V - five F-1 rocket engines, 7.5 million pounds of thrust.

And the complicated plumbing required to control those engines.

The looming first stage of the Saturn V.

Mars Explorer Barbie.  I'm reasonably certain that pink spacesuit is going to clash horribly with
the surface of Mars.

Atlantis:  33 missions, 4848 Earth orbits.

Every heatproof tile on the Atlantis is numbered to indicate its position.

The red-hot ramp to the Re-entry section of the Atlantis exhibit.

Shout out to the Canadarm!!

EVA - Extra Vehicular Activity. 

The elite: the Astronauts' Hall of Fame.

  - Sid

Florida 5: Pilgrimage.

It is a bright and sunny day in Florida as Colin parks our rental car in Zone 5 and we make our way to the ticket window - welcome to the Kennedy Space Center. Welcome to the history - and the future - of a dream.

For me, this trip is very much a pilgrimage.  I'm a child of the space age, born six months after Yuri Gargarin's first trip into orbit in May of 1961.  My entire childhood was spent immersed in the space race, and I have clear memories of the fuzzy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong taking that first step onto the surface of the Moon in 1969.

The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex offers a comprehensive overview of the space program, complete with the actual equipment used for the missions.  These are not mockups or duplicates, these are the spacesuits that were worn, the capsules that returned, and the control rooms that guided their paths.  As such, it's an evocative experience to see - and in some cases touch - the tools used to explore space.

The entrance delivers us directly into the Center's Rocket Garden.  These are literally names out of legend - Saturn, Mercury, Titan, Atlas - and it's interesting to note that NASA chose to use the names of gods, of beings who ruled the heavens, for their rockets and mission names.

From there, we go into the Early Space Exploration exhibit, which details the early days of the space program.  The control room for the Mercury flights seems small and primitive - I'm reminded of that oft-quoted statistic that I have more processing power on my iPhone than in the computers used for the Apollo missions.

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe characterizes the first American astronauts from these missions as modern equivalents of single combat warriors, facing their Soviet equivalents as part of the battle for global dominance during the 1960s.

It's easy to see these men in that role, helmed and gauntleted in their clumsy armour of synthetic cloth and metal, faces invisible and anonymous behind golden faceplates.

The weather looks doubtful when we leave the building, so we decide to do the bus tour of the launch sites before it rains.

The tour bus doesn't stop anywhere near the actual launch pads  - in fact, the only stop in the circuit is time limited for security reasons. We drive past the Vehicle Assembly Building, built in 1967 to assemble Saturn V launch vehicles, and the tallest single story building in the world.  We circle around Launch Complex 40, where Space X launches civilian supply missions to the ISS, and take a quick look at Launch Complex 39.

Unexpectedly,the bus doesn't take us back to the Visitor Center.  Instead, we leave the bus at the Apollo Saturn V Center, where we're seated us in the bleachers for the Apollo Control Room and watch a surprisingly evocative countdown to the launch of a Saturn V.

After the video presentation, we proceed to the main event:  a 363 foot Saturn V launch vehicle on its side, broken into its separate stages. I'm awestruck - for me, this is the high point of the entire trip.  Words fail to express my wonder and amazement.

The bus takes us back to the Visitor Center, where we run through pouring rain to the Space Shuttle Atlantis building.

The Atlantis exhibit starts with a video presentation detailing the challenges faced by the designers of the space shuttle, culminating in the launch of the Columbia in 1981. As the echoes of the launch fade, the screen slides up to reveal Atlantis, the workhorse of the space program's five-shuttle fleet with an epic record of 33 missions, 4,848 earth orbits, and 125,935,769 miles travelled before its retirement.

The three-story exhibit is built around the suspended shuttle, allowing visitors to see the entire vehicle from top to bottom.  As I wait for the presentation audience to disperse through the exhibit so I can take an unobstructed picture of Atlantis, I see someone stretch their arm over the railing and brush the edge of the shuttle's open hatch.

A small child sits at a nearby mockup of the space shuttle controls, screaming, "We're going to crash, we're going to crash!"  He's too small to realize that it's inappropriate to play that particular game of pretend in this environment: the loss of lives in the Challenger and Columbia accidents still presents a tragic resonance to the space program.

After Atlantis, both Colin and I are ready for a break.  We have a late lunch, and decide to give ourselves some down time by watching the Hubble IMAX movie. 

Unfortunately, it's not showing that day due to technical issues, so we call it a day - we haven't seen everything the Center has to offer*, but we're just burned out.  As we drive back to our Cocoa Beach hotel, I look back at the day and my only regret is that we didn't have another day to spend there.  I wish there was some way to send a message back in time to my 12-year old self to tell him about what I've just seen.

Space flight finds its origins in politics, as much a part of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall or the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, unlike those artifacts of the post-war conflict with the USSR, the exploration of space has continued, and developed over time into a purer phenomenon. Space travel is now a global pursuit: the United States works co-operatively with the Russian space agency, and the astronauts visiting the International Space Station come from around the world.

Which is as it should be.  When we leave Earth, it shouldn't be as Americans or Canadians or Russians, we should enter space as representatives of humanity.

- Sid

* The Visitor Center sells two-day tickets - if you decide to visit the KSC, I strongly recommend scheduling the extra day.