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If you’re looking for a film to get you good and spooked for Halloween, you can’t go wrong with Event Horizon, the 1996 sci-fi horror directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. The spooky atmosphere, the gore, the violence, the senselessness of the horror, the simultaneous claustrophobia and agoraphobia of a vast, cavernous spaceship in Neptune’s upper atmosphere all add up to provide a unique experience. But more important to us is the existential meaning of such horrors as the movie has to offer. (more…)
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Anyone who remembers the 1980s can recall exactly what they were doing when the space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after lifting off on January 28, 1986. People at the Florida launch site openly wept, pounded their fists on the hoods of their cars, and held each other. Schoolchildren looked at the televised images of the disaster with horror. The news media went into a frenzy, and President Reagan delivered a televised eulogy that evening that was probably his best speech ever. (more…)
Voyager 2, loading into a Centaur rocket.
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I suspect most people have particular topics that affect them profoundly and cause a welling up of emotion that most other people would find a bit strange. For me, the topic is space probes. When I watch documentaries or read articles about them, I tear up the way we all tear up at a piece of heartbreakingly beautiful music or a cynic-proof rendition of the national anthem. After the unmanned spacecraft Cassini completed its mission in 2017 and sent back its stunning images of Saturn, the probe’s creators issued (more…)
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Ad Astra (2019), starring Brad Pitt and directed by James Gray, is the best science fiction movie since Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). Like Interstellar, Ad Astra is visually striking and emotionally powerful, stimulating to both thought and imagination, and unfolds at a leisurely pace—all traits inviting comparisons to Kubrick and Tarkovsky, although I hasten to add that I found both Ad Astra and Interstellar so absorbing that my attention never wavered. (more…)
The Buran, the Soviet Union’s abandoned Space Shuttle from the 1980s, as it appears today.
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I frequently see articles by race realists expressing a pro-futurist, pro-technology angle. I roll my eyes, but that’s fine. If you’re an optimist concerning technology, so be it. But if you don’t explore the underlying issues that would make that tech-future possible, you haven’t made your case. (more…)
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Hidden Figures, a.k.a., We Wuz Astronautz, tells the story of three black women who worked at NASA in 1961 struggling for equal rights both as blacks and as women. The movie tells us that it is “based on true events,” and the three women — mathematician Katherine Johnson, computer programmer Dorothy Vaughan, and engineer Mary Jackson — actually did exist. But it is not clear if any of the struggles and achievements depicted actually happened, or if they are just-so stories. The moral of the movie, however, is quite clear: three unsung black women played an essential role in the US space program. (more…)
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Beginning in August of 1999, I gave a series of eight lectures on “The Pursuit of Happiness: Philosophies East and West,” (more…)
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Note: Contains spoilers
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is an epic, metaphysical poem addressing the question of ultimate human survival in both an individual and collective sense. (more…)
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Aviation and astronautics were once my prime interests. As a student pilot, at the age of 20, when aviation was much more dangerous than it is today, I concluded that if I could fly for ten years before being killed in a crash, I would be willing to trade an ordinary lifetime for that experience. In the ’30s, I assisted Robert Goddard, the father of spatial conquests. (more…)
