In the 1990s we had what I consider the two best space related TV shows ever produced: Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5. TNG showed humans as explorers, evolved beings trying to move forward peacefully. It was a beautiful picture, something to aim for. Babylon 5 was more realistic: we still have problems and it’ll be a struggle, but we can do it. Babylon 5: In the beginning, one of the movies of the franchise, has some of the most realistic space battles. I read they got NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to do the math for them.
And then space died.
It was a slow and painful death. The spinoff of B5 lasted half a season. Star Trek managed to go on for much longer, but the quality went down until Enterprise was cancelled before a proper ending. And then we have Firefly… possibly the last big attempt at depicting humans living in space. It suffered the same fate as B5′s spinoff.
These developments are not just about fiction. Space exploration has been disappointing us for the last 30 years or so. We never went back to the moon. We never went to Mars. The International Space Station is amazing, but it’s not the space habitats we used to dream about. NASA cancelled the Space Shuttle program. The Hubble telescope was almost decommissioned. We stopped dreaming…
Well, not everybody stopped dreaming. And in a world where making a difference is becoming easier every day, some people have enough resources to do it even when it comes to something as expensive and crazy as space. People like Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), and my favorite, Elon Musk (SpaceX):
In 2009 we saw the return of Star Trek with J. J. Abrams reboot. It’s not a good Star Trek movie but it is a good action movie, that happens in space, in the future, a future where humans have expanded throughout the galaxy and created a peaceful federation of planets. And this year we had another Star Trek movie for which I would say the previous statement applies as well. They are fun… but what really excites me is this:
potentially realistic depictions of space…
Maybe we are looking up again… hopefully… we’ll start dreaming again soon.
Yesterday I was going to meet a friend. I arrived very late due to poor planning on my side (leaving late) but also because I got lost. Well… I didn’t really get lost. I knew exactly where I was all the time. Pinpoint accuracy by my GPS. But I didn’t know how to proceed because buses got diverted, some may have been cancelled but I wasn’t sure.
One part of the definition of “lost” is the correct one:
Unable to find one’s way
but the other part is not:
not knowing one’s whereabouts
and when I say I got lost, I may sound like a lier: “How can you possible get lost with your phone/GPS/google maps?”. I need a new word that means “I know where I am but not how to proceed.”
I read The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl and an important part of the plot is the construction of a space elevator. There, the authors explain to you what an space elevator is, how does it work, what are the challenges and even who invented them. Apparently in the 19th century some guys already dreamed (and wrote about) space elevators. I bet it was dreamed even before that, but at any rate, I invented them as well.
When I was a kid, the house where I lived used to have scaffoldings here and there quite frequently. It was never finished. I grew up playing in scaffoldings and like some kids build a house in a tree, I built it on scaffolding. It was amazing! I loved it. Obviously I started thinking how high could I build a scaffold? With my child’s mind I saw no limit but I realized that at some point, the outer part would pull instead of push and I fantasized about a scaffold that would reach the moon. A bit more than a mere space elevator.
In my phantasy one would climb the scaffold in a space suit, reach the top and when the moon passed by grab onto it: a small grab for a mind, a giant leap for the scaffolding industry.
We did the crazy thing. We watched 1990′s Total Recall while eating burritos and then went to the cinema to watch the remake. It’s hard to figure out which one is worse. Which is quite an achievement if you think about it. But let me start with a positive note, before I go all ranty about a single aspect of the new version.
Our beloved protagonist… bah… who am I kidding… Quaid is in a quest to get his memories back and eventually finds someone who can help. In the old movie, it’s a super-weird psychic known as Kuato that by magic manages to restore some memories. In case you don’t remember:
In the new one, Quaid is instead connected to a computer through electrodes in his head. They replaced psychics with technology. I can’t help but believe that it’s a small piece of evidence that humanity is growing up, stopping to believe in fairy tales and trusting its fate in technology and engineering. At last, three or four hundred years of steady progress in improving people’s quality of life are paying of (mind you, also fueling a few terrible wars too).
Now to the rant! This was such a blatant disregard of the laws of nature that I felt like walking away from the movie, like I did with Lockout.
Let’s start with some facts. What happens if you put people inside a vessel, like a car or an elevator, and drop it? Let me show you what happens by showing you a scene from the movie that made it to the trailer (jump to 2:00):
Disregard the part when they decelerate in only three meters and still survive.
What happens is that the contents of the vessel seem to float because they are free falling with the same acceleration and initial speed as the vessel. In a more complex scenario but still using the same principles, you can experience weightlessness inside an aircraft. NASA uses that to train astronauts, Hollywood used that to film Apollo 13 (jump to 4:15):
And if you seen the movie you know where I’m going with this. In the new version, there’s a hole through the earth, from the UK to Australia. I’m not going to analyze how expensive that is or why it makes no sense. Keeping all our houses at spring temperature all year around, no matter whether it’s hotter or colder outside was, at some point, so impossible people wouldn’t even dream of it (specially the cooling down part). Science fiction is about dreaming, so, let’s dream about a hole from UK to Australia.
This hole is used for transport. They have a huge cylinder that people enter that travels through the hole. They sit in rows and get strapped to the seats like in a roller-coaster. I’m not spoiling anything, this is shown at the very beginning. They drop the cylinder and… what should happen now? Think of the car being dropped and make your guess: The cylinder is in free fall and so is everything inside it, things should appear to float… that’s not what happens in the movie.
In the movie, they enjoy gravity… and if you think that’s bad… get ready for more. When they are getting closer to the center of the earth, the PA system says something like “get ready for gravity reversal”. For a period of time they are weightless and some parts of the cylinder, with people strapped to the seats, is turned around, which is quite cool. When they leave the core of the planet, gravity comes back like someone waking up from a nightmare and everything falls. That is so wrong.
There seems to be no extra propulsion system, which if the hole through the earth is not vacum, would make for a very long trip… 20 hours or so? I don’t know, I didn’t calculate it. Even if the hole is free of air it’ll take a while… 2 hours? 3 hours? I don’t know… again, I didn’t do the math, if you want it, just ask me and I’ll do it.
What is more important though, is that without any propulsion system, you wouldn’t get to the other side of the earth. If you did, you’d have a perpetual motion machine, which violates the second law of thermodinaics, rigorously formulated by Sadi Carnot in 1824. Let’s assume there’s a propulsion system, ok? An invisible one… let’s say… it’s maglev on the walls or something like that… please? thank you.
Now Hollywood says: but isn’t this whole gravity reversal extremely cool? we want it on the big screen!
Agreed… but Mr Hollywood, hear me out… this is how that transport system should have worked:
Everybody goes inside the huge vessel and get themselves strapped to the seats like in a roller-coaster… it looks cool and realistic, as it’ll be quite a ride.
We have a countdown (awesome! why don’t airplanes have countdowns? imagine everybody going in unison 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, brakes released! take off!).
The cylinder drops and everybody inside experience instant zero gravity… things float, drinks are spilled, people vomit… ok… not that one.
We turn everybody upside down, like they did in the movie, while they are weightless.
We hit the rockets… yes… the vessel now has rockets to accelerate. Or maglev, or whatever, doesn’t matter. The vessel accelerates at 2g (1g is gravity’s pull, another g is caused by the rockets), making earth-like artificial gravity. Alternative the vessel accelerates at 3g or 4g, because they are just a bunch of shitty workers and can take it. If that acceleration is kept, by the time it reaches the core, it’d be traveling awfully fast, and by that I think space-shuttle-worthy fast… I can do the math if you ask me.
At some point they turn the rockets off and it starts falling at 1g again and everybody inside experiences another weightless moment.
We turn everybody around again.
We fire the rockets in the oposite direction… remember, we need as much force to stop it as we need it to get it moving, so everybody experiences gravity again. Instead of rockets, we could just use the atmosphere inside the tube to slow it down. Air is used to slow down spaceships coming back to Earth all the time, and that’s why landing on Mars is harder than landing on Earth… you have less atmosphere to slow you down.
Getting closer to the end of the trip, the strong deceleration stops and everybody experiences zero gravity once again, which is quite convenient, because we turned them upside down twice, which leaves them pointing up in the UK, but pointing down in Australia. So why they experience zero g again, we turn them again and we slowly stop it just in time to see some kangaroos.
So… Hollywood… wouldn’t that have been much more impressive? you had rockets and instead of one wrong gravity reversal, you’d have three correct ones in every trip. Think of the plot potential! I’m giving you three for the price of one!
We evolved ten fingers, so there seems to be something specially about how old I am today: 30. Even though I consider 32 or 64 a more round number, it’s impossible not to do some retrospective. Also… because when I was 25 years old, freshly hired by Google, I set myself the goal of being a millionaire by 30. That… didn’t happen. Nevertheless I’m really happy about where I am today and where I’m going.
The matching t-shirt was just a coincidence
My 30s start with me having a job I love, at last, product-building. I’m the CTO of my own startup, Watu. I’m surrounded with extremely capable and smart people.
For the first time in my life I’m living in a city I truly chosen: London. Until now, every city I lived in (hint: many) was a side effect of a good job in that place, or someone else’s decision that I accepted. This time I picked (ironically, the best job of my life followed) and I love it. London is a wonderful place. There’s always stuff to do, there’s so much variety and you can find almost everything.
My 30s also find me weighting 75kg. My impossible dream was to reach 74kg. It no longer seems impossible (I actually touched 74.3kg last week). But that’s not all, I’m also the fittest I ever been, at least as an adult. In the last couple of years I started running, and managed to run 6.25km. Then I jumped into water and I made a splash by breaking my almost 15 year old personal best. I’m already planning to break it again and go for 5km.
On top of that I’m surrounding myself with interesting and fascinating people that I like spending time with. This is probably my biggest challenge ever.
My life is still not yet all that what I want, but I’m getting there.
I just watched Mac Goodman’s TED talk about the crimes of the future:
That reminds me of a question I had some time ago: How was it possible for Nazi Germany to invade and maintain control over most of Europe while USA doesn’t seem to control a couple of countries while using the most advanced military machine ever created?
The answer is simple: technology helps the individuals more than the groups or governments. The technology to blow up a tank today is much cheaper than in the 40s, during the second world war. As Marc Goodman said: the power of and individual do influence a group is going up, at an exponential rate, for both good and bad.
Something else I been wondering is, where are all these evil people? Because I constantly see ways to cause a lot of harm and disruption to a lot of people. The world is full of opportunities, it’s full of fuses ready to be lit by those that like to watch the world burn. The only thing I can conclude is that there aren’t that many people eager to do it. In the end, human beings are inherently good.
But still, a lot of bad things are happening in lots of places. Organized crime in Mexico and terrorism in the middle east still exist. You definitely cannot fix the problem by outgunning them and you cannot fix it by outsmarting them. I believe the solution is in destroying the motivation.
You can have people willing to strap a bomb to their chest only by years and years of the worst kind of religious indoctrination. If those people had access to just see what the rest of the world was, then they would be less likely to do it. If those people had access to join the rest of society and not live as an oppressed minority, then I would be very surprised if any took any other path than being peaceful and productive member of the society.
People are putting a lot of ingenuity at fighting the system to produce something and get it to the hands of people that want it, and want it badly. You stop fighting them and you start taxing them. Suddenly, many of the drug related problems, specially those related to crimes, would go away. You still would have to deal with people self-destructing with drugs, but all evidence suggests that it would be the same or even better than what we have now. And if people want to self destruct, they’ll find a way to do so with or without drugs (tobacco, alcohol, food… heck, even exercise and TV!), no government or religion can magically solve the problem that all human beings face: what do I do with my life?
What I like about Marc Goodman’s approach is the openness. He’s not fighting to create a big brother, but to turn many more aspects of society into an open source model, a model we know it works. I just don’t think it’s enough, I think we still have to figure out what motivates people to be destructive and attack the motivations.
Woman decides to run the Boston Marathon, never run before by double x-chromosomed individual.
Lesson: thinking that women can’t or shouldn’t do something it’s stupid… sooner or later one will prove you wrong.
One of the organizers of said marathon is outraged and tries to catch her.
Lesson: there’s always going to be stupidity in the world; no matter how better we are there’s always going to be a few idiots out there.
The people she’s running with, the proud coach and the boyfriend help her get rid of the idiot.
Lesson: No matter how much stupidity a single individual can amass, the collective good will of human kind will prevail.
Five years later, women were officially allowed into the marathon. A few decades later, we can’t believe this actually happened because it sounds like a story out of the dark ages.
Lesson: the world is changing, it’s changing fast and it’s changing for the better. Move forward with the world or be left behind, don’t stand on the way or you’ll be run over.
I doubt any cinemas are going to implement this, because like airlines and banks, they seem to be very bad at making software. Nothing surprising there.
A few months ago I was searching for a room in London. There are about 4 big sites to do that, so I posted ads on all of them, and searched on all of them. Only one provided a web application that allowed me to see whether I contacted someone already or whether I marked a flat as not-suitable. It made searching so much easier that soon I was using that and only that site. The ads weren’t better per se, but the software was.
I like going to the movies with friends but I dread having to organize it. It’s such a pain because you have to balance the available time of each people, the timetable of the cinema, the shows in which there are still good seats, the fact that the seats might be going unavailable, and handling the money (I tend to pick the cool but expensive theaters).
If I was in charge of a cinema, I would make a built-in Doodle. Doodle is an awesome application that helps you organize an event. You select all the desirable dates and times, invite the people, and they respond yes or no to each slot. At the end you pick one and go for it. I thought of setting up a Doodle to organize going to see The Dark Knight, but I ended just picking a date and time that was convenient for me and inviting people. It didn’t work.
The built-in Doodle could work like this:
I go to the cinemas website.
I buy my ticket.
I pick all the shows I can go to.
Set a deadline (maybe, optional).
I send the invite to all the people that might want to join me.
Notice that I paid for my ticket before picking the date and time. I’m not sure whether that’s a good idea, I would be okay with that but maybe not everybody. What do you think?
Then each person that I invited goes to the web site and:
Look at all the dates and times I and others picked.
Buy their ticket or tickets.
Pick the dates and times they can.
Once everybody is in or I’m done waiting, I pick a day and time and I get all the seats assigned together in one action (even though the action of committing to the movie was individual and asynchronous). For those that didn’t get a ticket or those that changed their mind, they get their money back and/or the option to arrange the same movie, another day, with some of the same group and/or adding other people to it.
For the cinema it’s a revenue booster. It makes it easier for people to commit to going to the cinema. And even people than don’t manage to go one day are compeled to go another because they already paid.
Build it with nice Facebook and Twitter integration and that’s it, you’ll be the most popular cinema in town.
I took my parents on a virtual tour of London. It’s the second time I do it and I still can’t believe this actually works. We live in the future.
This is how I do it: using my phone, an HTC Desire, I call my parents via Skype and I enable video. This is over 3G, while walking the streets of London. I even boarded a bus and showed them how it works. It’s a lot of fun.
After showing them the Covent Garden market, I went into the second biggest Apple store and then it happened. A guard approached me and told me not to record video in the store, to what I replied that I wasn’t recording video. I told him I was Skyping. He looked at the phone and said “that’s video” to what I replied: “well, Skype can do video”. “But are you recording?” he kept asking. No, I’m not. I unplugged the headphones so he could say “Hi” to my parents. The security guard smiled and told me to go on.
First issue: he didn’t ask me whether my parents were recording or not and even I couldn’t know for sure. Now I’m wondering why is it wrong to record video but not to show a live stream to other people. I think the answer is rather simple: nobody thought of a live stream yet. The same way taking video recordings wasn’t forbidden anywhere at some point, live streaming is not forbidden yet.
I wish that instead of awkwardly holding my cellphone, I could be using a camera mounted on my head. There’s nothing new about that concept, but with products like Google Glass we might live in a world where almost everybody have an internet-connected, interactive, head-mounted camera quite soon. Are they going to ask everybody to remove their Google Glasses just in case they are recording or streaming?
What happens when something like the Google Glasses are embedded into my own glasses, the ones that correct my vision. Are they going to ask me to remove those? What happens when it is embedded directly into my eye. Are they going to ask me to remove my eyes too? Maybe they could say it’s my fault and treat me like people with full body tattoos. What if the interactive internet-connected device is the actual eyes that allow a blind person to see? Are they going to discriminate them too? Because that day is coming and the world is going to change.
I recently watched the movie Another Earth. The movie is really depressing, but aside from that it’s also bad. I should have stopped watching when the directory of SETI was trying to contact the other earth and said:
Let’s try another channel
Radios don’t have channels, unless the radios you know are the consumer devices that you can buy at your local convenience store.
What really irked me though, is the letter the protagonist writes. She writes that when people sailed to the new world, it wasn’t aristocrats who did it, but convicts and other rejects. So far so good. Then she says that they sailed thinking the Earth was flat. Wrong! Maybe she was taught the same lies I was told in elementary school, but since she got into MIT and was interested into science and specifically into astronomy, I would have expected her to have the facts right. I mean, didn’t she watch Cosmos?
Around 200BC, a guy named Eratosthenes, not only knew or figured out the Earth was round; he actually measured it. Interestingly we know the number of said measure, but not which units he used. He might have been off by as much as 16% or as little as 2%. I’m impressed either way. Not done with that, he then measured the tilt of the axis and invented the word geography. Actually, he invented geography itself.
Fast forward to the late XV century. What’s going on? All educated people, all people of science, actually know that the earth is round. Not only that, they actually knew it was approximately 40000km in circumference. Granted, education wasn’t that great for the common folk during the dark ages; but Christopher Columbus was no common folk.
So, what did this guy Columbus do? He calculated the circumference of the Earth again, using his own method, and came up with this number: 10000km. The earth is 300% bigger than he calculated. He should have shut up and study Eratosthenes, but we know he didn’t. Instead, he decided he was going to travel around the world to reach India. A feat that was possible in the small Earth that was inside his head, but impossible in the real one. He tried to secure financing from several people who rightly so told him “Are you fucking stupid or what?”
Eventually, Columbus managed to convince the Queen of Spain… I have two hypotheses… she was either very naive or she was sick and tired of this guy and it was actually cheaper to send him off to die at sea. Being fair, governments should make risky investments, otherwise, we wouldn’t have as much science and technology as we do today. Columbus set sail in an impossible voyage, one that should have killed him and all his crew and the only reason why this didn’t happen is because there was a continent in the middle. Even then, they barely made it. That’s not all, Columbus actually didn’t realize he found a new continent. He thought he was in India.
Long story short: Columbus was an idiot, who got lucky, but still an idiot. We can also argue about his morals, but that’s another story. The discovery of the new world is not a grandiose epic story to tell our children. If you want a story, tell them about Eratosthenes and how he measures the Earth after receiving a letter with a puzzling comment.
Yuri Gagarin did not spend 25 days in there
Back to Another Earth… our evidently clueless protagonist then goes on to describe a little incident that happened during the first manned flight to leave the Earth. She then says
and he had 25 days to go aboard the ship in space
or something like that. 25 days? do they have any freaking idea how hard it is to stay in space for 25 days? The Vostok 3KA made an amazingly long first trip: 108 minutes. Yes, that was an amazingly long trip. Let’s put it in context: America was doing its best to beat the Soviets after the Sputnik crossed the skies broadcasting a repetitive beeping. The United States’ Mercury program managed to put someone in space for a grand total of 15 minutes. Sending people up there is hard and the movie tell us the first cosmonaut stayed up there for 36000 minutes.
The disregard for the history of science and technology that this movie shows is shameful.
I wish that instead of awkwardly holding my cellphone, I could be using a camera mounted on my head. There’s nothing new about that concept, but with products like Google Glass we might live in a world where almost everybody have an internet-connected, interactive, head-mounted camera quite soon. Are they going to ask everybody to remove their Google Glasses just in case they are recording or streaming?
. The movie is really depressing, but aside from that it’s also bad. I should have stopped watching when the directory of 
