The Mars Science Laboratory, aka “Curiosity”
We can’t stop talking about it, so here’s a special place to continue the conversation that started on the Random thread.
Date: August 6, 2012
Categories: Non-Muse news, The Universe, Things We like
Friday, 29 March 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
We can’t stop talking about it, so here’s a special place to continue the conversation that started on the Random thread.
Date: August 6, 2012
Categories: Non-Muse news, The Universe, Things We like
Piggy asked whether there’s a genuine groundswell of interest in space exploration going on. I’d say there is, and I suspect it’s because Americans in particular need something real to feel good about right now.
I heard several mentions last night that relevant web pages were getting record hits.
If we’re picking something real to feel good about, I’m glad it’s space. It seems like a healthy option, and it inspires feelings of Exploration and The Great Beyond and Inquisitiveness. It’s also a bit of an unattainable ideal, since it’s actually impossible to explore all of space, which suits America. We tend to be good at unattainable ideals.
Also, a swell of interest in space may mean a swell of interest in non-dystopian science fiction, which would be fun.
The apparently dystopian science-fiction available isn’t always grim. Veronica Roth’s Divergent series is labeled dystopian, for instance, but I really don’t think its future world sounds all that bad. It’s not the best series around, either, but it’s extremely fun to analyze, so I love it anyway.
That’s true! But it just often seems like there’s a current trend in the popularity of shows like Firefly as opposed to Star Trek, or The Hunger Games as opposed to Isaac Asimov’s robot-verse. Positive feelings about space seem to translate pretty well to positive feelings about the eventual future of the human race. (And possibly more popular support and therefore funding for the space program, yay?)
science fiction is something I know very well and care about A LOT, as you can tell by my dissertation below on Neal Stephenson novels
Isaac Asimov vs. Hunger Games
I feel like this is kind of a false dichotomy. Some background:
The robot short stories were short stories mostly intended for pulp magazines in the 50s-60s or so, and make up a large portion of the “golden age” of sci-fi. (the golden age is defined mostly by Asimov, Heinlein, and… Clarke, I believe?). The robot novels (Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn composed the trilogy I believe, although they were set in the same universe as his popular Foundation series, which consists of a trilogy + two or three books written much later) were written around the same time. While I did read pretty much everything Asimov wrote by the time I was in high school, I was not his intended audience. The robot novels were written for adults, and the short stories were a little simpler, but not much so — I appreciate them a lot more now than I did when I was eight.
The Hunger Games trilogy, which I have not yet read despite pressure from several people and thus don’t feel fully qualified to judge, is a young adult novel written in contemporary times, where teens are presumed to like “darker” fiction, often with a supernatural bent. I think it’s so popular because of this trend towards darker fiction, but I don’t think it’s nearly as popular among adults as Asimov’s works were.
Fundamentally, while I don’t disagree with your point, I’m not sure it’s fair to compare books with different intended audiences.
also, no post by me about Asimov would be complete without a mention of a. how absolutely unlike the short stories the movie I, Robot was (which actually might prove your point very well)
or b. how The Gods Themselves is my favorite example of Asimov’s work, despite lacking robots (it also has a somewhat happy ending (unlike, for example, the short story Nightfall). an artifact of the times? of Asimov’s outlook on the future? did Asimov even take that book seriously? questions for another day.)
Neal Stephenson would agree with you. He is encouraging other writers to create more-inspiring fictional futures and fewer dystopias.
to hijack this, because Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is one of my absolute favorite books:
Is this encouragement of his a recent thing? Can we find it reflected in his novels, especially his newer ones?
-Zodiac was his second oldest novel, as I recall, I read it in early high school but I’m pretty sure the environmental destruction portrayed was not exactly optimistic
-Snow Crash was arguably a dystopia, but it was an unusual one, and it really depends on whether you think constantly escaping to the rich virtual world of cyberspace is a good thing or not — I think it is because I grew up on MuseBlog, but those of older generations may not agree (aside: William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” and it’s used slightly differently in his stories than I am using it here. other aside: I believe it was Neal Stephenson who coined the term “avatar”, though)
-The Diamond Age also took place in a dystopia, from what little I recall of it
-Cryptonomicon takes place in the present and past, so I can’t judge that
-The Baroque Cycle takes place in the past and I haven’t finished it despite owning the books for years, it is so long
-Anathem is in the very far future if it’s even in our world, and the society there is very different from our current one, and not really comparable?
-I haven’t read Reamde yet, it came out last winter, and every time I pass a bookstore I look for it but don’t get it because I haven’t finished 15 or so other books I just bought at various sales.
food for thought? I mean it’s also arguable that since Neal Stephenson’s future books are cyberpunk and cyberpunk is inherently set in a dystopia (is it? you could write a thesis on this, in fact once I almost did) there’s not much he can do to change the trend, and he is merely expressing hope for other writers.
Dodecahedron:
Stephenson called for a return to techno-optimism in fiction late last year in an essay called “Innovation Starvation” (www . worldpolicy . org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starvation). He calls it the “Hieroglyph Project.”
Thanks for the link! The essay made me excited for the future and to read the anthology he alluded to being the Hieroglyph Project’s goal. Also, innovation is something that’s talked about a lot in the industry I plan to someday enter (I know my father, who works for a big technology company, has given talks on it, and when I visited California and Google the SFO airport had a sign about San Francisco (and Silicon Valley in general, I suspect) being an innovation capital, and when my family went to Epcot in Disney World last June we saw all the innovation-focused exhibits sponsored by companies like Siemens and IBM), so it was interesting to see a pessimistic outlook on it and not just “look at all the innovation we are doing!”
(also I really like whoever decided to name a science fiction themed conference “Future Tense”)
I think we’ve all had enough dystopia books to last our civilization a long, long time.
Look at xkcd.
I would say that there is definitely something happening. If I had to pinpoint a starting point, I would say the Apollo 11 40th and the associated celebrations and web activities, but it may have been a few months earlier, with Hubble Servicing Mission 4 and Mike Massimino’s Tweets from space.
Either way, since then, it’s certainly grown, we’ve seen the NASA Tweet-Ups and socials, the Symphony of Science videos, the big parties for the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight, the send-offs for the final shuttle flights, the Unimpressed Astronaut meme, and lots more. This summer alone has been a tremendous time for space news from the shuttle ferry flights to the solar eclipse to the Venus Transit to the Soyuz launchings to the Dragon mission to the Chinese flight to Curiosity, and, on the sadder side, the deaths of Alan Poindexter and Sally Ride.
There is definitely an increase in interest, and the operative question as Kokonspirators and RATS is how we can encourage it.
G
GO
GO C
GO CU
GO CUR
GO CURI
GO CURIO
GO CURIOS
GO CURIOSI
GO CURIOSIT
GO CURIOSITY
GO CURIOSITY!
GO CURIOSITY
GO CURIOSIT
GO CURIOSI
GO CURIOS
GO CURIO
GO CURI
GO CUR
GO CU
GO C
GO
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There’s no better way to celebrate a rover landing than with a triangular sentance, eh?
I approve.
Now that I’m looking at it, what’s a curio?
A strange or interesting artifact or other object.
It can also be called a curiosity, after what it tends to inspire.
I have the feeling many of the rocks in Gale Crater will be curios to the MSL mission scientists! (That is, objects they will find interesting.)
Like a rock from Mars?
Exactly!
I’m excited! I’m sort of sad that I didn’t get to watch the landing, though. I’m at someone else’s house where there is no wifi, only one internet connected computer. Theoretically I could go looking for ethernet cords, but that would be silly and possibly harmful to my host’s internet connection. I don’t know if she understands her computer too well, and I don’t want her to be unable to fix it.
Must go seek photos when I’m back from this road trip!
Something awesome to do: watch the descent of curiosity to Homestuck music (descent, specifically, works very well)