On Mars, and when even our futures are ancient history

[enochs_fable]

Slate has an interesting article about a journalist's week in a Mars habit simulations in Utah.

What struck me most though was an exchange between the journalist and the youngest member of the crew, a college-aged engineer (Alyssa), when their main and backup generators die. End simulation - everybody dies.

Comments

[echoweaver]

Heh, I always thought that Roddenberry's future was quaint.

I *am* surprised that an engineer involved in a Mars program, even a young one, wouldn't know "He's dead, Jim." That scifi gag seems to have transcended the series that gave it birth, and it's hard to imagine someone having contact with scifi without having heard it. Perhaps this simply that she doesn't have much contact with sf or its fandom. Heck, I know of Lensman, and I can get basic references, though I've never read it.

[enochs_fable]

Maybe its quaintness is just more apparent now? But it seemed sparkling and new once upon a time.

I am also suprised that she had zero Trek reference - but on the other hand, while I've heard of Lensman, I wouldn't get references to it.

[echoweaver]

Maybe it's just that I found the TNG interpretation of the Roddenberry vision to be too much. Not so much the original. And I did watch a lot of original on oafter-school reruns, for all that the series preceeded me by a good bit.

[enochs_fable]

too much how so? (I have suspicions, but I love a good echo-rant)

[verin_the_brown]

Argh, I just hit some wrong key and it ate my whole post. :( I was almost done.

[echoweaver]

Come to think of it, Enoch, I have no idea what your new user pic is.

[enochs_fable]

Me neither. Just saw it in a picture gallery and said, hmm, that looks stark and mysterious... some structure or art piece I think.

[verin_the_brown]

That's not generation gap, that's just lame. I expect more from an engineer, especially one who's working on simulating etra-terrestrial habitats.

It pulls me back to my earlier musings on geekdom, and wondering what the geek canon of the next generation will be.

Minting television DVDs is going to change the lifetime of pop culture. Wasn't someone just mentioning watching "The Prisoner"? Sweeite and I are making our way through Star Trek: TNG Season 1. What a blast from the past that is.

It focuses heavily on speculative implications of biotechnology - what if there were modified germ-lines of humanity adapted to various environments? ... What does it mean to live in a universe where citizens of some nations are just better than others because they can afford the in-vitro gene-fixes? ... It's messy, provocative, and challenging.

I have a hard time being concerned about it when 99% of people want to outlaw this stuff before it even begins.

[echoweaver]

Yep. Was me watching "The Prisoner." These old classics seem not to die. My friend who had the complete set could not have watched it when it came out.

[enochs_fable]

Minting television DVDs is going to change the lifetime of pop culture.

Will it? There's a long tradition of media fandom with the walls of VHS tape - and we have already the rise of a new DVD format on the horizon. I'm not sure it will extend appreciably the memory of "mainstream" geek culture.

[verin_the_brown]

I think we're arguing different sides using the exact same evidence.

Will it? There's a long tradition of media fandom with the walls of VHS tape -

Exactly. My mom has such a collection of original Trek, all painstakingly recorded on a VCR. In the realm of the really hard core fans, many things have been passed around, but you can't buy them in your video store or on Amazon. Some years ago, they finally started puting old Trek on VHS, but they charged an arm and a leg for single episode. Who's going to buy that except hard core fans anyway?

Now we can watch old stuff, like "Prisoner" just by buying or renting it. We don't have to know someone who has a bootleg. Hubby and I have more moeny than friends, so this is how we've been able to enjoy Buffy, even though it's not so very old.

Sure, these things could have been released years ago on VHS, but they weren't because I guess the powers-that-be were still not comprehending the market. Or they'd take up too much room that way.

and we have already the rise of a new DVD

[verin_the_brown]

I don't think we need a lot of biotech for science to increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Every day on my walk home I pass by one of these new anti-aging boutiques. It makes no pretenses about providing medicine. It's more like a spa than a clinic, although MDs are required to perform most of their services, I think.

The more science can give us, the more we are expected to do just to be normal. Soon wrinkles and cellulite will be considered the result of poor grooming.

[enochs_fable]

I don't think we need a lot of biotech for science to increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Of course not, it's just one of the forces that might potentially have increasingly powerful effects.

And 99% of the population isn't for outlawing it - but unfortunately Shrub and his cronies are.

[echoweaver]

Yeah, my take on outlawing bits of science for which there is high demand is that it will be done somewhere, and it will take hold, and then eventually more reluctant places like us will be forced to either accept it or treat it like the War on Drugs.

This doesn't really address the very real ethical issues that many of these advances pose, but then it's become clear to me that you can't escape those ethical issues by rejecting the whole technology. The destruction or rejection of a technology only solves the problem in movies.