“Sleep Dealer is remarkably topical for a film set in the future (albeit one described by Rivera as taking place “five minutes from now”). Central themes include outsourcing, corporate ownership of water, remote warfare, confessional internet diaries and military contractors who are accountable to no one. It’s the rare political film without any reference to contemporary politics; like Blade Runner and other big-brained sci-fi flicks, it’s about ideas, not selling merchandise.”

“Films like Star Wars use terms like empire and rebellion, but they are bandied about in bland ways — powerful words used to describe nothing,” Rivera said. “One of the original propositions of my film is that we (create that sense) of a world divided between wealth and power.”

“I love gnomes and goblins and elves,” said Rivera, who’s made a name for himself touring museums and festivals with his award-winning shorts. “But what I’m really interested in is speculative fiction. I wanted to use this film to ask the question, ‘Where are we going?’”

- Wired Article

Sci-fi has for a very long time served the purpose of framing current sensitive social and political issues and putting them into a clear perspective without making people feel preached to.  It was a way to get people to think about issues that they normally wouldn’t or didn’t want to think about for various psychological reasons.  I feel that this has always been the greatest strength of the genre and during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, with the exception of Star Wars and a few other more trivial pieces, the genre as a whole set out to bring a multitude of social issues into the spotlight.  It was like film directors and authors realized this magic lamp where they could very surreptitiously put these unquestioned injustices into peoples minds and make them question them for the first time.  I wouldn’t call this a ‘golden age’ of sci-fi but it certainly was a purer age.  There was less science fiction being produced(as there were less movies in general being produced) but on a per capita basis they were overwhelmingly more thought provoking and taking full advantage of the above-mentioned strength of the medium.

Today however that is changed, and not that it is necessarily a bad thing as the more Sci-fi blockbusters we have the more

The porno of the sci-fi world

interest and acceptance the genre has as a whole and the easier it will be for true science fiction to get funded, but today is certainly a different age where Sci-fi is big business.  We have more and more pieces of strictly eye candy, where the strength of the medium to affect change in our thinking and society in general is thrown out for the ability to create big explosions and satisfy the increasingly shrinking attention span and ever expanding mental laziness of the developed world.  People don’t want to think, they want to be distracted from thinking by exploding starships and revenge seeking Romulans(referring of course to the latest Star Trek Film – thanks Abrahms).

However this isn’t a doom and gloom article, this is an article of hope for as I mentioned the more play these pieces of porno-graphic eye-candy get the more interest there will be in the genre overall and we are starting to see more and more thought provoking sci-fi than ever before.  While it may seem like the 60’s,70’s and 80’s were pumping out great sci-fi at a faster rate, it certainly wasn’t so.. There were so many classics made in this era no doubt but they were certainly spaced out over a long period separated by years at times.

Turn on your brain

Whereas we are seeing 2-3 fairly profound films coming out almost yearly now and even some of the frivolous eye candy such as Avatar will have an obvious and simplistic thought provoking message behind it.

Here’s a great resource that lays out a timeline of the SF era of the past: http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1960.html
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1970.html
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1980.html

Because of this evolution of the genre I feel that we are going to see a clear divide coming down between Sci-fi action flicks such as the last Star Trek, or Avatar and then the sci-fi that attempts to shine light on these dark recesses of our mind that we so conveniently block out such as District 9 or Soylent Green.

Alex Rivera, in the linked article at the top of this post mentioned ‘Speculative Fiction‘ which is a great term to show the other greatest strength of this medium.  As apposed to regular fiction or fantasy Sci-fi and speculative fiction forces us to look forward instead of being stuck in the mud of the past or present, but more importantly it forces us to look forward to where we are going and ask ourselves ‘Is that really where we want to go?’ .  I think that is where we are going to see a divide forming even stronger than before between Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction.  The latter intending to provoke debate and thought about our evolving society and the former meant to simply turn off your brain and take you on a mini-vacation from your everyday.  Both certainly having merits but I feel it is going to be incredibly dangerous to undervalue the importance of the former over the latter.

What cliff?

We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because of the exponential rate of change and development we are experiencing.  So much so that some scientists playfully predict the emergence of a species of humans, homo evolutis, engineered by us. Our world is changing so fast now that we often don’t have time to contemplate the full ramification that come with the increasingly rapid adoption of new technologies and social changes.  Most often this is simply because these changes are being introduced almost one after another after another without any time to breath.  Speculative fiction however, if widely adopted makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise.  It puts our brains into a future simulator of sorts where we are running through countless of possible outcomes for our society every week, culminating to subconscious database of sorts of ‘what if’ scenarios that we carry around with us.  Without this database in our heads we blindly charge forward through the jungle of our progress without any regard of potential cliffs that lay ahead until it is too late.  With a mind that is constantly being challenged with deep thought-provoking what if scenarios we will hopefully be able to recognize some of the signs of these impending cliffs before we are spinning our tires in mid air about to drop 1000 meters to our doom.

Clearly I am not saying that Speculative Fiction is going to single-handedly save this world however with the current rate of adoption of technology, a rate which is increasing exponentially, we can no longer afford to live in the past or even the present for that matter.  The logical part of our brains must exist 100% in the future at all times, not just one future but many possible futures.  A failure to do this could very likely destroy our future all together.

http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/h_ip01456.html

An interesting study commissioned by the Canadian Government shows evidence that p2p users purchase more music than their non-pirate brethren and at the very least that p2p activity has absolutely no effect on purchasing habits, and consequentially nothing to do with the woe’s of the music industry.

To Quote:

In the aggregate, we are unable to find direct evidence that P2P file-sharing either increases or decreases CD purchases in Canada. That is, in our analysis of the whole Canadian population we are unable to find any relationship between the number of P2P music tracks that were downloaded and the number CD purchases

Among Canadians engaged in P2P file-sharing, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between the number of music tracks downloaded via P2P networks and the number of CDs purchased (Table 4.3).9 For an increase in the average number of P2P downloads per month of 2.718282, the number of CD purchases per year will increase by 1.212. For an increase in the average number of P2P downloads per month of 1 (ie., 2.718282/2.718282), the number of CD purchases per year will increase by (1.212/2.718282 =) 0.44.

This is almost as good as a 90’s government funded study in the US to find the negative effects of THC on cancer cells which resulted, much to their chagrin, to the findings that pure THC(synthetic or otherwise) is one of the  most effective anti-tumeric chemicals on the planet.  Findings confirmed by a Harvard study in 1997 showing a 50-60% reduction in tumors and legions of cancer riddled mice: http://www.nowpublic.com/thc_marijuana_helps_cure_cancer_says_harvard_study

Are we seeing the slow decline of the age of ignorance which has been the past 50 years for mainstream america/canada ?

The wonderful thing about this talk that I found blog-post worthy was the fact that the topic it is on is something that I have always found incredibly tedious, as is the case with most people I think and yet I found myself clued to the screen listening to Garik Israelian talk, feeling my sphere of understanding expanding by leaps and bounds.  It really opened my mind up to the potential of what we can learn and the incredible exploration that is going on in our universe.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.800-malaria-vaccine-holds-out-eradication-hope.html

There is concern about how to pay for this vaccine when it is finally developed.  At a 98% rate of success at stopping the virus governments and aid groups around the world should be lining up to pay for this.  There is talk that this could eradicate Malaria which would be the single larger contributor to Africa’s success in human history, greater exponentially than all efforts before it combined.

To create the vaccine, Kumar’s group used genetically modified bacteria to make proteins identical to some of those involved in the parasite’s sexual development. They injected the proteins into mice and baboons, which generated antibodies. When the team added Plasmodium gametes to blood samples from these animals, the antibodies bound to and blocked the proteins. If a mosquito sucked up some of this blood it would still get a bellyful of the gametes, but they would be unable to combine and spawn new adult parasites.

One shot of the vaccine led to a 93 per cent reduction in malaria transmission, and the figure went up to 98 per cent after a booster shot (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006352).

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/glycinecomet

Scientists have discovered the amino acid glycine, a critical component of all living things, hiding in samples from the comet Wild 2.

It’s the first time an amino acid has been found inside a comet, and NASA scientists say the discovery supports the theory that some of the ingredients necessary for life originated in space and traveled to Earth by comet or meteorite.

“If you’re seeing amino acids in comets, then that really gives credence to the idea that the basic componenets of life are going to be widespread throughout the universe,” said planetary biologist Max Bernstein of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, who was not involved in the research. “It’s one thing for me to do it in the lab and say it should be so, but it’s another thing for somebody to actually measure it.”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17603-planet-found-orbiting-its-star-backwards-for-first-time.html

“

An exoplanet that orbits its star backwards has been found for the first time. The planet is also the most bloated found to date, and some astronomers suspect that both properties can be traced back to an earlier close encounter with a planetary sibling.

The solar system generally rotates like a record album, with most objects orbiting the sun in the same direction as the sun itself spins. This is thought to result from the fact that everything formed from the same natal cloud of gas and dust.

However, some objects, including a number of comets and asteroids, move in orbits that are so tilted with respect to the orbital plane of the planets that they end up travelling in the opposite direction. Astronomers think they were gravitationally thrown out of their original orbits by passing objects.”

I found the appearance of this discovery especially coincidental for me as 3 days ago I had a discussion with an ex girlfriend who had just started to devoutly believe in the Lord and creationism. Funny enough one of her supporting claims for a god-created universe was that planets spin and orbit always in the same direction.  In a random universe why would they always be the same as if designed?   The wonderful thing about my belief in science was that I had theories but my ego also had no problems saying ‘I don’t know, but because we haven’t discovered it yet that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist’ , that being that science is malleable and can change when new evidence presents itself whereas religion for the most part is written in stone(pun intended).

Well here we have it, a planet spinning backwards, with only 5-10% of the universe even visible to us, let alone known or understood, and countless new sciences waiting to be discovered, we have a long path of debunking religious mysteries ahead of us.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2009/090727_2.html

The implications of this discovery mean a hell of a lot more than simply being able to construct holding tanks for Humpback whales inside of a Klingon Bird of Prey.

“”What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth. Professor Wark added: ‘What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!’ “

Was just showed this video today and started to look for more resources on the topic so I thought I’d share

7 Part Series:

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

In a games related issue this makes me really rethink how I am going to structure the pricing for future products

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/science/26fusi.html

Great article about at the NYTs about NIF or National Ignition Facility, which I think is tied with CERN for the most exciting scientific project on the planet.  Truly one of the greatest achievements of human history and the article goes into a little of the life of the project, what it is doing and hopefully what it will achieve.