Aitch-Bar

Writing About (Mostly) Not Astrophysics

Category Archives: Movies


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It’s Only A Paper Moonfall

Screw the moon

You dumb moon! Don’t you know it’s day!?

Crossposted from Adventures in Poor Taste

Emmerich’s new spectacle involves a dubious premise that hits the planet in the face, but what do unlikely scientific theories look like when they end up being true?

Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster film Moonfall came out in theaters last week, and while I’m curious to see it, I’m also on paternity leave. My daughter’s as much explosive entertainment as I can take at the moment, so while I can’t evaluate the scientific reality of the movie, I’m not sure I’d even want to at this stage of the Emmerich oeuvre (especially not for a film that seems to involve the idea that the Moon is some kind of alien megastructure).

What I can do instead is pontificate a number of half-formed thoughts based on how the trailer looks! No longer content to merely destroy the surface of the Earth, Emmerich posits a baffling scenario in which Earth’s Moon gradually gets closer and closer to us, wreaking havoc, demolishing cities, and somehow culminating in shuttles scrawled with “Screw The Moon” flying up to fight … what seem to be robots? As custom dictates in such a film, one of the main characters appears to be a scrappy outsider whose hacking/amateur astronomy/conspiracy-theorizing skills bring them to the center of the elite governmental apparatus on a mission to confront the unfolding disaster.

Moonfall conspiracy theorist

John Bradley’s “Moonfall” character (probably) expounding on an imprecise array of questions, which, by sheer luck, happen to have merit in the universe of Roland Emmerich.

John Bradley (best known from his Game of Thrones role as Jon Snow’s guileless friend from the Night’s Watch, who exists to make Jon seem cooler by comparison) mugs his way through the trailer, implying that though he doesn’t work for the government, he knows more about the unfolding calamity than everyone else. This is a hacky archetype at this point, and one that’s gone some way toward convincing society that geniuses working in isolation, shunned by the establishment, are likely to be brave truth-tellers. (With vaccine hesitancy promoted by hucksters under that mantle having led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the past year, we can see what that notion has done for us.)

But what’s it actually like to be a scientific loner? What do you do when you think you’ve discovered something no one else accepts yet? Imagine you’re an amateur astronomer, unaffiliated with any institution, and you think you’ve discovered that the Moon’s orbit is decaying. How would you get anyone to listen to you?

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Lockpickbot, Part 0

(Ported from old blog)

It was a week before Christmas when I decided that my new purpose was going to be to father a robot. Excited by the prospect of exciting prospects, I went apeshit purchasing equipment to this end. Arduino, circuit components, motors, plastic sheets, batteries, yada. The last tally I recall was $400 in. Thus far all the robot does is sit in pieces in a drawer, but it does this very well, and with long stretches between charges.

The problem is not lack of interest in robots generally, but dreams which are cripplingly grandiose. I could make a robot that rolls into walls and turns left. I could attach a broom to its undercarriage and save a couple hundred on a Roomba. Unfortunately my motivation threshold is really crossed in the realm of automata who can understand commands such as “fetch me water” and “delouse this cat,” and have the appendages and power to do so. That requires a leap forward in AI programming, and probably another Arduino. $400 at The Shack is not going to get me the robot from Lost in Space. And so I was biding my time, waiting for the following Christmas when I could ask for some fuel cells and artificial muscle.

GS recently talked me back from the ledge and suggested a small robot that does something interesting and practical, which presents an engaging technical and logical challenge while simultaneously introducing a moral dilemma of a proportion usually restricted to shows on AMC. A lockpicking robot. I’ve blueprinted it in my head and then allowed my mental to leap forward five years in the future, where mass production of these bots and a subsequent glitch in their logic has led to a scenario where doors are all but useless. Like, why even bother shutting the goddamned thing, it’s just going to get opened again in an hour by some fucking robot.

Should we, as scientists, create simply because we can? Jeff Goldblum, dressed as an angel, sits on my right shoulder, reciting quotes from Jurassic Park. There is no devil counterpoint because I don’t need any other encouragement to build this thing. I guess it’s me. I am wearing a devil costume telling myself to build a robot and arguing with Jeff Goldblum.

My Geppetto-like interest might be blunted if I knew for certain that my sperm were all alive and viable. I can easily imagine years of cell phone radiation turning my nethers into an apocalyptic hellscape, haploidic Mel Gibsons constantly in search of fuel. “There is a test for that,” you say. You are correct. The test–and this holds true for tests in general–is a tool for people who are willing to have either verdict be known. Were it possible to only have a test if the answer will be yes, then that would be a good test. But, given the confines of causality, my best bet is to have no test at all until game time. Until then quantum mechanics suspends my seed in a superposition of alive and dead states. Schrodinger’s sperm. Not a good band name, by the way.