Movies Sci Fi

The actors Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes who played Deanna Troi and Will Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation, did an interview talking about many things including an idea about a sitcom called The Rikers, a half hour comedy about the Rikers in space. If they are serious, that show would be extremely funny, because the two of them talking together had me laughing non-stop. It is fun to hear them remembering their time acting in Star Trek and about the conventions they attend, and I will post the video, it is a little over 9 minutes, but I could have listened for an hour, they are that much fun.
You can read more about the interview on TrekToday. From the article:

In the video, the pair, whose characters married in Star Trek: Nemesis, talk about their Star Trek days as well as what they would do if they could make their own half-hour sitcom.

“We have this idea for a sitcom,” said Sirtis.

“A half hour, the Rikers in Space,” added Riker, “their wacky uncle Data, their little dog Worf. Two of us, on like the Titan probably, being funny. And we’re dead serious.”

I would watch that show, it sounds original and funny!

If you would like to be infected with a computer virus, you would first need to have implanted in your body a chip, and I discussed that topic in a previous post. A scientist who has a chip implanted in his hand decided to infect it with a computer virus. From the article:

The virus, infecting a chip implanted in Gasson’s hand, passed into a laboratory computer. From there, the infection could have spread into other computer chips found in building access cards.

All this was intentional, in an experiment to see how simple radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips like those used for tracking animals can host and spread technological diseases.

Gasson had a relatively simple chip implanted in the top of his left hand near his thumb last year. It emits a signal that is read by external sensors, allowing him access to the Reading laboratory and for his cell phone to operate.

He and his colleagues created a malicious code for the chip. When the lab’s sensors read the code, the code inserted itself into the building computer database that governs who has access to the premises.

“The virus replicates itself through the database and potentially could copy itself onto the access cards that people use,” Gasson said.

The experiment showed that implants which wirelessly communicate with other computers can infect them and vice versa.

He also goes on to explain that bionic medical devices such as a heart pacemaker, for example, may receive a malicious code to stop it from working properly thus endangering the patients life. Cochlear implants and brain stimulators used for patients with Parkinson´s disease also face interruption by a malicious virus.
My interpretation of this study is skeptical, but then again I usually am when it comes to research that looks at the nefarious uses of technology. Why choose to do research on how a computer virus can infect an implant unless in the future, an implant will be required for business, identification, and money transactions. Of course this is the science fiction, tin foil hat wearer in me, but I still wonder about this type of research.
You can read the entire article at LiveScience.com at the link below.
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• Man Infects Himself with Computer Virus (livescience.com)

I am glad the International Federation of Trekkers will relaunch their website because I never saw the first one! The countdown clock they have is very cool and as I write this there are 14 days left until it is up and running. From the article:
The International Federation of Trekkers (IFT), a Star Trek fan club, was first organized in 1984. A nonprofit corporation, IFT’s purpose, is “To promote the humanistic philosophies and ideals portrayed in the Star Trek myths in a realistic fashion conducive to the continued existence and responsible advancement of human kind. To provide, promote, and support education and positive legal activism in the area of human rights, racial and sexual equality, environmental causes, and space exploration. To promote a more positive impression of Star Trek fans as intelligent, socially conscious, active individuals who are aware and concerned about the real world today.”
Well, it looks like they have a lot of work to do in promoting their very positive ideals with an oil spill destroying the Gulf of Mexico, many wars currently being fought, and massive unemployment due to a global economic crisis. While a lot of the ideas are nice in the Federation, I doubt it would work and it sounds too much like one world government. I do not know if humans could evolve to the point of leaving greed for money and power behind, like the Vulcan species suppressed their violent emotions in exchange for approaching life with pure logic, and be able to handle a Federation that involves working with and getting along with other species when we cannot even get along on Earth with other races.
Here is a link to the article about the website.

Every year, the Lyrid meteor shower takes place in April and I remember one year camping out in the back yard on a sleeping bag and watching the show in the sky, it was a lot of fun and very memorable. From the Space.com:
Anyone who enjoys watching the sky for “shooting stars” will have an opportunity to observe an old and reliable meteor display over the next several days: the April Lyrids. The best time to watch will be for a night or two around the peak, April 22
.
Faithful meteor shower The Lyrids are an annual display of fairly fast meteors that may be seen any night from April 16 to 25: they are above one-half of their maximum in numbers for about a day or two centered on the date of their peak activity.This year, the peak is predicted to fall during the daylight hours (for America and Europe) on April 22. After the gibbous moon sets at about 2:30 a.m. local daylight time that morning, observers near latitude 40 degrees north will still have about 90 minutes of dark sky to watch for the Lyrids before dawn interferes. The southern states are more favored because the Moon sets earlier and twilight begins later.
The show is even better if you camp out in the mountains, camping is fun with the right crowd, a campfire, s´mores, the whole works!

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• Lyrid Meteor Shower Peaks April 22 (space.com)

If you feel like watching a an interesting movie, I suggest The Jacket (2005). It is a little on the heavy side in terms of subject matter which includes experimenting on patients who appear to be mentally ill, but the movie is based on the novel written in 1915 by Jack London originally under the title The Star Rover. The difference between the novel and the movie is that in The Star Rover, the prisoner endures torture by escaping in his mind into the universe as if he were a space traveler, in contrast, the movie has the patient shift in time which is induced by experimental drugs. The movie is well acted and of course it is an interesting story.

I am glad the International Federation of Trekkers will relaunch their website because I never saw the first one! The countdown clock they have is very cool and as I write this there are 14 days left until it is up and running. From the article:
The International Federation of Trekkers (IFT), a Star Trek fan club, was first organized in 1984. A nonprofit corporation, IFT’s purpose, is “To promote the humanistic philosophies and ideals portrayed in the Star Trek myths in a realistic fashion conducive to the continued existence and responsible advancement of human kind. To provide, promote, and support education and positive legal activism in the area of human rights, racial and sexual equality, environmental causes, and space exploration. To promote a more positive impression of Star Trek fans as intelligent, socially conscious, active individuals who are aware and concerned about the real world today.”
Well, it looks like they have a lot of work to do in promoting their very positive ideals with an oil spill destroying the Gulf of Mexico, many wars currently being fought, and massive unemployment due to a global economic crisis. While a lot of the ideas are nice in the Federation, I doubt it would work and it sounds too much like one world government. I do not know if humans could evolve to the point of leaving greed for money and power behind, like the Vulcan species suppressed their violent emotions in exchange for approaching life with pure logic, and be able to handle a Federation that involves working with and getting along with other species when we cannot even get along on Earth with other races.
Here is a link to the article about the website.

Two movies you can check out, if you are interested in speculating on what may happen to you if you reach the threshold between life and death, are The I Inside (2003) and Stay(2005). The I Inside centers more on the character shifting back and forth in time trying to correct a mistake, and Stay is more about relationships and actually being at the threshold between life and death. I would not consider either movie an “A” movie, but both are entertaining and interesting if you want a relaxing evening with popcorn and soda and a comfortable couch.

Physicist Paul Davies has written a book that is exactly the kind of topic I like to read. The basic question he asks is:
If aliens exist, where are they?The physicist Enrico Fermi asked this question 60 years ago, and it has since come to be known as the “Fermi Paradox”. Given how vast the universe is, and the billions of years that life has had to spread across the cosmos, why have we not found any evidence of alien life?Paul Davies takes a fresh look at this question in his engaging and thoughtful new book, The Eerie Silence.
He goes on to discuss if life on Earth is a simple fluke or there is a possibility that life does exist somewhere out there in the vast Universe.
He also explains that communication may take time:

Even if complex life can be found elsewhere, does that mean it will be intelligent? By “intelligent,” we often mean a species that will use science to investigate the universe. Davies again throws cold water on our assumptions, saying the scientific method is a specific outcome of Greek philosophy and medieval European monotheism. Despite this, Davies gamely uses the Drake Equation to estimate there could be 10,000 civilizations in the galaxy capable at this time of communicating by radio waves.

“At this time” is an important element of his estimate, since a barrier to interstellar communications is not only distance but time. Consider aliens living one thousand light years away. Davies points out that if they were able to see Earth in their telescopes, they would not see us as we are today, but as we were in the year 1010 A.D. – long before we invented radio dishes. And because human radio technology is only about 100 years old, it will take another 900 years for our first signals to reach them.

His writing would suggest he feels we are alone in the Universe but in true scientific form he states:

Still, the fact that we don’t know and may never have the answer about alien life is reason enough to keep searching, says Davies. By stretching our minds to try to envision all the possibilities in our search for aliens, not only may we one day find what we seek, but in the process we also will learn about many other deep and enduring mysteries of the cosmos.

I would like to think that life does exist in the Universe, but then again that is why I love science fiction, and I am not being unrealistic, in my opinion, because nothing has been proven to exclude the fact that life does not exist beyond our galaxy. It is a book that gets you thinking about all the possibilities in life.

LINK.

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• The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? by Paul Davies: review (telegraph.co.uk)

The famous physicist Stephen Hawking believes aliens exist in the universe but that they would be likely to conquer us rather than make friends. So we are looking at meeting Klingons or Romulans as opposed to Vulcans or Betazoids! From the article:
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has repeated his long-held belief that intelligent aliens are likely to exist, and that a visit by them to present-day humanity would probably have unfortunate consequences for us.
“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational… If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he argues. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”
Alternatively, in the case of aliens having originally evolved on an Earthlike world, it might simply be their goal to seize and colonise ours, as Prof Hawking says – regardless of the status of their homeworld, they might like to have another. The mere fact of their being able to get here across interstellar distances would tend to suggest they might be technically capable of overcoming humanity and exterminating or enslaving us – or confining limited numbers of us to reservations, if they were relatively kind aliens.
Ok, now I am thinking of the aliens from Stargate such as the Goa´uld or Wraith, yikes! His thoughts on the alien life are very interesting and oppose some the ideas of some of his colleagues who think that life on Earth is a fluke and no other life may exist in the universe.
You can read the entire article HERE.
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• Don’t Talk To Aliens, Warns Stephen Hawking (science.slashdot.org)

I was reading the article in TrekToday in which Goldberg talks about her role as Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation and in fact, that is the last character Gene Roddenberry ever wrote for the Star Trek series. I have heard her interviewed in the past about her strong desire to be part of TNG, but at the time, the producers did not take it seriously until she got on the phone and said she really was interested. From the article:

But those in charge of The Next Generation weren’t keen initially on having her at first. “When I got the opportunity, I asked to be part of it. But they were like ugh, they don’t wanna … The person I asked was LeVar Burton because he was doing it. I said, ‘Tell them I wanted to do it very much,’ and told them all the reasons. He said OK.”But it took a while before Goldberg got her chance. “A year went by and nothing happened. When I saw [Burton] next I said, ‘What happened?’ ‘They didn’t believe me.’ I said, ‘Give me the phone number,’ and I called them. We had a meeting with Gene Roddenberry who asked me the same question you just did (what drew her to Star Trek). I told them the same thing I told you. I never thought about it that way. So he wrote the last character that he wrote for me, and that’s how it happened.”

The episodes I like the most with the character Guinan are “Time´s Arrow” and Yesterday´s Enterprise and I have to say, Yesterday´s Enterprise has to be one of my favorite episodes of TNG.