My thoughts on the new Trek series announcement...

So, there's a new Star Trek series in the works over at CBS...

What will it be about?

Star Trek, in its early days, always excelled at re-imagining our Earthly issues, social and political, as challenges faced by our characters on alien worlds and within the Federation. At times, it was radical and almost subversive.

While the series of the '80s, '90s, and the naughties were generally written to a much higher standard, and often provided social or moral commentary on various issues of the day, the hard-edged daring that defined The Original Series (that and the copious cheese) was increasingly absent.

The world feels morally disoriented lately. Maybe that's something every generation thinks about the world as they age, but If you want a radical theme for the new Star Trek show, something topical, then how about ambiguity?

Friend? Foe? Neither? ...Why?

DS9 tackled some of this ambiguity with Changeling infiltrations and religious extremism. It occasionally seems almost prescient when you re-watch it these days!
I'm not suggesting we look for more of the same, but the current global political landscape offers many opportunities to dust off Star Trek's old social commentary mirror, and expand upon DS9's rich and textured groundwork:

Europe is facing a tide of refugees and immigrants from the Middle East, composed of desperate, decent people struggling tooth and nail to find a safe haven in the EU. They're running from opposing forces of tyranny and cult-exploitation, or just from the all-encompassing destruction between those forces.
The welcome they find here is limited - they're treated with suspicion for many reasons:
They're desperate - will they turn to crime?
They're running from radicalisation - have some of them been turned? Will they kill us if we take them in?
They're educated - might they have a hidden agenda?

Meanwhile the strife they're running from is a cesspool of competing corporate and political interests, many of which have environmental ramifications that are exacerbating the whole situation.

Imagine re-casting this real-world situation as the fallout of the Dominion War, or (cringe) the destruction of Romulus... or both.

The Federation, structurally, is much more like the EU in this situation, and would continue to serve as an aspirational society - though flawed. They would be the ones dealing with the moral dilemma of how to accommodate the displaced hordes of Cardassians, Romulans, and Gamma Quadrant species.

The Cardassian Union would make multiple attempts to create a lasting government, but repeatedly fall to internal struggles.

They, together with the Dominion would be like the Assad and Murzi regimes, desperately trying to hang onto control as their empires crumble. Initially the Dominion would be hit by a popular uprising applauded by the Alpha Quadrant powers, but some new group rising within the influx would represent ISIS, and start to co-opt the uprising to try to secure its own foothold.

Leaderless, structure-loving Romulans would cast around for whomever they could install as a leader, but unused to the nomadic lifestyle thrust upon them, and unable to contend with the uprisings on vassal worlds throughout the former empire, they fracture into multiple factions, some seeking Federation aid.

All of this would place a strain on the Federation, with border worlds beset by resource shortages and bottlenecks in the refugee trail emerging everywhere. Tensions between member worlds would rise, but I'd rather the Federation weather the storm. Star Trek exists to show us the most righteous way to deal with our problems. That's what it has always set out to do.

This might be controversial, but I think it would be interesting to turn the traditional Trek political analogy on its head, and have the Klingons fulfil some of the unsavoury roles that the US has had in the last couple of decade's events.

They should be the ones who suffer a 9/11-style atrocity, and then use it as an excuse to start a proxy war that's really about Dilithium or labor. The Federation has been ignoring some of the uglier traits of Klingon culture for decades, but events will conspire to force the UFP to either call them out, or tacitly permit immoral behaviour.
Their warp engines are damaging subspace, and they're waging war to continue mining the Kovenium Monotserite and dilithium that continue that process. Meanwhile, an enormous cultural bias against scientific advancement (There's no honour in being a nerd), and a general incompatibility with Federation tech stalls any move away from that dependency, and they maintain a misplaced pride in the fact that their primitive technology allowed the allies to circumvent the Dominion's Breen advantage in the war.

The Klingons would retain the sympathetic regard we've built up for them over the last 16 seasons of 24th century TV, in that many of them would be fine people, but the Federation public would have to deal with the uncomfortable truth of how the Klingon government conducts itself in war, occupation, and intelligence.

...So, that would set the stage. Then the writers come in and depict the heroes of the Federation, their Klingon allies, and the decent folk among the disadvantaged masses doing the right thing, and resolving the situation as peacefully as possible

Perhaps that's the perspective that's been missing from Trek - they need to stop trying to make the Federation be the US. It used to be the aspirational goal for the US, but America has shifted away from that path, and perhaps it's time for a foreign perspective. The Federation is the EU, and the Klingons are the US... everyone else is just trying to pick themselves up...

...you know... in a lot of ways, that fits like a glove!

Now, I don't expect this idea to be anywhere near the mark - for one thing, I figure 24th century Trek is done-for, thanks to the healthy profits turned by the lowest-common-denominator schtick of the Abrams films. The new series is being produced by Alex Kurtzman, co-writer of the 2009 'Star Trek' film, a core member of JJ Abrams' creative team and seated on their self-styled "Supreme Court Of Trek". Dollars-to-donuts, the series will be set in that continuity. It could still be an entertaining and valuable contribution to the canon, but with the foundation of those movies under it, it's an unstable start to say the least.

So this post is little more than a thought experiment, but a fun one at that. I actually came up with the idea as a thought experiment a few days before the announcement of the new shows.

The Star Trek "lit-verse" of Pocket Books novels has apparently provided a consistent continuation of the 24th century universe left behind in the wake of Voyager, incorporating many of the same elements I've used here, but I haven't read them, so I don't know how that cocktail turned out.

End Transmission.

My Google account got hacked.

Apologies for the spam mails!

Untitled SETI Story - Part III

Madeleine Browne smoothed out the freshly-printed press-package on her desk.
"And how did you get my direct number?"
She was just finishing the press conference announcement for the SETI website when the phone had rung.

NASA.

Specifically someone named Julie Shin at the National Astrobiology Institute. Somehow she had caught wind of the goings on in Puerto Rico before the press. She knew someone in Heliophysics at Goddard who knew somebody on something called RAGSS at Arecibo who knew somebody working for SETI there... probably this intern, Daisy Tobin. Word gets around. Someone in the NAI Press Office had had dealings with her, and he gave her the number. Matt Brinker, probably - he was the SETI attaché to the NAI.

This would be the first of many calls - and they'd get increasingly impolite as the story gained traction. Maddy had been a press officer for a dozen different non-profits, each more "fringe" than the last, and she'd been through this circus too many times to count. Luckily this was just a personal-interest call.

"The watch-word is patience and restraint. We need to confirm this with as many different instruments as possible, and then set about analysing the signal to confirm artificiality."

The same note of caution was re-stated the next day in front of a roomful of gathered journos - from science magazines, websites, a few newspaper sci correspondents, two TV news stations, and as many wing-nut conspiracy sites as you could shake a stick at. Not a great showing for what could-be-but-likely-wasn't the Greatest Discovery In The History Of Humankind^TM, but a respectably full room, given the short notice.

"SETI's Allen Telescope Array in California is currently undergoing an upgrade, but has been partially brought back online to provide more detailed analysis of the signal." She gulped. "NASA have - incredibly generously - offered to attempt to detect the signal with a number of their outer-Solar-System assets, namely New Horizons and the Voyagers. We cannot express our gratitude enough, as this will help to pin down the distance to the signal source via triangulation."

"So, to reiterate: The signal has been constantly transmitting on a tight-band frequency for at least the last 3 days. The signal strength is pulsing in a mathematically complex pattern that is unlikely to be naturally-ocurring. All man-made sources have been effectively ruled out. We're keeping the location of the source on the sky on a need-to-know basis for now, but that will change - SETI has always valued the contribution of citizen scientists."

Maddy gripped the sides of the podium and straightened up.
"Any questions?"
BOOM.

Untitled SETI story - part II

Carlton finished logging the data from the night's addition to the Radio Astronomy G-type Star Survey. RAGSS wasn't the most glamorous acronym, but he was glad to be working on a project that helped to characterise the Sun in comparison to its stellar brethren, and glad to be able to use the famous Arecibo "chum-bowl in the Jungle".
That nickname needs work - I better not say it out loud.
 
RAGSS was able to use this prestigious facility by the happy coincidence that they were interested in almost exactly the same set of stars that SETI liked to repeatedly survey, and that they were using a completely different set of electromagnetic frequencies to do so. RAGSS's PI Doctor Ortega would have liked to go star-to-star at a faster clip than SETI, but as a serendipitous alignment of interests between the now-wealthy Alien-Seekers and a tiny, under-funded, but respected graduate school in Philadelphia, they were slaved to SETI's will - and SETI figured ET would need at least 15 minutes-per-star-per-month to let itself be known.

Carlton smiled as he packed up his laptop and breezed out the door. He always liked to drop by the SETI shack when Daisy was on duty and try to cheer her up - she wasn't the most talkative intern, but she was cute and nerdy, and nowhere near as intimidatingly different as the local Puerto Rican girls. He liked to think she enjoyed his visits, despite herself.

The cheesiest grin he could muster plastered his jowly face as he knocked on the door.

"Carlton?! Come in! Look at this!" came the muffled but alert voice from the other side of the door.
That's unusually perky for Daisy...
The door was ripped open by a wide-eyed Daisy. "I think I've actually got a candidate!"
Carlton spread his arms demonstratively and dropped the line he'd been preparing.
"From RAGSS to riches!"
No effect.
That was terrible. Really awful. I mean, accurate, but in-poor-taste, and just terrible. Stop smiling, Carlton.
Luckily, Daisy hadn't seemed to hear him. "LOOK!" she implored, pointing at her laptop.

One half of the screen was a 3D signal attenuation graph, and the left hand side showed the familiar raw detector feed alphanumeric grid on the top half, and a similar drizzle-feed of frequency distributions. Each display was synced, and repeating a 30-second loop of recorded data.
A high-strength signal bubbled onto the upper left of the grid, pulsed rythmically across the field, the counter reset, and the playback started again. The frequency distribution graph showed activity confined to one vertical bar, and the 3D graph... looked pretty provocative.

Carlton's ample jaw succumbed to gravity.
"Is this real-time?"
"yeah."
"A comsat."
"No, look at the slew-rate."
"A geostationary comsat."
"No! look at the pointing!"
"Ok... you need more eyes on this. Have you called your boss?" He looked at her expectantly, totally not thinking about how hot she was when gripped by scientific awe.

She gulped, reaching for her phone. "I really don't want to be wrong."

Part III 

Untitled SETI story - Part I

Daisy rubbed her eyes and flicked at the red straw loitering against the rim of her tumbler of coke-and-meltwater. It made a full round of the glass, perturbing the last rounded remnants of the ice. The meager sighs of the beverage's expended effervescence underlined the monotony of her life recently.

Six weeks in Puerto Rico. 'Woohoo', right?

She was not the easily-jaded type, but after a month's worth of 8-hour shifts of doing basically-nothing, she was sick of the heat, sick of the view, sick of Carlton's painful attempts at conversation, and sick of closing her eyes to see a burned-in grid of negative-colour zeroes - the aggregate effect of zoning out while staring at a raw output terminal at 3am in the morning on an intern posting with SETI.

A beep from her terminal followed by a deep bass judder through the floor of her little perch overlooking the dish signified a scheduled target change, and the engagement of huge winches to tug the enormous feedhorn assembly to a new position. The cables twanged and popped and resonated with the strain. That, at least, was something that still amused her.

She glanced at the clock. 6:57am. One more hour before day shift and bed. She zoned out as the familiar otherworldy hum-and-zott of motor-and-cable continued. Some zeroes near the edge of the grid bubbled into higher numbers. It barely registered with her. The ball of undulating numbers cleared the edge of the grid and crossed the centre, some of the centre-most digits transitioning to letters after hitting 9. Daisy scratched her nose absent-mindedly.
The vertical centre line of digits on the grid briefly read
6
E
Q
U
J
5
The happenstance sparked recognition in her, and she glanced momentarily at the framed image on the wall - those same digits on a printout, circled in red pen, with "WOW!" written in excited penmanship in the margin.

Still, she was unmoved, beyond appreciating the coincidence - after all, it simply represented a spike in signal strength on the feedhorn - measured 1-9, then A-Z for easy reading. ASCII output. Old-school.

This was Arecibo, SETI, no fancy 3D signal attenuation graphs here, baby. The mid-nineties was as advanced as the in-situ equipment got, at least in SETI's on-site shack. Newer and better ears the world-over were listening to the cosmos on behalf of the usual retinue of Ivy-Leagues and Institutes of Technology, and thanks to an investment fad among the Silicon Valley Billionaire pack, SETI was now well-funded enough to outbid the small-fries and nearly monopolise Arecibo full-time.

The recurrence of the famous "WOW!" pattern was of course a red herring, a not-entirely-unlikely confluence in the data, and gone amid the constantly-shifting values in the blink of an eye.
It had spiked her attention, though. There was a signal, for sure - but that was hardly unusual.
Probably a satellite, she mused, watching the blob continue to pulse as it slowly slid across the detector grid. They caught comsats several times a night, the odd civvie aircraft would blink through, and occasionally a terrestrial signal reflected off a passing LEO object.
...but...
Comsats stick pretty close to the equator, planes and LEO sats are faster, and reflections are never this strong
She glanced at the feedhorn pointing read-out. Nowhere near the equator. She whipped out her phone, unlocked it, and tapped into the Sat-Pass app to see what was passing over her at that moment... a couple of spent rocket stages and a Russia Geo-science bird... but nothing in the track the telescope was slewing through...

The blob slid off the screen. The groan-and-womp of the slewing mechanisms ceased, and the subtle hum of the star-tracking motors kicked in as the great dish found its scheduled target and settled in for a quarter hour of uneventful observation.

She sighed and sat back in the creaky chair.

Daisy. You're not going to find a signal from the great beyond at 7am while strung-out on caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup.

She rubbed her itchy eyelashes again - the ever-present grid behind her eyelids flaring red with the pressure. Her mind overlaid an impression of the signal, unbidden. There had been a rythm to the pulsations.

Atmospheric scintillation? ...maybe... just a bit too rythmic, though...
A Pulsar? No... none in that part of the sky.
She had the locations of every notable pulsar in Arecibo's swathe of the heavens memorised by this point. She knew there weren't any new ones because stars exploding violently in the night sky are kind of hard-to-miss. For a SETI observer, seeing a pulsar transit the screen pipping off millisecond-perfect radio spikes could be momentarily thrilling, but mislea - hang on...
 
this signal had transited the field just like a pulsar, or a geostationary comsat.

It's stationary in the sky, relative to the stars... it's coming from Out There...

Part II

Blood Moon 2015 Photographed through my telescope by my phone.

Blood Moon 2015

MOVIE REVIEW: Ridley Scott's The Martian (Spoiler free)

I was lucky enough to win a pair of tickets to the Irish premiere of The Martian thanks to Astronomy Ireland.

Having read the superb, compelling, funny, and unapologetically-technical-but-amazingly-digestible novel by Andy Weir, I was hotly anticipating the film. I'm normally extremely shy of spoilers leading up to a film, but with all indications pointing to a very faithful adaptation by Ridley Scott, my familiarity with the story dispelled any such trepidation.
So I watched everything.

With each new trailer and promotional tie-in, my cautious optimism increased: Would this finally be a film that reveled in scientific literacy in a light, upbeat manner?! Whole tranches of dialogue were liberated right from the pages, and with every successive image in the trailers, it was like viewing a recorded compilation of my own mental images from reading the book... with a heavy heap of Hollywood gloss, of course.

As the release date approached, the media juggernaut rumbled on. I watched the book's subreddit swell with glowing reviews from sources personal and professional.

NASA, spying an opportunity to curry some additional goodwill, wisely convened joint press conferences, seating real live astronauts with the likes of Weir, Scott, and lead actor Matt Damon.
And so, it all culminated at the Savoy theatre on O'Connell Street at 7 pm on the 24th of September 2015.

My friend and I arrived, immediately engulfed by a throng of people. There was a red carpet, promotional decor (including a prop surface excursion helmet from the film), and hilariously well-chosen mood music playing. On our way to the cinema, we had spied a BBC news broadcast in a bar reporting live on the London premiere of the film... Attended by the entire cast... Meaning they were not in Dublin!

As it was, the most notable personality I spotted was the wonderfully avid space enthusiast and journalist Leo Enright, familiar to me from just about every notable space mission press conference I've ever watched. From Curiosity to Rosetta, the man gets around! I would have loved to speak to him, but he was busily chatting to someone else.

His presence was not his only contribution to the evening, however, as we discovered upon taking our seats.

The film was preceded, as people filed into the grand (and thematically named) IMC Galactic auditorium, by a slideshow of images from The real-life Martian, NASA JPL's Curiosity rover. Some images were less than 24 hours old, processed by Leo Enright himself, depicting rover's current environs in the foothills of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, Curiosity's home for the last three years.
With the place filled to capacity, the lights dimmed, and the screen filled with literal and figurative stars.

While he's never lost his mastery over visuals, I have not been impressed with legendary director Ridley Scott's recent efforts, so there was still some part of me waiting for the other shoe to drop after The Martian's well-pitched marketing campaign.
After so thoroughly enjoying the book, and sharing that enjoyment with my ten year old nephew (he devoured the novel in a matter of days), I had a sizeable emotional investment in the characters and the story. I was fearful of a repeat of Scott's last big space adventure, Prometheus - a film that looked astonishing, but played out like the script had fallen into a blender.

I need not have worried.

If you're familiar with the story of Andy Weir's book, let me just say that there is a special thrill to be had in witnessing something you hold dear being done such justice.

If you're not (as was my friend - in contrast to myself, he had seen little more than a few scene-setting promo videos), everything that keeps people turning pages in the book is effectively translated to the screen.

The film takes itself seriously, but by the nature of the characters humour occurs seemingly spontaneously, and I found myself creasing with laughter on several occasions.

The opening moments threw me a little by differing in presentation from the book, but after a few short moments, I developed a Cheshire cat grin that scarcely departed aside from moments of wincing empathic pain, dramatic tension or simple, reverent awe at the beauty of the vistas before me.

Matt Damon was set a herculean task in embodying Mark Watney, the loneliest person in history. Damon is a capable actor, but Watney carries the plot, commanding well over half of the screentime solo.

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote in detail in his Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth about the philosophical shift that comes with astronaut training. The methodical, logical manner of thinking that these professionals in life threatening and immediate situations rely upon to come out the other side.

That "right stuff" is present in spades in Damon's Watney, but so too - straight from the page - is his sardonic, cutting wit, near-boundless positivity and resourcefulness, and his genuine awe-fueled enthusiasm for his happenstance position in the universe. These moments come off as tender, honest, and breathtaking, and make full use of Scott's visual prowess, serving up grand, crater-pocked landscapes, steely cold skies scudded by high altitude clouds - and never too long a wait for Phobos or Deimos to pass unassumingly overhead in the distance.

In fact, from stark, elegant spacecraft, and rich, succulently-detailed orbital views of Earth and Mars, to NASA's Epcot-inspired installations and the cramped, cluttered college dorm aesthetic of JPL, the film is not short on visual artistry.

While Damon carries off his isolation as seemingly-effortlessly as Watney, the rest of the sizeable cast divide into two ensembles and play off each other beautifully. In fact, to single anyone out is to do an injustice to the others, though Daniels, Glover, Bean, Mara, Ejiofor, and Davis all get their chances to shine.
That I spent the last few minutes editing that list of names repeatedly speaks to how strong every link in this chain is...

...It also speaks to the egalitarian nature of the script!
For a film about isolation, there is an even hand played to each character, allowing everyone some measure of depth and development.

Of course, in any adaptation, there are changes wrought.
The labyrinthine plot of the book is straightened in some sections - parts are left out here and there, but never in a way that damages the consistency of the overall story or significantly alters its central themes. In a few areas, characters are gifted new scenes, and the opportunity for growth is never wasted. Some of the funniest parts of the movie are moments that weren't in the (extremely amusing) novel.

Conversely, some of the funniest moments in the book don't make it into the film - though one priceless stream of consciousness from Mark is faithfully repurposed in one of the promo tie-ins.

If I had one issue with the film's presentation, it would be the 3D implementation. It may have been our choice of seating, close to the screen, but the depth in a lot of scenes didn't really seem to tally with the footage it was applied to, leading me to suspect a somewhat botched post-conversion to 3D. The alignment seemed so far off that it created the optical illusion of mountains and rocks twisting and bending unnaturally in certain scenes... It could be mildly distracting.

Lastly, as a recurring member of Astronomy Ireland and a space geek, it's gratifying to see a film getting so much right from that scientific perspective. In recent years we've been increasingly spoiled on that front, with Gravity nailing the free floating ballet of microgravity, and Interstellar succeeding where Gravity failed in orbital mechanics (and in GLORIOUSLY using general relativity as an incredibly emotional driver of the plot).
 As befits a film adapted from a book by a guy who wrote his own simulation software to account for the effects of long-duration ion engine burns (as opposed to the more easily-calculated staccato burns of chemical rockets), there are no glaring errors in the treatment of distance, thrust, relative velocity, or signal delay in The Martian.
I had to scratch my head at one or two scenes where the ships engines seemed to be pointing away from the destination during supposed deceleration burns, but I can rationalise that as some kind of framing or compositional quirk I didn't immediately cogitate.

In reference to Gravity, that film's sound design was a marvel (sound was only transmitted through contact with the characters' space suits), but no such attempt at auditory realism was made here - action in space and on Mars'surface is as deep and as loud as it would be on Earth (so much so that I'm beginning to suspect that it was entirely filmed here!).
Similarly, although much is made in the dialogue of Mars' atmosphere's remarkable thinness, the wind howls, flaps 'pressurised' hab canvas, and causes people to lean into it to make progress at times.
And for that matter, there are very few instances where Mars' 0.38g surface gravity becomes apparent.

However what we have here is a gorgeously shot, immersively acted, cleverly scripted piece of top notch drama.
It could have been a brainless action fest.
It could have been a depressing critique on the follies of human ambition.
It could have been a psychological horror on the spectre of living with only your own thoughts to accompany you...

... But it's not.

What it is, is a love letter to exploration, to determination, to persistent positivity, to resourcefulness. It's an affirmation that what we astronomers do is part of a push towards space exploration that is going to define this century for the rest of human history...

And its a really bloody good film!

Thank you, Astronomy Ireland, for the opportunity to see it so soon - it was damn worthwhile.