Red Star Fly-by

I was fascinated by the Breakthrough Starshot Project to send a probe to another star system. They think it will take 20 years to develop the technology, 20 to 30 years to make the trip, and 4 years to send the pictures back. By then, my age will be triple digits and I just might not be around to see it. So, I decided to create my own version of what it might look like.

I started the animation earlier this year but got distracted with other things. This week I got back to work on it. It is a simulation of what a space probe flying through an exo-stellar system would see. I used the animation program Blender.

I created mini star system in Blender. I tried to make it to scale, so the distances and plant/star sizes were appropriate. I did make the planets on the large side, so they’d show up better. I created a path for the probe and created a camera that followed the route. I had to go back to my old geometry skills to work it out. Wikipedia was very valuable.

I'd dropped it mainly because I had trouble getting the camera to point where I wanted it to point. If the probe was travelling at 20% the speed of light, it would pass through the system is about 7 minutes. At 24 frames a second, that worked out to 10710 frames. To save time, I just specified positions and orientations for only about 30 frames and let Blender interpolate the others. The interpolations were kind of wonky.

I went back and recalculated the positions and orientations for about every 48 frames, or about 190 frames. When the probe was changing direction, or rotating faster, I used shorter time intervals. For the most part it works OK now, although there are a few glitches I need to fix. Some of the interpolations are strange. I don’t understand why.

I created a star scape back ground to make it look more realistic. That took me several tries to get right. I did a test run to see how it looks. I feel good about it.

I have some other changes I’d like to make. My artistic skills leave something to be desired, so I used images of various planets and moons in our solar system. Some of them are too recognizable, so I want to find a way to make something a little more alien. I don’t know how I will do that yet.

I also want to add a few moons to the system. Mainly to help illuminate the dark sides of some planets so they’re more visible.

I hope to get this done quickly, before I get side tracked again.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

What Would Extraterrestrial Intelligences Think About Us?

From time to time, when I watch some video, or listen to some music, I wonder what an extraterrestrial intelligence might think about us if that was the only piece of information they had.

I blame that fascination on a short story I read by Arthur C. Clarke called "History Lesson". It is sometimes called "Expedition to Earth", although he wrote another story with the same title.

The gist of the story is that aliens visit the earth long after humans have died out. The only artifact they find is a single roll of movie film. They try to understand what the movie is trying to tell them. After much discussion, the story reveals the nature of the movie, and it is nothing like what the aliens thought.

I read the story once, about 47 years ago, but the idea has been stuck in my mind ever since. What would extraterrestrials make of music like "The Blue Danube", "The James Bond Theme", "She Loves You", or "Disco Duck"? What would they make of movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey", " Casablanca", "Citizen Kane", or "Plan 9 from outer space"?

Other people have had the same thought, and some have even proposed to deliberately leave a message for extraterrestrials who might find them many millennia from now.

The best-known examples are the plaques on the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes, and the golden records on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes. Apparently, the New Horizons probe did not have any message on it. I always thought that it was Carl Sagan’s idea, but read recently that someone else suggested it to him. Carl was a friend of Arthur C. Clarke, so may have known the story “History Lesson”.

The record does have a range of music and sounds, but I don’t think it is as representative as we might like. It has three pieces by Bach and two by Beethoven. I do not want to put them down, but there is so much other great music from cultures throughout the world they could have chosen. Besides, to give a proper idea of humanity, some more mediocre music would be worth including.

I read that the Voyager records will last at least a billion years. So, a billion years from now, one of the Voyager records may be the only evidence that humanity ever existed.

A recent example of deliberately leaving a message is https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/a-time-capsule-launched-into-space-for-aliens-to-find-when-all-the-humans-are-gone/265718/ I believe there are other proposals along these lines, but I wasn’t able to find them in a quick search.

Several times over the years I imagined a movie based on the concept. It would be difficult to make, since although we would know the context of the surviving piece of human culture, how could we imagine realistic extraterrestrials and how they would interpret the artifact.

Another approach would be to have humans find the last remaining artifact of an earlier civilization. Although, in that case, it would not be possible to show the discrepancy between the reality of the artifact and how it is interpreted.

The idea I came up with would be to focus on a conference of extraterrestrial scientists as they argue about the meaning of the artifact. At the end of the movie, they would watch that one surviving human video: the cookie monster making cookie soup.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

"First Date" Script Posted

I have been struggling to get started on my writing and movie projects. Some one suggested that I write a story about a man who's wife had died. My wife died last year. They thought that writing a story about what it is like would help me come to terms with her loss.
 

When I made "Line of Taxis" I wanted to use it to help me deal with some of the problems I had. Since it was an on-going situation, I didn't want to address it directly. I created a situation quite different from my own, but where the protagonist would feel the same emotions. I believe that focus on the emotions was the main reason the film worked so well.

I tried to take a similar approach with this story. I hadn't come up with any good ideas for a story that would allow me to explore my feelings.

Over the last few months I have been part of a script writing groups. They have a writing exercise every session and I wrote up a number of ideas. Recently they suggested I write a two page dialogue scene. That gave me an opportunity to write a character like myself. Since it would be just a short scene, I didn't need to come up with a larger story that it would fit into.

The scene is about an older couple who are on their first date. The woman is recently divorced, while man's wife died. Not only is it their first date, but it is the first date either has had since they lost their spouses. I haven't progressed this far myself.

I felt it turned out OK. I only intended it to be a writing exercise, but I started to get interested in the characters. I felt I could build a larger story from it. I'm not sure just where I would take it, or what the point of the story would be. It isn't the approach I planned to take.

I revised the scene based on some feed back, and posted it on my website at: http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/stories/first-date/

I would like to know if people think it would be worth my while to pursue.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Martian Trip Video Posted

I posted a new video this week about my trip to Mars. I didn't actually go to Mars to make it. The video began as a short story I wrote for a class I took on conversational Mandarin, so the narration is in Mandarin. There are English subtitles though.

My new trip to Mars video is now posted at:

http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/my-trip-to-mars/ , and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqpdEFnbeoM

After my wife died last year, her brother took her remains back to China for burial. My wife and I agreed to that before she died. My brother-in-law invited me to visit to see her grave. I didn't speak any Mandarin and was worried about travelling there on my own. I decided to take a class to learn some of the language.

We had to write, and present, a short story in Mandarin. It was supposed to be only five sentences long. Mine ended up as six, but no one complained.

I'm still not very confident about my pronunciation, and I have trouble remembering words. After I recorded the audio, I asked some Mandarin speaking friends review it. I had to rerecord part of it.

I used some images of the Earth and Mars from the NASA website. They are in the public domain. I only needed one image of the Earth. I used several images of the Martian surface. To make them more visually interesting, I did either a pan or a zoom to give some motion. I had created a star-scape for another project, and I used that as the background for the full planet images.

In my original version, I used an image from the movie "The Martian". The image was exactly what I wanted, but since it wasn't public domain, I decided I needed something else. I tried several approaches before I found something I liked. Like the other images, I have an image of the Martian surface pan across the screen. I added a video of an eye blinking, so as to appear as if an astronaut was looking through a visor.

I wanted to add some background sound to the narration. NASA created audio files of the sounds that different planets and the Sun make. I think they convert the radio waves they produce to make the sound. I used sounds for the Earth, The Sun, and Mars.

I did sneak in a bit of an Easter egg. Only one person has mentioned it so far.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Interstellar and Martian Trips

It has been a while since I last posted. I've had a difficult time getting active on any of my movie projects. In the last few weeks I have started work on a couple of small projects that should result in something to post soon.

I've had a large number of people sign up for my mailing list while I was inactive. I have no idea why.

Red Star Planet Flyby

The Breakthrough Starshot project caught my interest when I first learned of it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot). It is a proposal to send a probe to the Alpha Centauri star system. I would like to see what they find.

Unfortunately for me, they think it will be 20 years to develop the technology, 20 to 30 years to travel to the star and then 4 or 5 years to send back the data. I don't need to reveal my age for people to realize that I won't likely be around to see the result.

So, what I have started to work on is a simulated flyby through an alien star system. Then, at least, I'd get some idea what they might see.

I've used Blender to create the simulated star system. I haven't given it a name yet. It is not based on any real star. I gave it 4 planets, 3 super Earths and a smaller planet. The furthest planet is about 7,500,000 km from the star. The size and distances of the planets and the star are all to the same scale.

I need to work on the appearance of the planets. I want them to look realistic. Since my artistic skills are a bit primitive, that is a bit of a challenge. For testing I have just used maps of planets and moons in our system. I'll come up with something else before I'm done.

The probe is projected to have a speed op about 20% the speed of light. At that speed, it takes about 7 minutes to pass through the system. For my test I sped that up to about 140% the speed of light. That isn't realistic, but it gave me an idea what the final version would look like.

The test version was a disappointment. The path I laid out for the probe was too far from any of the planets. I will need to change the path, or move the planets.

I wanted to have the camera point at each of the planets at it flew by. I set some key frame locations and orientation of the camera, and let Blender interpolate the other frames. This didn't work very well. The camera would drift off the planet, then snap back. I am not an expert in Blender, so maybe there is an automated way to do that. If I don't figure that out, I may need to modify the location and orientation for each frame.

Seven minutes of silence can be boring, so I want to have some sound. I have some ideas, but I haven't followed up on them yet.

Trip to Mars

I am not actually planning to go to Mars, just do a video about the trip.

I am taking a course in conversational Mandarin. My wife is buried in China, and I'll need to speak a little bit of the language to travel there. I'm not doing very well with it so far.

I did have some success with a short story I wrote for the class. It is only 5 sentences long. My first idea was to talk about my wife, but I felt I might get too emotional. Instead I wrote about an imaginary trip I took to Mars.

I made a PowerPoint presentation to go with the story. I plan to turn that into a short video. Some of the images I used were copy written, so I'll have to find something in the public domain. I don't think I can afford to go to Mars and take my own pictures.

I will record the Mandarin myself, but will include some English subtitles for non Mandarin speakers, and Chinese subtitles for Mandarin speakers who can't make sense of my poor pronunciation.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog