October 2017
The sci-fi noir world of Blade Runner
... cinema. To be fair, all the ingredients were there for a fantastic movie. First, an excellent book on which the story is - loosely -...green’ or won’t be at all. Popular culture, including movies such as Blade Runner, has certainly played a role in ...
March 2016
Saving Earth from an Expanding Sun
... edge of our Sun’s habitable zone moves past our planet’s orbit. Anyone who saw Woody Allen’s movie Radio Days knows that we were promised five billion more years of having a habitable planet! Sure, it’s five...
June 2017
Automated or human-operated systems?
Watching the movie The Martian recently I was captured by the creativity demonstrated by two key characters - the astronaut stranded on Mars, ...
March 2015
Twinkle, twinkle satellite
... his frustration and admiration of it Yet once again, the role of technology is beholden to plot not just in the movies, but also in our heads – hence our continuing, unrealistic treatment of it. Don’t expect films to be scientifically sound. Plot...
December 2014
Terraforming Mars: from CFCs to Total Recall
... generators, which Arnold coaxes back to life. In real life, however, terraforming a planet is not as easy as it made to appear in movies. Turning Mars into another Earth would be extremely challenging for several reasons. We can break these down...
January 2016
200 Days in Space: Living in Orbit
...things you don’t get to see in science fiction movies (because they’re usually too busy saving the universe)...- where do we sleep? Again, it’s not as fancy as it is in some movies. We have a little ‘phone booth’ that’s our own personal space, where we ...
