What If You Went to the Bottom of the Sea and Nobody Cared?

One of the more depressing aspects of living in the current epoch, at least for me, is a nagging sense that the days of the Great Adventure are over. What do I mean by this? Consider: throughout much of the 20th century, larger-than-life men and women were constantly pushing the boundaries of how far, how high, and how fast human beings could go, either making or contributing to extraordinary scientific discoveries along the way, and all with the full attention and support of the general public. Viewing the popular movies and newsreels of decades past, and reading the contemporary pulp fiction (which I believe is often more representative of a particular milieu than the “good” stuff), you can really feel the shared sense of excitement ordinary joes must have vicariously experienced as daring aviators flew solo across the Atlantic for the first time, then circumnavigated the globe by plane, then broke the sound barrier and ventured to the edge of outer space; as intrepid explorers uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun and located the legendary city of Macchu Picchu high in the mountains of South America; as hardy adventurers reached the poles and summited Mount Everest; and ultimately, as astronauts first stepped onto the surface of another planetary body. The word “progress” meant something unambiguously positive then, and it must’ve seemed to folks living in those heady times as if the human race was really going… well, somewhere. I personally came along a little too late to share in that zeitgeist firsthand, but even in my own youth during the 1970s and ’80s, I recall the public imagination being captured by the early space shuttle launches, by the first untethered spacewalk by an astronaut with a jetpack, and by Dr. Robert Ballard’s discovery of the most famous shipwreck in history, RMS Titanic, lying in the silent darkness two-and-a-half miles below the surface of the ocean.

Nowadays, though… things are different now. Here in the second decade of the 21st century, every square foot of the Earth’s surface has been mapped and photographed from orbit. Ancient cities lost for centuries in desert sands and steaming jungles can be pinpointed from air-conditioned rooms in anonymous suburban office parks using thermal imaging satellites. Any place on the globe can be reached by air in a matter of hours. African safaris and Everest hikes are vacation destinations for those who can afford them. And even distant worlds are accessible to the human race as never before, via our robot proxies and the information-sharing power of the Internet. And that’s all good, it really is. Many of those early adventurer/explorers I romanticize met with pitiful and/or horrific deaths because they had to be there in person, and the folks back home never got more than just a glimpse of the sights they saw and things they learned. Today, technology has made discovery much safer, and it’s made it truly democratic as well — everyone can view the latest photos from the Hubble telescope or the surviving Mars rover, or zoom in on some section of the globe at the click of a mouse. People can even participate if they like, though projects like SETI@home. But the trade-off, unfortunately, and the irony as well, is that just at the moment when the average citizen can become more involved in this sort of thing than ever before, not many people seem to care anymore. Exploration and discovery seem to have become, at least as far as I can tell, a niche enthusiasm that attracts a relative few, rather than a society-wide concern.

Why else would there have been so little apparent interest three weeks ago when James Cameron — yes, that James Cameron, the writer/director of Titanic, Avatar, and, somewhat prophetically, The Abyss — joined the ranks of the great explorers by riding a revolutionary new submersible to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the very deepest point in all of Earth’s oceans? To my mind, this was a Big Damn Deal. The sort of thing that strangers on trains should’ve been talking about for days afterwards, worthy of front-page articles and magazine covers. Instead, it seems to have been a mere blip on the cultural radar, duly noted and then shoved aside with the turn of another 24-hour news cycle. There are follow-up stories out there, but you have to seek them out if you’re interested. And my inner cynic can’t help but wonder with a sour grumble just how many of the mouth-breathers walking around out there actually are interested. Neither he nor I like the odds much.

To be fair to the mouth-breathers, though, a big chunk of the blame for the indifference that surrounded this story must be thrown at the media. There wasn’t much news about Cameron’s plans beforehand — I myself only heard about the expedition by chance a couple weeks prior, via the blog Boing Boing, if I remember correctly — and, as I said, the coverage of the actual dive has been perfunctory at best. I guess a good old-fashioned adventure is just not that important at the moment, not when there’s an endless race for the Republican presidential nominee to focus on, and hey, did you hear Snooki’s pregnant, and of course Facebook just bought Instagram, whatever the hell that is. If people who don’t follow certain types of blogs aren’t hearing about expeditions like Cameron’s, why should they care?

I also wonder if perhaps part of the problem is James Cameron himself. My mother’s reaction when I told her about the expedition was something to the effect of, “Why him?” And I imagine that’s not an unusual reaction. He’s a filmmaker, after all, not any sort of scientist (although the National Geographic Society has named him an explorer-in-residence, and he’s made over 70 deep submersible dives in the last couple decades, which I think qualifies him for this). That “king of the world” thing at the 1998 Oscars still sticks in some people’s craws, and he has a reputation for being a royal son-of-a-bitch to work with. But hey, let’s be honest: I think a certain degree of arrogance is probably a requirement to doing something like this. You have to believe that the thing can be done, and you have to believe you’re the one who can do it, and both require a sizable belief in oneself. In this case, Cameron wasn’t the first human to journey into the Challenger Deep — two men did it in 1960 with the help of the U.S. Navy and a submersible “bathyscaphe” called the Trieste — but he is the first to do it in 52 years, and the first to do it solo. And the conditions he knew he’d be facing were pretty daunting, even with a half-century of technological advancement since the Trieste.

Cameron’s submarine, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, dropped seven miles straight down into the Pacific Ocean, the downward journey taking close to three hours while his six-foot-plus body was folded into a steel sphere only 43 inches in diameter. The pressure outside grew to an astonishing 16,285 pounds per square inch — barely less than the pilot sphere’s rated capacity of 16,500 psi — pressure so intense that the sub actually shrank in height by a couple of inches. Meanwhile, the temperature inside Cameron’s sphere fell from uncomfortably warm near the surface (because of the electronics and Cameron’s own body heat in such a confined space) to meat-locker cold at the bottom of the sea. And of course it was pitch black at the bottom. He was all alone in utter darkness farther below sea-level than Mount Everest rises above it, trusting that the engineers who designed and built DEEPSEA CHALLENGER hadn’t overlooked anything. In other words, this situation was very much like a flight into space… and as much as I admire astronauts for their drive and guts, I admire James Cameron for his.

The Sunday he went down, March 25, I was following along on Twitter, a service I normally find rather silly, but that day it was the only place I could find any news. I was on the edge of my seat as each new update came in from the expedition, ticking off the latest depth he’d reached, the time elapsed since he’d submerged, etc. And when Cameron’s own tweet flashed across the Internet — “Just arrived at the ocean’s deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can’t wait to share what I’m seeing w/ you” — I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, and thought of the words of Charlie Duke, the CAPCOM on the Apollo 11 mission, when Neil Armstrong radioed back that the Eagle had landed: “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.” (Sidenote: How bizarre is it to think that a man was able to send a “tweet,” surely one of the most frivolous means of communication ever invented, from the bottom of the ocean? We really are living in the future, aren’t we?)

I don’t know… maybe a moment like that doesn’t do anything for you. Maybe this really is just one of my esoteric and slightly backward interests, like old movies, something that the vast majority of the population no longer has any use for. Another example of how I should’ve been born a generation or two back. These days, there are a lot of people out there who feel we shouldn’t bother trying to put human beings into space or other hostile environments; it’s too expensive, they say, and too dangerous to justify what we get back, and anyhow we can learn all we need to know with cheap, efficient robot probes. I don’t know if these people are in the majority. They certainly seem to have the loudest voices sometimes. And that just makes me sad, and frustrated. Because the world of the early 21st century feels too bloody tame to me. I’m so grateful that every once in a while, somebody like James Cameron comes along and does something to demonstrate that there are still frontiers to be crossed, and it’s much more interesting to cross them in person, if only somebody is willing to cross them.

Apr042012

The President Is One of Us!

Happily ganked from Jaquandor:

History has already recorded that Barack Obama was the first black president of the United States, but personally I think it’s important to note that he’s also our first Trekkie president… at least the first who’s willing to own up to it! Look at that grin… he’s as thrilled as any of my fellow nerds to be standing next to a pop-cultural legend, the lovely Nichelle Nichols, a.k.a. Lt. Uhura from the original Star Trek.

For the record, Nichelle was the first celebrity I ever encountered. It was at a one-day Star Trek mini-con held at the Salt Lake Airport Hilton back in ’87 or ’88, during my freshman year of college. To place that in some context, the last Trek movie to play in theaters had been Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home — that’s the one with the whales, for you civilians out there — the previous year, and Star Trek: The Next Generation had just gotten off to a bumpy start in television syndication. (I didn’t think it would survive its first season, to be honest. Boy, was I wrong!) I’ll admit to being a wee bit awestruck when I found myself standing on the other side of an autograph table from a woman I’d been watching on TV since before I could remember, but to my everlasting gratitude, Nichelle turned out to be as warm, gracious, friendly, and beautiful in person as she’d ever been on screen. It looks to me like none of that has changed…

Mar302012

This Is Going to Happen to Me Someday…

I just know that one of these days the amount of books inside my home is going to reach some critical mass that exceeds the structural limitations of the house itself, and then…

(This is actually an art installation in Madrid, Spain; I’m normally not too keen on modern art “installations,” but this one amuses me. Details and more pictures — and even a video of the thing in motion, because those are actual books that blow around in the breeze — here. And I found it via Boing Boing, naturally.)

Mar302012

Nobody Is Safer

Over the past week, the British magazine The Economist has been hosting an online debate between security consultant (and highly vocal TSA critic) Bruce Schneier and former TSA administrator (and current TSA apologist) Kip Hawley over whether, in fact, post-9/11 airport security procedures have done more harm than good. My own views line up nearly one-to-one with Schneier’s: I think the rigamarole you have to go through to get on a plane these days is needlessly demeaning, intrusive nonsense designed to make it look like the government is doing something to make traveling safer, but which ultimately accomplishes little except inconveniencing and intimidating travelers. (For one thing, all the procedures are designed to stop whatever the last would-be terrorist attempted to do; logically, that just means the next attempt will be something new that the TSA’s not screening for.) I could go on at length about this, and about how incredible I find it that a people who genuflect to the concept of individual liberty are so willing to simply “hand over their papers” (so to speak) when somebody in uniform demands them, as long as they think they’re doing it in the name of their own safety. But instead I think I’ll just quote the final two paragraphs of Schneier’s closing remarks:

The goal of terrorism is not to crash planes, or even to kill people; the goal of terrorism is to cause terror. Liquid bombs, PETN, planes as missiles: these are all tactics designed to cause terror by killing innocents. But terrorists can only do so much. They cannot take away our freedoms. They cannot reduce our liberties. They cannot, by themselves, cause that much terror. It’s our reaction to terrorism that determines whether or not their actions are ultimately successful. That we allow governments to do these things to us–to effectively do the terrorists’ job for them–is the greatest harm of all.

Return airport security checkpoints to pre-9/11 levels. Get rid of everything that isn’t needed to protect against random amateur terrorists and won’t work against professional al-Qaeda plots. Take the savings thus earned and invest them in investigation, intelligence, and emergency response: security outside the airport, security that does not require us to play guessing games about plots. Recognise that 100% safety is impossible, and also that terrorism is not an “existential threat” to our way of life. Respond to terrorism not with fear but with indomitability. Refuse to be terrorized.

The whole of the debate is worth skimming, although I remained totally unconvinced by Hawley’s arguments, which seem to basically consist of “hey, nothing’s happened, so we must be doing something right!” and “we’ve had lots of successes, we just can’t tell you about them.” I found Schneier’s comment that airports have become effectively “rights-free zones” where TSA “officers” can do pretty much anything they want to you and your belongings in the name of “security” especially trenchant… and chilling. Just lately, though, I’ve been seeing some signs that the tide may be turning, that people may be regaining a bit of sanity a bit on this subject, or perhaps they’re just getting tired of minimum-wage rent-a-cops feeling up their grandmas and confiscating their baby formula. Either way, I fervently hope we’re eventually going to ratchet things down to something that more resembles the way it was when I first started flying.

It’d be lovely to be able to go to the airport for a hotdog and an afternoon of people-watching again…

Mar292012

Awesome Space Image of the Day

That’s a snap of an unmanned cargo ship — technically referred to in NASA-speak as an Automated Transfer Vehicle — firing its maneuvering thrusters as it approached the International Space Station yesterday. This image was taken by astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS, and I think it’s simply incredible. Even just a few years ago, you could only see something like this on a fictional TV show like Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5, but here it is, actually happening right over our heads, captured on a perfectly ordinary digital camera and posted to both Twitter and Flickr like any old photo of somebody’s cat. The future hasn’t turned out to be quite what we were promised as kids, but every once in a while, it comes close.

Go here for a couple more…

Mar272012

Sometimes We Move Backwards

This morning, Boing Boing linked to an article I found interesting, on the way science-fiction stories often feature apparent “gaps” or imbalances in the technology of their imaginary worlds, and why those gaps are not necessarily a failure on the writer’s part. The starting point for the article was the current phenom movie The Hunger Games and the books from which it is adapted. I haven’t read or seen The Hunger Games myself, but apparently the story has drawn a certain amount of criticism because the futuristic dystopia in which it is set (supposedly descended from our own United States of America following some kind of apocalypse) includes such high-tech flourishes as hovercraft, force fields, and genetically engineered animals, but it still relies on coal-fired powerplants for electricity and has nothing resembling the Internet. Some readers/viewers question the idea of a society that’s so advanced in some ways but not in others. The article goes on to make the argument that real societies choose to adopt or abandon technologies for all sorts of reasons — political, economic, and/or cultural — and the seeming flaws of imagination in this story can be explained quite logically, given the assumptions of the society in question. The whole thing reminded me of what I said a couple weeks ago regarding the usage of swords in so much of the “planetary romance” sub-genre of science fiction, i.e., that it’s not at all unreasonable for John Carter or Flash Gordon to fight the bad guys with a sword while anti-gravity airships hang overhead, because Barsoom and Mongo have societies that, for whatever reason, still value prowess with a blade, even though firearms are available. Because, you know, swordfighting is cool. Especially in stories, which are all this stuff really is, after all.

And just in case you still don’t buy the notion that a society really might choose to go deliberately retro or turn its back on certain technologies, consider the somewhat depressing final line from that Boing Boing post:

A decade ago, you could fly London to New York in a couple of hours. A year ago, America had a reusable spacecraft.

But not now. Because we decided those things were no longer economical. Or necessary.

Mar222012

Surely… The Best of Times

In what seems to be turning into an annual tradition here at Simple Tricks, I’d like to wish a very happy birthday to the one and only William Shatner, who turns 81 years old today, and also to his friend and Star Trek costar Leonard Nimoy, who will be 81 as well on Monday. Their fictional counterparts, Kirk and Spock — as well as Doctor “Bones” McCoy, played by the late DeForest Kelley — were among my earliest heroes. They found their way into my life when I was a very small boy, and their example of loyalty, chemistry, camaraderie, and, yes, genuine love for each other strongly influenced my idea of what male friendship can and ought to be.

My thanks to Christopher Mills over at Space: 1970 (a really excellent blog if you, like me, happened to have been a sci-fi lovin’ kid during the “Me Decade”) for reminding me of this…

Mar212012

John Carter As It Should Have Been Done

Well, I guess it’s officially a flop: Disney announced yesterday that it expects to lose $200 million on John Carter, all but guaranteeing that the first big-screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic Barsoom novels is also going to be the last. And what a damn shame, too, because I really liked it. The pacing was a little uneven, and I disagree with some of the changes that were made in adapting the story from the source material. (I could’ve done without the formulaic Hollywood backstory and character arc that was pasted onto the title character, i.e., the man who’s lost everything learning to live again; in the original stories, he was simply an adventurer who had to adapt to a new world, and then fell in love. Also, the books were filled with enough conflict between Barsoomian races and city-states without having to elevate the stakes to the would-be epic, survival-of-two-worlds-in-the-balance stuff that nearly every summer tentpole flick of the last 15 years has beaten into the ground. And I prefer the book’s conceit that JC was the only person who was capable of moving between Earth and Barsoom, and that he did it through mystical means rather than technological, as in the film.) But overall I was very pleased with the filmmakers’ fidelity to the details and spirit of the books, and I loved the fun, escapist tone that neither took itself too seriously nor played the material for campy laughs. And I thought the casting was spot-on. Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins aren’t John Carter and the lovely Dejah Thoris as I have imagined them for 30 years of my life… but they could be cousins to the people who live in my imagination, and that’s pretty damn satisfying.

I recognize that I approached John Carter with a certain predisposition to like it, and also viewed it through a particular filter, i.e., how well did it adapt the books I’ve loved since childhood? But I’ve also spoken to several people who admit they wouldn’t know Edgar Rice Burroughs from William S. Burroughs, so they had no preconceptions whatsoever, and they liked the movie, too. Based on their testimonies, I’m convinced the movie had the potential to appeal to a wider audience than it obviously has… which suggests to me that what I wrote a couple weeks ago about the weak marketing was right on target. Fingers are now being pointed in all directions, with some gossips blaming the film’s director, Andrew Stanton, for mistakenly believing this character was as well known as Tarzan and insisting on the vague, uninspiring ad campaign. Others are saying the movie fell victim to internal politics at Disney, with the execs who greenlighted the movie departing midway through its production and their replacements just wanting to get it out the door and over with. But again, whatever the cause, there’s no question in my mind that the marketing on this film stank worse than fresh calot droppings, and that had a tremendously negative impact on the movie’s performance. And it’s so deeply frustrating to me, both as an ERB fan and simply as a lover of good Saturday-matinee adventure flicks, because this movie so easily could have been handled differently, and with far happier results.

Consider this: Two clicks of my mouse this afternoon turned up a fan-made trailer that uses the same footage as the official ones, but is so much more reflective of what this movie is about, who John Carter is, why these stories matter, and how frickin’ awesome they can be:

Now that’s how you do a trailer for a rollicking planetary romance based on a seminal but no longer well-remembered literary work. This trailer makes me want to run out and see the film again, right now. So why couldn’t anyone at Disney figure out how to do something that good? Why didn’t they care about nurturing something that could’ve been major for them, instead of setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure? (I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess; I’ve been asking the same questions for 20 years in regards to The Rocketeer, another great little movie with lots of franchise potential that Disney essentially dumped into theaters with very little support.)

Someday, somebody’s going to write a very interesting book on this debacle. In the meantime, I really hope this movie finds its audience on home video, and eventually comes to be recognized as something more than it was initially taken for.

Mar162012

Friday Evening Videos: “I Need to Know”

Just lately, I’ve been teetering on the edge of another one of those funks when I feel like my moment has come and gone, and the Arbiters of Cool have declared all the things I like obsolete and irrelevant, and it’s just as well I don’t have kids because what the hell could I possibly have in common with them at this point? You know, that thing Grampa Simpson was talking about when he said “I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.” (You see! A Simpsons reference. How passe’ is that? I hate it when I inadvertently prove my own point!)

But then today, just as the Generation Gap was yawning before me like the Grand Canyon and the edge was crumbling under my feet, onto my morning train stepped a pretty young blonde that I would guess was about seventeen years old. (Must… resist… obvious reference to the Stray Cats song…) She wore jeans that were ripped out at the knees, with red-and-black striped tights beneath, and fingerless knit gloves, and the ubiquitous hoodie. She was the sort of girl I would’ve fallen instantly in love with, once upon a far-off time when I was seventeen myself. She was holding an iPhone on which I could see a video playing, and she was bopping her head along to the accompanying music.

I cringed, because I really wasn’t in the mood to have some inconsiderate Damn Kid(tm) who can’t be bothered to wear headphones foisting her crappy music on me. My irritation rose as she sat down right across the aisle from me and turned her gadget toward me so the music grew even louder. And then I caught what she was listening to… and my mouth almost literally fell open from the surprise. It was something I knew. More than that, it was something I like, a song called “I Need to Know,” written by Tom Petty.

This particular version of the song was a live clip featuring my rock-n-roll sweetheart, the eternally sexy (in my eyes) Stevie Nicks, singing the lead while Petty provides the guitar and back-up vocal. In fact, I think it was this very clip here:

Seeing a teenage girl so obviously and unironically enjoying a song that was originally recorded when I was just a kid myself — 1978, to be exact — performed by two people old enough to be her grandparents, gave me such a simple feeling of genuine happiness that I feel foolish even trying to describe it.

My train stop came up just as the song was ending. I debated over saying something to the girl, telling her that she’d dispelled a black fog from my heart, or maybe just that she had excellent taste in music, but I feared coming across as some kind of creep. (It pains me deeply that a grown man can’t even speak to a young girl anymore without worrying that he’ll be, ahem, misunderstood!) So I settled for just tapping her on the shoulder as I passed and saying, “For what it’s worth, I love that one.”

She giggled. She actually giggled. And I had the brief impression I’d made her day as much as she’d made mine.

Then I stepped off the train and started walking toward the office. I noticed I had something resembling a spring in my step. And I was smiling, too.

Thanks, kid. Whoever you were. You don’t know how much good you did this morning.

Mar162012

“If My Childhood Plans Had Panned Out…”

A couple weeks ago, there was a cute little cartoon making the rounds titled “If My Childhood Plans Had Panned Out…” It easily lends itself to a fun mental exercise with several components to think about, so naturally somebody turned it into an Internet meme. (Thanks, Michael May!)

I chose to make my own responses to the questions raised in the form of photos, which I will place after the fold to save y’all some bandwidth. And for the record, I defined childhood for this thing as being between the ages of seven and 10, which for me would’ve covered the years 1976 through ’79. Click through if you’re curious…

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