A More Sane Approach To Alien Life

As we sat inside tonight, warm and safe, and the next round of ice and freezing rains were moving in for We're All Going To Die Winter Storm Gargantua (Gemini), it was time to peruse the list on Netflix -- I think I have 98 films and series, watched and unwatched.

Europa Report [PG-13]
Netflix streaming

This one snuck into teeny tiny release in August. It might have played in Grand Rapids, but it only had a $125,000 U.S. box office, probably affected by the online streaming availability two months earlier in iTunes, etc. Still, it looked intriguing.

Sort of like last year's Apollo 18, we see a lot of video footage. Sounded like the Europa Ventures corporation might have made their privately financed mission the ultimate real reality series. But whereas Apollo 18 was a sci-fi horror movie, this is much more of the adventure of science. Sure, things go wrong, but unlike the short-lived Defying Gravity, Apollo 18 and the unfortunate 2000 pair of Mission To Mars and Red Planet, aliens aren't invoked just because going off to the planets isn't interesting enough, Jupiter's moon Europa has conditions which might actually harbor life. In that respect, this movie has much more in common with 2010: Odyssey Two -- without the interstellar aliens.

Visually the Europa mission spaceship looks really good. I gather they used video from the International Space Station as a model. It's certainly not as bad as 2007's Sunshine in terms of putting all the eggs in one basket and having neither backup systems or backup crosstraining among the crew. Think about Sandra Bullock in Gravity versus the INCOMPETENT crew and scientists of the also privately funded Prometheus. Still, there are going to be dangers and limitations to what you can carry with you and that makes things dangerous.

Thank goodness they assume the audience has some familiarity with real space missions so as to cut down on either hokey scenes or As You Know Bob moments. In fact, there's a documentary aspect to some of the film and a nonlinearity to the timeline which let's you pay attention to what's going on. Offhand I don't recall what the surface gravitational acceleration is on Europa, but I know it's less than Earth's 9.81 m/s². However, unlike even trying to simulate zero gee, there is no easy way to simulate less than Earth gravity in interiors. Even the excellent Moon made no attempt inside to deal with one-sixth gravity.

Besides looking and sounding good and making a real pass at science, the thing I really appreciate about this movie is that there's a minimum of stupid. Yes, things go wrong. But the characters, while they don't just shrug it off, they also don't go nuts and decide I Have To Kill Us All!

This doesn't mean it's perfect. I have a real problem with the camera view of the orbiting ship watching the lander going down. At those lateral speeds and those distances, the lander would have slid out of the frame and disappeared to smaller than a dot anyway. And for all the expense, I would have sent probes down first. And they really needed some more remote capacity or even a free flying robot. And goddammit, you need more than one airlock. NASA also had the right idea of not leaving the orbiter unmanned. (grin)

However... Europa Report is a good 89 minute movie for both the SF fan and the space nut. Fact is, whether manned or robotic, we will be going to the surface of Europa and drill some holes.

Highly Recommended

Dr. Phil

Double Red Alert!!

12:13 5:51am

I was puttering and watching things late, as is typical, and went to bed around 3am. Woke up to see the clock blinking 12:13. Huh. Power was either out or glitched due to the ice storm overnight. Got up to use the bathroom and just as I was about to crack open the window to hear if our generator was on, I heard the neighbor manually start his -- I assumed our Kohler 12kW generator had come on automatically.

Went out to living room to grab my watch and figure out what the time was. Calculated that the power went out at 5:35am. Of course, there was the annoyance of a First World problem. Behind the cube with the TV is an old uninterruptible power supply strip whose battery has gone. Periodically it let's us know by rapidly beeping for sixty seconds. Now it was just continuously singing. As I wasn't going to reach behind there in the middle of the night to silence the alarm, I went back to bed. By the time you get to the bedroom, you couldn't hear it, especially with the thrum of the neighbor's generator.

10:12

Definitely double red lights on the transfer switch in the garage -- generator purring away outside coming up in six hours now. Consumers Energy reports:

An outage for your location has been reported. We are currently in the process of evaluating your situations. An estimated restoration time is not available. Estimated restoration times are updated regularly as we get better information. Please check back for the most current estimate.

We currently do not have an estimation of when service will be restored.

Of course with the UPS power strip not providing uninterruptible power, once we got up and abandoned the heavy blankets and quilts of the warm and comfy bed, I had to reset the VCR after Mrs. Dr. Phil cycled the switch. She had attempted to go out and see if the Sunday paper had been delivered, but the icy coating made it difficult -- she had grabbed one of my canes but the broad rubber tip made a lousy traction point -- and turned around right where the 240 foot driveway goes into the trees. It would have been annoying to get out to the road only to find it hadn't come yet anyway.

Meanwhile, The Weather Channel people are practically wetting themselves with weathergasms from Winter Storm Ginormous (Gemini). Apparently we have shifted from having an ice event to having a snow event. Ooops, forgot to capitalize those words to make it sound More Dramatic. And how ominous is it when they go to do the Local Weather On The Eights for nearby Grand Haven and... it's blank?

Sugar Frosted Flakeage

The rain/ice has shifted to snow now, coming down pretty good. The pines are all heavily flocked, though the branches aren't too weighed down right now. If the events had missed us, we might have planned on going to see Saving Mr. Banks in Holland this afternoon. Otherwise we have nowhere to go til Tuesday.

With the passing of the winter solstice, we're still seeing a lot of weather nationwide. The current storm system which is bringing rain and ice and snow here and New England, stretched from -26°F in Bismarck to +70°F in Newark, and heavy thunderstorms by my mom in Greensboro NC, with December tornadoes in Arkansas and Louisiana for good measure.

I sure due hope that the weather gods get this out of their system by January 6th. We don't have a good place here to sacrifice an ox or something like that. Best we can do is a couple of little Cornish hens come Christmas. (yum-grin)

Wherever you are in the world, even if you have to suffer in sunny Perth with highs of 33°C, be safe.

Dr. Phil

It's Not You, Just Us

17+ Hours

Sitting here in our warm little house, lights blazing inside and out, watching The Sound of Music (film) on ABC. Meanwhile, the generator is purring along outside -- and hopefully will continue.

Consumers Energy still has no "estimation of when service will be restored". Their map system doesn't display properly on my Kindle Fire HD, so I either needed to go to my Linux desktop at AlwaysOn.PC or unsleep the tiny Fujitsu UMPC -- the latter was easier to pinch the map and display here.

It's not a widespread outage here -- we're in that little wedge of a blob. I suspect that it's like an outage we had a few years ago when ice or winds pulled a tree down on the distribution line that runs along 84th Avenue. I also know of outages off southeast of us on the other side of Grand Rapids. Several thousands affected in Ottawa County. UPDATE: At 11pm, 70,000 in all of West Michigan.

10pm Sunday 22 December 2013 (Click on map for larger.)

At least we aren't in high winds this time. There are limits beyond which they have to recall the crews. And the snow that fell on the ice made walking down the driveway more bearable for Mrs. Dr. Phil, so the Sunday paper has been brought in and suitably devoured.

Just an ordinary day in the neighborhood...

Dr. Phil