Nothing Escapes Death: Farewell Michael Crichton and Phoenix Mars Lander

I guess I have to get used to having my favourite authors passing away one by one.

Yesterday, renowned best-selling techno-thriller author and biotech geek Michael Crichton died at the age of 66. His death was caused by a yet-to-be-announced cancer.

He will always have a special place in my heart. Among my first serious (read: thick paperback) novels were Crichton’s, and my subsequent interest in science was ultimately piqued by them.

It has always astounded me, how a lot of scientific and technical research was put into his books. The stories are usually followed by pages of appendix, documents and discussions. Although a lot of them utilise false document, you just can’t deny the sense of authenticity that they possess.

My favourite? Sphere. It started as a sci-fi adventure in deep sea, which evolved into a surreal take into psychology. I can still remember the concept of “a perfectly spherical structure is a sign of a really advanced technology”.

Not many people know that Crichton was also a prolific contributor in the TV and film industry. Besides being the creator of the long-running medical drama ER, Crichton also wrote the screenplay for The First Great Train Robbery, Twister and directed a number of movies.

I hope the novel he was working on right before his death will get to be published soon.

* * * * *

The saddest story in science this year has got to be the shutdown of the Phoenix Mars Lander due to insufficient solar coverage to recharge during the Martian winter. Not only that, the punishing climate will also most probably damage its system and parts.

If you have been following the lander on Twitter, you’ll get what I mean. It’s like hearing the last words of an abandoned astronaut in a distant star, his supplies running low and there’s only so much oxygen left…And you can’t do anything about it to rescue him.

John Herman of Gizmodo said it the best:

To the Phoenix, I say we’re right there with you, buddy. To NASA, I say STOP PERSONIFYING YOUR ROBOTS, IT ONLY LEADS TO PAIN.

I agree, mate. It’s just too depressing listening to Phoenix talking ever so calmly and high-spirited about its slow descent into death, and seemingly impossible chance of rebirth.

You can read Phoenix looking back at its life with its guest-blogging spot in Gizmodo, before the cold harsh winter swallows it.

Wired graciously ran a contest to create an epitaph for the lovable lander. I’d go with

It is enough for me. But for you, I plead: go farther, still.

I’ll wait for you next Martian summer with bated breath.

Does Anybody STILL Think That The Moon Landing Was Fake?

no stars in the background..fake!

6% of Americans believe that the Moon Landing was faked, while another 5% are undecided—according to a poll by Gallup in 2001. Then again, since only 40% of Americans believe in evolution, I guess that doesn’t really matter.

Sadly, I used to doubt that the moon landing was real too. I was still in high school, and during that rebellious period it was almost a pre-requisite to believe in cospiracy theories.

It was all too easy to believe that in order to win the Space Race from the then reigning Soviet Union, the USA faked a moon landing by staging and filming it in an undisclosed location (most probably the infamous Area 51). The proponents of the hoax then put out a number of so-called proofs such as the waving American flag and the absence of stars in the background.

Ray Villard, from the Discovery Channel had posted an article in the ongoing campaign to once and for all squash the notion of a fake landing. His rebuttals are clear, and by the end of the article, only the most die-hard conspiracy theorists will still believe in the hoax.

He hit the mark on the complexity of staging a believable landing:

The hours of astronaut moonwalk video are far too complex to be faked with comparatively stone-age 1960s special effects technology. For example, all the effects in the 1968 landmark film 2001:A Space Odyssey required complex, time consuming, and cumbersome optical printing techniques costing the equivalent of $54 million today. The Apollo billions of dollars would have to have been spent on building a time machine to bring back from the 21st century an image rendering supercomputer and powerful animation software – not to mention kidnapping a computer animation artist from the future.

On the waving flag:

Finally, the American flag doesn’t wave because a fan on the set is blowing! The flag appears to wave after an astronaut touches the pole. The vibration takes more time to dampen out than on Earth because the flag material is moving without air resistance in a vacuum and in 1/6th the pull of gravity.

With these kind of scientific explanations, it’s a wonder if anyone would still cling to the notion of hoax.

Nevertheless, a more amusing and famous rumour about the moon landing is that Neil Armstrong heard the azan (Muslim prayer call) while he was on moon, and decided to convert to Islam right after that. Oh, how proud the kids must feel when their ustazs mentioned this almost miraculous trivia!

Can somebody please tell these ustazs that this didn’t happen at all?

what if we had followed the Greeks?

The modern world nowadays know our planets by their names in relation to the Olympian pantheon. The Greeks and Romans mythologies are intertwined with each other, with each deity having their equivalent in the other culture. However, we now follow the convention of Roman names due to the expansion of Roman empire and the Catholic Church.

What if we had followed the Greeks instead?

Our solar system then will be known as a collection of these planets, starting from our parent star Helios:

• Hermes
• Aphrodite
• Gaea
• Ares
• Zeus
• Kronos
• Uranos
• Poseidon

And our beloved dwarf planet:

• Pluton. I wonder, shouldn’t it be Hades instead?

Of course, if we had followed Ptolemy as well, the earth is the center of the system, not the sun. That culprit set us back 1500 years of progress.