Europa Report was a 2013 film that focused on a human mission to the Jovian moon. Poster by Start Motion Pictures.
The producers of a new movie called “Europa Report” have released a new trailer about their film, which features a near-future mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, in search of extraterrestrial life. From the trailer, the film looks to be of extremely high quality, and it stars Sharlto Copley (District 9), with music score from composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, Eureka).
And while this is a sci-fi flick, the makers of “Europa Report” say they have steeped it in real science. JPL scientists acted as advisers on the film, and it’s been called “One of the most thrilling and realistic depictions of deep-space exploration since ‘Moon’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’” by Space.com
Enjoy the trailer below.
The film will be released on for download on June 27th and theatrically on August 2nd through Magnolia Pictures. The premiere showing of the film will be in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History on August 1st.
Dropping out of warp speed could have deadly results. (Image: Paramount Pictures/CBS Studios)
It was billed as the U.S. S. Enterprise’s first “real” flight in space, but the spaceship didn’t get quite that far.
A group of Star Trek fans launched a model of the famed fictional vessel to an altitude of 95,568 feet (29,129 meters) above Canada, or about 18.1 miles (29.1 kilometers), they told media.
The Karman line — a commonly accepted threshold for the edge of space — is at about 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, above sea level.
Still, the high-flying feat made the Canadian group quite happy, even though the ship made a suicidal crash landing at the end of its flight.
“We lost our engines,” said Steve Schnier, a member of the group that set Enterprise aloft with a weather balloon from Stayner, Ontario, in an interview with Canada AM.
“It wasn’t a smooth ride,” Schnier added concerning the ship’s final minutes. “It was moving, at one point, at 117 kilometres [72.7 miles] an hour.”
Enterprise smashed into the water near a Georgian Bay island in an area roughly 2.5 hours’ drive north of Canada’s largest city of Toronto. Searchers found it using a GPS signal.
The launch at the end of April came just weeks before Star Trek: Into Darkness, the next installment of the nearly 50-year-old franchise, zoomed into theaters in Canada and the United States this week. (Read our full review here.)
Weather balloon flights are used in science to collect information about the upper atmosphere. Other amateur groups have had fun using the idea, flying tokens ranging from teddy bears to Lego figurines.
Oh, those little creatures that are no Tribble at all. If you’re not familiar with these small, non-intelligent lifeforms known for their prodigious reproductive rate, Tribbles (Polygeminus grex) are part of Star Trek lore. And we’ve all got Star Trek on the brain with the opening of the latest movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness (see our review here). So just for fun, here’s something that Nilz Baris would have loved to have access to. Provided by the folks at Movoto, this handy calculator will will tell you a.) not only how many Tribbles will fit into your home, but also, b.) how long it will take them to be fruitful and multiply to fill your home.
And for more fun here’s some estimates of how many Tribbles will fit into various landmarks, both real and imagined:
Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Kirk (Chris Pine) as portrayed in Star Trek: Into Darkness. Credit: StarTrekMovie.com
If you’re a fan of the rebooted 2009 Star Trek film, we think you’ll love the second edition. You’ll find similar whip-cracking dialog, inside jokes and action-filled storyline in the sequel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, which opens in theaters in the United States and several other countries today.
While the first movie introduced us to the characters, this movie is all about choices… moral choices, and when it is best to help somebody, as opposed to letting things be. That’s where things can get uncomfortable, though.
The film’s start portrays a moral dilemma in the first few minutes, with choices that bring upon punishment for the players involved. The consequences are quite logical — Spock would point that out — but when more dilemmas pile up at the end of the film, many decisions go unquestioned.
Yes, this is an action film and yes, the Star Trek franchise is one that never lets itself get slowed down by plot holes and inconsistencies. (The plot isn’t that groundbreaking, either.) Still, the movie could have benefitted from an extra five or 10 minutes to show the reasoning behind the final few choices. Thinking over what happened, there could be problems with what the crew decided to do.
Nyota Uhura as seen in Star Trek: Into Darkness. Credit: StarTrekMovie.com
Enough Tribble-like quibbling, though. Star Trek: Into Darkness pulls you in with an action sequence in the first few minutes, and the pace never lets up. Spock (Zachary Quinto)’s straightforward nature gets him into trouble — as usual — with James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), leading to quotable insults that generated audience guffaws in an advance screening Universe Today saw in Ottawa, Canada.
There’s enough time and, well, space for other characters to shine as well. While Nyota Uhura (Zoë Saldana) spends ample screen time mooning about her boyfriend, she proves to be an excellent and forceful translator. Scotty (Simon Pegg) also has a wonderful back-and-forth sequence late in the movie, breaking up some intense moments with his slapstick humor.
Also: Another character comes along and — with a presence that commands attention on the big screen — threatens to steal the show from our heroes. You don’t want to like them, but as you get to know them you realize they have reasons behind their actions.
What did you think of the film? Please share your thoughts in the comments
Yikes! The trailer for an upcoming film “Gravity” is absolutely terrifying. This movie won’t hit theaters until October 4, 2013, so we can expect to see more trailers after this first ‘teaser.” We do know it is directed by Alfonso Cuarón and stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. But with an emergency spacewalk likely taking place tomorrow at the International Space Station, the timing of the release of this trailer is just a bit eerie.
Bullock plays a medical engineer on her first shuttle mission, with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (Clooney) in command of his last flight before retiring. But on a seemingly routine spacewalk, disaster strikes. The shuttle is destroyed, the space station is damaged, leaving the two astronauts completely alone and tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness.
Watch the teaser below:
The word on the street is that NASA was not consulted at all for this film, so we can only hope for a hint of reality (i.e., let hope it’s not another “Armageddon.”) But from the trailer, it seems to follow the recipe for any space disaster film: go into space, have the mission go awry, bring in the heroes to save the day. Guesses on thumbs up or down?
We guarantee you’ll go out of your Vulcan mind watching this new car commercial starring Spock … and Spock.
The Audi ad shows Leonard Nimoy (Spock from Star Trek‘s original series) and Zachary Quinto (Spock from Star Trek: Into Darkness, which premieres May 17) looking for new challenges after Nimoy wins a chess match.
“You want to play a round of golf in the club and get some lunch? Whoever gets to the club last buys lunch,” Quinto says to his predecessor.
“Stand by to have your wallet emptied by a tractor beam,” responds Nimoy.
The Star Trek lego is spelled out on the atomic level in new research performed by IBM. Credit: IBM Research
Add IBM to the list of entities eagerly counting down to Star Trek: Into Darkness, the next installment of the famed franchise, which opens up in theaters May 17. Researchers at the computing giant are so excited that they created atomic images of Star Trek symbols.
Users of the Star Trek: Into Darkness app available on iOS and Android can see images of the USS Enterprise, a Vulcan hand salute and, of course, the logo for the movie itself — spelled out in individual atoms.
“These images were made by precisely moving hundreds of atoms with a two-ton microscope, operating at a temperature of -268 Celsius and magnified 100 million times,” IBM stated.
To show off just how good they think they are at this, IBM also released “the world’s smallest movie”, called A Boy and His Atom, where they play a stop-motion movie using the same moving-atoms technique. Check out the results below:
“Moving atoms is one thing; you can do that with the wave of your hand. Capturing, positioning and shaping atoms to create an original motion picture on the atomic-level is a precise science and entirely novel,” stated Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research’s principal investigator.
“This movie is a fun way to share the atomic-scale world and show everyday people the challenges and fun science can create.”
As a quick science reminder, an atom is a unit of matter with a nucleus that is surrounded by electrons. That’s the simple explanation, but there’s a lot to explore even within that basic concept: electron transitions, subatomic particles and what happens if a piece of matter encounters a piece of antimatter.
Atomic physics is important to help astronomers understand how the sun shines, for example. Engineers also are trying to figure out how to develop antimatter engines for future space exploration.
A shattered Luna as depicted in the summer blockbuster Oblivion. (Credit: Universal Pictures).
AVAST gentle reader: mild SPOILER(S) and graphic depictions of shattered satellites ahead!
We recently had a chance to catch Oblivion, the first summer blockbuster of the season. The flick delivers on the fast-paced Sci-Fi action as Tom Cruise saves the planet from an invasion of Tom Cruise clones.
But the movie does pose an interesting astronomical question: what if the Earth had no large moon? In the movie, aliens destroy the Earth’s moon, presumably to throw our planet into chaos. You’d think we’d already be outclassed by the very definition of a species that could accomplish such a feat, but there you go.
Would the elimination of the Moon throw our planet into immediate chaos as depicted in the film? What if we never had a large moon in the first place? And what has our nearest natural neighbor in space done for us lately, anyway?
Earth is unique among rocky or terrestrial planets in that it has a relatively large moon. The Moon ranks 5th in diameter to other solar system satellites. It is 27% the diameter of our planet, but only just a little over 1/80th in terms of mass.
Clearly, the Moon has played a role in the evolution of life on Earth, although how necessary it was isn’t entirely clear. Periodic flooding via tides would have provided an initial impetus to natural selection, driving life to colonize the land. Many creatures such as sea turtles take advantage of the Full Moon as a signal to nest and breed, although life is certainly resilient enough to find alternative methods.
The 2000 book Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee cites the presence of a large moon as just one of the key ingredients necessary in the story of the evolution of life on Earth. A Moon-less Earth is also just one of the alternative astronomical scenarios cited by Arthur Upgreen in his 2005 book Many Skies.
Save our satellite: A possible target for an alien attack? (Photo by author).
Contrary to its depiction on film, the loss of the Moon wouldn’t throw the Earth into immediate chaos, though the long term changes could be catastrophic. For example, no study has ever conclusively linked the Moon to the effective prediction of terrestrial volcanism and earthquakes, though many have tried. (Yes, we know about the 2003 Taiwanese study, which found a VERY weak statistical signal).
All of that angular momentum in the Earth-Moon system would still have to go somewhere. Our Moon is slowly “braking” the rotation of the Earth to the tune of about 1 second roughly every 67,000 years. We also know via bouncing laser beams off of retro-reflectors left by Apollo astronauts that the Moon is receding from us by about 3.8 cm a year. The fragments of the Moon would still retain its angular momentum, even partially shattered state as depicted in the film.
The most familiar effect the Moon has on Earth is its influence on oceanic tides. With the loss of our Moon, the Sun would become the dominant factor in producing tides, albeit a much weaker one.
But the biggest role the Moon plays is in the stabilization of the Earth’s spin axis over long scale periods of time.
Milankovitch cycles play a long term role in fluctuations in climate on the Earth. This is the result of changes in the eccentricity, obliquity and precession of the Earth’s axis and orbit. For example, perihelion, or our closest point to the Sun, currently falls in January in the middle of the northern hemisphere winter in the current epoch. The tilt of the Earth’s axis is the biggest driver of the seasons, and this varies from 22.1° to 24.5° and back (this is known as the change in obliquity) over a span of 41,000 years. We’re currently at a value of 23.4° and decreasing.
But without a large moon to dampen the change in obliquity, much wider and unpredictable swings would occur. For example, the rotational axis of Mars has varied over a span of 13 to 40 degrees over the last 10 to 20 million years. This long-term stability is a prime benefit that we enjoy in having a large moon .
Perhaps some astronomers would even welcome an alien invasion fleet intent on destroying the Moon. Its light polluting influence makes most deep sky imagers pack it in and visit the family on the week surrounding the Full Moon.
But I have but two words in defense of saving our natural satellite: No eclipses.
The diamond ring effect as seen during a 2008 total solar eclipse. (Credit: NASA/Exploratorium).
We currently occupy an envious position in time and space where total solar and lunar eclipses can occur. In fact, Earth is currently the only planet in our solar system from which you can see the Moon snugly fit in front of the Sun during a total lunar eclipse. It’s 1/400th the size of the Sun, which is also very close to 400 times as distant as the Moon. This situation is almost certainly a rarity in our galaxy; perhaps if alien invaders did show up, we could win ‘em over not by sending a nuclear-armed Tom Cruise after ‘em, but selling them on eclipse tours… Continue reading “Into Oblivion: What If the Earth Had No Moon?”
“Pilot,” a new sci-fi thriller, follows law enforcement officer Legitt Redd, as he finds himself in the middle of an extraordinary set of circumstances. It is set in a solar system where humans occupy 6 life-supporting planets. Each planet has a different role to the civilisation, one being an energy source, another a prison, another a holiday destination, for example. Legitt is a low ranking officer whom serves for the oppressive government, ‘The Ministry.’ He is introduced as a fairly ordinary, uninspired man whose main duty is to transport prisoners to and from the Prison planet Gorby for processing. He has a long standing friendship and affiliation with one such prisoner – Afyd Geller whom has a reputation as a leader in the underworld and has the respect of many amongst law enforcement. Once a free man, Afyd often invites Leggit for drinking sessions. It‘s on one of these ordinary drinking sessions that the out-of-the-ordinary sequence of events begins. After a few adventure and violent encounters, they travel to the Litton where the apparent real figure head of the underworld resides. Leggit find out that the mythical ‘boogie man’ of child stories of old, Murlon Furlong is in fact a real person, and the all-powerful ruler of criminals.
Murlon sets Leggit, Afyd and other members of this motley crew, on a task to kidnap a spiritual leader. There is a back story of the civilisation’s theology which, in short includes the beginning of time and the eventual coming of salvation.
When this goes horribly wrong Legitt realises his true potential, and attempts to conquer Murlon and avoid swift and violent punishment of The Ministry. This means a whole lot more than he realises and intends the reader to question what is good and what is evil.
This book has great potential. Author R.D. Drabble paints pictures with his words, as if he can see them all around him. Initially this was inspiring to read. You can really imagine the frames in which Drabble was describing. But this positive is also a negative and too much visual description means at times it reads like a script, rather than a novel. There is only the present tense and only one story line, which leaves the reader feeling a bit flat with this one dimensional presentation of an otherwise interesting plot. It would have been a lot more enjoyable if there was a sub-plot or scenes that did not include the main character. Even though Leggit was in every scene, I still felt I didn’t have much insight into him as a character.
Having said that, there are definitely great moments. The technological creations and concepts found in Pilot are really inspiring. They seem to mix the spiritual human elements with technological fantasy. And the Drabble paints an Orwell-esque picture of the Ministry ruled worlds, and there were some phrases that were so poignant and poetic, that is will make you read them twice. The book starts of in a very certain black and white view of the world but progresses a grey outlook, at the same time that character Legitt questions his own morality in certain situations.
But these great moments are sandwiched between cliché, yet lovable characters and the many un-foreshadowed random unnecessary scenarios. There is an appendix of illustrations to support the story lines and backstories, but these don’t really add value or are explored.
Having said that it is clear that Drabble has an amazing amount of imagination. The 6 worlds and their stories are quiet intricate and to be honest, could be explored further in future books. I hope Drabble can express this obvious talent of imagination in future stories, especially if they are in comic or graphic novel format.
Overall, it’s a great read with some cool concepts.
R.D. Drabble is an electrician and science fiction fanatic who has had a lifelong obsession with the strange and inexplicable. It was his love for the unusual that inspired him to write his debut novel Pilot.
Wreckage, war and wrath are often the only results we see after aliens invade Earth, at least if you believe science fiction classics such as War of the Worlds. The new SyFy show Defiance, though, shows something a bit different: humans and aliens (Votans) trying to live side by side after the war.
Warning: minor spoilers ahead …
Now, this is no District 9. In 2046, the Votans roam around about as freely as the humans, although there’s a bit of ugly backstory that includes fighting and an uneasy truce. And no, this isn’t like Star Trek or Star Wars:the Votans and humans don’t work all that well together, at least not yet. Perhaps it’s too early in their history to think about it.
The show debuted on SyFy this month. Starring is Grant Bowler, previously of True Blood and Ugly Betty, as well as Dexter‘s Julie Benz.
“Nolan is an extreme pragmatist. He’s gone from war hero to scavenger and back again. He’s kind of the blunt instrument, if you like,” said Bowler of his human character in an NBC interview. Making things more interesting, Nolan has an alien adopted daughter and yes, they do actually get along (as well as most families do, anyway.)
When you have an hour on your hands, this one-hour discussion below about the show is well worth the watch. Don’t miss the part where Bowler talks about the challenge of working with “green screens”, which are essentially blank areas on set that are later filled with computer-generated graphics. Kind of disconcerting for an actor used to working on pre-arranged sets.
What other TV shows or movies featuring aliens can you recall that shows them living with humans after they get to Earth? Share them in the comments.
