vimeo/108650530 Take a moment and let this sink in: Nearly every location depicted in this video is real. These aren’t just fanciful places made up in the head of a special effect artist; those are worlds in our solar system that actually exist. Many were based on images taken through telescopes, or probes that have physically visited these distant locales. Sunset on Mars. The weird ridge wrapped around Saturn’s moon Iapetus. The ice fields of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Uranus’ moon Miranda, with the highest cliffs known in the solar system. Nothing in there is impossible; no faster than light travel, no wormholes. Even the space elevator shown towering over Mars and the huge cylindrical rotating colony in space are problems in *engineering*, not physics. We can build them. Each is a dream of mine, things I see when I close my eyes. Cruising through the geysers of Enceladus, skimming over Jupiter’s clouds, floating in Saturn’s rings (note the scale of the rings in the video; the chunks of ice and the height of the rings are correct), humans flying under their own power with wings in Titans dense atmosphere and low gravity. You dont need a space suit or any kind of fancy pressure suit on Titan, just some warm clothing and extra oxygen, like the woman in the last shot, watching airships over Titan. Right now, we can only see these possible futures, when we dream. I was happy seeing some of these visions laid out. For now, we send our machines into space. We learn a lot that way, and there is no end to what we can discover. But this is a *human* endeavor, a human adventure, and there will come a time when the views of those worlds you see in this video will no longer be science fiction. To some of us, someday, those worlds will be home.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:25:53 +0000
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