Prometheus (review and unanswered questions)

So I finally got round to watching Prometheus. I’d seen a lot of Facebook status updates from people who’d seen it in the cinema and complained about the plot. I tried to take these with a pinch of salt but I have to say it did put me off a little. Their main problem with the movie was that the plot was confusing and it asked more questions than it answered. I reminded myself that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing and that my tolerance for arcane sci-fi plots is probably higher than my average Facebook friend because I only really read arcane sci-fi books. On the other hand, I knew the screenplay had been written, or at least developed significantly, by Damon Lindelof of Lost fame and while I enjoyed Lost its tendency to drip feed the audience with trite answers to mysteries that promised far more was hard work in the later seasons.

Was the plot confusing and did it contain a lot of unanswered questions? Yes, but I’d say this – how better to make your audience feel an unnerving sense of alien-ness and wonder than making them wonder about some unnerving aliens? I liked it. It’s a lovely cinematic experience. Aside from the cerebral considerations of plot and theme, I felt like I was actually there, particularly in the opening act. The unanswered questions don’t detract from this, they add to it. Like the characters with whom you’re travelling, you are confused and curious and crucially, you know you might not get answers. Apart from the film itself I also enjoyed immediately going on the internet and reading about the plot, characters and people’s theories, some crackpot some rather clever. Below are some of the questions I felt weren’t answered explicitly in the movie and my attempts at answering them. Apologies if I’m restating what others have said, I’ve not based these on theories I’ve read elsewhere…

(spoiler warning!)

What is the Engineer in the opening sequence doing?

The Engineers create and destroy life. They play God and are literally the gods of ancient Earth religions. The Engineer at the start is creating life on Earth by adding his genetic material to the river. He does this by destroying his body – like instant primordial soup. I think he is Prometheus. The rather violent and painful nature of his method of sharing his DNA suggests to me that this isn’t the normal way the Engineers do this kind of thing. He’s a rebel.

What is the ‘pyramid’ and what are the Engineers doing on LV-223?

There’s a scene in the movie in which David talks about his creators, humanity, not wanting him to be too human. It’s also suggested throughout the movie that David is more intelligent than humans and that this is not particularly a good thing for his human masters. I think this is a hint about the Engineers. In order to remain dominant they create life of limited sophistication. Prometheus has broken this rule by creating life from himself that will one day be the Engineers’ equal. I’m undecided about the cave paintings in the story. They are evidence of visitations of Engineers to early humans but their intention is not obvious. They could be the orthodox Engineers who have deliberately left ‘directions’ to LV-223 as a trap. Should we become advanced enough to follow the directions then we are too advanced and must be culled. I tend to think they are actually warnings from Engineers who followed Prometheus who nurtured human civilisation, gave rise to stories of gods and giants and told us the story of our creation, by Prometheus. These Engineers knew that others would plot our destruction and from where it would come. In the Greek myth of Prometheus he gives fire to humanity, our first ‘technology’ and in the movie David watches Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence demonstrates his ability to extinguish a flame with his fingers. I think this is also hinting to us about the Engineers intentions. The pyramid on LV-223 is a weapons factory. The weapon is the black goo and its xenomorphs, designed to infect and destroy the biosphere of a planet. To cleanse it before it can be reseeded with more appropriate life. Two thousand years ago, Engineers about to deploy this weapon against Earth and its fledgling civilisation became victims of their own bio-weapon.

Why does David infect Holloway?

Without empathy David is effectively a psychopath. I think he does it because he’s clever enough to understand what the black goo might be and simply because he can. This also ties in with the conversation they have around the pool table when he infects him. They discuss asking humanity’s creators why they did it. Holloway says they created robots like David “because they can” and David responds by saying how disappointing it would be to hear that.

There are a lot more questions being posed and answered on the internet but these are the ones I felt I wanted to answer. I may have simply stated the obvious in these theories but that’s all they are. I’m not saying I’m right, I’m almost certainly wrong but this is my best guess so far. I watched the movie once and I didn’t take notes so I may have misremembered or totally missed some important bits. I also watched the viral TED video of Peter Weyland after writing my ideas above and I feel it reinforces them. Let me know what you think.

Sighting Over Norway Linked to Large Hadron Collider?

An odd sight in the skies over Norway has left the world wondering – what in the world was that?

Seen for many miles, the bizarre spiral light show has been explained variously as a botched Russian missile launch, a thunderbolt from the gods, something called Project Bluebeam, a meteorological phenomenon and in one interesting and fairly anonymous comment on the Sun newspaper website, a Black Hole that escaped yesterday from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland.

My guess is a malfunctioning rocket but hey, it looks cool!

Life On Mars

According to today’s Sun newspaper there is now compelling evidence of life on the red planet. I was able to extract the facts from the sensation, something I imagine the average Sun reader will miss entirely. NASA have confirmed that methane is present in the Martian atmosphere in concentrations that require there to be an active source of methane on the planet. The prime candidates for such a source are vulcanism and microbes. End of story. And a great story at that. But in the Sun, the recipe is incomplete. Add in a dollop of sensation and a generous sprinkling of speculation, wild is best. Honestly, it’s on the front page, “Life On Mars“.

Why is it that stories, particularly science stories, must be reported this way? You may say that accessible and exciting science reporting is a good way to get the general public interested in such matters. Yet it is done in such a way that a decidedly wrong impression is often given. In the case of today’s Mars nonsense, the results are little more than harmless fun but given a more serious subject matter, the consequences can be disastrous. I’m thinking of food scares and even worse, medical scares. Following the irresponsible reporting of links between autism and the MMR injection, take up rates plummeted. The doctor whose flawed research was used to ignite that particular fire was stuck off but what happened to the journalists who, with their lazy, dumbed-down, badly researched, sensationalist tripe, fanned its flames into a deadly inferno. Nothing, of course.

Just think for a moment about the size of the problem. The vast majority of what is being told in the newspapers and on television, is edited, twisted and repackaged for the consumption in bite sized pieces, of the majority. And not to inform but to impress and astound.

Manchester City and the Money Thing

Manchester City Football Club was purchased recently by the Abu Dhabi United Group, fronted by Dr. Sulaiman Al-Fahim, the Donald Trump of Abu Dhabi. It has raised the debate, once again, about money in football. The debate seems to revolve around whether or not the level of commercialisation in football is “good for the game”.

The Premiership is becoming divided into two tiers: clubs still waiting and clubs who have already attracted foreign benefactors. Success is increasingly determined by this arbitrary, off-the-field concern rather than the sporting but equally arbitrary fortunes of twenty-two men and a ball.

So, why are people so concerned? The game may be more commercial that it once was but club football, by it’s very definition, runs on money. Clubs are businesses and the Football Association is a business. They are creatures of the commercial world. In order to limit the impact of business on the game, rules would be needed, rules that would strangle the enterprise out of clubs and make them poor investment opportunities.

If the supporters want the Premiership to carry less prestige, attract less money, fewer world-class players and promote a more honest game where fortunes are determined on the pitch, then they should go ahead and demand reform. On the other hand, I think what they are looking for is right under their noses. It’s called The Football League. And yet they’d hate to see their club relegated to its ignominy; the hypocrisy being, they love the prestige and the glamour of the top flight.

Of course, there’s always international football. Unlike club football, internationals are not controlled by money. The competitions are as presigious as it gets and the players are world class. Unfortunately, games aren’t local or regular enough to quench the public’s thirst for the beautiful game.

Large Hadron Collider – Timeline of the Apocalypse

Wednesday, 10th September 2008

10:04AM (CET)

Deep underground beneath the Swiss-French border, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is used for the very first time. At modest power levels first, the plan is to gradually increase the power while the device and its enormous particle detectors are calibrated.

14:47.23PM (CET)

Initial results are encouraging and the team increase the power for the third collision experiment.

14:48.06PM (CET)

A microscopic black hole is formed from the incredible energy density in the collision proving that gravity is much more powerful over tiny distances, a prediction of the multi-dimensional hypotheses of String Theory.

14:48.07PM (CET)

Contrary to the less than compelling predictions of Prof. Stephen Hawking, the black hole does not immediately collapse in a shower of photons. It is stable and because it doesn’t destroy itself the LHC’s particle detector has nothing to detect. The tiny black hole shoots invisibly out through the walls of the detector’s cavern.

14:48.20PM (CET)

After penetrating tens of kilometres of earth the speeding black hole weighs a few milligrams. It emerges from the ground and like a tiny hypersonic bullet passes through a row of houses on the outskirts of Lyon, on its way upward.

14:50.54PM (CET)

Up through the atmosphere the black hole sucks in ever greater numbers of air molecules. As it grows it slows down.

14:54PM (CET)

The black hole arcs silently out into space. It has slowed too much to escape the Earth’s gravity. Under the influence of the Earth and Moon the microscopic singularity is in a highly eccentric and unstable orbit. The first collision could happen in a few weeks or it could be years, but it will happen. The most likely target is the Earth but the Moon may be first.

Tuesday, 23rd December 2008

An earthquake and a devastating explosion destroy the city of Chicago. Survivors see a comet-like object shooting into the sky.

Wednesday, 24th December 2008

The object is tracked by telescopes as it curves ominously out into space. It is Christmas Eve. Helpless to change the inevitable, the wise men of science look to the eastern sky and realise what shall come to pass.

Thursday, 25th December 2008

Too slowly now to slice through our planet, the growing black hole falls into the atmosphere and begins to gorge itself. Our world is eaten in the space of a few hours, bathed in the glorious light of its own annihilation.

 

It could happen… Merry Christmas.

Of course, you could always find religion. If it wasn’t EVIL that is!

A Price To Pay For Everything

I’m willing to be wrong, in fact I hope I am, but it certainly seems that society has gone to the dogs. I don’t think things are as bad as the media would have us believe but let’s say, for this discussion, there is a growning sub-culture of casual crime and anti-social behaviour. I don’t want to talk about chavs or trailer trash or your own particular local scapegoat, adopted by the middle classes as proof that poor people are in some way diseased. But something has changed and has been changing for decades, generations even, leading to an increasing minority of citizens simply opting out of society.

The saying goes “I blame the parents”, and I do. But why are standards falling with each successive generation? Why the decline?

For those on the bottom rung, life until the middle of the last century was a matter of sink or swim. You worked yourself from poverty to the grave. If you didn’t work, got in trouble or were just unlucky things would get much worse. And the class system was in place to stop you working yourself clean out of the water. Fast forward to today and, pushing the metaphor slightly too far, the water is chock full of flotation devices, rafts and rather comfy little dingies courtesy of the welfare state, human rights, social mobility, national health care and political correctness. At worst, these measures represent a huge investment made by all of us in a kind of institutionalised kindness. Measures that save dignity, suffering, even lives and they are absolutely essential.

But just because something is good does not mean it is without its negative effects. It sounds obvious but this crucial piece of reasoning is ignored by many.

The world order was once simple. You were born into a class, or more specifically into a set of complex social parameters and that was your lot. With no regard for work ethic, intellect or ingenuity your role was determined by birthright and would determine that of your children. Today, the system is no longer static. Call it what you will, social and economic mobility or “The American Dream”. Society is now ready and willing to reward that which a rigid class system ignored. But it cannot reward everyone. And so, since the old system began to crumble, society has been reshuffling the standings of its members, slowly at first, then with increasing portent.

As first the brilliant, ingenious and aspiring rose to higher station, so the merely conscientious, diligent and keen followed. And as the bloated and lazy fell from grace, there their unwashed bedfellows remained. We are gathering at the lowest level of our society not those trapped by dictate but those who do not possess the will to improve themselves. We have provided the mechanism by which a wholly deserving underclass is formed from those least deserving of anything better.

So, how do we fix it?

Take away the means by which the poor live in comfort? But many, if not the majority of those that benefit, are deserving of help. Rebuild class boundaries? Not likely. The results would be an enormous and brutal step backward for anyone with the slightest social conscience.

Is it even possible to fix? After all, someone will always be at the bottom.

We have to break the mechanism somehow. Can we invest in the assessment and distribution of state benefits, to better target the right recipients? How would they be identified? Can we stop bad parents from raising the next generation of bad children?

I honestly don’t know. But identifying the problem, they say, is half the battle.

Faith In Something Greater

Developed countries including the United Kingdom are becoming increasingly secular. Not necessarily at the state level, the Church Of England is the UK’s official state religion, but at a personal level. Your average member of the public is much less likely to consider themselves “religious” than, say, one hundred years ago. Why is this?

For a non-believer, it’s easy to attribute this to increasing literacy, technology, awareness of science and logic. Basically saying that people in westernised, formerly Christian countries are somehow cleverer or less gullible than they once were. It could even be true. Another school of thought however, maintains that the public are becoming increasingly stupid, fat and lazy, with their remote controls, ready meals and txtspk. So which is it?

Religion or belief in something greater fills a human need, which appears to be diminishing. From the time of the first modern humans until the twentieth century, life was hard. It still is for many but for an increasing and lucky majority of westerners, daily life is no longer a struggle for survival. We evolved like other wild animals in a dangerous world of eat or be eaten. The timeline of worries regarding daily nutrition from prehistory to the present goes something like “I hope I don’t get eaten”, “I hope I get to eat”, “I hope I get to eat properly”, “I hope McDonalds is still open”. Similar timelines could be cited for our other elementary concerns: shelter, sanitation, security etc.

So with decreasing hardship comes increasing acceptance. Conversely, belief in the afterlife, reincarnation, divine retribution, judgement day, the end-of-the-world or simply an all powerful and all loving God who isn’t going to let things get any worse for you, are clearly very comforting ideas for someone living in a world so horrifying they can’t accept its flaws.

So am I saying that religious faith is a kind of mental illness? Well, yes but not in a bad way. It is a clever and probably vital defence mechanism we humans have developed to keep ourselves sane. I just think the world will be a better place when comfortable delusions are no longer needed.

I shall risk quoting Karl Marx to finish, for he said it before me and with greater oomph,

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”

First Thought

Well then. Blogging. Here we go…

It occurred to me in a random thought, that I have lots of random thoughts and that I forget most of them. It also occurred to me that this was probably a good thing since most of my thoughts are utter rubbish. It then occurred to my ego that some of my thoughts might be wonderful and insightful and magnificent. “They should be recorded, perferably as binary data and emblazoned for all to behold” it said, egotistically. If only there was some kind computerised diary technology that would do just that. It then occurred to my emo (my ego’s nemesis) that people might read my thoughts and think them tosh. “But what if someone reads your stupid thoughts and thinks you’re an idiot? You should use a fake name.” it said, disparagingly. My ego wasn’t happy, there was a short argument, a fake name was devised, a blog account created.