Coolest Things of the Week - Week of July 2

Another week another blog post of cool shit that happened in it. Reading that story about the hypersonic jet concept that Boeing released got me all excited about space and technology and futurism and made me oddly optimistic. So, a lot of the stuff I was looking up this week is related to that. Let's kick things off, shall we?

But seriously last warning - if you don't give a shit about space you probably won't give a shit about this. 

Mobile Suit Gundam live action movie Announcement

This first one is long, so strap in.

I'm trying to remember the last time a piece of (non-political) news made me feel so much. At first I was elated to see what's probably my second all-time franchise get a movie announcement because 10 year old george heard it all the way back in 2000 and that high pitch noise you heard was him screaming through the time-space continuum. 

But then a slightly weighted sadness clenched onto my shoulders when I realized I'm not going to be the person working on it. Seriously. Ever since Michael Bay's first Transformer movie came out about 11 years ago, I've believed a Gundam movie could work, based on that movie's intricate mechanical designs, mature story, and the fact that so many people suspended their disbelief. 

Seriously. I have six gundam movie scripts in the can. I've adapted the original series and the followup, Gundam Zeta into two trilogies, incorporating stuff from the TV series, the model kits, the manga, the games, and MSV (Mobile Suit Variation) Catalogues. 

For those who don't know, Gundam is a long running anti-war sci-fi space opera out of Japan. It takes place in a future where mankind overpopulated Earth and took to the stars in gigantic orbiting space colonies (I'll get into that later in this piece). After about 80 years, some colonists in space decided they weren't being treated fairly and started a war for independence that basically saw half of humanity die in a week. 9 months later, with both forces exhausted, we meet the titular Gundam - a 50 foot tall humanoid weapon of war that people can pilot. 

It's been on air in some form or another since 1979 and serves as one of the longest running animated series ever. It's basically to Japan what Star Trek is to the US or Doctor Who is to the UK. 

I love this universe. I love this universe so goddamn much. I'm not armchair angry. I don't think they're going to fuck it up or anything like that. I'm just bummed. I wish I could be a part of it. Legendary Pictures out of Burbank is producing it and they've had a lot of kickass movies. Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Town, The Hangover, Inception, Interstellar, Blackhat, Crimson Peak, Kong: Skull Island - this studio knows how to make good movies, they know how to make fun movies, and I have no indication that they'll do anything less with Gundam. I just wish I could be a part of it. 

I've been watching Gundam Unicorn lately, which is kind of a coda to the main Gundam series. It goes all the way back to the beginning of the original series, and basically puts punctuation at the end of every sentence that was left unfinished through various stories. It was one part fan service, and two parts kickass story that gave the series something it never had before: an ending. 

In addition to that, it also had a phefuckingnominal score. Here's a live concert series of the main overture from it with snippets of the show thrown in. It's one of my favorite things to write to. 

Gerard K. O'Neil's The Vision (Uncut)

Gerard K. O'Neil was a physics stud. Seriously. This dude ruled. He was a physicist working out of Princeton University. While there, he invented the particle storage ring, which basically led to the development of particle accelerators, allowing scientists to study the fundamental structure of the Universe at places like CERN. He also invented the Mass Driver, which is a magnet powered propulsion system that would allow non-rocket (read: safer, more efficient, more controlled) launches in space. He also founded the Space Studies Institute, a non-profit that prioritizes the exploration of space and humanity's capacity to survive there. 

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This dude was a goddamn genius. In the 1970's he conceptualized what's known now as the O'Neil Cylinder, a means for mass emigration and human survival in space. By using the rotation of the cylinder to create an artificial gravity and mirrors to bounce sunlight in to grow food, the Cylinders are generally considered the most realistic way humans could live in space. Yoshiyuki Tomino, the creator of Mobile Suit Gundam was so taken aback by the concepts, that a lot of the science in the series was based off O'Neil's research, including a lot of the designs for space-habitats in the series. They were even used in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, as you can see in this scene here, around the 2:10 mark (spoilers for the end of Interstellar). 

Anyways. I recently found a long talk he did on YouTube and the shit is fascinating. This dude was a beast of hope and possibility. 

Lagrange point

Simply, every object has mass, so every object has gravity. Light is an exception, but it's affected by gravity, so it's not really an exception as much as a clusterfuck of a concept that people have been studying for centuries and still don't really understand, least of all some copywriter with a blog who likes cartoons about robots fighting in space. 

That said, there are some physics/astronomy concepts I can, wrap my head around. One such concept is gravitational pull. An object attracts other objects near it. We're standing on Earth and not flying off because the largest object near us is the earth and it's keeping us on it. So, the sun has a gravitational pull, the earth does, and so does the moon. Easy, right?

Well, there are places between all these objects where gravity essentially cancels out, because the pull between two objects is in effect, equal. Three such locations were discovered by Leonhard Euler in the late 1760's/early 1770's. These are called Lagrange points because Joseph-Louis Lagrange found the last two, and the dude had a cooler name so he won out.

It's a weird concept to understand and the shitty diagrams that try to explain it don't really help. But while perusin' the net, I found some awesome art that sort of explains it simply, elegantly, and romantically. Huge shoutout to Rebecca Mock for drawing the fuck out of this. You can find her work here

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"The Edge of Materiality" 

Let's spend a minute with my friend Hypothetical Henry and say you were living on an O'Neil Cylinder. Obviously water would be filtered, maintained, tightly regulated - flown in from earth (which would be expensive AF) or be ice chipped off of asteroids (which you would need anyway for raw materials to construct the cylinder to begin with). The farming would be done in its own little bubbles that were perpetually exposed to sunlight (you wouldn't want that in the main colony, constant sunlight would make them grow faster anyway). let's say you used real grass instead of turf because you know how there are certain things you can't give up when you're apartment hunting like a gas range or a dishwasher? Let's say that's one thing that people wouldn't give up - landscaping and gardening to keep certain traditions of humanity even in space. They'd be irrigated, right? You're designing an entire world, of course you'd make it as efficient as possible. 

But what about clouds? Can you make clouds? How would you make clouds in a cylinder that's constantly spinning? When the furthest point from the wall of the cylinder is the center, and that's relative to a circle, how would you create clouds that acted the way we know them to? It's a stretch, but it also serves a purpose - a psychological one, if not a resource or aesthetic one. 

I don't know why I think about this stuff. I don't even smoke pot.

Thankfully, Dutch mindbending artist Burndnaut Smilde already figured out how to make indoor clouds, if even for just 10 seconds. Using water vapor and smoke, he's able to create what he calls sculptures but it's heavily dependent on the environment; he needs shit to be cold and damp with no air circulation. I don't know if this could work in a space colony, which is nothing except a giant controlled environment, but this shit is awesome regardless. Check the video below.