Great Poster

V'GER, SON!

HEY.  At lease three way excellent things happened in 1977:  I was born, a movie named Star Wars was made by people who actually know how to make good movies and not by people named George Lucas, and NASA launched the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. Of course, that same year Elvis died and INTERPOL came up with those obnoxious “FBI WARNING” things that you still have to sit through at the beginning of every vhd/dvd/blue-ray; so it’s not like the year was all roses.  But on the balance, a pretty good set of 365 considering the Voyager program is so rippingly whips.

A Typical Hot NASA Scientist.

At present, Voyager 2 is about 8.6 billion miles from Earth, carrying with it all manner of scientific instrumentalia and thefamous “Gold Record,” containing recorded greetings in a number of languages, some ‘sounds of Earth,’ and then a music section with Humanity’s greatest hits.  Perhaps if you’ve been obsessively watching The West Wing lately, you’ll recall that one of those songs (“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” by Blind Willie Johnson) is featured in the episode The Warfare of Genghis Khan after Josh falls for a hot NASA scientist.  Oh scientists, how hot you all are  (you’ll be stoked to know that Chuck Berry also made the cut for the record).

The probe sends back regular updates to Earth, but in April someone odd happened.  It stopped transmitting and then started back up again, but was sending strange messages that scientists could not decipher. Even really hot scientists. I can think of only one possibility. Fortunately, someone more credentialed said out loud what we all were thinking.  Tell us about it, The First Post:

German academic Hartwig Hausdorf believes the change could be down to extraterrestrials. He says that because the rest of the spacecraft is still working normally there may be more to the cryptic messages than meets the eye.

“It seems almost as if someone has reprogrammed or hijacked the probe,” he told German newspaper Bild. “Thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth.”

MERGE WITH CREATOR YUSS.

YUSS. THE ALIENS ARE COMMUNICATING WITH US USING THE VOYAGER SPACECRAFT! CAN A TOTALLY BALD, TOTALLY SMOKIN’ CARBON-BASED ENVOY WALKING AROUND IN A BATHROBE BE FAR BEHIND? OH CARL SAGAN! OH DON PIANO!

Oh. Wait:

But if Hausdorf is correct in assuming that aliens are trying to send messages there could be trouble ahead, even if they understand the information on the Golden Disk.

Last month, Professor Stephen Hawking, the renowned British astrophysicist and believer in aliens, warned that advanced extraterrestrial life forms would aggressively seek to colonise Earth should humans ever make contact with them.

SIGH.  That’s no good.  Dealing with an alien invasion is totally a complicated post and outside the scope of this discussion. While most people will likely cite V or Independence Day as the touchstone examples for how to organize our resistance and ultimate liberation, anyone who isn’t considering Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall is doing themselves a great disservice.  Especially considering the latter has aliens that are man-sized elephants.  Probably least likely (but somehow still on my to-read list) is Harry Turteldove’s Worldwar series, in which WW2 is interrupted by alien invasion, and we have the upper hand because the aliens hadn’t swung by since the Crusades and weren’t expecting us to be so good at developing killing technology.

Unfortunately Fortunately, it turns out that NASA had some scientists on the job and they were able to figure out what is going on.  Boringly, it was just some software glitch, which has subsequently been fixed and totally not having anything at all to do with Explorers.  Guh.  I think my weekend has been ruined in advance.

Dances With Crude

Remember Waterworld? It was that Kevin Costner post-apocalyptic tanker that proved, definitively, that children in Sci-Fi films are vastly more off-putting than even the protagonist drinking their own urine. If it wasn’t thrown in the same mental junk-drawer where you keep The Postman and Star Trek: Insurrection, you might recall that the bad guys in this multiplex Multisanto (who were called The Smokers) rode around in an apparently refurbished Exxon Valdez.

Not content to have his exploits combating the pinnacle iconography of crude-based environmental cataclysm eclipsed by the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, Costner and his brother Dan headed down to the gulf to lend a hand, as reported by the Chronicle’s Celebrity Buzz Blog:

The brothers run Costner Industries Nevada Corporation (CINC), and have previously promoted a filtration system, designed by Dan Costner, to recycle oil.

Now BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles has agreed to test out six of the devices on the oil spill this week.

I’m not one of those people that thinks BP is dragging their feet or incompetent or being impertinent in all this. Far from it. But, I am going to go ahead and say that, following on the heels of describing a shut-off method as involving golf balls and old tires (rather than, say, ceramic spheres and strips of radial-steel reinforced rubber), they really should stop giving the late-night comics such ready and easy fodder as enlisting Costner for help. Please leave your best Costner entendre in the comments.  If you spill it, he will come.