Inkless Wells

 Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW
He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

Categories: Capital Read, Inkless Wells

Filmed on location

by Paul Wells on Saturday, May 9, 2009 11:23pm - 11 Comments

JJ Abrams’ Star Trek, as you have no doubt already heard, is spectacular, touching, funny, gorgeous. It is not flawless, and it’s only a superbly executed piece of pop culture after all, but I can’t imagine anyone else doing a better reboot for the series. Abrams is much more than just another skilled technician. He’s good for the movies.

It contains one sequence designed to appeal, not to Star Trek geeks, but to fans of real-life space exploration. In the third act it becomes necessary for the Enterprise to hide somewhere briefly. Scottie and Sulu pick Titan, the cloudy moon of Saturn. The sequence lasts about a minute and a half — this movie moves fast — but as a guy who used to spend hours poring over Voyager pictures from Saturn and Jupiter in Discover and National Geographic, I  was happy for a chance to see Titan again.

It’s always been the coolest moon in the solar system. Stormy, violent, shrouded in clouds that protect its mystery, larger than our own moon, Titan was once regarded as a good candidate for life. I still regard it as a good candidate for life, but those will have to be some hardy bugs because the surface of Titan is pretty nasty. Among its features: lakes of liquid natural gas the size of Lake Superior.

We know a lot about Titan thanks to the NASA’s Cassini probe, which has been orbiting Saturn for five years and is still sending back mountains of data. Cassini even launched a surface probe, Huygens, which landed on Titan and briefly sent back data from the surface. NASA uses web technology well to popularize its discoveries, so you can catch up on Titan here. It’s worth your time. This is our neighbourhood, after all.

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  • Kyle Bailey

    Those liquid methane pools may actually be quite useful for life- just not life that uses water as a universal solvent. Silicon based life maybe?

  • Brammer

    Tres cool! I can hardly wait to see it.

    I didn’t know you were an astronomy nut but since you are, you might like this nasa site. All kinds of logs, manuals, high res photos (including the infamous “earth rise”) and other minutae from the Apollo missions. Enough here to keep you occupied for a week.

    http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html

  • http://dougsamu.wordpress.com/ dougrogers

    uhmmmmm…. wasn’t that Chekov who picked Titan?

    • http://economics.about.com Mike Moffatt

      uhmmmmm…. wasn’t that Chekov who picked Titan?

      That’s how I remembered it too.

      I had similar thoughts to Wells, when they mentioned going to Titan. Actually, my exact thought was “Cool! Maybe they’ll run into V’ger”.

  • ernie

    One of my favorite Kurt Vonnegot novels is The Sirens of Titan (actually, I love them all)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirens_of_Titan
    In it he explains the reason for humanity’s existance. A great read.

  • Stephen

    I always thought Europa was the best candidate for life….I thought here was liquid water underneath that ice and the gravtiational tooing and froing was helping generate heat in the mantle.

    Then again, I am sure its all Stephen Harper’s and Guy Giorno’s fault if there is no life found on either moon.

  • Paul Wells

    Okay, maybe it was Chekov. I think I was out at the concession stand getting a Slusho at the wrong moment. And Europa is probably the best prospect for life, but Europa’s too easy — a big ice marble with liquid water underneath. Titan’s a hellpit, but there’s so much going on I have to imagine life got a toehold there at some point.

    As for Giorno and Harper, if there is life on a moon that harbours lakes of petrochemicals, rest assured it votes Conservatives.

    • Stephen

      Will they pitch to get Titan renamed Ft MacMurray?

  • Andrew Potter

    SPOILERS

    I saw the film last night, I loved it. I cringed for a bit when the time travel plotline emerged – it is seriously overdone in the series — but in the end, who cares. The casting and acting were superb, and Abrams did a nice job of winking at the original series without pandering to the hardcore (e.g. the green space babe; the skydiver in the red suit…)

    Also, it was cool to see they’re setting up Spock to be a bit of a player. Can’t wait for the next one.

  • Andrew

    Titan is certainly fascinating, and worth sending down some kind of probe to study in greater detail. It’s a pity that with all of the more irritating things governments have been focusing on for the past few years, space exploration has really fallen by the wayside. It’s an area where only governments, and preferably many governments working together, can come up with the capital and the ressources to start the bolling and say, put a manned mission on Mars or send probes down onto the moons of the Gas Giants. But the scientific, and possibly even economic (if we start exploiting those petrochemical lakes) benefits are potentially limitless.

    Star Trek is a source of great memories for a lot of us. In many ways the whole series was one big metaphor for post-war American Liberalism and the endless sense of possibility held out by science, technology and the modern state. After all, if we’d managed to get in just over a hundred years from a world where the average farm family lived in essentially the same manner as their ancestors in the time of the Roman Empire to industrialized cities and suburbs, why couldn’t we be travelling through the farthest reaches of space two hundred years in the future. But that Liberalism, and the optimism that went with it was corrupted and put by the wayside, partly by the worst aspects of conservatism, and partly by the post-modernists and anti-development eco-nihilists who have run the show on the left for the last decade. Not surprisingly, Star Trek faded as well. One can only hope that the rebirth of the cultural phenomenon is indicative of something greater, and not just a nostalgia trip for some and another action film for others.

    • http://www.invisiblehand.ca/ The Invisible Hand

      After all, if we’d managed to get in just over a hundred years from a world where the average farm family lived in essentially the same manner as their ancestors in the time of the Roman Empire

      This is so completely wrong. There was a huge amount of advancement between the 3rd and 19th centuries.

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