Today’s “Insomnia File” episode offers two stories of cosmic insight. The first is about ”An Accident More Complex than the Universe” from former astrophysicist and hard science-fiction author Alastair Reynolds, who’s epiphany is found in his novel , Blue Remembered Earth — first of a trilogy which follows humanity’s development over many centuries and Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine.
Perhaps in 10,000 years, or perhaps tomorrow, the inhabitants of Earth will wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit, writes China’s preeminent ‘hard’ science-fiction author and philosopher of alien contact, Liu Cixin, described as China’s Arthur. C. Clarke. Liu warns that the universe is a “dark forest” and a possible and terrifying reason behind the Fermi Paradox.
Before his death in 2018, Icelandic director and composer Johann Jóhannsson –director of Arrival and The Theory of Everything–adapted Last and First Men, a “future history” by British science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon –a “film that straddles the border of fiction and documentary. It is a meditation on memory and failed utopia.” The story –a channeled text from the last human species–describes the history of humanity from the present across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first.
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The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
Sixty-five years and 35 films later, Godzilla is back and bigger than ever in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Godzilla first made his debut in 1954. At inception, he was a 50-meter tall metaphor for wanton destruction, particularly U.S. hydrogen-bomb testing in the Marshall Islands, which, in the film, destroyed Godzilla’s deep-sea ecosystem.