When we look out into space, we’re looking back in time; the light from a galaxy a billion light-years away, for instance, will take a billion years to reach us. It’s an amazing thing. The history is there for us to see. It’s not mushed up like the geologic record of Earth. You can just see it exactly as it was.
The first voyagers to the stars will be creatures whose life cycle is matched to the voyage: the aeons involved in traversing the galaxy are not daunting to immortal beings. By the end of the third millennium, travel to other stars could be technically feasible. But would there be sufficient motive?
The first science fiction show on television was ‘Tales Of Tomorrow’ using scripts from the radio show ‘X-1’ which used stories from ‘Galaxy Magazine’ as its source material.
I never get tired of talking about ‘Galaxy Quest.’ I am so proud of that movie. Our only fear was that we were having so much fun making the movie we got concerned it might not be as good as we thought it was going to be.
When they sold me on ‘Supergirl’, I went and sat down with Andrew Kreisberg and Greg Berlanti, and they described the character to me. Greg Berlanti used a couple of music theater references to kind of explain who the character was. They threw up Chris Pratt in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ as a reference point.
I think of those giants who made the Indian National Congress. Seldom has the world seen a nobler galaxy of women and men, so selfless in their devotion to the cause of freedom, so exalted in thought, so brave in action, so pure in spirit.
The key to proving that there’s a black hole is showing that there’s a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars. The way the star moves around the center of the galaxy is very much like the way the planets orbit the sun.
All of the stars rotate, have orbits around the center of the galaxy, and most of them go around the center of the galaxy in nearly circular orbits. They vary a little bit from circular, but they’re predominantly circular.
I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ I’d never really heard of that gang before, that comic series before. And I think when you go into those, watching those sort of films, you watch them with no expectation as well, so you’re always kind of pleasantly surprised, I think.
The reality is that we know that this universe, that our galaxy, has billions of stars. We know that stars have planets. So the likelihood that there is life somewhere else to me is just absolutely there.
‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ have pumped up the recognition factor a thousand times. I can’t get off an airplane anymore. I don’t know how the hell they know and how these people find out. They must have some interesting, secret way of getting a hold of the flight manifesto or something.
If you want to see a black hole tonight, tonight just look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation. That’s the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and there’s a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy together.
Recent results from astronomers who study the occasional gravitational lensing of unknown worlds by intervening stars suggest that orphan planets could be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphan worlds shuffling through our galaxy.
One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it – in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them – that’s huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us.
Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy’s edge… there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.
The traditional Hollywood system is pretty rigid, but the film scene in, say, South Africa is booming with a lot of possibilities. If you have the cameras and reasonable capital, you can put your film in theatres next to ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ A great example of that was Kagiso Lediga’s film ‘Blitz Patrole.’
While human space travel is daunting, machines – with their indefinitely long lifetimes – could travel the galaxy. It might make little difference to them that bridging the distance from one star to the next could take hundreds of thousands of years or more.
Let’s say you need a perfectly obedient servant who never gets tired, never needs to be paid, and is virtually indestructible. If you’re in a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away, you’ll just fly off to the local droid auction and pick up one of those shiny gold models with lovely manners.
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