9: Space Opera

From Sea to Space and the Human Imagination

When thinking of the space opera grand adventure awaits, a world filled with robots and aliens, heroes and villains, space travel and fiction solely built around predictions. It tends to be cheesy at times but it’s meant to entertain, it’s a dreamers dream as I like to put it. So often do we as humans like to paint a picture of the unknown we are a curious species, thus if we can’t travel to space well damnit we will write about it. The same could be said about the sea once told as a vast unknown deep that could only be traveled through the finest of vessels littered with sea creatures and magical beasts and beyond the blue on the other side of the world a new world awaits. Just imagine it the sea must have been as much of a new frontier as space travel is to us and fiction is eminent when questions are asked. But as we take the genre farther we find that our imaginations are not far from reality and so the sea story progresses into the space epic and as the space opera grows we travel to space. Star Wars is so influential especially to artist like us because although now only relevant through nostalgia as a child it captures the imagination. The people that grew up inspired by Star Wars grew to fulfill their dreams and fiction slowly turns into reality. The computer, the Internet, the cellular phone, robotics…what’s next? Racer Pods right. Ehh…only in my wildest dreams.

The Nine Billion Names of God

For this section of the class I decided to read The Nine Billion Names of God written by Arthur C. Clark naturally because it was written by Arthur C. Clark, big fan. Anyways, the short story tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the names of God, believing this is the purpose of the Universe, and that once the task is completed the Universe will come to an end. They calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about nine billion and the name being composed of only 9 letters or characters. Since doing this by hand would take another 15,000 years the monks turn to modern technology to finish this task in three months. So they get a super computer and recruit two western programmers to help with the machine. After three months the westerners leave the lamasery before the project reached it’s completion in fear of something bad happening to them. Under the night sky around the time that the monks would be pasting the final printed names into their holy books and as they look back they notice the stars of the night sky fading away. It was interesting I like how most of the story is told through narrative between the foreigners. It’s littered with great imagery mixing two contrasting cultures and religious outlooks lead by a theme of skepticism and belief. This idea that the answers to life will soon be answered in this pseudo sci-fi twist of kingdom come is quite interesting. It’s a journey of faith grounded in reality with for it’s time a futurist outlook. I enjoyed it.