What is a jellyfish?

Alien jellyfish is the 90'es equivalent of the 50'es bug-eyed aliens. They're still alien to behold, but sooo peaceful and tranquil. Like the hippies of the deep sea.

Having said so this little movie is quite a treat - and it reminds us just how strange these creatures are - and that a jellyfish isn't just any jellyfish. Our definition of "jellyfish" looks a bit daft after watching this, since said definition basically just is a large box containing whatever looks see-through and wobbly found anywhere near water. They aren't the same species for a start. So watch and learn. I'm amazed here. 

And here I haven't even been taking up on the Awwwww! factor. It looks awesome.

Enjoy the movie :)

Angels and Apes

I haven't blogged for quite some time now, primary because my wife is hugely pregnant, and secondly because writing a scifi story is like catching fish with oily hands. Whenever you finally get one thing straight something else turns on you.
I've come to realize that that's what this blog is mostly about. To straighten my path out, and giving me a broader perspective on what the Frag I'm doing!

I started out with a regular story (an old story I wrote a years ago)- it was a bit messy, and maybe a little more lightheaded than I usually like, but entertaining in it's own right. Now I want the universe the story takes place in to be whole and believeable in it's own right.
So I started collecting everything I knew and could find about space, evolution and life and threw that into the boiling pot. But the more I got into the science part, the wierder the fiktion part became. I had to find out more about means of travel, communication, aliens, future humanity, settlements, living in an ancient universe, and most important: Which solutions I wanted to use in the story! Questions like: Is there a thing like an alien civilization at all? And if so, is it in the story? And are there more than one?  (I decided to go "Yes" on those ones, by the way...)

I like Star Trek, but to me those aliens are rarely truely alien. And that's because Star Trek always are about human interactions, and never aliens. I want the alien to be truely alien and overwhelming. To keep the mysteries mysterious. And the more I thought about it, the harder it got. Because how do you describe something as strange as the unknown and unseen and on top of that make it interact with us, with humans? And wanting it to do so?
To quote Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 

If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is that we will find apes or angels, but not men.

I love science - I do. And I find inspiration in it every single day. It has made me see how miraculous our planet must be, just by being here. Where ever you go - There's nowhere like here. It's unique. But there are other places as just wonderfull as this small planet. There has to be. At least that what science and mathematics has tought me.
So I have to walk a very fine line - and I may not succeed at all - of what I think I know there can be and of how my story wants to be presented. Science on one side and space opera on the other.

Captain Rob



I know flares are cheap - I just luv 'em so much an' wanna hug 'em for ever an' ever
an' squeeze 'em an' snuggle an' cuddle 'em...





Crew doodles

I'm working on the looks and traits of the crew on the space freighter - both in writing and in doodles, and I just thought I want to share some of the doodles... I haven't decided on any specific looks on the cast, though I like the short haired, bright looking female character though. She would fit in quite neat with the somewhat daft captain. Her name is McKenzie (just McKenzie) and she'll be the ships navigator. I think I got the captain somewhat worked out (he's the guy below, having a quiet drink). He's named Rob Roos, and he is not a people person. He doesn't like space either, but since you don't run into a lot of people out there, it's where he prefers to be. His motto would be "L'enfer, c'est les autres" if he could speak other languages than Terran Standard... Untill he learns, it's "Get the f*** lost, you mindless tosser!"

I always find it hard to settle for a final set of characters, so this time I've decided just to go with whoever I feel will work, and if it turns out they don't, then just get rid of them. Very holistic...

The universe and us...

Take the time to watch this. I promise - it'll be worth it...

The amount of Earth like planets in the galaxy...

I suck at math. I suck so bad at it, I had to become an artist. Or a bum. I choose the first. That's how much I suck at math.

Therefore I'm always in awe whenever someone like Phil Plait (the creator of Bad Astronomy, astronomer, lecturer, and author) solves questions like: How many Earth like planets are there in our galaxy?

Phil Plait came up with this surprising result: There's lots out there.We're not talking Earth mass planets, but the real deal. Planets roughly the same size as this pebble, inside the Goldilock Zone (where water will stay runny and wet, and not rock hard as mostly common out there) and orbiting the same type of sun as ours! The math behind it is quite amazing - nearly as amazing as the figure itself.

"The distance to the Gliese 581 system is what gets me excited: it’s 20 light years away. This planet is about 3 times the Earth’s mass, and it orbits its star in the right place. We don’t know what it’s made of, if it has an atmosphere, or really very much about it at all! But given its mass and temperature, it’s potentially habitable. Extrapolating from our one example, let’s say that habitable planets are roughly 20 light years apart in the galaxy (as we’ll see, that number can be a lot bigger or smaller, and the end result is still cool). That means there’s one star per cube 20 light years on a side:

In the drawing, each box is centered on a star, and the two stars are 20 light years apart. That means the cubes are 20 light years on a side, right? If we assume stars with livable planets are distributed throughout the galaxy like this, then there is one star per 20 x 20 x 20 = 8000 cubic light years. That’s the density of habitable planets in the galaxy.
So how many cubic light years are there in the galaxy?
A lot. Let’s say the Milky Way is a stubby cylinder 100,000 light years across, and 2500 light years thick. The equation of volume of a cylinder is
volume = π x radius of disk² x height of disk
so
volume = π x 50,000² x 2500 = 2 x 10¹³ cubic light years
Holy wow! That’s 20 trillion cubic light years!
Now we just divide the volume of the galaxy by the density of stars with planets to get
2 x 10¹³ / 8000 = 2,500,000,000 planets
Oh my. Yeah, let that sink in for a second. That’s 2.5 billion planets that are potentially habitable!

Even if my numbers are way off, there could be as few as hundreds of millions of planets, or as many as maybe hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone that we could live on!
Again, the point being that mathematically speaking, there may be a lot of habitable planets out there. And who knows; some may be marginally habitable and we can terraform them. And then there are moons of worlds, too… I don’t think I’m speaking too far out of school if I were to speculate that for every perfect Terra Nova out there, there might be three or four more planets we could live on with some work.

Of course, I’m ignoring how we’d get there! But that’s an engineering problem, and given enough time — oh, say, a century or two — I imagine we can overcome a lot of those issues." 

 Then there's all the other details - as one reader intelligently replies:

Remember that the Earth itself was incapable of supporting modern humans until almost 500 million years ago — that is, for 8/9ths of its existence. The rest of the time there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, or not enough, or there was no ozone layer, or carbon dioxide levels were so high that humans would be unable to breath.
Then there is the problem of composition. A world where sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide are part of the planet’s respiration system would kill terrestrial life off pretty quickly. The planet’s crust might have a lot of toxic compounds that, if they didn’t kill terrestrial plants, would kill animals who ate those plants. Where there is only a vanishingly small chance that an exo-world would harbor a toxic virus or other pathogen, there is a much higher likelihood that the planet would have annoying — even fatal — allergens. And how many soaps, solvents and preservatives have we invented that mimic estrogen and other hormones? It is unlikely that other worlds would have naturally occuring compounds that pose a similar risk to human health?

 
Check it out here.

James Gurney

I think, I'll just leave the pictures to do the talking here...

But for the record Mr. Gurney was the man behind "Dinotopia" - Just in case you think, you've seen his name before...

 

Illustration "Asteroid Miner" for the novel "Out of the Sun"

(Note the "Right stuff"/blue collar attitude)...

 Unpublished work (happens to all of us...)

 Illustration "Etruscans" for National Geographic(!)

Dinotopia

(First I didn't want to put up any Dinotopia related pics, but the depth in this

picture is sooo very nice...)

And the maestro himself - now that's what I call a study!

Ok - so I couldn't keep my blabber all shut to let the pics do all the talking, so what! It's my blog!

Check out his website at www.jamesgurney.com and his blog at gurneyjourney.blogspot.com.