it came from outer space
11:14 on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 • 2 responses
Anyone that reads etherf@rm on a regular basis knows that I’m fascinated with disasters of both the natural and manufactured kind. It’s not really a morbid fascination, per se. I consider my interests in the apocalyptic not an obsession with gloom-and-doom scenarios but rather a real appreciation for the fact that the human species, in the face of probability and despite itself, persists.
Last to arrive from my netflix queue was a six-part BBC documentary series entitled Hyperspace. Narrated by an incredibly smug Sam Neill, 
this DVD serves up a six-course astrophysics-flavored meal: the big bang, black holes, wormholes, terraforming, space sails, the end of our solar system, near-earth-objects, and much, much more. It’s amazingly overproduced, but not in a completely offensive way. Once the cheesiness of the interaction between Mr. Neill and computer-generated galaxies wears off, the animated imagery is actually phenomenally spectacular. I’ve read quite a bit about black holes and worm holes over the years, but rarely have I seen these entities visualized well—and until viewing this series, had never seen them visualized with a temporal component (i.e. animated). The series is informative enough to make me wish, yet again, that I had grown up to be an astrophysicist. Or even just an Area 51 conspiracist.
Most of Hyperspace falls in line with my general disposition towards all-things-foreboding. Why is this planet we call home even here? Because despite the existence of tens of millions of black holes in just our galaxy, we haven’t yet been sucked into oblivion. Why is there life on Earth? Because by some major stroke of luck, we haven’t yet been hit by an asteroid. Why should we look towards colonizing other planets? Because our earth will be consumed in the fiery death of our sun.
The series is so obsessed with the fact that by merely existing, we’ve beaten all odds, that I think it should be called We All Gonna Die. I think it should be hosted by Mr. T, not Sam Neill, and I think that rather than having intricately rendered animations of 50km-wide asteroids and comets hitting a computer-generated Earth at 2500km/sec, the BBC should have just taped asteroid-shaped cardboard cutouts on Mr. T’s knuckles as he delivered a knockout roundhouse punch to an ordinary globe, explaining the event in masterful dialogue—”I pity the foo who gets hit by a big space rock goin’ real fast.”
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