[X] My Assistant

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

I'm sure someone has said this before, but I think the best series about planetary space science is still The Planets, produced by the BBC. High quality, good interviews with some real scientists like Bazilevsky, and a rare evenhandedness in including both Soviet and American results.

I've been horribly disappointed by recent NOVAs, pretty much all the programs with Neil Tyson seem to be pretty sloppy. I assume that is not Tyson's fault, I think he's just hired to narrate, but I'm not sure.

In terms of "semi-fiction", I like Voyage to the Planets and Beyond, (called Space Odyssey in Britain). Also produced by the BBC, its portrays a 5-man mission to explore the planets. OK, its not "unmanned", but still. It gave a somewhat dark spin to manned space exploration, which I guess is partly accurate and partly just Labour-Party screenwriters who don't like the space program. My biggest technical nit-picking was the section on Venus, which had a lot of historical and scientific errors.

Alien Planet was a pretty good DVD about a robotic mission to a nearby star. It speculates about how artificial intelligence would be tuned (one probe was curious and another probe was cautious), and there are frequency interviews with scientists (and sort-of scientists) discussing some of the speculations.

I've just been watching Cosmos by Carl Sagan. It's a little dated, and yes he is kind of narcissistic, but it is still a good series to watch. It's noteable in having been produced by a real scientists, and not just by random television writers.

[dvandorn]

The Discovery Science Channel has been running The Planets on Tuesday evenings for the past several weeks. I may be mistaken, but these may be updated versions. The episode on outer planet exploration, for example, included results from Galileo and a description of her death plunge into Jupiter. It still placed Cassini's arrival at Saturn in the future, though.

The Science Channel has also recently run an updated version of Sagan's Cosmos. Nice additional touches of MGS, Odyssey and MEX images, as well as a few Pathfinder and MER images. And some Galileo and Cassini images. But re-edited in such a way that the narration still made sense. Very nicely done.

As for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, yeah, it's a true classic. I guess I will always have a soft spot in my heart for a Mars with enough air pressure for liquid water at the surface, and enough oxygen for abundant plant life... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

[Stephen]

As for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, yeah, it's a true classic. I guess I will always have a soft spot in my heart for a Mars with enough air pressure for liquid water at the surface, and enough oxygen for abundant plant life... *sigh*...

Actually, the "liquid water" in question was below ground in a cave, and the only sign of "abundant plant life" in the movie was in that pool of water in that cave. Above ground, the Mars of that movie was entirely barren.

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Stephen

Yep, even with Adam West (in his pre-Batman days) making an appearance, and the entire plot plagiarized.

Where was it plagarized from?

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Stephen

(EDIT: These were two separate posts! Is this an IPV bug?)