Category Archives: James Cameron

James Cameron "Aliens of the Deep"

. “That party’s been join’ on down there for a billion years – and its going to be going on for the next billion years. They’re just doing their thing – it’s got nothing to do with us, the sun could go out tomorrow – and they wouldn’t know and they wouldn’t care.”
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“These microbes go far beyond anything our imagination might conceive of, back, when we were studying where we might find life.”

“So you know when you’re little and used to play that you were in a submarine? That was this. Way better than a cardboard box.”

“You’re in the world’s best spacecraft to explore this planet. [Eartth’s ocean]”

“Let’s say that my kind of Modified Drake’s Equation, says that life was possible on any planet any distance from the sun or not even anywhere near a sun or any planetary-like body, like a moon of Jupiter or whatever, that had ice around it. Okay. And had some kind of tidal pumping from some kind tidal pumping from some kind of gravity source near it, so that it had a liquid core, so that it would generate heat – and it was making heat like these thermal vents that we’re seeing. And if we said that there were ten or twenty or maybe fifty times as many worlds – like that. Isn’t it likely to assume, that when we get a call from one of your buddies – out there – when Setti Institute finally picks up a signal, it’s going to be coming from somebody who had to bore up through ice. And set their transmitter out on the ice. Statistically – isn’t that indicated by what we’re, what we’re talking about here.”

Curiosity and Cameron

“I think any kind of exploration should always try to acquire the highest level of imaging. That’s how you engage people — you can put them there, give them the sense they’re standing there on the surface of Mars.”

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For obvious reasons the pro-active visionary heroics of Oscar-winning director James Cameron have become a running theme on this blog. The director of “Avatar” and many other sci-fi flicks, “Titanic,” and technologically demanding undersea documentaries, is now helping NASA develop a high-resolution 3D camera for the next Mars rover, SUV-sized Curiosity, due to launch in 2011.

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Remember the beautiful Mars imagery NASA’s Mars rover, Spirit, captured during its journey to the Red Planet? Now imagine high-definition color 3D video from the surface of Mars at eye-level, in motion, at walking pace: sunrises and sunsets, stars after midnight, vistas stretching for miles.

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Zoom lenses will allow for “cinematic video sequences in 3-D on the surface.”
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“The fixed focal length [cameras] we just delivered will do almost all of the science we originally proposed. But they cannot provide a wide field of view with comparable eye stereo. With the zoom [cameras], we’ll be able to take cinematic video sequences in 3D on the surface of Mars. This will give our public engagement co-investigator, James Cameron, tools similar to those he used on his recent 3D motion picture projects,” said Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, Inc, the company which developed the Mastcams.

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“[NASA Administrator Bolden] actually was really open to the idea.  Our first meeting went very well. It’s a very ambitious mission. It’s a very exciting mission. (The scientists are) going to answer a lot of really important questions about the previous and potential future habitability of Mars.”
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“We so desperately need not to blow it,” Cameron said of the first opportunity in decades to consider moving human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. Cameron has lamented that space exploration stalled — because of political compromises — after the Apollo moon landings. Rather than being a jumping off point to future great adventures, the space shuttle and International Space Station ultimately “formed a closed-loop ecosystem for self-justification.”
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Now, the agency has a chance to move beyond that and chase mankind’s “greatest adventure” — landing humans on Mars.
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“Where does the money come from? From working people, with mortgages and kids who need braces. Why do they give the money? Because they share the dream.” They need reasons to stay engaged: from telling them the ways space exploration has provided them with tools that improve their daily lives to helping them to be more interactively involved in the missions.
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NASA’s focus has been on hardware instead of people, partly because the agency shields its people from the public. Instead, in an era when American kids and adults need inspiration, NASA needs to do a better job of selling its astronauts and scientists as heroic people.
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“Our children live in a world without heroes,” he said. “Your kids need something to dream about. We need this challenge to bring us together.” I think that any kind of exploration should always try to acquire the highest level of imaging. That’s how you engage people — you can put them there, give them the sense that they’re standing there on the surface of Mars.”
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“The [1997] Sojourner Rover became a character to millions of people, a protagonist in a story. How long is it going to survive, could it perform its mission? It wasn’t anthropomorphic in any way, there was absolutely no emotion in a little solar powered machine that was being commanded from eighty million miles away, and yet people thought of it as a character. The reason we thought of it as a character is that it represented us in a way. It was our consciousness moving that vehicle around on the surface of Mars. It’s our collective consciousness — focused down to that little machine – that put it there. So it was a celebration of who and what we are. It takes our entire collective consciousness and projects it there – to that point in time and space. That’s what the Sojourner Rover did.”
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“I was involved in a private company that was going to try to land two rovers on the Moon. That collapsed in the dot com crash – they ran out of money. I’m loosely involved with people who are going to be doing future robotic missions to Mars. I’m involved in terms of imaging, and of how imaging might be improved in terms of story telling. I’ve been very interested in the Humans to Mars movement –the ‘Mars Underground’ — and I’ve donea tremendous amount of personal research for a novel, a miniseries, and a 3-D film.”
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Mars is real, non-threatening, a living character with which humanity must become familiar and comfortable. Stay tuned for a forthcoming post explicitly about Cameron’s Mars film work, yet again.

James Cameron…Lone Voice in the Wilderness

James Cameron, the writer and director of “Avatar” and “Titanic,” served on the NASA Advisory Council from 2003 to 2005, and has led 6 deep ocean expeditions.  He is currently a co-investigator on the Mars Science Laboratory Mastcam team and a lifetime member of the Mars Society.  (This commentary also appeared in the February 5 edition of the Washington Post.)

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Rockets Run on Dreams

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What do rockets burn for fuel? Money. Money that is contributed by working families who have mortgages and children who need braces. And why do the American people support our efforts in space? Because they still believe, to some extent or another, in that shining dream of exploring other worlds. So it could be said that rockets really run on dreams.

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The exploration of space is the grandest adventure challenging the human race. As a filmmaker I have celebrated this greatest of dreams in my movies and documentaries, and I remain as passionate about the discoveries ahead as I was when I was a kid. So it was with some trepidation that I waited for the NASA budget to be unveiled this week. I was concerned that amid the nation’s fiscal crises, space exploration would fall off the priority to-do list. But the new NASA budget reveals a pathway to a bright future of exploration in the coming years. It simply reflects the deep changes and hard decisions necessary to accomplish that goal.

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Last year President Obama instructed the Augustine commission to report on the likely prognosis for NASA’s exploration activities. After months of study, the conclusions the panel released last October were gloomy. The Constellation program, implemented in XXX and designed to put humans back on the moon by 2020, could not possibly succeed within that timeframe or for the budgeted amount, it reported.

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In response, the president and NASA have crafted a bold plan that truly makes possible this nation’s dreams for space. Their plan calls for the full embrace of commercial solutions for transporting astronauts to low Earth orbit after the space shuttle is retired next year. This frees NASA to do what it does best: deep space exploration, both robotic and human. By selecting commercial solutions for transportation to the International Space Station, NASA is empowering American free enterprise to do what it does best: to develop technology quickly and efficiently in a competitive environment.

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As Peter Diamandis, chairman of the nonprofit X-Prize foundation, said in a recent blog, “The U.S. government doesn’t build your computers, nor do you fly aboard a U.S. Government-owned and -operated airline. Private industry routinely takes technologies pioneered by the government and turns them into cheap, reliable and robust industries.” When the shuttle is finally retired after more than three decades of service, the United States will be dependent on the Russian Soyuz to get our astronauts to the International Space Station, at a cost of $50 million per person. But under the new NASA plan, private industry will take over this capability within a few years, much more quickly than Constellation would have, and at a competitive price.

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The money saved will be plowed into research and development of robotic explorers that will act as precursors and technology demonstrators, paving the way for human exploration of the moon, asteroids and Mars. Additional funding has been committed to the development of advanced propulsion technology, which can bring down the cost of spaceflight. And the space station’s lifespan will be extended several years, which in turn will increase the science yield and satisfy our international partners. This international cooperative effort is important as a model for how future large-scale missions will be organized and funded. In addition, money is being made available to both Earth and planetary science, which can help us understand climate change on our own world and the alien processes at work on some of the other worlds in our solar system.

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Over the past 15 years, I have gotten to know a lot of people at NASA while working on projects to advance space and ocean exploration. I’ve found that many, if not most, started as starry-eyed childhood dreamers. Maybe they loved science-fiction stories, with their promise of alien worlds, or maybe they were geeks like me, peering through a telescope in the back yard until their moms yelled again for them to come inside, “it’s a school night!” They grew up to become engineers, brilliant planetary scientists and steely-eyed missile men, who collectively have pushed our human presence out to the moon and our robotic presence not just to Mars but to the outer reaches of the solar system. I applaud President Obama’s bold decision for NASA to focus on building a space exploration program that can drive innovation and provide inspiration for the world. This is the path that can make our dreams in space a reality.

James Cameron: The Last Hope for Hollywood

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James Cameron personally attended the International Mars Society Conference in 1999. He delivered the Keynote Address then spent the entire weekend moving from panel to panel with his camera crew, sitting in the audience alongside other attendees while taking extensive notes on a yellow legal pad with a ball point pen. That was before laptops and only a year and a half after the release of his record blockbuster “Titanic.” It was a bold dramatic meaningful appearance which said: I care about Humans-to-Mars; I want to get this right. For the next two years he continued to send teams of videographers to record every presentation. Then, two purely idiotic movies were released — “Red Planet,” “Mission to Mars” — and Cameron wisely decided to shelve his project until the cultural debris settled. Periodically interviewers will ask, “What about Mars?” The most important consistent reply he provides with confidence is: “I have done the research. I know Mars. When the time is right it will happen.”
James Cameron has not only laid the foundation for making one of the most important films about Mars in our generation, for a time he even sat on NASA’s Advisory Council – a panel of experts and advisers appointed by the agency’s administrator. He remains on the science team for the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory. The Mars Science Laboratory, known as Curiosity, is a NASA rover scheduled to be launched between October and December of 2011. One can only hope this window of opportunity is not corrupted by competition from less informed directors, once again.
“I’ve been very interested in the Humans to Mars movement—the ‘Mars Underground’—and I’ve done a tremendous amount of personal research for a novel, a miniseries, and a 3-D film.”
These very rough drafts of Mars mission equipment were created by Digital Domain nearly ten years ago to accompany Cameron’s Keynote Address. Although they were of high-quality for CG at that time, he nevertheless apologized for not being able to bring final renders. The point of showing these images though was to demonstrate his support for Mars Direct and in particular humans to Mars; Cameron wanted to show fellow space enthusiasts he could be relied upon to “get the facts right” and — that this is important. (As an aside, during his keynote the name for Factual Fiction was conceived: if we could get the facts right a “New Mars” in the public’s imagination might lead to a rethinking of humans to Mars.)
“Exploration is not a luxury we can’t afford; it’s a necessity we can’t afford to lose. Pushing farther into the unknown is our greatest endeavor as a civilization and our deepest responsibility to future generations.” Near-term, realistic — without aliens, laser, or guns — someday James Cameron will change the way we think about Mars. No doubt there are many right now saying, “Come on Cameron!”

The follow are excerpts from his Mars Society keynote address:
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“People are always saying … we need to solve our problems right here on Earth before we go spending money out in space. It makes me want to vomit frankly. [applause!].

Check back in five hundred or a thousand years. People will still be talking about all the problems that need to be solved. We are never going to reach some utopian plateau where everything is solved so we can then, with lordly confidence, look around us for worlds to conquer as some kind of hobby. Not spreading ourselves outward into the solar system now, when we have the capability to do so, is one of the problems we have to be solving right here on Earth. [more applause].

We are really at a turning point. Go forward, or go back. By stopping, by stagnating, we go back. I look around at the turn of the millennium and see a prosperous, powerful, technologically unparalleled society which, collectively, has no purpose but to feather its own nest. It is a goal-less, rudderless society, dedicated to increasing security and creature comforts. .

Our children are raised in a world without heroes. [!!!!!!!!!!]

They are led to believe that heroism consists of throwing a football the furthest, getting the most hangtime during a slam dunk, or selling the most movie tickets with your looks and boyish charm. This is not heroism, and these are not valid tests of our mettle as an intelligent race.
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Young kids need something to dream about, something to measure their value system against. They live in a sea of mind-numbing inputs, a point-and-shoot videogame world where it is hip to not care, where death and violence have no meaning, where leaders are morally bankrupt, and where the scientific quest for understanding is sooo not cool. Going to Mars is not a luxury we can’t afford … it is a necessity we can’t afford to be without.”