LOTR indie film: "The Hunt for Gollum"

LOTR fans have released "The Hunt for Gollum".  The trailer is excellent, the movie is even better.  Director and Executive Producer Chris Bouchard also wrote the score for yet another great fan film: "Star Wars Revelations".   Since "The Hobbit" is now delayed until at least 2012 perhaps Chris and team might think about starting it ! Here are a few links to other fan fiction movies and shows.

StarTrekNewVoyages has released "Blood and Fire Part 1".

Did you ever seek "Star Wreck, in the Pirkinning?"  Even though it's in Finnish it's very entertaining.

Starship Exeter has released 2 episodes.

And I just found Starship Intrepid on a google search, never heard of it before now.

Fan fiction indie movies are pretty much ready to replace Hollywood and TV.  I'm sure the new Star Trek movie will be excellent and worth the $10 ticket.  I'm also sure that these fan movies are worth a lot more than $0.  Let's hope the movie moguls will recognize the value and start allowing fans to make a little money, at least enough to cover their expenses.  Or how about offering a 50% cut to the fans in exchange for unlimited licensing?  Most fans would gladly take that deal.

Yet another answer to the Fermi Paradox

Reginald Smith from the Bouchet-Franklin Institute in Rochester, New York has written a paper which claims that every civilization in the Milky Way stops broadcasting EM after 1000 years.  Based on this assumption he shows that it is reasonable that our galaxy has multiple sentient species who never interact with each other. This assumption seems very weak to me.  Why would every single species stop communicating by radio?  He also has an implicit assumption that colonization is rare or non-existent.

The real answer to the Fermi Paradox is much simpler:  the rate of evolution of sentient species is less than 1.0 per galaxy per 13 billion years.  We are the first and only intelligent species in the Milky Way, the odds that another will evolve before we have colonized the galaxy is nearly zero.  This theory perfectly fits the observed facts.

Singularity, a free audiobook

I have started listening to a free audiobook, Singularity by Bill DeSmedt. So far it's great, it's about the real cause of the Tunguska explosion. I'll review the book when I'm done listening to it.

I listen to it as a podcast feed.  I had some trouble setting up the feed in iTunes, the response of the podiobooks website was VERY slow, but it did finally work.  You can choose to get one chapter per day, per week, or all at once.

Your own personal stereotype

This is slightly off topic for this blog, but I found this ZenHabits post to be deeply profound.  To sum it up, virtually everyone fits into a pidgeonhole:  the smart guy, the cold physician, the golf hack, the office gossip, the troubleshooter, the troublemaker.  It applies to scifi writers too.  How many pidgeonholed authors have an opportunity to break out into a different genre?  If Terry Brooks tried to write a hard scifi story about alien robot colonies invading Earth would you give him the benefit of the doubt?  Many people would not. Most famous people are pidgeonholed:  George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Brittany Spears....the list is nearly endless.

The best advice is to make sure that your pidgeonhole is a good one.  You need a positive image associated with respect and dignity.  Because you probably will be stuck in that hole for the rest of your life.

We live in one big hologram

Scientists have analyzed noise in the GEO600 gravitational wave detection system and concluded it is holographic in nature. This leads them to propose that this entire universe is a holographic projection.

That is one serious projector.  The computational power required to process the signals and send them to the projector probably outpaces an entire galaxy of Matrioshka brains.

The Jeffries Tube

For several years now I have been greeted at church by a pleasant older usher, never dreaming that his brother was a science fiction giant:   Matt Jeffries  !!  Richard Jeffries has written a book about his famous brother. http://www.mattjefferies.com/wmjb.html

The book is "Beyond the Clouds"

Matt flew a "secret reconnaissance bomber" during WWII, build airplanes, designed the Enterprise (THE Enterprise), worked on many TV shows and a few movies.

I haven't read the book yet but it sounds excellent.

Fermi Paradox - All the aliens went dark !

Suppose the cosmologists have it wrong and dark matter really is composed of baryons.  It's not like cosmologists have a great track record.  Most of their theories have been proven wrong over the past few centuries.  Comparing the track record of mathematicians with cosmologists is pretty much night and day.  When a mathematician says they have a new discovery it's right, they have cred.  A new cosmology theory and $1.50 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  So why should a computation on the density of baryonic matter in the universe be one of the precious few ideas they actually got right? If dark matter is baryonic then why is it dark?  Could it be that it's dark because it's actually dominated by Matrioshka brains?  Matrioshka brains are shells which absorb all the light from a star, and all the light which radiates from that shell, and so on until the outer shell is ice cold, let's say for the sake of argument that a typical Matrioshka brain radiates at 2.73 Kelvin so it's in equilibrium with the cosmic background (or maybe the only relevant source of the cosmic background !!)

What if virtually all sentient life evolves in the far outer reaches of a galaxy and galaxies start out as 100% visible matter.  As a few Matrioshka brains are born they begin to send out ships and to convert neighboring stars.  Within a few hundred million years all stars outside of the core of a galaxy are dark.  As galaxies age they "shrink" because the number of visible stars drops, they are being absorbed by the Matrioshka civilizations.  This offers an intriguing observational program, watch for vanishing stars at the very edges of the Milky Way.

The interesting implications of this theory are:  there is no such thing as time travel, and there is no such thing as FTL travel (faster than light).   Either (or both) would mean much faster (essentially instantaneous) conversion of the entire galaxy.

Would there be any hope for us if the first survey ship arrived tomorrow to begin "Matriforming" our solar system?  It would certainly take centuries to convert our solar system, but it might only be a few decades before Earth became uninhabitable.  Could we fight back, would they absorb us into the collective before we had a chance to fight back?  Makes for an intriguing plot.