6 ms·

Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien

102 points by benbreen 12y ago

rexignis 12y ago
If imdb's movie /year/1979/ list is to be believed, there was a lot of self loathing going on in films in the late 70s (i.e. Vietnam).
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  You have no idea. One of my favourite 70's quotes is from the quite brilliant book "The Medieval Machine" by the Anglo-French historian Jean Gimpel, published in 1976 (which really is a very good history of Medieval technology): "The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion. There will be no further industrial revolution in the cycles of our Western civilization." These words were written at the same time as Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Allen were all hard at work. This smug bastard was just one voice amongst many telling the world that we were in the grip of a permanent, inexorable "malaise" that could at best be accepted passively, which there was no point in fighting, which had to be simply taken as given, unstoppable, forever. At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1]. Gleeful murderers of hope were desperately trying to crush any spark of innovation, creativity or freedom. And it was happening the world over. A relentless, ruthless, assault on the Enlightenment, the rule of law, and the industrial revolution. They failed. A lot of it was funded, ultimately, by the Soviets, who generated an enormous amount of propaganda that was intended to make people believe these things. One of the notable things that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the stunning pall of silence that fell over the Left in the West. It was almost as if the lifeblood of the whole enterprise had been cut off. Part of that was simple empiricism: it was hard for Leftists to hold up their pathologically insane ideas as "better" when their poster-child had just endured a complete and spectacular collapse, including the freeing of a large number of vassal states, all because some shipyard workers in Poland had laid down tools a decade before. But part of it was also that funding for a bunch of stuff that Comintern paid for (mostly by indirect means, in the same way the US government funds stuff through NGOs today) vanished. Today, hyper-capitalist brands like Naomi Klein are attempting to resurrect some of the old zombie Soviet ideas, but it's a pretty pathetic effort, full of contradictions and gibberish. They won't have a lot of influence, at the end of the day, and it is my firm belief that we are entering into a century of progress that will make the 19th century look staid and the 20th century look stupid. Having lived through the '70's, this is a good thing to see. [1] We have done both, and more: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/astronomers-image-lowest-mass-exoplanet-around-a-sun-like-star/ http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/astronomers-image-lowest...
  - olavk 12y ago
    Are you suggesting the Soviet Union founded covert propaganda to convince the west that exoplanets couldn't exist? Do you have any more information about this? Because on the face of it it sound like the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard.
    - Joeboy 12y ago
      To be fair I read it as meaning we would be incapable of discovering them, rather than that they didn't exist. But yes, taken as a whole the post is rather eccentric.
      - mikeash 12y ago
        I wasn't around at the time, but from the science fiction of the era, it looks like nobody really thought about how to detect exoplanets from Earth, because everyone assumed the curve of technological progress in propulsion would keep going and you'd just send scout ships to other stars to survey them up close.
        Retra 12y ago
        To be fair, nuclear technology was still new and fresh.
  - IndianAstronaut 12y ago
    >At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1] Wow, I never knew they were so pessimistic about that. I thought the science for visualizing extrasolar planets had always been there, they just needed the equipment built. Now I wonder what ideas today's pessimists have that will be disproven. Maybe Interstellar travel is really possible?
    - pharke 12y ago
      You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, some people are just out for their own crazy agendas. You're correct that the science has been there for quite some time and astronomers have been lobbying and popularizing the idea of building the necessary detection equipment for quite a while. There was even quite a good book written on the topic in 1966, a collaboration between a young American astronomer and an accomplished Soviet astronomer/astrophysicist [1]. It's a very interesting read, especially today now that we have accomplished some of the things they theorized about on the planets in our solar system and through observations of our stellar neighbourhood. I highly recommend it. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-life-universe-I-Shklovskii/dp/B0006BM4BG http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-life-universe-I-Shklovskii...
- Joeboy 12y ago
  That would be the "most popular" films of 1979, as rated in recent years. Here's imdb's biggest films of 1979 by US box office: http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=1979,1979 http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_u... Alien is thrashed by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Moonraker. Apocalypse Now is thrashed by The Muppet Movie.
beloch 12y ago
------ "The U.S. is not waging the Cold War in outer space. We have no moon colonies, and our supercomputers are not nearly as super as the murderous HAL. " 2001 was a prescient film, but the details have turned out somewhat differently than Kubrick and Clarke imagined. HAL was portrayed as truly sentient. The same cannot be said of any AI existing today. However, HAL was also immensely limited. He was like a servant or child in his abilities. He was not the the oracle and gateway to the sum of all human knowledge, as the computers of today have become. If you asked HAL how to build a boat or how to score a date with a beautiful woman, he'd have been baffled. Google, on the other hand... HAL also had a large central core that could be attacked. If we built a true AI today, it's possible that the brains of such a beast could be the size of a pocket watch and the software copied and transferred freely. If such a viral consciousness had infested the Discovery, Dave would truly have had nothing to strike back against. HAL would not have been a single consciousness, but a legion! Meanwhile, the U.S. is very much still engaged in a struggle for control of space. Other challengers have appeared, but Russia hasn't gone anywhere, and that particular war seems to be getting colder by the minute. However, the commercialization of space has been late in coming. Pan Am's collapse must have delayed things somewhat. However, it's finally starting to happen. ------ "Mother, on the other hand, spends the whole movie like a fated southern belle hooked on laudanum, locked in her room. She can’t even advise on how to defeat the monster. The computer cannot help. No costly investment in heavy capital will keep nature at bay. " Alien does indeed present a very different view of technology. Where, in 2001, technology was the tool of humanity, uplifting it to greater and greater heights, in Alien technology cannot overcome the base nature of humans. The people in space aren't heroes or explorers, but working-class stiffs trying to make a living. Technology serves its owners first and foremost. The corporation's interests reign supreme, even over the space workers very lives. This vision too is both wrong yet prescient. The computers of today are of tremendous help, but are also tools of control. You can ask google how to do practically anything, but you have to accept the fact that your request will be logged by the NSA (and probably other organizations) for future reference should you ever be naughty. Computers do not directly control us, but other humans use computers to tell us how to do things. For example, look up why UPS drivers are trained to avoid turning left. Computers and automation have eliminated many jobs, but always seem to create even more in the process. ------- The last few years have greatly increased my optimism for the future. It seems that we're finally pulling out of the cyberpunk dystopian funk of the last decade or so and trying to do "big" things once again. Electric cars are finally a practical reality. Self driving cars are close at hand. Private space flight is taking off. People are talking about capturing and bringing asteroids down to Earth for their resources. Space elevators that will make getting bulk quantities of material off of Earth seem almost possible. Quantum cryptology is currently in limited use and expanding, and may one day offer us all security from the NSA's of the world, even should they gain the tremendous power of quantum computers, which themselves will offer humanity fantastic new abilities. 3D printing is rapidly improving and making new things possible, and our advances in nanotechnology will only amplify and ramify their capabilities. It's an exciting time to be alive, even in spite of all the nicks and cuts we receive from the other side of every new sword we invent. Humanity needs to keep its ideals and be on guard against the darker half of it's nature, but there are many great reasons to think we might just surprise ourselves and turn out okay after all.
mikerichards 12y ago
Heh, I loved the term "truckers in space", which pretty accurately described some of the characters in Alien - Brett, Parker, Dallas. Speaking of Ridley Scott, my favorite movie of all time is Blade Runner. I was watching it the other day, and noticed that the incept dates of some of replicants were 2016. Oh boy, Ridley got that one wrong. But they still used payphones too, like in Alien. Remember Deckard calling Rachel from the video pay phone at the bar? So it seems like filmmakers predictions either grossly mispredict the amount of technological progress at the big scale. Everybody thought there would be moon colonies by now, or advanced cyborgs. Or they don't see the technological innovation at the small scale. They can't see things like cell phones, the internet, etc.. I have seen several movies with the 70s or so, with flat screens hanging on the wall. So I guess they ocassionally get things right
- rbanffy 12y ago
  > So it seems like filmmakers predictions either grossly mispredict the amount of technological progress at the big scale It is said sci-fi is less about predicting the future than to preventing it. I'd go more with the idea it's about showing what can be and helping us finding our way there (or out of there).
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    While some people predicted the Internet, or something like it, no one predicted Internet culture. And I don't think anyone seriously imagined that the Internet would be accessible through a terminal you could carry in your pocket that also worked as a clock, camera, calendar, video and audio phone, calculator, weather forecaster, fitness monitor, games machine, and smart personal assistant. It's debatable if a moon base would have been better. I suppose a moon base would have created cultural changes of its own, but I'm not convinced they would have been as disruptive as the Internet. (And it's just getting started...)
    - lerchmo 12y ago
      I think some of the predictions were probably driven by the expectation of large scale government funded projects, rather than incremental consumer driven advancement.
ArkyBeagle 12y ago
In the sequel, "2010", it's revealed that HAL has essentially had a "nervous breakdown" because he'd been lied to. This is apparently true for both the novel and the film.

102 points by benbreen 12y ago

If imdb's movie /year/1979/ list is to be believed, there was a lot of self loathing going on in films in the late 70s (i.e. Vietnam).

tjradcliffe 12y ago
You have no idea. One of my favourite 70's quotes is from the quite brilliant book "The Medieval Machine" by the Anglo-French historian Jean Gimpel, published in 1976 (which really is a very good history of Medieval technology): "The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion. There will be no further industrial revolution in the cycles of our Western civilization." These words were written at the same time as Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Allen were all hard at work. This smug bastard was just one voice amongst many telling the world that we were in the grip of a permanent, inexorable "malaise" that could at best be accepted passively, which there was no point in fighting, which had to be simply taken as given, unstoppable, forever. At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1]. Gleeful murderers of hope were desperately trying to crush any spark of innovation, creativity or freedom. And it was happening the world over. A relentless, ruthless, assault on the Enlightenment, the rule of law, and the industrial revolution. They failed. A lot of it was funded, ultimately, by the Soviets, who generated an enormous amount of propaganda that was intended to make people believe these things. One of the notable things that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the stunning pall of silence that fell over the Left in the West. It was almost as if the lifeblood of the whole enterprise had been cut off. Part of that was simple empiricism: it was hard for Leftists to hold up their pathologically insane ideas as "better" when their poster-child had just endured a complete and spectacular collapse, including the freeing of a large number of vassal states, all because some shipyard workers in Poland had laid down tools a decade before. But part of it was also that funding for a bunch of stuff that Comintern paid for (mostly by indirect means, in the same way the US government funds stuff through NGOs today) vanished. Today, hyper-capitalist brands like Naomi Klein are attempting to resurrect some of the old zombie Soviet ideas, but it's a pretty pathetic effort, full of contradictions and gibberish. They won't have a lot of influence, at the end of the day, and it is my firm belief that we are entering into a century of progress that will make the 19th century look staid and the 20th century look stupid. Having lived through the '70's, this is a good thing to see. [1] We have done both, and more: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/astronomers-image-lowest-mass-exoplanet-around-a-sun-like-star/ http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/astronomers-image-lowest...
- olavk 12y ago
  Are you suggesting the Soviet Union founded covert propaganda to convince the west that exoplanets couldn't exist? Do you have any more information about this? Because on the face of it it sound like the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard.
  - Joeboy 12y ago
    To be fair I read it as meaning we would be incapable of discovering them, rather than that they didn't exist. But yes, taken as a whole the post is rather eccentric.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I wasn't around at the time, but from the science fiction of the era, it looks like nobody really thought about how to detect exoplanets from Earth, because everyone assumed the curve of technological progress in propulsion would keep going and you'd just send scout ships to other stars to survey them up close.
      - Retra 12y ago
        To be fair, nuclear technology was still new and fresh.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  >At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1] Wow, I never knew they were so pessimistic about that. I thought the science for visualizing extrasolar planets had always been there, they just needed the equipment built. Now I wonder what ideas today's pessimists have that will be disproven. Maybe Interstellar travel is really possible?
  - pharke 12y ago
    You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, some people are just out for their own crazy agendas. You're correct that the science has been there for quite some time and astronomers have been lobbying and popularizing the idea of building the necessary detection equipment for quite a while. There was even quite a good book written on the topic in 1966, a collaboration between a young American astronomer and an accomplished Soviet astronomer/astrophysicist [1]. It's a very interesting read, especially today now that we have accomplished some of the things they theorized about on the planets in our solar system and through observations of our stellar neighbourhood. I highly recommend it. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-life-universe-I-Shklovskii/dp/B0006BM4BG http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-life-universe-I-Shklovskii...
Joeboy 12y ago
That would be the "most popular" films of 1979, as rated in recent years. Here's imdb's biggest films of 1979 by US box office: http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=1979,1979 http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_u... Alien is thrashed by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Moonraker. Apocalypse Now is thrashed by The Muppet Movie.

beloch 12y ago

------ "The U.S. is not waging the Cold War in outer space. We have no moon colonies, and our supercomputers are not nearly as super as the murderous HAL. " 2001 was a prescient film, but the details have turned out somewhat differently than Kubrick and Clarke imagined. HAL was portrayed as truly sentient. The same cannot be said of any AI existing today. However, HAL was also immensely limited. He was like a servant or child in his abilities. He was not the the oracle and gateway to the sum of all human knowledge, as the computers of today have become. If you asked HAL how to build a boat or how to score a date with a beautiful woman, he'd have been baffled. Google, on the other hand... HAL also had a large central core that could be attacked. If we built a true AI today, it's possible that the brains of such a beast could be the size of a pocket watch and the software copied and transferred freely. If such a viral consciousness had infested the Discovery, Dave would truly have had nothing to strike back against. HAL would not have been a single consciousness, but a legion! Meanwhile, the U.S. is very much still engaged in a struggle for control of space. Other challengers have appeared, but Russia hasn't gone anywhere, and that particular war seems to be getting colder by the minute. However, the commercialization of space has been late in coming. Pan Am's collapse must have delayed things somewhat. However, it's finally starting to happen. ------ "Mother, on the other hand, spends the whole movie like a fated southern belle hooked on laudanum, locked in her room. She can’t even advise on how to defeat the monster. The computer cannot help. No costly investment in heavy capital will keep nature at bay. " Alien does indeed present a very different view of technology. Where, in 2001, technology was the tool of humanity, uplifting it to greater and greater heights, in Alien technology cannot overcome the base nature of humans. The people in space aren't heroes or explorers, but working-class stiffs trying to make a living. Technology serves its owners first and foremost. The corporation's interests reign supreme, even over the space workers very lives. This vision too is both wrong yet prescient. The computers of today are of tremendous help, but are also tools of control. You can ask google how to do practically anything, but you have to accept the fact that your request will be logged by the NSA (and probably other organizations) for future reference should you ever be naughty. Computers do not directly control us, but other humans use computers to tell us how to do things. For example, look up why UPS drivers are trained to avoid turning left. Computers and automation have eliminated many jobs, but always seem to create even more in the process. ------- The last few years have greatly increased my optimism for the future. It seems that we're finally pulling out of the cyberpunk dystopian funk of the last decade or so and trying to do "big" things once again. Electric cars are finally a practical reality. Self driving cars are close at hand. Private space flight is taking off. People are talking about capturing and bringing asteroids down to Earth for their resources. Space elevators that will make getting bulk quantities of material off of Earth seem almost possible. Quantum cryptology is currently in limited use and expanding, and may one day offer us all security from the NSA's of the world, even should they gain the tremendous power of quantum computers, which themselves will offer humanity fantastic new abilities. 3D printing is rapidly improving and making new things possible, and our advances in nanotechnology will only amplify and ramify their capabilities. It's an exciting time to be alive, even in spite of all the nicks and cuts we receive from the other side of every new sword we invent. Humanity needs to keep its ideals and be on guard against the darker half of it's nature, but there are many great reasons to think we might just surprise ourselves and turn out okay after all.

mikerichards 12y ago

Heh, I loved the term "truckers in space", which pretty accurately described some of the characters in Alien - Brett, Parker, Dallas. Speaking of Ridley Scott, my favorite movie of all time is Blade Runner. I was watching it the other day, and noticed that the incept dates of some of replicants were 2016. Oh boy, Ridley got that one wrong. But they still used payphones too, like in Alien. Remember Deckard calling Rachel from the video pay phone at the bar? So it seems like filmmakers predictions either grossly mispredict the amount of technological progress at the big scale. Everybody thought there would be moon colonies by now, or advanced cyborgs. Or they don't see the technological innovation at the small scale. They can't see things like cell phones, the internet, etc.. I have seen several movies with the 70s or so, with flat screens hanging on the wall. So I guess they ocassionally get things right

rbanffy 12y ago
> So it seems like filmmakers predictions either grossly mispredict the amount of technological progress at the big scale It is said sci-fi is less about predicting the future than to preventing it. I'd go more with the idea it's about showing what can be and helping us finding our way there (or out of there).
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  While some people predicted the Internet, or something like it, no one predicted Internet culture. And I don't think anyone seriously imagined that the Internet would be accessible through a terminal you could carry in your pocket that also worked as a clock, camera, calendar, video and audio phone, calculator, weather forecaster, fitness monitor, games machine, and smart personal assistant. It's debatable if a moon base would have been better. I suppose a moon base would have created cultural changes of its own, but I'm not convinced they would have been as disruptive as the Internet. (And it's just getting started...)
  - lerchmo 12y ago
    I think some of the predictions were probably driven by the expectation of large scale government funded projects, rather than incremental consumer driven advancement.

ArkyBeagle 12y ago

In the sequel, "2010", it's revealed that HAL has essentially had a "nervous breakdown" because he'd been lied to. This is apparently true for both the novel and the film.