Tangential: Alien(s) brought H.R. Giger to my attention, for which I shall ever be thankful. My parents visited Gruyères in Switzerland a couple of years ago, and whilst they didn't tour the museum[0] (his art isn't their thing) they did take a couple of photos of the sculptures outside for me.
His cafè just opposite the museum is also quite something, chairs and tables from spine-infested shapes.
And when in Gruyères then one should taste meringues double crème, or fondue in colder months.
And last but not least - its a region of Swiss pre-alps, mountains up to cca 2000m high, lovely hikes all around in picture-perfect nature and fields (government pays farmers to keep it looking nice) and even nearby very nice via ferrata on Moléson peak which I did 2 weeks ago, this time with some snow. It overlooks the castle and whole area from avove. That was interesting and intense experience while being alone on whole mountain.
My dad took me there as a kid a long whole ago when Giger was still alive, it was really something. The bar is amazing and the museum is... oppressively dark in a very unique way, like anything Giger ever did I suppose.
There's several lifesize necronomicons/xenomorphs, some earlier and later variants, Sil and the skull train, a lot of art that was never used in Alien and sequels but some made it later into Prometheus.
I always loved how the Nostoromo looked futuristic, yet cramped and dirty. The narrow halls and small rooms reflect the minimalism you would expect from a greedy corporation that considers its crew expendable, while the clutter and disrepair reflect what you would expect from the apathetic, disgruntled employees.
I kicked myself on the second read for missing why the title mentions trucking: it’s in the article, buried a little, but Ridley Scott called this the “truck driver” version of sci-fi.
“Bachelor pad” sci-fi is another great description, and this subreddit uses the equally fantastic term “cassette futurism”:
I think it’s why I love the Technology Connections YouTube channel too. A lot of the devices are like 1980s science fiction! (The article in this discussion mentions the set designers using rotary mechanical switches to automate blinking light patterns so, in a way, they were living in their own futurism.)
I love the casette futurism aesthetics, I just wish I had a practial application for physical buttons and the like, and / or that the higher interest products in those collections were still available outside of museums.
I'm sure there's some modern day reproductions (Filo's products [0] come to mind), but they won't have the same feel due to different switching mechanisms and materials being used.
In one of the myriad making of / behind the scenes docs I've watched over the years, they described how after the first set was built it was decided it should be more cramped, so they cut a horizontal swath out of big chunks of it and lowered the ceiling forcing the actors to crouch and duck as they moved around.
Fantastic decision, the claustrophobia really adds to the creep factor IMO.
I agree that the aesthetic made for an excellent film but I always thought that if they had sufficient power for FTL travel (e.g. massive fusion reactors or something) they could have powered a few extra light bulbs.
Although the ship in Dark Star wins the space-grunge contest hands-down.
I'd say it's not only the greedy corporations but maybe technical challenges. Compare with clutter on ISS or in earlier spacecrafts - also claustrophobic, narrow and packed with equipment.
With all the back and forth over the props, also with Ridley Scott scrapping loads of spaceship footage in order to reshoot everything after repainting the models, I get the impression that communication was quite bad in the production. I'm sure we've all encountered this in industry to some degree but having months of work tossed because it ain't look right must sting somewhat.
Sometimes you can’t predict what will work until you see what doesn’t. I’d say that if you’re really developing something new you should have that experience at least once of having something you’ve worked very hard on scrapped because it just isn’t right.
This is just part of working in art and design. 90% of all my design work never made it to production. It’s the epitome of “the journey is the reward”. You need to find your satisfaction in doing the work not getting it released or you won’t last long.
I was taken by how freely they spent months of man hours on things to go 'meh' and casually throw them away. Different world. Quite holistic with their production costs
Once production starts the costs for many roles are locked in and they work till it wraps, often due to union rules and contracts. Anyone working in parallel with the film crews just does whatever the director/producers prioritizes since they’re not getting sent home.
It's definitely a different world though because you’re not supposed to go under budget. If investors give you $100mil to make a movie, they want to maximize the return on that $100mil, so if you’re $5mil under budget, they want you to go and spend that money to make it even better (usually in post production now, but back then it was less of an option).
What has always bothered me about this "interstellar mining" plot device (which is not only used in Alien, but also in e.g. Avatar): is it really somehow plausible to find minerals in other solar systems that can't be found much cheaper in our own solar system? Of course, you need some kind of McGuffin to justify your heroes going to other planets, but "to seek out new life and new civilizations" is much better IMHO than "just looking for substance XYZ that for some reason can't be found in our own solar system or synthesized much cheaper than the cost of ferrying it over several light years"...
In Avatar they are literally mining a room-temperature superconductor. If you had to think of a way to make interstellar mining plausible that certainly would be a candidate.
I think you have to assume that faster-than-light travel is both possible and economical. At that point, far-flung supply chains across the galaxy really aren't any more surprising than the far-flung supply chains across the globe of our current reality. When distance becomes less economically relevant, other factors (like labor availability and costs, regulations, ease of access, security, etc) become more important.
FTL isn't even necessary. Consider the majority of tanker ships travel at bicycle speeds[1]. If you're transporting sufficiently profitable nonperishable goods in extremely high quantities, and have enough automated ships, you could have a functional interstellar supply line at a fraction of light speed.
Of course, this isn't how it's usually presented in science fiction, but that's because a sci-fi story about a non-sentient fully automated mining machine wouldn't be very interesting. Gotta get humans out there.
If interstellar travel is possible then it probably means intrastellar travel had been possible for a long time. Which means most readily accessible minerals had already been mined in the solar system. Not to mention humans probably have settled throughout the solar system. Which means solar ecological movements have gained momentum throughout the solar system. After all, who would want mining near their vacation properties on the moon or mars.
The fact that interstellar mining is happening is evidence that it's cheaper than mining locally. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.
What a bizarre take. It's not a mcguffin. Both Alien and Avatar were based on economic/historical realities of their times and throughout history. Why do you think companies mine or drill for oil all over the world. Why not just stay within their national borders? You exhaust resources locally and you look for resources elsewhere. It's just common sense.
And the fact that superman can fly is evidence that people are lighter than air. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.
The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.
Unlike the other poster, I don't think interstellar mining needs finding, I'm perfectly happy to lean back and enjoy the show. But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.
This has always been a sticky thing for me as well. These kinds of McGuffins lean towards physics are different in other parts of the galaxy/universe if there are minerals found only in certain parts of the galaxy. That would also imply there are other elements that we do not have on our periodic table. Unless someone has become able to stabilize some of the unstable elements to keep them around long enough to make some sort of material out of them, there's only so much unobtanium or dilithium nonsense I'm willing to accept.
> These kinds of McGuffins lean towards physics are different in other parts of the galaxy/universe if there are minerals found only in certain parts of the galaxy.
Or the local conditions are such that they produce different chemical compounds.
I'm not going to strike gold in my backyard, but people in Colorado might. There's not a lot of diamond production happening within reach underneath my location, but there's plenty in parts of Africa.
If we want to take it to space, there's not a lot of Helium-3 to be easily extracted on Earth, but apparently there's quite a bit more on the Moon.
But seeking out new civilizations etc is a noble cause, mining is dirty industrial space trucking types with an evil mega corp trying to make a buck out deadly aliens. Well that's my guess anyway!
Well if you put yourself in the perspective of a time period where something like _The Nostromo_ actually exists - our scientific understanding is literally lightyears ahead of where it is right now. Meaning, our periodic table as it stands today is 1/10th the size of the future table. So it's reasonable to conclude that there are large swaths of never before even imagined materials out in the universe.
Novel materials - even those that occur naturally - are almost certainly molecules of elements that we already are familiar with. There might be some interesting things to find in the island of stability, but I'd say that practical FTL is a more plausible discovery than would be finding gross quantities of elements with 1000 protons.
>How Deckerd can afford to live in one post economic meltdown is a bit unclear.
He's part of a precarious minority of semi-technical functionaries, armed bureaucrats afforded generous promotions and great inner leeway amidst the post-meltdown order of things, in return for their unquestioning allegiance to the same
For those interested Deep Purple apparently originated the term "Space Truckin'" with their identically-titled song [1]. I'd be astounded if there weren't a copy of "Made in Japan" lying around somebody's apartment when they made "Aliens".
Yeah, weird how that seems to never come up. I sometimes have trouble keeping the movies apart in memory (Silent and Dark).
But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake that somehow got stuck in the elevator scene (and lost all of the original's lightheartedness in the process), that absolutely is my favorite piece of scifi movie trivia.
> But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake
granted, but this wasn't a Point Break remake either. Dark Star is pretty much a student film turned into a blockbuster. Even El Mariachi->Desperado wasn't as different as Dark Star->Alien was.
The recommendation on how many times to brush daily varies by country. In most spanish-speaking countries, for example , it’s thrice. (My unscientific poll: I googled for “tres veces al dia” and found media from a handful of countries promoting this frequency).
Latin American here: my coworkers used to (note: I'm remote now, that's why the past tense) brush their teeth after lunch, so if they also brushed in the mornings and before going to bed, that'd make it three times.
I didn't though, I'm not taking my brush & toothpaste to a public restroom at the office.
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I'll get there one day.
[0]: https://www.hrgigermuseum.com/en/
And when in Gruyères then one should taste meringues double crème, or fondue in colder months.
And last but not least - its a region of Swiss pre-alps, mountains up to cca 2000m high, lovely hikes all around in picture-perfect nature and fields (government pays farmers to keep it looking nice) and even nearby very nice via ferrata on Moléson peak which I did 2 weeks ago, this time with some snow. It overlooks the castle and whole area from avove. That was interesting and intense experience while being alone on whole mountain.
There's several lifesize necronomicons/xenomorphs, some earlier and later variants, Sil and the skull train, a lot of art that was never used in Alien and sequels but some made it later into Prometheus.
Deleted Comment
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQwxhqR...
I kicked myself on the second read for missing why the title mentions trucking: it’s in the article, buried a little, but Ridley Scott called this the “truck driver” version of sci-fi.
“Bachelor pad” sci-fi is another great description, and this subreddit uses the equally fantastic term “cassette futurism”:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cassettefuturism/
I think it’s why I love the Technology Connections YouTube channel too. A lot of the devices are like 1980s science fiction! (The article in this discussion mentions the set designers using rotary mechanical switches to automate blinking light patterns so, in a way, they were living in their own futurism.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Truckers
I'm sure there's some modern day reproductions (Filo's products [0] come to mind), but they won't have the same feel due to different switching mechanisms and materials being used.
[0] https://www.fiio.com/echomini
Fantastic decision, the claustrophobia really adds to the creep factor IMO.
Although the ship in Dark Star wins the space-grunge contest hands-down.
The justification for the light situation in the movie is simple: corporate greed and human laziness (which fits nicely in the narrative as well).
It's definitely a different world though because you’re not supposed to go under budget. If investors give you $100mil to make a movie, they want to maximize the return on that $100mil, so if you’re $5mil under budget, they want you to go and spend that money to make it even better (usually in post production now, but back then it was less of an option).
Of course, this isn't how it's usually presented in science fiction, but that's because a sci-fi story about a non-sentient fully automated mining machine wouldn't be very interesting. Gotta get humans out there.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming
The fact that interstellar mining is happening is evidence that it's cheaper than mining locally. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.
What a bizarre take. It's not a mcguffin. Both Alien and Avatar were based on economic/historical realities of their times and throughout history. Why do you think companies mine or drill for oil all over the world. Why not just stay within their national borders? You exhaust resources locally and you look for resources elsewhere. It's just common sense.
The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.
Unlike the other poster, I don't think interstellar mining needs finding, I'm perfectly happy to lean back and enjoy the show. But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.
Or the local conditions are such that they produce different chemical compounds.
I'm not going to strike gold in my backyard, but people in Colorado might. There's not a lot of diamond production happening within reach underneath my location, but there's plenty in parts of Africa.
If we want to take it to space, there's not a lot of Helium-3 to be easily extracted on Earth, but apparently there's quite a bit more on the Moon.
Dead Comment
How Deckerd can afford to live in one post economic meltdown is a bit unclear. And those whisky glasses are worth a mint now too.
"Enhance" indeed.
He's part of a precarious minority of semi-technical functionaries, armed bureaucrats afforded generous promotions and great inner leeway amidst the post-meltdown order of things, in return for their unquestioning allegiance to the same
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wv1ij7KxWc
But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake that somehow got stuck in the elevator scene (and lost all of the original's lightheartedness in the process), that absolutely is my favorite piece of scifi movie trivia.
granted, but this wasn't a Point Break remake either. Dark Star is pretty much a student film turned into a blockbuster. Even El Mariachi->Desperado wasn't as different as Dark Star->Alien was.
I didn't though, I'm not taking my brush & toothpaste to a public restroom at the office.