Month: December 2018

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The Hidden Beauty of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s Best Ending

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-hidden-beauty-of-black-mirror-bandersnatchs-best-e-1831369911


Stefan’s mother presents him with a heartbreaking choice.
Image: All images via Netflix

Netflix’s latest television experiment, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, has several possible endings to the story. Some quick, others more detailed. But one of them stands out, giving us a poetic story that—unlike all the others in the film—was only made possible through its interactivity. It may not be the only way the story ends, but it is the only way it ends correctly.

I’ve spent hours watching Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch over the past few days, to the point where I’m starting to wonder if I’ve lost the ability to control my own life (I haven’t, at least for the time being). While some viewers have not been big fans of Bandersnatch, including our colleagues at Kotaku, I personally enjoyed it—especially as a fan of visual novels. It was fascinating forking through the different paths and seeing where they ended up.

Directed by Black Mirror alum David Slade and starring Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk), Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an interactive one-off special about a young man named Stefan (Whitehead) who’s turning his favorite Choose Your Own Adventure-style fantasy novel into a video game. Much like Alice in Alice in Wonderland (where the name Bandersnatch originated), Stefan falls deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, to the point where he starts to question his ability to control his own destiny. Which, as we well know, he can’t.

I will admit that sometimes I got bogged down in the decision-making, trying to find all the possible storylines, to the point where the adventure felt like it was more important than the story itself. With one notable exception. I’m going to call it the “White Rabbit” thread.

Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) begins his journey.

The story is pretty standard for the first several minutes. Stefan talks with his father (Craig Parkinson) about Bandersnatch, chooses some cereal, rides a bus. After Stefan successfully pitches his video game (assuming you didn’t go the “accept CEO’s offer” path, which ends the story), Stefan finds himself at his therapist’s office. Dr. Haynes (Alice Lowe) wants to talk about Stefan’s mother (Fleur Keith), as the anniversary of her death is coming up. Now, Stefan can refuse to talk about his mother, but it’s important to note that this is the only time in the episode that refusing to do something is followed up with another request from one of the actors. Because she really wants Stefan to talk about it, as do we really.

If Stefan finally agrees to share more about his mother, we get to see a flashback to the day she died. Stefan’s father took his stuffed rabbit doll away, and he refused to leave the house without it. This delay caused his mother to take the 8:45 train rather than the 8:30—the later train derailed and killed most of the passengers onboard. It’s a tragic backstory, but I want to point out one specific detail with it: It’s the only time in the entire episode that we’re given a dialogue tree with only one option. This is significant because we’re being told that this was a decision, but one we cannot change. It’s the only choice that is not only outside of Stefan’s control, but ours as well.

This is the only time we as viewers/players are given a choice that’s not actually a choice.

Stefan is furious with his father for taking his rabbit away, but he’s even more furious with himself—not only for delaying his mother but for refusing to be with her on what happened to be the last day of her life. His therapist insists that he couldn’t have known, as he was only a child, and then delivers what might be the thesis of the White Rabbit storyline:

The past is immutable. No matter how painful it is, we can’t change things. We can’t choose differently with hindsight. We all have to learn to accept that.

As many twists and turns as Bandersnatch has, for the most part, you can get from the beginning to most of the endings in a straight line. For example, the other “big” ending—where Stefan kills his father and chops up his body, giving him enough time to make his game a massive success—is relatively linear, so long as you have Stefan’s gaming colleague Colin (Will Poulter) kill himself after the drug trip. However, White Rabbit is an exception, as it’s impossible to finish without retracing your steps. You cannot complete it without changing the past.

The moment when we can go back and change the past.

If Stefan picks up his family photograph during the “going to bed” sequence, he ends up walking through the Looking Glass (like Alice), becoming a little boy and having a vision of his father hiding the stuffed rabbit in his locked room. Stefan can’t do anything with this information after learning it, so he simply continues on with his normal adult life. However, after Stefan’s story ends, in whatever way it does during that particular journey, the option will come up to “Get Rabbit From Dad” (as shown above). This takes Stefan back to the moment when he chose the photograph or book, this time going for the “Look Door, Get Key” book. That night, he sneaks into his father’s locked office, enters “TOY” into the safe (an option that won’t be there otherwise), and we get the White Rabbit ending.

Stefan becomes a little boy again, and his father—having seen the lengths Stefan went to to find his favorite toy—tells him to put the rabbit “back where it belongs,” a moment of understanding and healing between the fraught pair. The next day, his mother is again trying to get him ready to go to his grandparents’ house, only this time he’s found the rabbit under his bed. Everything seems to be going okay. Only then, we get the most heartbreaking decision of all: His mother says they’ve still been delayed. They’ll have to take the 8:45 train, and wants to know if he’s going with her.

Young Stefan chooses to go with his mother, dying in the present.

Stefan (and the audience) are now being given the choice he never had, with the burden of knowing it’s going to lead to his death. It’s a hard decision to make, for both Stefan and us. In that moment, it’s not about what is best for the story, it’s about what’s best for this young boy. If we say no, that part of his life is over. He’ll be an adult again, working on his video game, still traumatized by the burden of his choice. But if we say yes, he dies in his therapist’s office, on that first day when he told us about his mother. But in his mind, he’s boarded the train, as Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” plays in the background, and he accepts his death. In love. His mother by his side.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch isn’t just a story about a guy having a mental breakdown from a weird fantasy novel. It’s about a man in mourning. Guilty over a mistake in his past, and unsure how, or if, he can ever move on from it. A man who wishes he could go back and change the past, be with his mother again, even if it costs him everything. Much like “San Junipero,” it’s an ending that may not be totally happy, but it is hopeful.

The episode largely gives the impression that choice does not exist, that Stefan’s life is outside of his control, and the sooner he accepts that the more blissful he’ll be. But there is one moment when choice actually matters. White Rabbit is the only ending in the entire film where free will is celebrated instead of derided. We may still be pulling the strings in Stefan’s life, but White Rabbit forces us to think about what’s best for him, not for ourselves. It’s a story of empathy, not voyeurism.

Having “No Future” isn’t always a bad thing.

This ending also feels “true” because of how well it comes full circle. Early on in the episode, we see Stefan taking a bus to the first part of his journey, the game studio where he’s pitching Bandersnatch. As the bus rolls on, with Stefan enjoying whatever music we picked for him, we see a nearby billboard that has graffiti showing the dialogue tree symbol (from the “White Bear” episode), along with the words “No Future.” This might seem like general foreboding, as is wont with Black Mirror, but it’s especially important for White Rabbit. It wasn’t just a billboard, it was a sign. Stefan didn’t have a future, because he was going to choose to die in the past.

And it’s no coincidence that a post-credits scene for White Rabbit takes us back to that very first bus ride. Stefan takes out a tape, only this time it’s playing a series of computer beeps and tones. Its name: Bandersnatch.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

December 31, 2018 at 01:00PM

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Soon they will be shipping oil from the Alberta oil sands in little plastic tubs

https://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/soon-they-will-be-shipping-oil-alberta-oil-sands-little-plastic-tubs.html


Canadian National Railways figures out a crazy new way to mix oil and plastic – to what end?

The politics of oil are tough in Canada. So what if Justin Trudeau bought a pipeline for $4.5 billion to move Alberta oil, angering everyone outside the province; Albertans still put on their yellow vests and accuse him of treason. You can’t make anybody happy.

Albertans are mad because oil companies are making abou

t 200,000 barrels a day more than they can ship

by pipeline, thanks to delays in construction caused by court challenges brought by environmentalists and indigenous peoples. Oil companies can barely give the stuff away; Canadian oil was recently selling at a US$ 50 discount.

Alberta oil was always really expensive to make; it took almost as much energy to boil it out of the rocks as they got out of it. It is also expensive to transport; it is as thick as molasses and won’t flow in the pipelines so they have thin it with a diluent, usually natural gas condensate or naphtha. Since there is insufficient pipeline capacity, a lot of it is going by tank car, but there are not enough of them.

Canapux from CN on Vimeo.

But there are a lot of hopper cars kicking around, so Canadian National Railways put its scientists to work and have figured out a new technology to mix bitumen from the oil sands with plastic made from recycled grocery bags and encase it in more plastic, so that instead of shipping oil it’s shipping what look like little hockey pucks of very viscous oil. Cleverly, they call them Canapux. The patent application describes them in greater detail as:

A solid pellet comprising a core surrounded by a shell, the core comprising a mixture of crude oil refinery feedstock and a hydrocarbonaceous polymer, the polymer having a melting point temperature of at least 50° C….the mixture having a first and a second non-miscible phases, the first phase being a crude oil refinery feedstock rich phase and the second phase being a polymer rich phase, the polymer having a solubility in the crude oil such that the crude oil refinery feedstock rich phase maintains compatibility with the oil refinery to allow separation of the crude oil refinery feedstock rich phase into said constituents.

There are some real advantages over other ways of shipping oil. The pucks float, and are sealed in their protective plastic wrap, so they are not dangerous in an oil spill. They are a bulk commodity that can go in open rail cars and transported like coal or grain.

Eric Atkins writes in The Globe and Mail that it is a great way to ship oil to Asia, where there is no discount for Canadian oil:

CN says that based on current oil prices, the move to Asia is a money maker. That’s because the discount on Canadian oil at U.S. markets does not apply there. CN pointed to a study released earlier in 2018 that said it would cost about US$23 to ship a barrel of bitumen as CanaPux to Asia from Alberta, including packaging, rail and vessel charges. This is just less than the US$24 it costs to transport a barrel of diluted bitumen by train to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

But what’s the carbon footprint of making Canapux?

CN Innovations does not tell us what the carbon footprint of this process is. Alberta bitumen is already carbon intensive, and here they are mixing it with plastic bits and wrapping it up in more plastic, all of which is already a hydrocarbon product. Then they are shipping all that plastic along with the bitumen, only to shred and heat the pucks at the other end to separate out the plastic, which they say will be recycled, although they do not say how they will clean all the oil off it. More likely it will just be burned.

In other words, it will probably all be far more carbon intensive than the usual Alberta oil sands product.

It is all totally crazy. Justin Trudeau would personally roll barrels of oil down the TransCanada Highway if it would make Albertans happy but they would rather string him up or talk Albexit. Meanwhile, every little puck that gets shipped will contribute to the climate catastrophe that is coming up very quickly, and which Albertans would rather totally ignore.

Now the leader of the opposition is thinking that dumping the Paris accord is good politics. Dealing with climate change has a good chance of tearing the country apart; this seems to be a worldwide trend.

Canadian National Railways figures out a crazy new way to mix oil and plastic – to what end?

via TreeHugger http://bit.ly/2v7tbJp

December 28, 2018 at 09:23AM

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New Delhi’s Air Quality Is So Bad the Government Is Enlisting Firefighters to Help Fight It

https://earther.gizmodo.com/new-delhis-air-quality-is-so-bad-the-government-is-enli-1831341330


Look at that smog the day after Christmas.
Photo: AP

Firefighters in New Delhi, India, have got a new job: battling air pollution.

The country’s capital region is constantly suffering from air quality issues, but things have gotten particularly bad again recently. Some parts of the region were reading air quality indexes over 500, which is as high as the scale is supposed to go. Scores of over 300 indicate pollution levels that are hazardous levels for anyone, healthy or not.

In response, federal authorities have directed firefighters to shoot a little water from tall high-rises to help “settle dust and stop garage fires,” reports the Associated Press. Construction activity in the area also came to a forced halt to help prevent the air quality from worsening. Indian officials ordered workers to leave sites covered to keep dust from moving, as well. And diesel vehicles older than 10 years of age need to stay off the roads.

The government is taking severe action because this sort of pollution is no joke. All this particulate matter can enter and damage the lungs when inhaled, eventually making its way to a person’s heart. India’s air pollution problem is estimated to shorten lives by an average of 3.4 years, per a 2016 study.

Nobody can see through all that air pollution.
Photo: AP

The pollution comes from a variety of sources. There’s temporary construction, sure, but vehicles contribute much more. So do industry and crop burning from rural farmers. The geography and dry winter climate conspire to cause pollution to become trapped, covering the city in a thick blanket of smog.

“Delhi’s air quality, when we say improvement, what we notice is that it falls from severe to very poor days,” said Vivek Chattopadhyaya, a senior program manager with New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, to the AP. “None of the days are good, satisfactory or even moderately polluted.”

The government finalized a National Clean Air Programme earlier this year to help solve this health crisis. The strategy sets targets to reduce air pollution by 20 to 30 percent by 2024 compared with 2017 levels. It calls for more air quality monitors and a close partnership between the federal government and states to develop plans to improve local air quality.

Let’s hope the government figures this out and causes portable oxygen tanks to become a fashion statement of the past.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

December 27, 2018 at 02:24PM

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Rotating Detonation Engines Could Propel Hypersonic Flight

https://www.wired.com/story/rotating-detonation-engine


Yesterday, Vladimir Putin presented his country with a belated Christmas present: the Avangard hypersonic missile. According to Russian media, it’s capable of reaching Mach 20. And if its ability to conduct evasive maneuvers at high velocity is as good as the Russian president boasted back in March, it would render missile defense systems effectively useless.

Cold War recidivists aren’t the only ones hoping hypersonic technology will deliver a futuristic throwback. Last month marked the 15-year anniversary of the Concorde’s final flight, but right now, a handful of aerospace outfits are working to leapfrog supersonic travel and launch straight into the Mach 5 world of hypersonic propulsion.

‘Hypersonic’ isn’t just buzzy reboot jargon for ‘supersonic.’ It’s a word scientists and engineers use to generally describe air travel between Mach 5 and Mach 10 (that’s 3,836 and 7,673 mph for you sticklers). Aircraft travelling faster than the speed of sound need all sorts of heat shielding and aerodynamic redesigns. But really, all that stuff is secondary to propulsion—without speed, there is no need. Standard jet engines won’t cut it. The rotating detonation engine, though, just might.

Turbofan engines are great for most commercial travel, because they can get a plane going up to around 600 mph while burning fuel really efficiently. North of that, they burn through fuel like a Powerball winner with 50 second cousins. Also, they don’t have the muscle to take an aircraft too far past Mach 1. The Concorde got around that latter problem by using turbofans to get up to sub-Mach speed, then kicking in a set of turbojet afterburners for the rest of the way through the sound barrier, settling into cruising speed at just above Mach 2. But the Concorde was an expensive aircraft to fly, and modern airlines are all about value.

The rotating detonation engine, though, might someday offer both high velocity and decent fuel economy. The engine’s awesome name pretty much describes how the thing works. The engine’s detonation chamber is essentially a thin, hollow cylinder (actually, it’s the thin, hollow space between two concentric cylinders, if you want to get specific). The engine sets off a detonation using the usual means—fuel, oxygen, pressure, heat—which sends a shockwave chasing itself through the cylindrical loop. Imagine a movie scene where the heroes are running away from an explosion then get knocked forward by the shockwave. A rotating detonation engine traps that shockwave in an endless loop, using it to repeatedly jumpstart new detonations.

If you’re wondering how a shockwave detonates something, consider how explosions happen: Pressure. Heat is important, but it’s really just a side-effect of molecules being forced close to one another. Force enough of the right kind of molecules close together and they react. Here, the shockwave slams into oxygen molecules and fuel molecules with so much force that they compress, excite, and detonate. Each subsequent detonation keeps the shockwave going, and the engine keeps those detonations coming by feeding the chamber carefully timed injections of fuel and oxygen.

“What this allows the engine to do is burn fuel at a much higher rate compared to conventional combustion engines,” says Narendra Joshi, the chief engineer of propulsion technologies at GE Research. This higher burn rate creates more thrust, which is how these engines will (theoretically, one day) push aircraft into hypersonic speeds.

But wait, isn’t burning fuel at a higher rate contradictory to the whole efficiency thing? In this case, higher rate doesn’t necessarily mean more. See, the combustion chamber—that thin space between the two metal cylinders—is about 10 times smaller than the chamber in conventional turbine engines. That means it is burning fuel at a much higher pressure than the competition. Internal combustion (or detonation) type engines produce work by compacting fuel. The higher the pressure, the more work the engine gets out of the molecules once they explode. “We estimate a 5 to 10 percent improvement in gas mileage,” says Stephen Heister, a propulsion engineer at Purdue University whose research includes rotating detonation engines. (That’s compared to conventional turbines, jet engines, even rockets.) Also, because this engine isn’t purging a bunch of combustion byproducts that happen in each cycle, it’s far more efficient with the fuel it does burn.

One important caveat: These engines are still only in prototype stage. General Electric isn’t the only one trying to make this concept work for real, though. Aerojet Rocketdyne has been prototyping rotating detonation engine models since at least 2010. The Department of Energy and NASA both also fund research into these maybe-one-day marvels, as does the Department of Defense (more on that in a bit). Finally, research scientists at engineering schools around the country are working on everything from engine designs to the fundamental fluid mechanics that happen inside. Oh, and that’s all just in the US. You better believe that Russia, China, and every other defense-forward country in the world is exploring rotating detonation engines as part of their hypersonic missile programs.

GE Energy claims an aircraft propelled by its rotating detonation engine could travel from New York to LA in an hour. Yes, that’s barely enough time to sleep through all three complimentary episodes of “The Big Bang Theory” available on your seatback display, but there are no physics standing in the way of that claim. It’s all just a question of when tech makes it into existence. However, researchers are still trying to lock down some of the fundamental physical processes at work inside these engines. For instance, Heister says they still don’t know why a detonation wave sometimes goes clockwise around the combustion chamber, and other times it goes counterclockwise. Such knowledge gaps make it hard to design an engine that works predictably.

Another problem is unspent fuel. If the engineers designing the engines can’t predict exactly how the detonation wave will behave, they can’t reliably calibrate the fuel injector. This might mean a little bit of oxygen and fuel misses the detonation wave each cycle. The engine is so hot, this stuff combusts. That might not sound like a big deal, but striking a match technically counts as a combustion. In order to keep that shockwave moving, this engine needs bona fide detonations. So, if the fuel injector isn’t calibrated perfectly, these wimpy combustions cannibalize the fuel, and the engine no longer has the oomph for hypersonic flight. And if your rotating detonation engine can’t reliably keep you traveling at hypersonic speeds, what’s the freakin’ point of anything?

Despite these challenges, Joshi is optimistic. He says GE Energy has already solved a lot of the fundamental challenges associated with hypersonic transport. For instance, the company is developing ceramics that can handle the high temperatures a rotating detonation engine creates as it contains an endless explosion. He says innovations like these will put commercial travelers back into supersonic jets by 2025, and hypersonic transport should follow not much later.

Joshi’s timeline is contingent on the goverment government stepping up its hypersonic research. Lucky for him, the US military’s top technologist announced that hypersonic transport should be the highest priority for the DOD’s top minds earlier this year. The Pentagon’s motivation is the usual scary geopolitical stuff—Russia has the Avangard now of course, which is powered by a scramjet engine, and China claims a robust hypersonic missile research program, too. As long as this arms race doesn’t lead to global annihilation, tech transfers from this missile work could help commercial air travel finally reach the other side of the sound barrier again. Hey, they don’t call it the Danger Zone for nothing.

More Great WIRED Stories

via Wired Top Stories http://bit.ly/2uc60ci

December 27, 2018 at 01:09PM

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The Streaming Wars Began in 2018—and They’ll Only Get Worse

https://www.wired.com/story/2018-streaming-wars


It was one of the most hectic Twitter episodes of the year: The One Where Everyone Freaked Out About Friends Going Away. Earlier this month, a few Netflix users noticed that the beloved series, still one of the most-watched sitcoms in the world, was scheduled to depart the streamer in January. Twitter went into shock-and-aww mode, mourning the loss of one of Netflix’s late-night binge staples. Preemptively, as it turned out: Within hours, the company announced a $100 million deal with the show’s owners, WarnerMedia, to keep the show for another year. The Central Perk gang would still be there for you—at least for now.

The panic over Friends, and the nine-figure renewal that ended it, were indicators of just how costly (and caustic) the streaming wars will become in the year ahead. With several high-profile new services being launched next year, including Disney+ and unnamed entries from both Apple and AT&T, viewers will find themselves subjected to the programming and pricing whims of various studios, tech companies, and mega-conglomerates—all of them locked in a battle for your attention.

The hope for many of these companies, of course, is that they can prove to be a viable competitor to Netflix, which is expected to hit nearly 150 million worldwide subscribers by year’s end, and which continues to mint must-see original shows (The Haunting of Hill House), specials (Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette), and movies (the critically beloved, shakily handled Roma). But Netflix is just one of a trio of streaming titans, all of which had notable years, at least creatively: Hulu invested in original movies and found itself an Oscar contender, while Homecoming proved Amazon could make a small-screen hit with a big-time movie star.

But as those companies continue to expand—adding new shows seemingly every ten minutes, often in season-long lumps—the question becomes: How much more of this stuff do viewers actually need? Outside of Netflix and its ilk, the streaming universe is already crowded with smaller but beloved services, many of which cater to specific fandoms: Acorn TV (British programming); Crunchyroll (anime); Shudder (horror movies). In 2018, they were joined by new efforts from long-running comedy outlet CollegeHumor and way-longer-running superhero-depot DC Comics, which launched DC Universe, home of original series like Titans, as well as Batflick-and-chill films like Batman & Robin.

When you combine all of these services together, they make for millions of viewing hours—far too much for anyone to keep up with. And in 2018, the race to be part of the streamosphere began racking up casualties. WarnerMedia shuttered such “niche” providers as FilmStruck—a classic-movie service with reportedly around 100,000 subscribers—and DramaFever, which specialized in Korean programming. The indie-flick provider Fandor, which has been streaming since 2011, laid off its staff, reportedly in preparation for a sale. And YouTube Premium, despite having a buzz-making hit with this year’s Cobra Kai, shifted its business strategy and announced a move away from pricey scripted shows.

But the other, more hazily defined victims are the streaming shows and films that were simply avalanched this year. The upstart Facebook Watch had one of the better-reviewed drama shows of the year with Sorry for Your Loss—but the show struggled to seep into the cultural conversation. The same goes for YouTube’s sci-fi series Impulse, which received a season renewal—and a huge reception at this year’s Comic-Con—while mostly staying under the radar. And while it’s cool that Hulu is getting into the prestige-indie game, did you even know about Minding the Gap when it was released in August? Even if you only subscribe to a single streamer, there are so many on-demand offerings that it sometimes feels as though you’re not sitting back and relaxing with a show; instead, you’re hurriedly gobbling down show after show with gotta-keep-up exhaustion, like Lucy at the chocolate factory (By the way, all six seasons of I Love Lucy are now on Hulu! Watch them all by next Wednesday, and tweet your episode rankings!)

And it’s about to get all the more crowded. The forthcoming Disney+ will not only pull from the company’s massive library, but will roll out original series like the Star Wars drama The Mandalorian (it could also revive some of the high-profile Marvel series—including Luke Cage and Daredevil—that Netflix unceremoniously axed this year, as the streamer moves away from Disney-owned properties). Apple’s streaming arm, meanwhile, has lined up original programming from such marquee names as Reese Witherspoon, M. Night Shyamalan, and Snoopy. And AT&T’s service will likely draw upon many of its recently acquired pop-culture corporate assets, from Harry Potter films to Game of Thrones to numerous Warner Bros.-produced TV series (including Friends). That will make AT&T and Netflix two of the most formidable adversaries in the showdown over streaming—meaning that, at some point in the future, AT&T might decide it wants all of its properties for itself. Could there be a better time to invest in a few Friends DVDs, just in case?

More Great WIRED Stories

via Wired Top Stories http://bit.ly/2uc60ci

December 27, 2018 at 08:03AM

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Fake Alexa setup app is topping Apple’s App Store charts

https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/27/fake-alexa-app-topping-apple-app-store-charts/



ASSOCIATED PRESS

If you received a new Alexa device over the holidays and are working on setting it up, be warned that a fake Alexa setup app has been making its way up Apple’s App Store charts. The app is called “Setup for Amazon Alexa” and it’s from a company called One World Software that, as 9to5Mac points out, has two other shady apps in the App Store as well. As of writing, the app was ranked at #75 in the “Top Free” apps list and #6 in the list of top utilities apps.

According to 9to5Mac, when you launch the app, it asks for an IP address and your device’s serial number, and so far, neither Apple nor Amazon seem to have taken any action against it. If you or anyone you know is setting up a new Alexa device, be sure to steer clear of this scam.

FAke Alexa App

Images: App Store via 9to5Mac

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

December 27, 2018 at 09:24AM

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50 years ago, ‘Earthrise’ inspired the environmental movement

https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/24/earthrise-50-years-the-big-picture/


The most famous photo ever taken from space, Earthrise, is 50 years old today. It’s so iconic that we now take it for granted, but it may have had a greater impact on humanity than any photograph ever taken. Far from being planned, astronaut Bill Anders snapped it during the ground-breaking Apollo 8 mission on the spur of the moment. “Suddenly we saw this object called Earth,” Anders told the Guardian. “It was the only color in the universe.”

The 1968 Apollo 8 mission was crucial in the race to get a man on the moon. It was the first manned launch of the colossal Saturn V rocket, which had only flown twice before in unmanned test missions. It was also the first manned spacecraft to escape Earth’s gravity, reach another celestial body, and orbit it. It took nearly three days for the crew to reach the moon, and after a tense four minute engine burn — which could have flung them into space or crashed them onto the Moon’s surface –they successfully entered orbit.

The astronauts were equipped with a highly modified Hasselblad 500 EL with the reflex viewfinder replaced by a mechanical sighting ring. They were fully trained in its use and in photography principles and had access to both 70mm color and black and white film. Commander Frank Borman happened to be turning the command module when it came around on its fourth orbit on December 24th, and the Earth appeared as a blue jewel against the Moon’s drab monochrome surface.