The Wanderers

Crni Vuk

Crni Vuk

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What is this?

WANDERERS is a short science fiction film by Erik Wernquist (that´s me) - a digital artist and animator from Stockholm, Sweden.

The film is a vision of our humanity's future expansion into the Solar System. Although admittedly speculative, the visuals in the film are all based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. All the locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available. For those interested in learning more of the places featured in the film, I recommend turning to the gallery section.

The title WANDERERS refer partly to the original meaning of the word "planet". In ancient greek, the planets visible in the sky were collectively called "aster planetes" which means "wandering star". It also refers to ourselves; for hundreds of thousands of years - the wanderers of the Earth. In time I hope we take that leap off the ground and permanently become wanderers of the sky. Wanderers among the wanderers.
There is no apparent story - other than what you might imagine for yourself - and the idea is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds - and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there.

As some may notice I have borrowed ideas and concepts from science fiction authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke, just to name a few. And visually, I of course owe many tips of my hat to painter Chesley Bonestell - the legendary master of space art.

More directly, I have also borrowed the voice of astronomer and author Carl Sagan to narrate the film. The audio I used are excerpts from his own reading of his book 'Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space' (1994) - needless to say, a huge inspiration for this film.

I want to fully admit that I have no explicit permission to use the voice of Carl Sagan in this film. My hope is - as this is a completely non-profit production, made to enlighten and inspire - that whoever holds those rights today will approve of what I have done. However, if any owner of these rights finds this use inappropriate, please let me know and I will take measures immediately.

A really awesome little short movie, about space and space exploration. So? Will we ever see space, the way how it is shown in some of the more realistic depictions of Science Fiction? Will future generations walk on the surface of the Jupiter moon Europa, the same way how you plan a trip to Florida today? If we can believe the short movie, it would be a breathtaking sight. No doubts about that.

I am no scientist, but I guess there are still many obstacles that have to be solved somehow. For once, we are not made for zero-gravity, not for more than a few months, leave alone the radiation in space, so no big windows. The space is beautiful, but it is probably the most hostile environment you can imagine.

It's almost a joke, the technology to reach into places is there, or well, it will be, ion drives and even more sophisticated engines are possible, within the next 100 years, some very reputable physicists believe that it is possible to get close to light speed. Possible in, the technology could be there one day. But we still might never leave our solar system.

Relativistic effects of light speed, or close to light speed travel, gravity, radiation, and not to forget, solitude. The chance is very real that a trip to the next solar system would be a one-way-ticket.
But a man can still dream right? Will we ever manage to to solve all the issues?
 
Looks like an awesome little movie. I would say that us not being made for space is not a big limitation, since whenever we hit something we're not made for, we make ourselves able to do that.
 
sure, but there are limitations however, and sometimes its not about to overcome them put to push them away. We certainly can dive in the ocean, up to a certain limit, but we can never overcome it. You can't change your biology. Physicist Harald Lech loves to talk about those limitations, albeit it's in German. But from what I can get, it would be extremly difficult to get around some of those, particularly if you get close to lightspeed. like 290 000 km/s. Relativistic effects and radiation become a serious problem.

You swoop around a couple of months close to lightspeed and the chance is high that several thousands of years have passed on earth ... so that would be a one-way ticket. It would definitely make it difficult to plan your next holidays. The fun part is, he said the most realitsic concept would be star ships that can hold several generations, a few thousand people, then you can make them spin and simulate gravity, and you could get around the issue of solitude, but it would be still wasting a lot of space inside it.

Social studies have shown that humans have serious trouble to work and live in situations like we see them in space movies, for example. places where you are on board of a ship, not just for a few days, but months, years maybe. Traped like in a vault. Living in your basement is one thing, knowing that you have no chance to get outside is another. That you have no way to see sky, the sun, grass etc. is a whole different story. Hell people can get already serious depressions if they decide to spend a few months close to the north/south pole because of the changed climate and situation. But the last thing you want is to spend time in a space capsule with someone who is suicidal.

Maybe one day we can get around the issue with the so called faster-then-light travel, but it still would be no easy thing! It is likely that we are 100 or maybe even 1000 years away from such a technology that would allow us to bend space, the same way a black hole does. The energy required for it is ... yeah. Equal to the mass of Jupiter. And I do not really believe in the concept of worm-holes. The chance is high that they are just mathematical constructions.
 
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Chilling. Haunting. Makes your hairs stand up straight. In only the best way possible.

But I will agree that it is a distinct possibility that real space colonies will not truly be created until after we are deceased. I know that for all too many problems of space exploration, scientists are still kind of scratching their heads. The problem with radiation is the biggest one that always comes to mind for me. I also think that there's a certain lack of international jeau de vivre concerning space exploration, despite the potential fantastical prospect of "pure gold asteroids" and the like. Sure we're still moving forward, but at a snail's pace in comparison to the possibilities with funding on the kind of level that say, the american military has.
 
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hoh, yes, funding, resources. I think someone said that if they received enough resources we would have already permanent colonies on the moon. The technology is certainly there. But there simply is no real need for it, or well, not yet. Things might change in the future if we go for more deep space exploration, well with deep I mean our solar system, anything outside of that is still ... yeah almost science fiction. But a mission to Mars? Possible. Maybe in 50 years. To have the moon as base for operations would make a lot of things easier.

I mean, talking about exploring different planets, millions of light years away is one thing, but exploring our solar system? That might be a possible reality. At least for the next 100-150 years.

Ah well, you know, sometimes I am thinking about the technology we have now, and I cant help it but feel a bit sad. Of course, it depends if we will actually survive the next 500 years. But lets say we manage to solve most of the issues we have here, pollution, wars, poverty, at least the big ones, but the technology to really reach the stars is not impossible! Its not magic. The math and physics behind it are real afterall. Imagine how things would be in 100 years, in 500 or even in 1000 years. Thx to incredible advance in science, we can at least imagine those things, we can make predictions. That is awesome and sad at the same time, because there is no chance for us to reach those things, we can only dream about it.

A man can dream ...

 
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some very reputable physicists believe that it is possible to get close to light speed
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Which physicists would that be? And how close is close? Because weird shit happens when you "get close to light speed".

Akratus said:
The problem with radiation is the biggest one that always comes to mind for me.
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Yeah, that one and distance.

I'm not going to look up anything or write pseudo-scientific drivel like Crni did (and loves doing). I'm just going to keep it very simple:

No, humankind will not colonize the rest of the solar system and no, humankind will never travel beyond that. NEVER. Except in Hollywood studios.
 
Really, never? I think fantasies of it taking place in our lifetime are unrealistic sure, but. . never? Ever?

I just like having that "humanity, fuck yeah!" type idea, that, if enough time passes and enough giant shoulders arise to stand on, we can do things once thought impossible. And don't forget, it was once thought impossible to go to the moon, to fly across the ocean, to fly at all or to sail around the world. Obviously interplanetary expeditions are an insane magnitude harsher in their conditions when compared to mere long sailing trips, but advancements are made all the time. I mean, when it comes to science, can you really ever say 'never' definitively?
 
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Lies, The Wanderers is a 1979 drama film about gangs and the greaser subculture, based on the novel "The Wanderers" by Richard Price.
 
alec said:
some very reputable physicists believe that it is possible to get close to light speed
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Which physicists would that be? And how close is close? Because weird shit happens when you "get close to light speed".
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Harald Lesch, he is a reputable scientist and physicist and I like him a lot more then Michio kaku because in general, he is a lot more lets say critical. Probably bad wording from my side. What Lesch means that the technology to get close to light speed is not impossible, of course what means close to light speed? Already 200 000 kilometers per second would be quite remarkable, he was rather obscure here, he just said he believes that we will achieve high speed with things like ion drives and even fancier engines, maybe even getting close to light speed. And he does mention effects like time dilation and radiation. And what this means for interstellar travel. But I guess engines that can get close to light speed? Who knows, it might be a possibility.

alec said:
I'm not going to look up anything or write pseudo-scientific drivel like Crni did (and loves doing). I'm just going to keep it very simple:

No, humankind will not colonize the rest of the solar system and no, humankind will never travel beyond that. NEVER. Except in Hollywood studios.
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And you write overly cynical comments (and loves doing so), so feel free to correct me then. But seriously, let's assume we don't blow our self up in the next 1000 years, I know this is very very hard for you, but just try it, if only for a few minutes. But is interstellar travel impossible, just from the technical/scientific side?. It took almost 500 years from the first circumnavigation to the moon landing. Maybe it will take another 500 years before someone can set foot to a foreign planet in a different solar system, or maybe 1000. Albeit the chance is higher that we might blow our self up before that happens. But who knows? Really. Do you? I don't.

I mean the point is, while it is practically impossible, at least for a very long time, the concept, the science behind it isn't. And that is what gives me hope. It's not just mathematics. Bending time and space actually happens, and it is actually understood. If we will ever reach a level of technology allowing us interstellar travel? That is a whole different question. But we could be nothing more like caveman dreaming about the moon, you know, thinking that it is impossible because we simply can not imagine it yet, because we can not imagine the technology you need for it.

Or who could have seriously imagined in the 15th century to get around the world in just a few hours when it takes you almost half a year with a ship and god knows how many dangers. Or who thought about things like carbon nanotubes when they made the first plane and cars some 100 years ago.
 
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Akratus said:
Really, never? I think fantasies of it taking place in our lifetime are unrealistic sure, but. . never? Ever?
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The ability to colonize other planets assumes several factors.

One, that there is the resources to do so. After all, you cannot simply "determine" to colonize a neighboring desert if there's no wood to build your settlements out of. You can ship the resources to your colony, of course, but if the assumption of colonization is the EXPANSION of resources, then you're presenting the conundrum of stressing resources lines for the simple sake of expanding living space. Either way, it's a finite, arguably doomed solution.

Another is that the places we go to are livable. Again, as in my previous desert example, there are no other planets in our solar system that can sustain human life. The closest is Mars and it contains no known resources that could sustain us. It might have frozen water, the fantasy of terraforming might make it more livable, but that would be a huge expense just to turn a desert into an oasis, to call back to that example, again. But other planets are just plain impossible in many ways. Jupiter is just a ball of gas. There's nothing to colonize. Moons perhaps, but not the planet. Saturn's gravity would crush us. Living on Pluto would provide little more than making a colony out of the moon, and the distinction of existing the furthest away from the sun for the sake of that distinction. If we could assume, ala Gundam, that mankind were to colonize the SPACE itself with large man-made vessels for human living, then again it would be presenting a massive dilemma of a resource problem as mentioned above.

Another problem is the time it would take. As in the period of history referred to as "the colonial era", many human beings died on the lengthy journey to reach another continent. Entire expeditions would fall victim to the elements just trying to discover new trade routes because of how long and hour far their journeys would take them. These are matters of a few weeks to months to years, depending on the specific journey you're referring to, but they pale in comparison to the amount of time it would take to reach another planet in our solar system. I believe it would take several months to reach Mars, alone? It took that probe something like a decade to reach the next closest planet, and the time it would take to reach farther simply increases exponentially. Humans would need to create expansive vessels capable of traveling these distances whilst providing for daily living for generations, and doing so would be quite an undertaking.

Another issue is that of the physics involved in impacting certain forces onto a human being (let alone entire settlements). Whether or not we're able to speed up certain particles to the speed of light... a human being??? We're adapted to Earth's gravity, and we can condition ourselves to cope with heavier forces, as many astronauts do to prepare themselves for their journeys. But we're talking about forces that cause most humans to black out, SIMPLY to escape Earth's gravity. The forces caused by nearing the speed of light? I won't claim to know what that does, but I imagine it would liquify us!

These don't make it impossible, but excruciatingly unlikely. Never in our lifetime, not for a very long, long, inconceivably looooooooooong time. I'm positive that the whole Star Wars OR Star Trek fantasies of intergalactic space travel are just that: fantasies. But I also know that human beings are ingenuitive and when pressed with a problem endeavor a solution. That's our nature. I'm sure, at some point, there shall be some level of human expansion into a considerable distance into space. But what those measure will be, and when, and through how, shall be utterly beyond our current comprehension.
 
@Crni: You name one physicist, but you used the plural in your previous post. :razz:

I have various reasons to think humans won't ever colonize space. One is called the Fermi paradox. You know what I mean. The best answer to that conundrum, in my opinion anyway, is that interstellar space travel is impossible - for whatever reason. Hanson's Great Filter and the Kardashev scale are other ideas that make me rather pessimistic when thinking about humans and interstellar space travel, but the book that really convinced me is called Big History and the Future of Humanity by Fred Spier. I'm not lying when I say that this is the single most interesting book I've ever read, and I highly recommend it. Spier does some impressive number crunching in 'Big History', without turning his book into a mathematical nerd fest, and it's this data on the availabilty of matter and energy, the exhaustion of critical resources and growing entropy that convinced me. Spier concludes with a simple 'it's not going to happen'.

Comparing interstellar travel to getting to the Moon is a bit naive, no matter how you tend to compare the two. The Moon was easy. It was peanuts. Technologically speaking, it's harder to explore the depths of the oceans than it is to set foot on the Moon. There is no way to compare that feat to interstellar travel. Not even historically.

A good and reasonably easy book on this subject is Paul Davies' The Eerie Silence. Searching for Ourselves in the Universe. Most of the books that deal with interstellar travel are science ficton rather than science.

We will continue to explore our own solar system, of course. And we should. It's the most interesting place in the Universe simply because we are a part of it. Given enough time and ample resources, we might even see mining companies trying their luck in the asteroid belt, but: asteroid mining won't happen during our lifetime. And I seriously doubt I'll get to see a manned Mars mission during my lifetime. Don't forget people were already talking about Moon bases in the fifties. More than 60 years later, we're still waiting for one.

Space isn't exactly a hospitable place for biological life. Life is Earthbound and is completely in tune with our remarkable little planet. Put life in the vacuum of space with all its radiation and lack of gravity and it witters. Robots tend to perform a lot better in such conditions.

I can't imagine humans becoming the space explorers we see on the white screen. But I can imagine us sending robots and probes into the vast regions of space, maybe even one carrying the seeds of life and the necessary hard- and software to seed life in places far far away. That's the best I can do.
 
Yeah, I can agree with you, as far as my limited knowledge goes. But well, what should I say, I am overly optimstic when it comes to difficulties. So I have faith in human ingenuity. At least about the technology. Like I said, a man can dream!

But as long as they can not figure out a way to travel millions of light years without braking the laws of physics, then yeah, I dont see how we will make a trip to the next star. It simply isnt the best kind of holiday when you travel around for a few weeks with your ship while a few million years have passed for everyone else. So faster-then-light-travel is somehow a must, for all of those concepts, no matter if they use space-bending alcubierre drives or wormholes to get around the limitation of lightspeed. And this is usually where it all falls apart. Not to mention the other issues.

But who knows, maybe our own solar system will see a lot of exploration in the next 500 years, where people will be wandering around on Jupiters moon Europa in the morning and geting back for dinner to Mars?

If I get the money, I will be checking out some of the books you mentioned!
 
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Personally I don't think interstellar travel is impossible, it's just so hard and rewardless that it probably won't be done unless a scientific breakthrough happens that solves at least some of the problems (for example, the Woodward effect being real and scalable to dimensions that are useful; especially if it were possible to create negative mass with that effect, because that would make it possible to build the Alcubierre warp drive or make traversable wormholes).
Interestingly enough, the way interstellar travel is shown in Avatar is physically very sound and uses no pseudoscience at all (ok, it's not shown in the movie, but it's in the fluff). It's pretty far out from our point of view (antimatter annihilation/fusion drive, ridiculously huge laser arrays that can accelerate a spaceship at 1.5g for three quarters of a year...), but the process is definitely sound.
Colonizing the rest of the solar system seems feasible, though, although it also stands to debate if the reward would ever justify the cost. It's not likely to happen in our lifetime, unless we get self-replicating robot technology sometime soon.
If the economy could really be completely post-scarcity then intrasystem travel and colonization might happen, simply because people can do it.
But the most likely and sadly most boring course of action is that a species born on a planet will also die there.
 


Hassknecht said:
(for example, the Woodward effect being real and scalable to dimensions that are useful; especially if it were possible to create negative mass with that effect, because that would make it possible to build the Alcubierre warp drive or make traversable wormholes).
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Oh baby, you´re saying all the right things.
 
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well there is a little bit of hope though. No matter what we do now. Earth will recover. Even a nuclear war and the worst weapons we have available now will not destroy earth. We might destroy our own species though. But a few 100 000 years and things will start to become normal for our earth again, a few million years and pretty much nothing will be left. Maybe we will make room for a better species. Who knows.
 
I posted the video, but I don´t take it very seriously. I think it´s actually quite silly how many people see humanity as closer to a plague, rather than something like how Jacob Bronowski explained mankind: “Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape — he is a shaper of the landscape.”
 
Akratus said:
Hassknecht said:
(for example, the Woodward effect being real and scalable to dimensions that are useful; especially if it were possible to create negative mass with that effect, because that would make it possible to build the Alcubierre warp drive or make traversable wormholes).
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Oh baby, you´re saying all the right things.
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Mind you that this is all more or less science fiction right now.
Alcubierre warp drive and traversable wormholes both require negative mass, the existence of which is highly hypothetical.
And I'm rather sceptical about the Woodward effect. It seems rather fuzzy, although Woodward and his colleagues are rather thorough and open about their experiments.
I sure hope that it turns out to be real and usable, but I wouldn't bet on it.
 
Akratus said:
"... — he is a shaper of the landscape.”
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Oh, I definitely agree.

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