Tuesday 27 January 2009

Fiction’s Most Realistic Vision of Our Astrobiological Future?


The above titled piece has just in from an authoritative source on astrobiology. It reminds me as well just how worthwhile it would be to trackdown Are We Alone? The Stanley Kubrick Extraterrestrial Intelligence Interviews (edited by Anthony Frewin):

"Kubrick’s bible was Sagan and Shklovskii’s Intelligent Life in the Universe. Kubrick had originally filmed interviews with twenty-one leading scientists about the possibility of alien life as a prologue to the film’s narrative. Interviewees included physicists Frank Drake and Freeman Dyson, anthropologist Margaret Mead, roboticist Marvin Minsky, and Alexander Oparin, the great Soviet authority on the origin of life, often described as the ‘Darwin of the twentieth century’. Kubrick’s intention was to lend astrobiology that special dignity it has only acquired since. Though the interviews were cut from the final version of the film, a book of the transcripts was published in 2005."

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