Science non-fiction

How about a reality TV show that sends people to  Mars to establish a colony? Sounds like a great sci-fi book or movie. Or…actually a TV show about real people settling Mars. Click that link. You gotta read this…Then come back.

Imagine the ratings on the episode when that one guy, the not real smart one, runs out of oxygen on his mission to find one of the original Mars rovers. And when they kick someone off the island, I mean planet, that’s the real deal. The ratings wouldn’t just be stellar, they’d be extraterestrial.

I can easily imagine this being a broadcast TV spectacle that brings viewers in like a live sporting event does. It could easily beat Dancing with the Stars. After all that show doesn’t have real Stars. We all know that. The first two years of space travel would be the dullest. Maybe those are just monthly specials. But then you get the landing! Oh Baby! How much could they charge a minute to advertisers for that broadcast!?

And when the Mars show hits its sophomore slump (Typical complaint – I stopped watching because it was just so much yadda-yadda-yadda, big storm coming, yadda-yadda-yadda who is going to win the cup of pudding or the real apple this week…) they can have a singing contest. The Best in the Galaxy moniker would actually mean something.

By the fifth season it would have mainly Ultimate Fighters on it tearing each others oxygen tubes out. And by the 9th season the Superbowl would feature a half-time show from Mars.

Wait a minute…I had this idea years ago! Just watch this animated short on Reality Shows – we proposed putting people on the moon. We were just ahead of our time I guess. And we didn’t push this concept far enough. Would James Cameron spend a few bucks to be part of this? And by a few bucks I mean like an extra billion? Between him, Bill Gates and the Google guys we should be able to make this happen by next year.

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Woolly Mammoths

I miss Woolly Mammoths. Of all the extinct animals, and this is not even a close call, I think Woolly Mammoths are the coolest.

Dinosaurs are too glamorous. Weird feathers, teeth the size of a human shine bones, dying out in an asteroid hit. Very ‘hot jazz’. I loved them as a kid, but now, they are just so-much-too-much, you know?

But those big ice age animals…early humans even got to hang out with them! You could probably get up early, before all the hubbub of the day kicks in – starting the fire, looking for your gopher fur mukluks, trying to remember where you left your spear ETC and go out and sit quietly on a knoll and watch the baby mammoths play. Maybe an occasional saber tooth tiger drops by and an 8 ton mama mammoth knocks them on their butt.

They keep finding baby mammoths in the melting permafrost in Siberia. It’s so sad to see the frozen husks. The last few of the last. I like the mammoths in the animated film Ice Age. It’s a pretty touching moment when we get his backstory. The loss of his family. I keep that film in my animated top ten mainly because of the mammoth. I keep a mammoth toy/statue made by Schleich on my desk. And there is a great picture book illustrated by Oregonian Kurt Cyrus that I love to read to my daughter called Mammoths on the Move.

I miss mammoths most of all. But I’m a bit mixed on the idea of bringing them back to life via cloning. At the same time, yeah, I’d line up to see a live one. Like Jurassic Park but with a much lower ‘being bitten to death’ possibility.

I think their extinction is so powerfully sad to me because they almost made it. They were still alive while Khufu was building the Great Pyramid. And a few wandered the arctic islands into the 17th century BC. But by then they were the last of the great Pleistocene, ice age animals. The dire wolves were gone, saber tooth tigers were kaput, the cave bears were extinct. It was getting to be a lonely place for those last mammoths. Times had changed.

Some people hope to find Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. I would love to find a few woolly mammoths still wandering about in some distant tundra. Shaking the ground as they walk, trumpeting their invincibility. Letting us know how much more they are than just bones and tusks stuck together in a stiff pose in a museum lobby.

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