Apple's TV show based on Asimov's FOUNDATION, starring Jared Harris

[Spockydog]

11 minutes ago, David Selig said:

The worst actor on the show is definitely Alfred Enoch (Raych), he's just laughably bad.

Aye. Would have included him, but thankfuly he is dead. Honestly, his scenes with Gaal in the episode where Hari got killed was some of the worst television I have ever seen. 

 

Edited October 31, 2021 by Spockydog

[Lord Patrek]

3 hours ago, Spockydog said:

The actors playing Gaal and Salvor are the worst on the show, and the rest of the cast are pretty meh. The casting director has done a terrible job here. 

I feel that Lou Llobell and Laura Birn are actually the best of the bunch. Not that the bar has been set too high, mind you. But they deliver the goods.

[Clueless Northman]

On 10/30/2021 at 6:59 PM, Annara Snow said:

I've always found it interesting to compare how our present times (then 'the future') were imagined in, say, 1950s SciFi movies - the focus was on futuristic means of transportation (flying cars etc.) or travel to space, and, as it turns out, the 21st century is nothing like that. Means of transportation really haven't changed much over a century, the space race was only a thing during the Cold War when two superpowers were competing who gets to do what first and now no one really cares (except billionares who want to have fun) - but the information and communication technologies have been developing faster than most old SciFi works anticipated.

Yeah, I've always been surprised that some techs evolved so slowly over the last decades, though major leaps can occur, it's not a steady pace, as seen with cars. With space and rockets, it's mostly that leaders lacked any interest in it; it could take off if we wanted to, of course.

Like you said, the most glaring failure of nearly all previous SciFi is about communication, computers, internet, mobile phones and the like. Heck, in Herbert's Dune, people still communicate through big radios between planets and spaceships, they don't even have any handheld comm device (and that's not just because of the IA ban, over 10K years you could easily design a communication device that doesn't require advanced computing yet is smaller than a desk.

[Werthead]

18 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Yeah, I've always been surprised that some techs evolved so slowly over the last decades, though major leaps can occur, it's not a steady pace, as seen with cars. With space and rockets, it's mostly that leaders lacked any interest in it; it could take off if we wanted to, of course.

 

This is the angle that Apple's other and vastly superior SFF show, For All Mankind (I'm not counting the stupendously bad-apart-from-a-couple-of-underused-subplots Invasion) pursues with much greater success, the idea of what would have happened if the Space Race had just kept going and going, resulting in a manned Mars mission in 1995.

[Clueless Northman]

1995? Quite optimistic. I still remember that when I was still a kid in very early 1980s, I had made a sketch of the solar system and asteroid belt with dates for future manned exploration mission and permanent bases. I think I more or less put manned Mars mission and Lunar base in 1999/2000. Pluto base obviously was a couple of centuries in the future, at least. Granted, I hadn't any clue what I was doing and of course I was too optimistic  (on the other hand, once we're going beyond the asteroids belt, odds are that manned missions and bases won't take much time from planetary system to planetary system, since it's mostly a matter of advanced tech to go to Jupiter and satellites, and when achieved, it's more of the same until Neptune.

Edited November 1, 2021 by Clueless Northman

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

1995? Quite optimistic. I still remember that when I was still a kid in very early 1980s, I had made a sketch of the solar system and asteroid belt with dates for future manned exploration mission and permanent bases. I think I more or less put manned Mars mission and Lunar base in 1999/2000. Pluto base obviously was a couple of centuries in the future, at least. Granted, I hadn't any clue what I was doing and of course I was too optimistic  (on the other hand, once we're going beyond the asteroids belt, odds are that manned missions and bases won't take much time from planetary system to planetary system, since it's mostly a matter of advanced tech to go to Jupiter and satellites, and when achieved, it's more of the same until Neptune.

Stephen Baxter's vigorously-researched novel Voyage postulated that if NASA funding had remained at Apollo levels indefinitely, then they could have realistically launched a manned Mars mission in 1986 (though at the cost of the unmanned programme not being developed, so thus no Pioneers or Voyagers).

For All Mankind pushed back that timeline by a decade because they also wanted the space shuttle and an early version of the ISS and a moonbase, though they also suggested that NASA could benefit financially much more than it did from patents so its income became even more enormous than just sustained Apollo-level funding.

[Clueless Northman]

Funding, yes. Technological level to ensure we can send people to Mars and bring them back alive? I'm not so sure. As I said about exploring the gas giants, there's basically a technological leap to achieve, just like you needed one to send a man to outer space. Odds are that a Moon base would also require some tech advances, but possibly different ones. Of course, I'm pretty sure we could go there in less than 20 years, starting now, if we had the will to achieve it and put enough resources on it. Alas, this requires political leadership and a genuine vision (note I didn't say "a golden path"), and people who aren't solely focus on their immediate gratification and earthly mundane matters, all sorely lacking in the last few decades.

[Werthead]

We could have sent people to Mars and brought them back alive a long time ago, it's just orbital mechanics which people can work out by hand. Modern technology just increases the odds somewhat with better and faster calculations and more readily available lightweight materials and communications.

[Werthead]

Some good stuff with Lee Pace walking in the desert, almost dying, then owning his religious opponent and then ill-advisedly overstepping. Some good background stuff for Demerzel though. I'm assuming it was her vision in the Spiral hat led her to committing her loyalty to the Emperor no matter what? Interesting they didn't spell that out.

No idea WTF was going on with Gaal. Is her cryopod just going to be a way for her to take part (however tangentially) in each story's timeframe and she doesn't actually do anything. Very weird. And having VR Seldon going off to found the Second Foundation, but the ship blew up, so the Second Foundation doesn't now exist...or what?

Not a lot going on in the Invictus storyline, apart from a potentially good space battle that only lasted five seconds.

[David Selig]

I gave up on this show midway through episode 7 when I realized I wasn't interested in any of the plotlines and couldn't care less about any of the characters. And it's not even entertainingly bad for me most of the time, just tedious and boring. A shame these impressive visuals were wasted by the utter ineptness of the writers.

[Lord Patrek]

1 hour ago, David Selig said:

I gave up on this show midway through episode 7 when I realized I wasn't interested in any of the plotlines and couldn't care less about any of the characters. And it's not even entertainingly bad for me most of the time, just tedious and boring. A shame these impressive visuals were wasted by the utter ineptness of the writers.

Amen!

I'm trying to get through the last 3 episodes, hoping that there might be something passably good about the series before the end. But there's no way I'll watch season 2.

[karaddin]

9 hours ago, Werthead said:

No idea WTF was going on with Gaal. Is her cryopod just going to be a way for her to take part (however tangentially) in each story's timeframe and she doesn't actually do anything. Very weird. And having VR Seldon going off to found the Second Foundation, but the ship blew up, so the Second Foundation doesn't now exist...or what?

Yeah not really loving that, given Gaal is the character I most want to see more of. I'm not sure if the ship actually blew up or if that was just the engines or something, it was confusing.

[polishgenius]

On 11/3/2021 at 10:53 PM, Werthead said:

We could have sent people to Mars and brought them back alive a long time ago, it's just orbital mechanics which people can work out by hand.

 

It's not the trajectories that are the problem with a manned Mars mission, it's the radiation shielding. You either need amounts of shielding that'd make the fuel load needed absurdly huge, or new materials/methods. I'm not a super-consistent follower of the space race so maybe they've figured something out recently but I feel like it'd have been bigger news if they had.

[Werthead]

20 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

It's not the trajectories that are the problem with a manned Mars mission, it's the radiation shielding. You either need amounts of shielding that'd make the fuel load needed absurdly huge, or new materials/methods. I'm not a super-consistent follower of the space race so maybe they've figured something out recently but I feel like it'd have been bigger news if they had.

Or you just rotate the ship so the water tanks are between you and the radiation source and pray for the best, which has been the preferred option for a manned Mars mission since the 1960s (and Kim Stanley Robinson depicts in Red Mars). Better materials help, but ultimately going to Mars - or the Moon - is a complete crap shoot. A high-intensity solar storm would kill the astronauts no matter what. The August 1972 solar storm showed that, if it had happened  four months earlier - during Apollo 16, or four months later - during Apollo 17 - the astronauts would have been in serious trouble.

[IFR]

For All Mankind sounds pretty interesting.

Wrt radiation hazards of a Mars trip, I figured the space program would send their initial batch of death lemmings to establish an infrastructure on Mars (probably underground), which would then open it up for habitation. Maybe use nukes a la the Plowshare proposal to expedite the excavation of the site.

Then it would be quite feasible to send a trial community (though probably not children or pregnant women) to Mars. From what I've read, you're looking at roughly half a sievert for the journey, which definitely correlates to an increased expectation for cancer, but it's not remotely like a death sentence.

Radiation safety standards in the first few decades following the moon landing were nothing as strict as they are today. So I could see this being viewed as an acceptable venture.

The idea of using the water supply as shielding is pretty interesting. Water would be ideal. The problem with metals and other material is they can potentially become activated and start emitting radiation themselves. This would be a problem with mid to low energy ionizing cosmic radiation interaction. The high energy (mega electronvolts), relativistic radiation will go through any shielding (water or even lead) like it's not there.

Anyway, it's a fun topic to think about.

Edit: Thinking about it further, I do wonder about the feasibility of the nuking an excavation site approach. It seems like with all the ambient radiation, one couldn't use an H-bomb due to the high risk of predetonation and a fizzle, and would be confined to a fission bomb, which I believe an unboosted weapon still is at submegaton yield. It seems more reliable and affordable to just go with high yield conventional EBX explosives to get the job done. But I honestly don't know enough about explosives to have a good take on this subject.

Edited November 6, 2021 by IFR

[polishgenius]

5 hours ago, Werthead said:

Or you just rotate the ship so the water tanks are between you and the radiation source and pray for the best, which has been the preferred option for a manned Mars mission since the 1960s (and Kim Stanley Robinson depicts in Red Mars). Better materials help, but ultimately going to Mars - or the Moon - is a complete crap shoot. A high-intensity solar storm would kill the astronauts no matter what. The August 1972 solar storm showed that, if it had happened  four months earlier - during Apollo 16, or four months later - during Apollo 17 - the astronauts would have been in serious trouble.

 

Radiation storms are one thing but just the regular radiation would be a concern too. It wouldn't be insta-death but the way I understand it a Mars mission would put astronauts near to or over the acceptable lifetime exposure limit by NASA standards. A good part of the problem would be galactic cosmic rays, of which the effect isn't very well studied because, well, life isn't hit by them very often, which aren't as big a problem close to Earth and which the Moon missions were only out in for a few days but to which a Mars mission would be a year or more of exposure, and which are of a type that if the shielding is too thin, they break down into secondary radiation that also has to be dealt with. 

 

The article I linked is from 2004, but like I say I've not come across anything since suggesting they've found a clear solution to that problem yet. 

Edited November 6, 2021 by polishgenius

[IFR]

24 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

 

Radiation storms are one thing but just the regular radiation would be a concern too. It wouldn't be insta-death but the way I understand it a Mars mission would put astronauts near to or over the acceptable lifetime exposure limit by NASA standards. A good part of the problem would be galactic cosmic rays, of which the effect isn't very well studied because, well, life isn't hit by them very often, which aren't as big a problem close to Earth and which the Moon missions were only out in for a few days but to which a Mars mission would be a year or more of exposure, and which are of a type that if the shielding is too thin, they break down into secondary radiation that also has to be dealt with. 

 

The article I linked is from 2004, but like I say I've not come across anything since suggesting they've found a clear solution to that problem yet. 

The estimated year long dose for a trip to Mars would be about ten times the NASA recommended annual limit for low Earth orbit astronauts.

This xkcd graph is actually a very good reference point.

A trip to Mars would unavoidably increase a person's chances of manifesting cancer. However, if the premise of the show were that the space program had continued proportional in effort and expense to what it was for reaching the moon, it's worth noting that standards for radiation exposure were more relaxed then. Further, one can expect that those standards would not change as quickly as they have in our timeline, to accommodate space exploration.

A trip to Mars and then time spent developing an infrastructure would be basically a death sentence. Just a trip though would be merely hazardous, but far from a guarantee of premature death. Especially if upon landing you inhabit a properly shielded, subterranean area.

Edited November 6, 2021 by IFR

[Ran]

Really liked the Empire/Demerzel side of the story. Very well done, especially the turn from Laura Birn as she did as Brother Day commanded her to. Lee Pace was terrific  as well (and is in fantastic shape, I have to say -- has a competitive swimmer's physique). This sort of thing shows the promise the series has.

(Re: Demerzel, I don't think her vision is necessarily why she supported the Emperor. Cleon is from only 400 years ago, right? But I do wonder if she, too, had a vision of of three-in-one and spent the next 10,600 years nudging things along until we get an an Empire and then an Emperor who's convinced to create a genetic dynasty...IIRC, we know the Empire itself is only some ... was it 1,100 years old? 1,700? Something like that.)

Also, just realized that Roxann Dawson (aka B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek Voyager) directed this episode (and one earlier one), a fact I didn't realize before it was mentioned in passing in this article about the filming of the episode and Pace's behind-the-scenes photography. The scenes on the Luminist planet were filmed on Malta and the Canaries, apparently. 

Gaal's story was perfectly good and interesting... and then they do this thing with the ship exploding. Did Hari beam his quantum personality recording or whatever to Helicon, with the ship only having existed for the benefit for Raych/Gaal, and once Gaal left it was no longer needed? This seems likeliest to me.

Yet again, it's the Salvor storyline that just feels generic and uninteresting. The fact that her one shot at the Grand Huntress was used to disarm her uselessly... so bloody lame. She's already killed people, why is she hesitating?! Bad writing, that's why. 

Will be curious if the consequences of being conscious during a jump will be played out -- I expect Salvor's uniqueness to protect her, but shouldn't everyone else go mad as a hatter?

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Really liked the Empire/Demerzel side of the story. Very well done, especially the turn from Laura Birn as she did as Brother Day commanded her to. Lee Pace was terrific  as well (and is in fantastic shape, I have to say -- has a competitive swimmer's physique). This sort of thing shows the promise the series has.

(Re: Demerzel, I don't think her vision is necessarily why she supported the Emperor. Cleon is from only 400 years ago, right? But I do wonder if she, too, had a vision of of three-in-one and spent the next 10,600 years nudging things along until we get an an Empire and then an Emperor who's convinced to create a genetic dynasty...IIRC, we know the Empire itself is only some ... was it 1,100 years old? 1,700? Something like that.)

The Empire is 12,000 years old in the TV show as it is in the books. They've mentioned it a few times so far.

I did do a double take when they said the spiral requires walking for 170 kilometres in the burning heat. There are some real-life comparisons - there's an endurance hike through the Sahara for more than 250 kilometres, but you have a week to do it and can bring water and medical equipment - but that is pretty implausible.

[Ran]

Ah, well, if it's 12,000 -- don't recall where that much shorter figure came from -- then it does seem to fit pretty well with Demerzel's experience.

Yeah, 170km without food -- okay. But water? Nope, nope, nope.