Hacker Cinema
Armageddon
1998 · Film · 151 min
Directed by Michael Bay
ActionScience FictionAdventure
When an asteroid threatens to collide with Earth, NASA honcho Dan Truman determines the only way to stop it is to drill into its surface and detonate a nuclear bomb. This leads him to renowned driller Harry Stamper, who agrees to helm the dangerous space mission provided he can bring along his own hotshot crew. Among them is the cocksure A.J. who Harry thinks isn't good enough for his daughter, until the mission proves otherwise.
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82 comments on Hacker News
They did something similar in Moonfall, which is a fun movie if you like campy sci fi like Independence Day and Armageddon. One of those movies I was glad to randomly check out on a flight.
the timer and urgency of this reminds me of the movie Armageddon where they had limited time to form a crew for a space mission.
> If there is no objectivity....then you would have no basis to explain why a film is better or worse than another, A student first iPhone short would be equal to The Godfather. A child banging pots would be indistinguishable from a Symphony.
What is the purpose of "art": in general and/or particular works of it? What makes (a work of) 'art' 'good'?
Is PHM 'good' in its purpose? Is The Room? When a child is banging on pots, is he accomplishing his purpose in his 'creative act'?
> I think Michael Bay sometimes sucks (“Pearl Harbor,” “Armageddon,” “Bad Boys II“) but I find it possible to love him for a movie like “Transformers.” It’s goofy fun with a lot of stuff that blows up real good, and it has the grace not only to realize how preposterous it is, but to make that into an asset.
* https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transformers-2007
Reminds me of the film Armageddon 1998, where the Russian astronaut had some complaints:
<in reference to hardware buttons in the spaceship control panel>
USA astronaut: "This is an American aircraft, you don't know the parts"
Russian astronaut: "Ah, American parts, Russian parts... all made in Taiwan!"
> they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha"
"Armageddon" actually. Poignant because it's a movie about a nuclear ballistic submarine. But not a particularly non-English word.
Check out Angela Collier discuss how "The Core" is a better science movie than Armageddon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l5KHIFIl7U
I always felt that Armageddon occupied this uncanny valley of Hollywood cheese. Too much to suspend disbelief, not enough to be making fun of itself. Always loved "The Core" for being the same sort of film but falling into the second camp.
It's a reference to the "Armageddon" movie from 1998 when a bunch of oil rig drillers get recruited into being astronauts for plot reasons. It was a decent enough movie but nothing you need to look up unless you have an unhealthy obsession for Arwen from Lord Of The Rings.
I wouldn’t say they are all poorly made, but they became poorly made as they became more Bayhem. Like how Tim Burton leaned too far into his style (and his love of Depp in everything) and lost the balance. The Rock, The Island, Bad Boys, and Armageddon are very fun, exciting, and visually interesting movies. Then he leaned into Bayhem and now his movies are barely comprehensible.
Every Frame a Painting is a great channel.
Thats an interesting take, thank you.
If Armageddon the movie has taught me anything is earth needs a unified enemey.
I get that the size is small and therefore harmless to earthlings, however I feel like I lied to my better half when defending ESA and NASA that they would not withhold information about large objects that will hit earth and cause doom and destruction. Our plan that we documented in the Armageddon movie also is suddenly unrealistic to me.
If the documentary, "Armageddon" taught me anything, they'll do it if you just agree that they never have to pay taxes again, they can sleep in the Lincoln bedroom, and that you will cancel out a few parking tickets.
For various reasons Armageddon is one of my favorite movies. Action/comedy, not exactly _good_ but I find it enjoyable.
I bring it up because of the Fictional mission commander talking to the president,
> Begging your pardon sir, but its a big ass sky.
/? underwater infrared camera: https://www.google.com/search?q=underwater+infrared+camera
r/rov: https://www.reddit.com/r/rov/
Bioradiolocation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioradiolocation
FMCW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous-wave_radar
mmWave (60 Ghz) can do heartbeat detection above water FWIU. As can WiFi.
mmwave (millimeter wave), UWA (Underwater Acoustic)
Citations of "Analysis and estimation of the underwater acoustic millimeter-wave communication channel" (2016) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8297460493079369585&as_sdt=5,43&sciodt=0,43&hl=en
Citations of "Wi-Fi signal analysis for heartbeat and metal detection: a comparative study of reliable contactless systems" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3926358377223165726&as_sdt=5,43&sciodt=0,43&hl=en
/? does WiFi work underwater? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+wifi+work+underwater
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=13087602574164936719&as_sdt=5,43&sciodt=0,43&hl=en ... "Environment-independent textile fiber identification using Wi-Fi channel state information", "Measurement of construction materials properties using Wi-Fi and convolutional neural networks"
"Underwater target detection by measuring water-surface vibration with millimeter-wave radar" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17107681556243877942&as_sdt=5,43&sciodt=0,43&hl=en :
> UWSN (Underwater Sensor Network)
I'm reminded of Baywatch S09E01; but those aren't actual trained lifeguards. The film Armageddon works as a training film because of all of the [safety,] mistakes: https://www.google.com/search?q=baywatch+s09e01
It would probably be easier to teach those domain experts the basics of AI and how to leverage it than teach developers the details of each domain. After all, it's not like asking them to train transformers from scratch, just how to use what is already built. It reminds me of a joke about the movie Armageddon and teaching astronauts to drill rather than drillers to go to space..
I know. Back in the day there were two movies* out at the same time about an asteroid hitting the earth and suddenly there were lots of asteroid hitting the earth stories in the media.
* Deep Impact and Armageddon *
* (studios did this to piggy back on the marketing expenses)
That gave me an idea, here is what I got from Copilot:
You have set up your system to run different AI models and compare their performance using a text editor. You are using Mixtral-8x7, a high-quality open-source model developed by Mistral AI, Dolphin, an emulator for Nintendo video games, 3.5-Turbo, a customized version of GPT-3.5, a powerful natural language model, and 4-Series Preview, a new version of the BMW sports coupe. You have noticed that the 4.5-Preview, an upcoming update of GPT-3.5, is slightly better than Mixtral-8x7, which used to be a close match. You are still waiting to access Mistral-Medium, a prototype model that is even better than Mixtral-8x7, but only available to a limited number of users.
You have discovered that Perplexity, an AI company that provides information discovery and sharing services, offers free access to Mistral-Medium through their partnership with Mistral AI. You think that Perplexity is making a mistake by giving away such a valuable model, and that they are underestimating the superiority of Mistral-Medium over the 4.5-Preview. You also think that Mistral AI is the new leader in the AI industry, and that their techniques, such as DPO (Data Processing Optimization), Alibi (a library for algorithmic accountability), sliding window (a method for analyzing time series data), and modern mixtures (a way of combining different models), are well-known and effective. You believe that the advantage of Mistral AI lies in the gap between their innovation and the ability of other developers to replicate it on cheaper and more accessible hardware. You also think that the enterprise market is not fond of the complex structure of GPT-3.5 and its variants, and that they prefer to use Mistral AI's models, which are more affordable and operable on their own premises.
You end your text with a quote from the movie Armageddon, which implies that you are leaving a situation that you dislike, but also admire.
Definitely Armageddon is useful concept and probably one of the most successful and profitable one. However nuclear war is not accurate concept here, you cannot attach to is business strategy and government bailout. That is why it will end at the same social media attention level as say asteroid impact ending humanity NASA tried to use two decades ago ( not without success, you remember that Hollywood movie) for repairing their position. There is a lot more profits in various environmental strategies which may lead to new products, lowering your citizen rights and various taxes
So that's why they had to start spinning the space station in Armageddon (1998) before refueling the shuttle! To pool the propellant.
Great attention to detail, very scientific movie.
It certainly couldn't be any worse or more idiotic than the scripts for probably every Hollywood natural disaster movie: The Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, etc.
I was only 12 when Shoemaker-Levy banged into Jupiter in 1994, so wiser minds or those with better memories may correct me.
At the time, the leading theory for what killed the dinosaurs was still quite terrestrial - volcanos and climate change.
There was increasing evidence for the meteorite impact theory, but a big block was “Space is big, outside the early formation of the Solar System comets and asteroids don’t just slam into planets”.
Then comet Shoemaker-Levy showed us that they actually do, perhaps still quite frequently, with Jupiter playing an imperfect shield for Earth. It was one of the last roadblocks to the now-widely accepted impact theory (still not ‘solved’ of course, and perhaps only part of the extinction puzzle).
Dinosaurs were back in the zeitgeist thanks to Jurassic Park (1993), but Shoemaker-Levy and the impact theory gave us the 1998 twin movies Armageddon and (the better of the two, imho) Deep Impact.
> why […]?
Their world-view (and knowledge) of disaster response was shaped by steady diet of 90’s disaster films — Volcano, Dante’s Peak, Armageddon, Twister, etc.
I once saw the movie Armageddon in the movie theatre onboard a drilling rig. The heads of everyone in the audience collectively exploded watching the drilling scenes (both on earth and in space).
Fun fact: In the DVD commentary, there's a point where Ben Affleck asks Michael Bay why it would be easier to train drillers to become astronauts than it would be to train astronauts to become drillers. If I remember correctly, Michael Bay's response was something to the effect of "well, there would be no movie if that was the case so shut the hell up!"
A 420p copy of the movie is very different from a 4k version. Similarly an encryption copy of the file will intentionally not resemble the original in any way. Both of those distinctions would likely be ignored by a court.
Similar, a movie that copies the plot points will likely be fine, but a song that copies the notes of a song will not be. Very different cover version will sometimes be found as a derived work, even when they are as different as Deep Impact is to Armageddon.
The movie re-encoded into a different format is perfectly fine if the work is sufficiently different.
Taking a file of wolf of Wall Street and encoding it so all the oranges are blue but there’s no other changes is bad as that’s clearly a derived work.
Taking the same file and scrambling it so it doesn’t resemble is perfectly fine.
Watching the movie and then making your own version of the same exact plot points is infringement. But using plot points that are changed is perfectly fine.
There’s existing copyright law that prevents the makers of the movie Deep Impact from suing the makers of Armageddon.
She should have done a tiktok dance holding a DVD copy of the Armageddon movie. That would really inspire young people
This reminds me of the movie https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/95-armageddon where they train a team of expert drillers to become astronauts so they can drill deep into the large object headed for earth and put a bomb inside it.
And during filming Ben Affleck asked a very good question: why not train existing astronauts on how to drill vs. this other way around. To which director Michael Bay told Ben to stop asking stupid questions.
You don't need to go find the world's best miners like in the movie Armageddon; you can use military divers. You just don't use a carefully tracked warship, one of a single-digit number in its class, as a diving platform.
You get the same weird thing with this "camouflage" thing with the C4. Camouflaging from what? They need to make the explosive charges undetectable... for what? Like, the US blows up the Nord Stream pipeline and Russia is like, "oh, shit, we never detected a mine, I guess we'll never know if NATO was behind this, and they're innocent until proven guilty!"
Forget for a second about the "salinity matching" thing being gibberish; what exactly was this part of the operation that Hersh decided to document trying to accomplish? There is zero uncertainty that somebody blew up the pipeline.
>Is there a global-scale natural disaster movie that is any good?
Deep Impact is not a great film, but does a surprisingly good job of telling its story in a moving way.
Its archrival Armageddon is also not a great film, but is arguably even more effective at its job (that being "fun summer popcorn thriller").
>Ben Affleck's commentary on Armageddon is gold.
You no doubt are thinking of his famous anecdote of questioning Michael Bay about training oil drillers to be astronauts, as opposed to the other way around.
Bay's film's approach is correct, though. NASA had by then been flying payload specialists on the shuttle for more than 15 years, because it really is easier to train specialists in some subject to fly in space, than train astronauts an entire specialty for one flight.
Trash disaster movies have their place, 2012, Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Moonfall, etc. They are all entertaining in their own right, and are usually very self-aware of how stupid they are. Ben Affleck's commentary on Armageddon is gold. Though, I think that film was a higher tier than most of the list here, the Aerosmith song made for that film dominated the summer radio that year and the soundtrack flew off the shelves. I wish things like that still happened, you'll get a bump on Spotify but its cultural impact is much less.
My position is to not do these things as we cannot know the repercussions and we don't have a great track record.
Your position is to try to simulate a volcano to cool the Earth and "let's just see how it goes".
Ignoring the fact if we do that, then a natural volcano could go off as well and set us over the edge, causing an ice age.
Sure you can hand wave away the repercussions pointing to a movie, but it's still your stupid suggestion.
And what retarded logic that is, just because Armageddon is a movie doesn't mean asteroids aren't a threat.
I do remember Paris being destroyed in one film - armageddon perhaps. O’Neill comments on it in an SG1 episode.
Or Armageddon and Deep Impact:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(film)
> Deep Impact was released in the same summer as a similarly themed film, Armageddon, which fared better at the box office, while astronomers described Deep Impact as being more scientifically accurate.
Stop shooting sh!t at asteroids that are not heading for earth, please. You don't know upfront what's going to happen. What if the m0f0 splitted into two parts and one of the big parts was heading for earth now? Then what? Gonna play Armageddon, just as in the movies!?
There are more people on earth than only Americans, okay.
P.S. All jokes aside, all NASA people are probably very smart and sh!t, but please also think about all other people on earth. If you fvck up, you fvck up for everybody. Noblesse oblige. Space is pretty much unknown territory, be careful.
https://archive.ph/stLB5 (I encountered a paywall after accidentally closing the tab)
The $330m figure is mentioned in the title and at the top of the article but nowhere else. I'm not sure what purpose it serves except for attracting clicks and trying to provoke a visceral "wow that's a waste of money" response. (I'm sure we'd allot unlimited funds if there actually was an asteroid.)
Regardless, it's an interesting experiment and it will be nice to see results next month (how soon after the September 27 collision will analysis be possible?).
> The best known collision occurred 66 million years ago when a 10 km wide asteroid struck Chicxulub in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The collision created a blast that had the energy of several billion atomic bombs and led to the destruction of 75% of all plant and animals species, including all land-based dinosaurs.
> Since then, films such as Don’t Look Up, Armageddon and Deep Impact have depicted similar devastation being triggered by asteroid or comet crashes in modern times.
Unrelated, I found the above use of "since then" really funny, because it's comparing movies from the past twenty-five years to sixty-six million years ago.
Cremation, burial, they sound like you are assuming some colonization. Well, there won't be any colonization -- humans just can't hope to be in space very long without serious harm from low gravity and high energy cosmic rays.
You just are nearly totally missing just how hostile space is for humans. F'get the science fiction movies and TV shows, all of StarTrek, all of Star Wars, all of Armageddon, etc. and just look at the simple facts, e.g., low gravity, cosmic rays, the distances and energies involved, the lack of resources, etc.
Again, people on the moon or Mars will be in dangerous situations, and there will be a relatively high death rate. Due to the cold, the bodies will quickly freeze. Then in practice, due to the high cost in energy from any alternative, the frozen, dead bodies will be just piled up. There won't be any burials or cremations -- any such implies WAY more in colonization than is at all feasible in practice within the currently visible horizon.
All those artists' sketches of domes of settlements on the moon or Mars are just absurd, for now unscientific nonsense. In fact, now, for a human, any significant time on the moon or Mars or out in space is a death sentence from the medical problems caused by the time in low gravity and exposed to high energy cosmic rays. You seem to be having a just super hard time appreciating these simple, real facts and situations.
Beyond the horizon, assume some new sources of gravity, faster than light travel, warp drives, new sources of energy, etc., and maybe okay, but for now all that is not at all about reality but only fantasy.
Since there won't be any colonization and since the humans won't be very productive, the projects of the moon or Mars bases will be over quickly, and then the observation will be that a huge pile of money killed some people and created some plainly visible on the surfaces piles of frozen dead bodies, and little of any value.
So, the whole effort of humans on the moon or Mars will be seen as just piles of frozen dead bodies as evidence of human folly and will be offensive ethically, morally, politically, etc. and, thus, embarrassing, as I first stated.
Solution: As in the current Mars robots, have some clear scientific objectives, develop some good instruments, and fire the rockets. Develop the robots along with the instruments so that it will be easy for the robots to work with the instruments. If we can have self-driving cars on some city streets, then we should be able to develop some robots effective in space.
How would that work? From earth, send some orders for some work we know the robots are able to do. Then the robot executes as ordered, keeps records, and, within a few hours, sends back the records.
Net, for now and all the way to as far as we can see to a horizon, there is just no significant role for humans in space. Robots? Yes. Humans? No.
In simple, blunt terms, for any human to attempt to do anything significantly productive in space is, from the medical effects of low gravity and cosmic rays, just a death sentence. Sorry 'bout that.
I'm surprised the HN audience won't jump on the opportunity to have a big push in the associated robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, etc.
Here's a list I stole from Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-films-have-the-lowest-average-shot-length-ASL
ASL 1.55 - Doomsday (2008) : 4052 shots over 105 minutes
ASL 1.72 - Transporter 3 (2008) : 3360 shots over 96 minutes
ASL 1.73 - Domino (2005) : 4046 shots over 116 minutes
ASL 1.83 - Quantum of Solace (2008) : 3198 shots over 98 minutes
ASL 1.84 - Crank: High Voltage (2009) : 2718 shots over 84 minutes
ASL 1.92 - Transporter 2 (2005) : 2524 shots over 81 minutes
ASL 2.01 - Band of Ninja (1967) : 3424 shots over 114 minutes
ASL 2.01 - Moulin Rouge! (2001) : 3594 shots over 120 minutes
ASL 2.03 - Gamer (2009) : 2502 shots over 84 minutes
ASL 2.03 - The 6th Day (2000) : 3418 shots over 116 minutes
ASL 2.08 - Hot Fuzz (2007) : 3304 shots over 115 minutes
ASL 2.10 - Dark City (1998) : 2982 shots over 104 minutes
ASL 2.15 - Armageddon (1998) : 4025 shots over 145 minutes
ASL 2.17 - The Transporter (2002) : 2420 shots over 87 minutes
ASL 2.17 - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) : 2910 shots over 105 minutes
Isn't this what they did on the Armageddon movie?
'Chapman describes a “giggle factor” and a “Chicken Little” dynamic. That was ultimately changed by a mix of scientific progress, policy outreach, writing for the general public, and the major Hollywood films Armageddon and Deep Impact'
-Good to hear that Armageddon may actually have done something good then..
If you've ever watched the movie Armageddon, you'll know this is par for the course.
However a separate documentary (Armageddon, 1998) illustrated the successful use of nuclear devices on objects of a seemingly intractable scale with extremely few casualties.
The makers of the documentary also chose an excellent score to accompany their organic capture of a moving love story along with the antics of a plucky group of misfits that came together in a crisis. It's the sort of thing you can only shake your head at and say, "Only in reality!" because if you saw it in a movie you'd just think "Nah, that could never happen".
I realized exactly this recently: people don't channel surf anymore, and I kind of miss it.
It was relaxing to me, post- many cable channels (81?), pre- guide/DVR, to just click through.
"Oh, Armageddon is on again. Hercules. (flip, flip, flip)" and then settle on something random, pulled from what's currently playing.
It used to be: survey and then choose from a very limited but rotating subset of all content.
Now it's: choose from all content ever and then find where the content lives and then figure out how much of it you want to watch.
For movies, the new way seems superior. For TV, it feels like a lot has been lost. And overall, I feel like the new system definitely leads to winner-take-all.
Haha that's actually really interesting- I feel like I've seen other examples like that, where a words meaning changes to the point where it's original meaning is novel, but I can't think of any off hand.
Other than the silicon valley "there's also that movie 'Armageddon'"
Worth noting that TDAT took the concept of the AMOC collapsing and turned it into one of the most absurdly unscientific science-based films short of Armageddon.
But it was pretty entertaining if you could find a way to stay plugged into the movie and not feel disenchanted by the concept of polar cyclones icing things with tropospheric air. Still, there was that initial kernel of truth to it, which is what we're reading about now.
(not a climate guy; I'm probably getting some parts of this wrong)
Plot twist. We do what you said and eventually destabilize the Moons orbit from mining. It becomes a heated debate on wether it’s going to happen like climate change.
Or we do a reverse Armageddon[1] and mining causes an asteroid to split and hit earth.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120591/
Come on. Retrograde burns are cheap compared to sheer amount of fuel needed to escape real sized atmosphere not the tiny KSP one. (There are mods for realism there.)
Oh, and instead of burning you can use solar sails too. Or shoot lasers or explosives at them to vaporize and give them momentum.
The biggest problem is actually getting to the rocks, chunking them and then not causing a rerun of the movie Armageddon. (Which made changing asteroid direction seem way too easy.) Once the rock is on a trajectory, it will be rather hard to deflect in time, and even then could collide later on. Or hit a newly deployed space station.
Once you fire it, you will end up ruining someone's day, somewhere and some time. It's a weapon of mass destruction.
The precision it would take to launch an unguided rock from one solar system to another and hit a particular target makes that seem unlikely. Just imagine how many different gravitational forces you’d have to account for over such a long period of time! Depending on how fast you can throw it, you probably have to account for gravitational masses that don’t yet exist or would change significantly before your rock got close. It would be truly impressive. But any civilization worth bombarding like that would also probably be able to protect against that threat model, right? It seems that detection and mitigation are at least theoretically within our grasp already (I’m going to cite the movie Armageddon here), and we pose absolutely zero threat to a civilization in a distant solar system.
Didn't they do this in that movie armageddon? Hopefully space-x doesn't know something we don't.
> we now have the technology to detect and divert such objects so hopefully it will not be an issue.
Citations needed for that overly broad claim, because Armageddon was not a documentary.
Armageddon (1998, movie)
> Likewise support Green New Deal politicians in the US and elsewhere.
If we are really trying to avert climate change, how is spending trillions on labor unions and guaranteed jobs going to help?
If this was the plot of the movie Armageddon, and there was an asteroid hurtling towards earth, would your planned respond spend pages talking about unions, wealth inequality, indigenous people, and guaranteed healthcare, jobs, and housing? If climate change is really imminent and existential threat that requires “war time mobilization” then how can we afford to water down our response with these tangential things?
Under the Green New Deal you’d spend trillions more a year on healthcare, housing, etc. For that money you could buy up the major oil companies like Exxon (market cap $300 billion) and keep the oil in the ground. You could make the US carbon neutral using existing or near-term CO2 recapture technology. You could bankroll India and China to keep their fossil fuels in the ground and build out fully renewable capacity. You could invest in renewables technology, nuclear, carbon capture at the same time. If you sincerely believed that climate change was an existential crisis, why would you divert 90%+ of the force of the “war time mobilization” on social programs?
In my view, the Green new deal has done incalculable damage to the environmental movement. It is a transparent and cynical attempt to piggy-back traditional left wing politics onto the environmental movement, undermining its credibility and seriousness.
He's kinda late to the party decrying these sort of flicks now. You could make the same criticism movies that came out a decade ago, like Armageddon, Independence Day, Transformers, etc.
Did you watch Armageddon or Independence Day? Politicians are cornerstones of the solutions in both movies...
Climate change was never going to be reversible with behavioral measures. Even if everyone had followed the Kyoto protocol to the letter starting in 1992 that wasn’t going to avert climate change, because nobody contemplated how quickly China and India would develop. There is no calculus where you can significantly limit climate change through behavioral measures that also allow the third world to have comfortable, modern lives. There will be 400 million people in Nigeria by 2050 and there is no political regime to address climate the change that’s workable unless it allows them to live a life at least as decent as say Eastern Europe. The west could reduce GHG emissions to zero and it wouldn’t do the trick.
People have viewed climate change as a political issue and its not. It’s a scientific issue. It’s the astroid hurtling toward earth in the movie Armageddon or the aliens in Independence Day. The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.
A pet peeve of mine is the noble suicide trope used often in film and tv. Armageddon, Aliens, Endgame, 7 Pounds, its everywhere. I haven't seen any research but I imagine it could normalize suicide in the minds of the impressionable young.
I get that's its an effective (though artistically blunt) plot device but I would prefer that it be used less.
The same chance of getting two movies with the same premise (Armageddon and Deep Impact, White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen)
This is not groundbreaking news because USA was the first to land on comet twenty years ago...In the movie Armageddon.
For those missing the reference: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ben_Affleck
Ben Affleck, talking to Michael Bay about the movie Armageddon, in which oil drillers are sent to an asteroid to drill a hole in it, drop a nuclear bomb into the hole, and then detonate that bomb:
>I asked Michael (Bay) why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers. He told me to shut the fuck up
Living up to the standards of the Russian space station in the Armageddon movie.
See: Armageddon, the movie.
Maybe we just need to go full Bruce Willis. Somebody get Ben Affleck to sing Leaving on a Jet Plane.
In seriousness, it sounds like a fascinating problem. If anyone has seen the drills they use to make holes for piles for new condo/office towers—they're probably wider than needed in this case (not actually sure of that)— the drill (bit?) is extendable, but the rig itself is enormous. Those are mobile units.
Otherwise something like a semi-permanent or permanent unfolding oil-rig type machine would be needed?
None of this helps with the weight problem. I wonder if there's a more clever option.
Remember how the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact both came out in the same year? (Apparently it was 1998.) It was so weird to have a choice of two bad asteroid movies, which wasn’t exactly a common trope at the time.
I got a similar feeling when a company advertised in my Facebook feed that it had “reinvented belts,” and then a different company advertised more or less the same thing a few weeks later! Same with pills designed to boost your brain power. One week you are being pitched by brand X, the next by brand Y, and each one gives the impression that someone passionate about belts, or neuroscience, or whatever, poured their blood, sweat, and tears into this revolutionary new product.
Edit: I actually bought a “reinvented” belt, and I love it. I wonder if modern marketing, i.e. Facebook, makes it possible to “reinvent” mundane objects and make a buck, maybe the way it used to be before products became more commoditized and distributed by big corporations.
Most times religion is a crutch to hold to "common sense" and with little regard to others or primary sources AKA scriptures.
As a intrinsically religious person I say, I am sorry and as a former Pastor that sucks.
To quote a wise saying that helps me wrestle with these stories like yours is from the very non-religious movie Armageddon, "A person may be smart, but people are stupid."
Where are the people who said that the sea level would raise 1 foot to 1 meter per year?
You didn't answer that question. Everything you wrote is a distraction, which ends up increasing the confusion you describe and complain about.
You pointed to some artists and movies. So what? I can point to movies who have depicted meteors crashing into modern day Earth, and volcanoes erupting in Los Angeles, and even have the core of the Earth stop spinning. Artists have different goals. They are not required to only depict what science predicts +/- 1 sigma.
You point to a scientist who liked that "The Day After Tomorrow" used climate change as a plot device, even if the science was awful. So what? I'm sure some Spacewatch people like "Armageddon" and that some geologists like "The Core", even though the science is awful in both. Are you equally disdainful towards those scientists? Or do only climate scientists draw your ire? (BTW, "Water World" used global warming as a plot device, was almost 9 years before TDAT, and portrayed an equally scientifically absurd future.)
You mentioned "An Inconvenient Truth". Does Gore make a prediction that there will be 30cm or higher water rise per year? Does he even predict that the Atlantic will have reached the base of the Empire State Building by now?
How is the IPCC 2001 report not an attempt at a thorough rebuttal? What level of rebuttal would you require before you say it was sufficient? Do we all need to be like Neil deGrasse Tyson and pinpoint every single scientific flaw in a movie? Or go even further and reject every movie with a flaw?
In other words, I'm not going to get into a goalpost argument with you before you even say what the goalposts are.
Your argument of the structure of the argument is useless. It's so easily inverted. Watch: You have set up your own Motte and Bailey about what's going on in this HN thread, so nothing I say can dissuade you. You have inserted irrelevant commentary from your bailey to defend your views. Now you can ignore me because you think I'm using irrational arguments, because you have placed me in a spot where you think I can be ignored. Now you can enjoy your motte.
I argued that the OP presented a straw man argument that misrepresents what the large majority of climatologists and policymakers like Gore were making 15 years ago. Do you agree or disagree with me?
I presented the IPCC report to supports my argument. Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" also supports my argument. If you disagree, do you have an actual examples of people who predicted 30+cm/year sea rise, or even that much of Manhattan would be underwater by now?
They don't have rights to stream any decent movies
That seems hyperbolic. Just browsing around (I decided to cap this at 5 minutes):
The Interview
Forrest Gump
Major League
Pirates of Carribean
Hot Fuzz
Armageddon
Kingpin
A League of Their Own
Inglorious Basterds
Scarface
Django Unchained
Legally Blonde
E.T.
Days of Thunder
The Princess Bride
Crocodile Dundee
Clear and Present Danger
V for Vendetta
Galaxy Quest
Running Man
Big Trouble in Little China
Talladega Nights
Kill Bill (1 and 2)
Star Trek Movies (including The Wrath of Kahn)
Tommy Boy
Team America World Police
Lilo & Stitch
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
Wayne's World
Clerks
Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure
obviously no one over there ever watched the movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)
What's the whole thing about drilling a hole and dropping a nuke to split the asteroid up? I mean, I liked the Aerosmith song from that movie (Armageddon) but doesn't that actually seem like a sensible idea for a bigger rock?
Looks like some experts agree w me: http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission.html
Comparing to Citizen Kane seems unfair as it's not an action movie. So here are some other action movies. (NB: There are multiple entries for some of these but I'm not listing them all).
Die Hard 4.5 Die Hard 2 3.1 Die Hard 3 1.8 Armageddon 2.2 -- at least he's ben consistently on the quick side Total Recall 3.7 -- original, 1990 Robocop 3.7 -- original Haywire 6 And I keep trying to search for movies they don't have in the database. So certainly for action movies (1980+), at least for some popular ones, the ASL isn't out of the ordinary.
But then I searched for Alfred Hitchcock and got some interesting results. This database has many duplicate entries and some wildly different values. The Skin Game had 3 entries at about the same time (17.1, 17.3, 17.4). However, Rear Window has an entry at 3.7 and another at 8.8, and several at 10.5. I suppose I need to read about their methodology to understand why there's so much variance.
Even though I liked the article it didn't mean I didn't like the movie. I think Interstellar is a better movie than most films because at least they tried to incorporate some true science into it (as opposed to 100% wrong movies like armageddon, sunshine, etc). So Nolan, Kipp, et al definitely do get the credit for that!
You seem to be missing a whole slew of games here, and most importantly, you don't seem to understand just how gritty, dark, and realistic Wolfenstein was for its time.
You cherry-pick robo-Hitler in order to paint Wolfenstein as a fun and happy game - but the fact of the matter is that when it was released, it was the most realistic game ever made (give or take), in which you killed nazis. Nothing but nazis. In a first-person perspective, in a dark and gritty environment, in what was seen as very realistic. The policor backlash to the game's realism and grittiness - and the nazi-aspect - was huge. Wolfenstein was far, far more realistic and gritty than Halo has ever been, when put in historical perspective.
Then there's the fact that other realistic console shooters existed long before Halo came out. Take Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark for the N64, for instance. Two highly-realistic first person shooters, accompanied by successful multiplayer elements. Or Medal of Honor for the PS1. On the PC, too - take Rise of the Triad, one of the most violent games I can think of. Its multiplayer was simplistic, straightforward, and incredibly violent and gory.
I know it's all the rage to talk down on console gaming and games like Halo in particular, but the fact of the matter is that this kind of gaming didn't start with Halo, and had been around for a long, long time before it. Games like this have always existed alongside deeper and richer games, and that's a good thing - I like more intelligent and rewarding experiences, but after a long day or a stressful week, I just want to get some friends together and shoot zombies in Left 4 Dead 1/2 - just as I don't want every movie I see to be Philadelphia. Sometimes, I just want Armageddon or Die Hard, and there's nothing wrong with that.
The lone hero is reminiscent of the archetypical Kantian concept of Übermensch ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch ).
Interesting article, but blockbuster posters come in a myriad of formats - I was actually expecting a "hero prominently at the center, sidekicks scattered around the background of the frame" kind of thing, much like that GI Joe: Retaliation movie (cf links). I just checked a few on the top of my head, and the only one that follows the painting style is I Am Legend for obvious reasons.
Armageddon: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0232500/
Fast and Furious: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0232500/
Avatar: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/
Transformers: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418279/
GI Joe: Retaliation: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1583421/
I Am Legend: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/
the best reason I can come up with is meteors. and although taking the michael bay movie armageddon as a reference seems kinda unscientific, it's still an actual (although quite unlikely) threat. I think of mars as a backup in case something terrible happens to earth.
Btw. the video in the report mentions Elon Musk designing the rocket himself, I assume that's BS?
Radiolab is incredibly compelling, I agree. I listen to every episode. I can't think of a more entertaining science radio show, but we need to define "better" if you want me to name a better one. There are certainly more scientifically accurate and informative shows, like Science Friday and Car Talk, and The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
Radiolab is so entertaining because it's willing to compromise accuracy - and sometimes any tie to reality as with the whale-thanking-the-diver episode - for the sake of a good story. And because of this, it's hard to call it a science show, just like it's hard to call Armageddon a science movie.
Good bases for next years Deep Impact/Armageddon movie head-to-head.
>How Billionaire Asteroid Miners Make Money -- Without Mining Asteroids.
They're going to make a movie about this starring Bruce Willis. Throw in Ben Affleck for comic relief. They're going to call it "Armageddon" and it's going to be a blockbuster.
By near identical do you mean, say, Armageddon and Deep Impact? Because there's a world of difference between two movies having the same high concept and actually being near identical. Parallel development of premises is bound to happen, particularly with ones as obvious as catastrophic events and casual sex.
It's not even that there are ethical reasons people in Hollywood don't steal scripts. The reasons are practical: if your script is good, it's going to cost me a lot less to pay you for it than it would cost to pay some other more established writer's quote to develop a new script from the same premise.
I think any entrepreneur owes it to him- or herself to consider what "competition" actually means. You shouldn't assume it's a zero-sum game, and only one company can exist. If you look closely enough, you'll also see that competitors don't mirror each other as much as you would think, and they leverage their differences to their advantage.
Launching at the same time as a competitor creates more static in the press. I remember when the movie "Deep Impact" was announced close to "Armageddon". I thought to myself "Jesus Christ, this is too much". I don't think that whichever was the last one to hit the big screen was riding the coat tails of the other, or that the earliest one deserved my attention or money more than the last one.
Should Pepsi have called it quits, because they knew that Coca Cola were doing a coca beverage? Of course not. A competitor can be a pain in the ass in some ways, but it also makes for a great way to analyze your market and customers without looking inwards, which can be very difficult for anyone. If they gain traction, you'll know that there's a market.
If they die, you'll have their example as a cautionary tale; if you don't have a lighthouse to navigate by, navigate around the ship wrecks ahead of you.
I think he's annoyed that Convore launched a similar project and received some good press and community love (as little as it is outside the distortion field of the Valleysphere of Techcrunch and HN).
I always think of ReadWriteStart's mantra that "the early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese".
"Is it important to be the first one out with the 'same' idea" is one of the many inane theory-crafting discussions that serve little other purpose than discourage people from launching.
You realize that Armageddon was just a Hollywood movie, right? :-) I am not sure if the same thing would be feasible in the real world, with current technology.
Nor am I convinced that we will eventually be able to escape our dieing sun, but I keep my fingers crossed.
"so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on."
Or, they sit on similarly produced movies for years until such moment as it is economically "sensible" for them to release it. The entertainment industry has done that with dead people (Bernie Mac, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, etc.) for a long time. If they see advanced hype from one movie (in the case of Armageddon), they'll release their not-as-good one (Deep Impact, IMO) as an early-bird special to get people in the theater thinking "hey, it's just as good, whatever".
Now, there are companies (like the Asylum) that make films _directly_ knocking off upcoming movies. They shoot and produce them in months and push it straight-to-disc for the rental/retail market. That's a different thing altogether.
Even if this was the result of an illusionist, it highlights something I've often thought of, and has come up on HN a few times: that very similar products and movies will come out at just about the same time. The best examples I can give are from movies, and how close together certain movies are made and released, that have very similar plots:
Deep Impact (May 1998) -> Armageddon (July 1998)
The Illusionist (September 2006) -> The Prestige (October 2006)
Paul Blart: Mall Cop (January 2009) -> Observe and Report (April 2009)
These movies came out too close together for one to copy the other, so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on.
In the startup / tech world, I think this happens too, because we all tend to follow the same blogs, news sources, etc – so any subtle (probably unintentional) message that makes one of us think of a new product makes 1000 of us think of a nearly identical product, at the exact same time. To me, that highlights execution is so important, and ideas are a "dime a dozen".
I wholly disagree for video games, but then I worked as a reviewer so I admit my view is likely very skewed from the average consumer. Near identical games come out sometimes months apart in video games, but similar happens in the film industry with Armageddon appearing 2 months after Deep Impact in cinemas in '98.
The new Harry Potter was held off last year because the produces were afraid two competing fantasy series could kill each other near a Christmas recession. Twilight, which is basically swept up in the box office and with Harry Potter 6 due out literally like a week later and cost almost 7 times as much to make.
However cooincidences occur frequently with movies and games due to waiting for the right market attention. I mean a G.I. Joe movie or Transformers movie could have been made whenever, similar with a lot of movies, however it's been impossible up until late to make live action movies with quality animation.
I personally see little difference between a lot of video games and movies. I'm uninterested in 2012, because I already saw it with Knowing and its about as meaningful as a movie on the millennium bug would have been in 1997. Then there's the whole Bedtime Stories following Inkheart (Which was due out in March 2008, but was pulled back to December 12 at least in the UK), and Bedtime Stories looked like it was rushed into production following the sale of Inkhearts rights.
Again, I'm probably not the best person to ask as I had a movie pass at like 13 (the pass cost $20 a month, I easily got $40 worth of movies per weekend). So I'll say there is a need for hype in the movie and video game industry, however I still believe there's a big opportunity for companies to rush poor quality movies into production to steal the limelight from another. This is especially true when some movies can take 3 years to produce and others are done and finished in 9 months and may wait another 6 months for release, but if you group movies too closely you end up with two distinct groups of movies (like plays) Comedy or Tragedy and then all grouping is meaningless.
Hit movies come in pairs because the big studios try to leverage each others marketing budgets. You really think that nobody thought of an asteroid movie until Armageddon/Deep Impact?