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James Cameron Begins His Deep-Sea Dive
James Cameron is on his way down. The director's long-planned trip to the deepest spot on Earth — the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep — is in progress; by the time you read this, if all goes well, Cameron will be navigating around in depths unvisited since 1960. National Geographic's coverage of the dive is excellent as well, as is the BBC's (with video).
I can't decide if I hope it all goes well because of Terminator and Aliens, or if it's a complete failure because of Titanic and Avatar.
One of my "If I was a billionaire" fantasies was a documentary trip back to the trench. Amazing that it's taken this long to get back.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Maybe he will stick to things like this instead of making shitty movies.
*cough* Avatar *cough*
Gone!
I personally think that deep trenches are at least as interesting as outer space, if not even more so. There is a rich flora and fauna which have evolved to adapt to the high pressure and lack of sunlight and oxygen at such depths, it almost makes them seem like species that are alien to this planet.
Unfortunately, travelling and exploring the the murky depths are prohibitively expensive for the average guy. A small excursion itself would cost about $40,000, so I would imagine that James Camerons trip is going to cost several hundred thousand dollars. Ah, I envy the rich. :)
Anyway, here's to hoping that he gets excellent clips.
Forget Avatar and Titanic... this is the kind of stuff he will be remembered for.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
As far as rich guys hobbies go, this is way cooler than buying a fighter jet or trying to get a monopoly on fighting HIV in Africa.
lucm, indeed.
Awesome. there are still magic (quite a lot) in one of the most, if not the most inhospitable place on the planet apart from Brierley hill.
Tally ho old chap.
We'll Smoke you a Kipper for breakfast
Couldn't do it; I have a pretty severe phobia of pressurized things. That scene from 'The Abyss', where the villain's ship goes down too far and... *shivers* Everyone at work pokes fun at me every time we have to change the fountain soda machine's carbon tanks, because I take off to the side room to steer clear. I came close to whaling on the bosses' son for taking a nearly-empty one, bring it over where I was and spurt out at me.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Can he take George Lucas with him, and leave him at the bottom?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
like when aristocrats used to fund and participate in science. We're seeing more of this kind of thing now, like this study, or this. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but there are definitely parallels to the way science was done during the renaissance.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I hope he can find Ed Harris
How come he hasn't gone to space yet?
I can't believe the last time we were there was 1960. May God go with you, Mr. Cameron. Apologies to you atheists for that last one ;^)
And if it works well he will use it to film Titanic 2.
The rich men are at it again. Some are going into outer space. Some are going under the ocean. I can't wait for the earth explorers, digging down deep into the crust.
Did you see it? They said it was hauled from the Challenger Deep, but I'm positive that beast never swam in terrestrial waters until a week ago...
Can an ego that big go that deep??
He tweeted it about 45mins ago. https://twitter.com/jimcameron/status/184036733959143425 An amazing achievement!
Does this mean that Titanic is no longer the lowest point in James Cameron's career?
Kinda interesting, but I understand he chose the spot of the seafloor he's visiting simply on the basis of it being the deepest point in the ocean, not because of something that's there and that's worth seeing/exploring. So chances are that all he'll find is... um, a seafloor, made of a lot of sand. I hope I'm wrong.
We're leaving him down there, right?
Someone go down with him with a squirt gun and right as the sub reaches the depth squirt some water on the back of his neck and scream Oh my God a leak!
Oh, c'mon! Where the frig in the Periodic Table does one find "Unobtanium"? Seriously? I heard that, and gave up on the flick from that point on.
I figured Unobtainium to be some sort of ClarkeTech-level meta-material, much like the Cavorite in A Deepness in the Sky. In that story, Cavorite was a mineral discovered by the native Spider civilization, possessing miraculous anti-gravity properties Yet it was composed of nothing more than common elements, mostly diamonoid carbon, that should have yielded an unremarkable pile of dust. In that story, it was insinuated that the material was not naturally occuring, but the legacy of some hyper-advanced intelligence or civilization.
The implication being that the Na'vi were not a primitive pre-industrial society -- but a primitive post-industrial one. The planet-wide bio-net and cooperative defense system doesn't make sense from a Darwinian evolutionary standpoint, but it might have made sense if it was designed that way. And those Unobtanium "ore" formations? Perhaps the remains of some ancient server farm or energy storage-facility... or garbage dump.
Entity, meet biological warfare (easily possible, given the ease with which the DNA was replicated) and a gaggle of large asteroids being flung at the surface just for good measure (also possible, given the massive energy require to go FTL (or was it near-light?) speeds in the first place). There's at least half a dozen ways, given that story's tech, in which to destroy the inhabitants without harming the material, endangering a single human being, and basically turning the place into an airless rock that can be strip-mined.
In the aftermath of Avatar's release, I found similar viewpoints all too common among my fellow nerds. It bothers me to think that we can consider genocide to be the "obvious" solution, and that not resorting to total war at the get-go as being the mark of a plot hole.
The corporate managers in Avatar weren't actually evil, but merely self-serving and cynical. They told themselves it was ok because they weren't really doing anything evil -- just moving some stubborn natives somewhere less inconvenient. I'm sure after the orders were given, they told themselves that it was the natives who forced them to act as they did, their superstitious and ignorant natures prevented the savages from listening to reason.
In any case, we often forget that the humans were employees of a corporation, not a sovereign military force. The soldiers were the equivalent of some Blackwater mercenaries. Regardless of how powerful corporations sometimes seem, it is government who still holds the leash, being jealous entities that hold the best goodies (like WMDs) for themselves.
Actually I only have a couple complaints with the tail end of the film.
#1: Norm
So Norm is out there fighting and he gets shot. We cut back to the science lab and Norm is crawling out of his linking device, clutching the area where he was shot. It's a, "I saw myself get shot! I'm dead! No, I'm not--my avatar is. Whew!" type of moment. Cut back to the air battle going on. Trudy has reached the end, her helicopter is shot up, and she says her emotional goodbye, "Sorry, Jake," just before a missile slams into her helicopter and blows it to pieces. A scene or two later, we see Norm exiting the lab with his air mask on, machine gun in hand, angry and determined look on his face, going...
Where the fuck are you going, Norm?!
Now it was pretty obvious that there was something between Norm and Trudy, even though most of the scenes were cut (but take a look at the deleted scenes on the DVD for the true meaning of "Norm's attitude is improving." Classic!). But Norm was off-line when Trudy was blown up, thanking his lucky stars that he wasn't killed. His radio was on his dead avatar. So he doesn't know that Trudy is now in little tiny pieces. But even if he does, where is he going? To find the pieces?! Is he going to stand with the Dragon Lady at the Tree of Souls? Then why isn't he there when we see her? Is he going to avenge his dead avatar in the forest? Even Norm isn't that stupid.
Of course, we know why Norm is leaving. Because if he sticks around, he'll mess up the big fight scene at the end of the movie.
#2: Jake Sully, Military Strategist
Okay, I'm no military genius. But come on! We've got a line of troops with machine guns and grenade launchers and flame throwers and walking tanks with really big honkin' machine guns. And Jake's strategy? Frontal assault! Even I know that's a recipe for disaster.
So all the folks on the ground are "combat ineffective", running for their lives if they're not dead. By the end, it appears that all his air assets are gone and he's the only one left alive and still fighting. Eywa comes along and distracts the bad guys so he can hit the bomber and destroy it. And, at the end, it appears he's now the leader of the tribe?! I'm sure Eywa's thinking, "Oh great! Now I'm going to have to babysit this schmuck or he'll get everybody killed. Which dead ancestor had this bright idea!?"
If I were a present-day Marine, I'd be kind of offended at how stupid "recon gyrenes" are made out to be in this movie.
much like the Cavorite in A Deepness in the Sky.
And, in another show of useless pedantry, I have to note that Vinge named his material Cavorite as a homage to Wells who used the name in his 1901 book The First Men in the Moon
Constructed in secret, Cameron's undersea craft is really propelled by a Johnson outboard motor.
It seems the dive is complete http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james-cameron-mariana-trench-challenger-deepest-returns-science-sub/ and he is back on the surface. A little quicker than expected.
I know, I shouldn't have done it.
"One of the risks of a dive so deep is extreme water pressure. At 6.8 miles below the surface, the pressure is the equivalent of three SUVs sitting on your toe."
Could anyone help me to convert this to "Libraries of Congress per toe" units?
I hope that he's bringing enough ballast to counter his ego.
In any case, we often forget that the humans were employees of a corporation, not a sovereign military force. The soldiers were the equivalent of some Blackwater mercenaries. Regardless of how powerful corporations sometimes seem, it is government who still holds the leash, being jealous entities that hold the best goodies (like WMDs) for themselves.
That's not really accurate. You're looking at a fantastically expensive operation that is seeking to get an incredibly valuable substance and which is a very long way from home. There have been such things in the past on Earth (e.g., during the age of sail) though to a lesser extent; Earth just isn't as hostile as all that. The history of such expeditions is that they are not run as democracies, but rather as dictatorships with theoretical overview from back home, though typically as long as the goods are delivered the rulers at home don't care what happens. (Perhaps they should care, but they don't.)
If I remember the fluff right, that corporation is rather closely linked with governments in the solar system, but that doesn't really change my major point: in the space around Prometheus the corporation is the effective government for humans. The film documents the start of a revolt (and given the value proposition of the MacGuffin, I wouldn't expect the corporation to give up; the only thing that would have forced that would have been if they found a way to synthesize it in quantity within the solar system).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I have a BAD OMEN, like he's gonna get trapped down there and die and stuff and after one hundred years someone is gonna find his frozen body and revive him and hessgonna be facing a brand new world overrun by replicants and stuff and ....o shit wait ! I have been using Youtube too much !!!!!
Wow, maybe we might even be putting men back on the moon sometime!
From http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james-cameron-mariana-trench-challenger-deep-deepest-science-sub/ ..."is to jettison steel weights attached to the sub and shoot back to the surface."
Can't we go anywhere and follow the "Leave No Trace" ethos? What effect will those weights have on the local ecosystem?
- Jasen.
Watch, we get down there and the things 100 feet deep in oil....
Cameron is back: and there is nothing to be seen....
Maybe Cameron did it to escape the mess that is Julian Fellowes's version of the Titanic disaster?
(1) Mariana Trench
(2) South Pole after the big 1911 race
(3) The Moon looks like at least 50 years (40 already)
These guys are Indians used to living in harmony with nature because on this planet, the "gods" they pray to are an actual tangible entity that controls nature. They aren't going to know military strategy either, to them, a frontal assault might make sense. In nature, when males vie for dominance, they usually make a lot of noise and "frontally assault" the other male.
And so the way the story goes, the natives are about to get slaughtered when it turns out that the "gods" the natives worship are not an intangible entity at all (look up ghost dancers for the historical parallel) but in fact some kind of planetary defense system.
that with a head as swollen as his, he would keep rising to the surface
I understand what you're saying, but I don't buy it.
You'd be 100% correct if the Indians were planning this themselves. However, they had Jake "Taruk Maqto" Sully in charge--a guy who knows all about the bad guys and their capabilities. This is their leader. So why didn't he suggest that the ground forces, say, try to take out a few of those tanks from a perch up in the trees? I mean, he's the man chosen by Eywa herself to lead them. You think he'd suggest the strategy but the dumb ignorant savages would say, "Hey, screw you, we're gonna yell and scream and ride our horses right at 'em!"
I mean, I understand why they all had to be killed--so that the audience would see how evil these people are and so that Eywa could make her presence known. But I agree with Trudy when she said, "We're going up against gunships with bows and arrows." Even with some intelligent strategy, they were going to do little but delay the inevitable.
When did the final S fall off the Marianas Trench and associated Islands?
Even this site http://www.fws.gov/marianastrenchmarinemonument/ seems to lose its S part way through.
Not to mention the other question arising - What is the world is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service doing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
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"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard