Wanderers
The most realistic “scifi” I’ve ever seen… WHY can’t we have movies like this?!?!?
(Make it full screen)
Wanderers – a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.
This is what I was going to say, but turns out Phil Plait already said it on his blog and much better than I could:
“Nearly every location depicted in this video is real. These aren’t just fanciful places made up in the head of a special-effects artist; those are worlds in our solar system that actually exist. And many were based on images taken through telescopes, or probes that have physically visited these distant locales.
Sunset on Mars. The weird ridge wrapped around Saturn’s moon Iapetus. The ice fields of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Even those cliff divers? Yup: That’s Uranus’ moon Miranda, with the highest cliffs known in the solar system.
Every time the scene changed in the video, my jaw dropped a little further and my brain soared to a new height. Nothing in there is impossible; no faster than light travel, no wormholes. Even the space elevator shown towering over Mars and the huge cylindrical rotating colony in space (did you notice the Red Sea in it?) are problems in engineering, not physics. We can build them.
And each is a dream of mine, a thing I see when I close my eyes. Cruising through the geysers of Enceladus, skimming over Jupiter’s clouds, floating in Saturn’s rings (and note the scale of the rings in the video; the chunks of ice and the height of the rings are correct).
Right now, we can only see these adventures, these possible futures, when we dream. I choked up several times watching the video, seeing these visions laid out.
But it was that last shot, the close-up of the woman watching the airship exploring the clouds over Saturn; that was what pierced home.
For now, we send our robots, our machines into space. We learn a lot that way, and there is no end to what we can discover. But this is a human endeavor, a human adventure, and there will come a time when the views of those worlds you see in this video will no longer be science fiction.
To some of us, someday, those worlds will be home.”
Probably no surprise to you that I also had an interest in science(fiction) when I was young. I read every Tom Swift book I could get my hands on in the late 50’s and early 60’s. The final shot of this video reminds me of the ending of one of the books. Tom Swift had an outer space adventure with an alien he had befriended from another planet. I can’t remember the story but in the end they had to return to their own planets. The final chapter described Tom sadly saying goodbye to his friend through a clear layer of protective
ice that surrounded his friends habitat. Hands overlaying hands on the ice. Tears in both their eyes. I was probably 9 or 10 years old at the time. I think that was the first time I ever cried from sadness. Friends departing forever. Friends from different worlds. Hopefully in the future, the goodness of our humanity will be the ones reaching out…..to make new friends from new worlds.
Awesome story! I think it’s almost inevitable that humans (or some future version of us) will, if not contact and communicate with other life forms, we’ll at least confirm their existence. That knowledge alone will drastically alter our future.
-As a bonus, I went looking for your Tom Swift story… Couldn’t exactly find it, but I found a cool site you might be interested in:
http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/
Here’s the full text of one of the books, “Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17985/17985-h/17985-h.htm