Is it possible to take out a hit on a channel? Last night I skipped through a few television channels and was briefly intrigued to see A Princess of Mars on SyFy! I had to watch a few minutes to discover that it was a heretical abomination which must be burned and its television creators hunted down and punished. I saw enough to notice that:

• The green Martians were made up with some cheesy lumpy appliance over their heads; their tusks wobbled like rubber every time they talked.
• The green Martians had only two arms. Two! They were also runts, far short of 12 feet tall. I tuned out before I could see how amputated the banths or calots were.
• Dejah Thoris was not naked. Nor red. And she was played by Traci Lords, who looked exhausted beyond her years.
• The dialogue was hokey beyond belief…aw, OK. They get a pass on that. That was true to the book.

The horror. My father was a major fan of Burroughs’ works, and I grew up on Tarzan and John Carter. I cannot believe the botch SyFy made of the story, ripping all the romance and exotic weirdness out of it.

It’s also sad because there are rumors of a big budget version in the works; let’s hope this quickie lump of SyFy emesis does not chill the market for it.

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Just to add to the sadness, while looking for a few of the classic images of Burroughs’ Barsoom, I learned that Frank Frazetta died just last month. Noooo!

I was catching up on Narbonic this morning, and she linked to an animated Little Nemo cartoon by Winsor McCay — from 1911. I was impressed. We all need a little hundred-year-old psychedelia to start the morning.

McCay was a pioneer of animation — you might also enjoy the famous Gertie the Dinosaur, or even the rather jingoistic Sinking of the Lusitania. They’re all a bit quaint and slow-moving by modern standards, but then again, you have to appreciate that each frame was hand drawn and hand colored by McCay himself — it took him a year to make a 5-minute cartoon.

I am reminded that today is also the 30th anniversary of Ian Curtis’s death…so I think we need a little Joy Division.

It looks like there is a theme going around the science blogosphere, triggered by a few remarks from Stephen Hawking.

Stephen Hawking says we should avoid any aliens—they’ll destroy us.

Sean Carroll agrees, but think it’s highly unlikely.

Phil Plait disagrees that aliens will destroy us, also thinks it is unlikely anyway, but also thinks it more likely we’d be demolished by von Neumann replicators without seeing the aliens at all.

Ethan Siegel is optimistic and wants to run out waving his arms for attention. He scares me the most.

As the token biologist, I’ll differ from all of them. If I were in charge of humanity’s expansion into the universe, and if light-speed is the absolute limit it seems to be, I’d be sending out robot probes all right…all loaded with the biological seeds to impose human-compatible biospheres on any remotely human-compatible geospheres it encountered. It would bombard atmospheres with bacteria, sow the planet with algae, fungi, and lichens, and work its way up to grasses and trees and rodents and birds. And then it would start unspooling the stored genetic information of millions of humans into infants that would be raised onboard, educated by machines, and eventually transported onto the now hospitable planet surface to build a new technological civilization. Communication between planets would be limited and slow, and all the planning would be long-term — thousands to tens of thousands of years — so this wouldn’t be so much the growth of a human empire, but an organic expansion.

I’d expect that any intelligent aliens aspiring to expand would be doing the same thing. There would be variants: maybe Phil Plait is right, and advanced alien civilization will discard biology and advance in machine mode; it may also turn out that it is easier to modify biology than planets, so my bioprobes will produce radically gene-engineered humans who don’t look much like us anymore in order to more rapidly take over new worlds.

Anyway, my bet would be on interplanetary biowarfare, the slow infiltration of engineered organisms to change environments for alien compatibility. The only way we’d be able to survive is to fight them on the same ground. Don’t expect alien tripods with lasers, watch out for alien viruses and bacteria turning the soil and atmosphere poisonous or unsupportive. I’d also side with the people who are arguing we ought to worry about aliens, if they exist — if they’re so advanced over us that they can travel here, they aren’t going to be as interested in our primitive conversations as they are in our real estate.

I also think the possibility of that happening to us is unlikely. Intelligent life with grand schemes of interstellar expansion don’t seem to be evident out there, or maybe there are interesting obstacles that thwart such growth that we haven’t quite discovered yet.

By the way, I also caught an episode of Hawking’s Into the Universe on the Discovery Channel, the one on alien biology. I have to say I thought it was just awful, with no useful content and was merely a contrived excuse for the Discovery Channel to trot out more cgi of imagined weird animals. Biology is definitely not Hawking’s strength. Maybe his other episodes on time travel and cosmology will be more thoughtful and interesting.

One of the most annoying features of South Park is the creators’ hypocrisy. They’re so infatuated with tearing down that they never bother to build up. Trey Parker has an odd comment in an interview:

“All the religions are super funny to me,” Parker said. “The story of Jesus makes no sense to me. God sent his only son. Why could God only have one son and why would he have to die? It’s just bad writing, really. And it’s really terrible in about the second act.”

But Parker says atheism is more ludicrous to him than anything else.

“Out of all the ridiculous religion stories — which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous — the silliest one I’ve ever heard is, ‘Yeah, there’s this big, giant universe and it’s expanding and it’s all going to collapse on itself and we’re all just here, just ‘cuz. Just ‘cuz. That to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever,” he says.

Nah, he doesn’t even get the physics right. We’re here; we have the observations and measurements and experiments to show how we got here; it just is, no because about it.

But here’s the cowardly part of his statement: he implies he’s not a Christian, he implies he’s not an atheist — neither of which are particularly interesting comments — but nowhere does he say where he thinks we came from. You know why, and he knows why: he’s made a profession out of tearing down and ridiculing ideas (no problem there, it’s often a good thing to do), and he is well aware that if he actually gave even tentative support to some idea, not only would others reciprocate and rip into it with ridicule, but he’d be expected to do a show where he laughs at it himself. Of course, it may well be that he accepts the physical explanation of the universe — or even the Christian story, for that matter — but still thinks it is ridiculous because that is his only response to everything.

I think his show is often funny, and it does sometimes do a good job of satirizing even stuff I like (and often does a bad job, but heck, 95% of everything is crap), but the depressing pattern it constantly exhibits is that it is so damned hollow.

Oh, and I think the recent Mohammed episode falls into the 95%, and I really don’t believe their claim that the network forced them to censor it — I find it hard to believe anything they say, and think it’s just Parker and Stone gaming their audience some more. Just ‘cuz that’s what they do.