Arrival
If someone were to ask me what I thought of the movie Interstellar, I would enthusiastically speak of some of my favourite parts and tell them how much I had enjoyed the movie. I would give a few outstanding quotes and finish off with the spiritual meaning of those quotes. Recently, a friend asked me…
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Artificial Intelligence
“What does it mean to be alive? To think, to feel, to love and to envy? André Alexis explores all of this and more in the extraordinary Fifteen Dogs, an insightful and philosophical meditation on the nature of consciousness. It’s a novel filled with balancing acts: humour juxtaposed with savagery, solitude with the desperate need…
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We’re Just Here To . . .
Previously I have recommended the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar (here and here) and I will continue to sing its praises even while encouraging us to see it for all it is and look discerningly at its message. As the main character, Cooper, says his good-byes to his family and prepares to leave the galaxy, he…
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Exploring Life
New Horizons, Rosetta, Mars Curiosity, The International Space Station, Cassini, Hubble, and Mars Express, many of these missions, spacecraft, and satellites have become well-known to us over the last few years. NASA, ESA, and the international space community have accomplished magnificent feats of exploration and the news media has shown us the significance of these…
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Venetian Dreams
The popular press has, in recent years, written much about the planet Mars, but very little about Venus. This is to be expected since Mars is the planet of greatest focus for the major space programs of the world. Four planetary rovers have traversed various portions of the Martian surface,1 orbital spacecraft have mapped the…
Continue readingInterstellar 2014
Once again Christopher Nolan (writer and director) and Jonathan Nolan (writer) have succeeded in changing our perceptions with the visually stunning, Interstellar (2014). If you have not seen the movie, you may want to see it before you continue to read this blog which contains elements of the plot (in other words: spoiler alert). From…
Continue readingDeep Thoughts by Kilobot 142
The CBC news site had an article about a Harvard research group that built 1,024 tiny robots. The “Kilobots” have three tiny legs and are powered by a rechargeable battery. They express a “hive mentality” in which the researchers can send a signal to the group of robots and they will assemble into groupings of…
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Europa
The May 17 issue of Science News features a series of articles about Europa, the fourth largest moon of Jupiter. Europa is perhaps the most interesting moon in our solar system. At roughly two thirds the size of our own moon (with a mass of just 0.0080 times the mass of earth) it is still…
Continue readingApophatic Theology
I happened upon an article at BioLogos which directed me to an article at www.respectfulconversation.net which caused me to reflect on theology, poetry, and Children of God. By the time my brain had come in for a landing it had gone on quite a merry chase. The theme that runs through these perambulations is one…
Continue readingV’Ger Has Left The Building
One of the more philosophical Star Trek movies was Star Trek: The Motion Picture released in 1979. The plot line wrestled with what makes humans human; what makes a machine a machine; what makes a sentient being sentient; and what might happen when an alien race encounters a human-made probe. The story revolved around a…
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