by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles, our friend Garry
and I watched a DVD he’d brought over of a 2005 German documentary called Hubble:
15 Years of Discovery, an interesting if
somewhat disappointing and rather lumbering documentary about all the cool
stuff the Hubble space telescope has shown us about the universe. It was
directed by Lars Lindberg Christensen and written by him with Stuart Clark and
Stefania Varano, and it was a bit disappointing in that though it promised
actual images from the Hubble telescope, most of what was really shown was
computer animations and simulations of what merging galaxies and the like would
theoretically look like (though since their interactions would take place over
a period of billions of years this is really time-lapsed time-lapse photography!). I joked that
since the show described galaxies as encountering each other in space and their
gravitational fields pulling them together and merging them into
super-galaxies, some Ayn Rand Libertarian at a science-fiction convention would
probably cite that as yet more “evidence” that lassiez-faire capitalism is the one good, true and moral
economic system: “You see, even in outer space galaxies do mergers and acquisitions!” I had expected this
to be about 45 minutes (the usual length of an hour-long TV program less
commercials) but it was nearly an hour and a half and it did tend to drag.
