The Moon looks rough. Pock marks, craters, what have you. Dull grey. Rough. Just from its looks I would say it’s something like 9-trillion years old. I’d be way, way  off. However, even scientist-wunderminds were wrong in their estimation of the Moon’s age for a long time. The pig is 200 million years younger than previously thought.

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Duncan Jones is one of my favorite up and coming directors. Moon is one of my favorite movies of the past five years, and Source Code was enjoyable. What I’m now sweating is what Jones has been calling his ‘homage to Blade Runner’, talking about it even before making Source Code.

Recently Jones met with WETA to discuss this third flick of his.

I’m damp.

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Yesterday, we spat about the possible confirmation of white holes. Well today True Believers, I have some more sizzlin theoretical heat for you. Scientists are speculating that the Moon may have as much water on it as Earth does. Let us don our Probably Senseless But Nonetheless Exciting Speculating Caps!

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Moon was fucking phenomenal. Source Code was good, fun, solid sci-fi. Duncan Jones is a current favorite of mine. Now he could be doing ‘The Wolverine’?

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There’s an early episode of Quantum Leap, it might even be the pilot, where Sam Beckett leaps into the past and, despite being warned not to by Al, calls his dad. In Source Code, director Duncan Jones delivers an obvious nod to this heavy Leap moment – even having Scott Bakula voice the dad of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Colter character. That great little moment in the film is just one of the reasons to give up an hour and half of your life and go see Source Code – despite it’s flawed final minutes.

Jones’ sophomore scifi effort (his first being 2009’s bitchin’ Moon) also features a male protagonist who should stop trusting “the man.” Colter is an army helicopter pilot who awakens to find himself on the Chicago commuter rail, sitting across from a woman he’s never met who keeps calling him Steve. Manic and confused, Colter tries to make of sense of his Twilight Zone plight…and that’s when the train blows up.

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Duncan Jones’ Moon is one of my favorite movies of the last five years. Jones dared to riff on Blade Runner and 2001 with gorgeous visuals and a haunting soundtrack by Clint Mansell. Max Tannone, the dude behind Jaydiohead and more took Mansell’s score and decided to rock out a hip-hop album to the riffs. The vocals are provided by Richard Rich.

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Thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we have the most detailed reliefs of the far side of the moon. Ever! Ever! Oh, technology. The Orbiter was capable of capturing the surface down to thirty-meters. G’damn. The trippy colors? False colors used to denote the various heights. The reds are the highest areas, the blues are the lowest.

Hit the jump for the psychedelic space porn.

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Every space junkie knows how fucking sexy Saturn’s rings are. But fuck, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know this. Saturn’s rings are the remnants of an exploded moon. What? Awesome.

io9:

Saturn’s rings are among the most iconic sights in the solar system, but where did they come from? Long ago, an icy moon was ripped apart by Saturn’s gravity, creating rings once a 100 times bigger than they are now.

100 times bigger? Good lord. how big are they now? I looked that shit up for us, and they’re 275,000 kilometers which is “is a little less than the distance between the Earth and Moon.” Fantastic.  

4.5 billion years ago, as the solar system was still in its primordial stages, Saturn was likely home to a number of large moons. These days, Titan is its only really big moon, as its lost siblings were likely pulled into Saturn by its gravity and destroyed. Most of the moons would have exploded within Saturn’s giant gaseous atmosphere, leaving no trace of their former existence. But the last moon to be pulled apart would have left a remarkable memorial behind: Saturn’s ring system.

[cont.]

But as huge and remarkable as Saturn’s rings are, an explosion of that size would create much, much bigger rings. A Titan-sized moon would probably create a ring system anywhere between 10 and 100 times bigger than what we see today. It’s hard to imagine just how awe-inspiring it would be to look upon Saturn all those billions of years ago with a sight like that waiting for us.

Over the eons, the rings would have steadily shrank, as parts of the ice fell back into Saturn and others drifted out into further orbits, where they would have clumped together and began to form new moons. Saturn’s inner moons all have masses and compositions that fit in with such an explanation very nicely, which is a good boost for the veracity of this new theory.

Goddamn fantastic.

One of my more recent obsessions is Moon. Well, uh, by recent? I guess I mean the entirety of 2010. Sam Rockwell’s performance continually rocks the socks off my little piggies. It doesn’t help that the visuals are gorgeous Space Odyssey Sex, and the soundtrack is by the inestimable Clint Mansell.

If you haven’t seen Moon, see it. If you have seen it? Seen it again.

[legend has it that Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word story to win a bar bet — For sale: baby shoes, never worn. leading to the author’s birthday, I’m going to offer a daily post of my own six-word story. readers are encouraged to respond with their own]

I watched the moon bleed out.

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