Matinee Science Playlist, Part 6: ‘Silent Running’

going to be doing a movie episode. That's right. We've been trying to do one of these a month just because there's so many, so many films we love, and so many films that either have wonderful tie ins to scientific and cultural topics that we've discussed on the show, um or you know, they allow us to discuss new things and new angles. It wouldn't necessarily necessitate an entire episode on their own. Alright, So what's on the docket today, Well, this month we're looking at really one of my I

have to say, it's one of my favorite films. Uh, you know, in terms of thinking about films you saw at a definite point in your life that had an impact on your your your outlook. Uh. And the film is ninety two is Silent Running. I saw it for the first time this weekend. Yeah, I've never seen it before. I'd seen like stills from it. I think I've seen stills of the robots because it's a very robot heavy film, despite being one obsessed with nature and environmental themes of

the robots getting awful lot of screen time they do. Yeah, I think if you're having trouble picturing the film, if we just mentioned like Judesic Gnomes in space with with forests and them Bruce Dern and then three domain diminutive robots that kind of shamble around, that's that's silent running in a nutshell. Now. This was directed by Douglas Trumbull, right,

who was like a visual effects guy for many years. Yeah. Yeah, he he provided special photographic effects for such classic sci fi films as two thousand and one of Space Odyssey, one of the best close encounters of the third kind, Star Trek, the motion picture Blade Runner, and then later on The Tree of Life. Uh. And then it was in the family too, because his father was a special effects pioneer who worked on ninety nine The Whiz of Oz.

You can really feel the spirit of the sixties in this movie from seventy two, but maybe you can also feel the despair of the seventies, and it is both of those spirits come crashing together in Silent Running. Yeah. I thought about I've been thinking about this a lot recently, in part because we're researching episodes about psychedelics and about psychedelic research, and then the the decades in which actual

medical research regarding psychedelics just completely languished. And it always makes me think of Hunter S. Thompson's commentary about the the the wave of the of the nineteen sixties crashing and falling back. Uh and and once again, I think you know that ties into to this film as well. Before we continue, though, let's let's have just a quick audio sample from the original trailer for Silent Running, just to remind everybody a little bit about what we're talking

about here. A space convoy on a strange voyage carrying a rare cargo. The forests, the plants, the growing things doomed to extinction on Earth. We have count received orders to abandon that nupler, destruct all the forests, and returned our ships to commercial So we're going you blow up discourse. Thank you now more. Volga Silent Running characlysm in outer space, every moment bringing its own danger as man explores the

mysteries of an unknown and limitless universe. Valiport volliport, little wrong, You will be out, you're accelerating. I got a premature, so I think we have a taste in that that trailer.

This is a very ranty film, oh man. A lot of the movie also, and besides the scenes with robots just kind of hanging out and not really executing much uh much having to do with furtherance of the plot, just moving around and doing things, there's also a lot of Bruce Dern chastising the camera and giving sermons to

other characters about their lack of appreciation for nature. Yeah, so it's it's a very it's a very weird movie in that regard, and you know that, thinking of you talked about how you watched it for the first time just the other day. I watched it for the first time, probably like in a Sunday afternoon on cable TV in

the nineties when I was like in junior high. I guess, uh and and you know air on a any just like matinee showing of it, and I just like turned over to it and was just sucked in by this film that doesn't have much in the way of action. There's there are a few key action scenes, but it is not an action film. It is a it is an environmental science fiction film. I mean I'd also say it's not even really a very plot heavy film. There's basically a situation and that situation comes about and then

that's about it. I mean, the huge swaths of the runtime are just characters kind of hanging out. Yeah, and uh, it benefits I think from three major factors. You know, if we're just sort of pull these out and then realized it's complicated when you try and like pull the key elements out of a picture when everything needs to essentially be a cohesive hole. And then I think in this picture is but you have Bruce Dern's performance, which is fabulous. I mean, Bruce Dern is was and is

an acting treasure. I mean, often relegated to the villain rolls for sure, but capable of much more. And I think we see, uh, we see a little bit of that in this film. And then the other key aspects of this are they the sets look fabulous, Um, the models look fabulous, The effects are all wonderful. Uh, and you have you have some wonderful music in the film too.

So again, this this film is a product of the late nineteen sixties spilling over into the early nineteen seventies, uh, and and it is it's for several reasons for stars. The studio apparently decided to give more first time directors a shot after the success of nineteen sixty nine is Easy Rider, which is directed by Dennis Hopper, said Dennis Hopper's first director red directorial feature and uh. In anyway, the films to come in the wake of that included

Silent Running. Also the music, so Joan Bayaz uh submitted like to two songs for this film, Silent Running and Rejoice in the Sun, both of which are prominently featured. And for anyone not familiar with Joan Bayazz, first of all, go look up Joan Bayazz and and these songs in particular are currently on streaming services. But she was a major social and political musical force of the nineteen sixties

and beyond playing at the original Woodstock. And she's always advocated civil rights, environmentalism, and human rights including l g P, d q I A plus rights. Um. So I mean, all these elements I think really give it a feel that that sets it apart from everything else. Like so, if you were watching looking around for any kind of science fiction on TV in the in the late nineties like this stood out. This was a different type of

space and robots film. It's from another dimension. I mean, it's got it really does have this feeling of the sixties and seventies culture coming together. But also it's a very weird combination of elements. It's got these robots, but the environmental themes. It's got these great special effects and like practical miniature effects, you know, which watching movies like this really just makes me simmer with rage at the c g I age. You know, I'm so sick of

all the c g I space ships. I wish they'd bring back the miniature models and you know in the backdrops and the painted sets and everything. Oh yeah, I mean yeah, they were so good, and those skills still exist. Uh, they're just not being employed for the most part with motion pictures. Yeah, but then you've got that, and so those like sci fi special effects are clashing with just really in your face Joan Baya's musical numbers. Uh. It's it's a strange, unique kind of movie. I don't I

can't think of another thing I've seen like it. So let's talk to just a little bit about the plot, just to remind everybody who's seen it before and refresh everyone else. We're gonna I guess I think we're gonna avoid any real spoilers here in terms of the end of the film. But you know, if you want to go into the film spoiler free, pause this, uh this podcast, go watch it and then come back. So the basic synopsis,

it's the future. The planet Earth is essentially dying. A great dying has ravage botanical life on our planet, and the remaining shreds of botanical life and some animal life now thrive solely within a series of geodesic domes that are affixed to a spaceship called the Valley Forge, and the Valley Forges orbiting just outside the orbit of Saturn,

and here a four person crew tends to things. That includes botanist Freeman Lowell, who's our our main character, played by Bruce Den, and three helper robots named Huey, Dewey and Louie Well. Originally, no, originally they have robot names. They're called like Drone number one, that's Drone number two, and then Bruce Den, in a in a moment of sort of magical thinking, names them. And it said that moment that they seem to acquire personalities that they don't

seem to have had before. Yeah, the end this occurs later when it's when it's just a durn. So how does it just become a situation of only Bruce Den's character in Three Robots. Well, basically, one day an order comes down, uh that all the forest have to be jettisoned and detonated with new clear ball with nuclear weapons. Yes, and then the and the rest of the crew just take this and stride. They're like, all right, it's time to go home. Time to ditch these uh these forests

and head back. But Lowell is very upset by this and finally breaks and betrays his fellow crew members to save one of the save the Last Forest pod and uh he ends up faking a malfunction and then takes off through Saturn's rings with the World's Last forest and uh. You know what follows is a story of of survival loneliness, thus the naming of the robots and the bonding with

the robots. But then also you know this this environmental message. Yeah, and it's clear that the orientation of the film is a pro environmentalist one, though it's not quite clear exactly how much we're supposed to agree with everything Durn says. I mean, Durn's character gives these monologues where he excoriates his crew members for being satisfied with this horrible synthetic existence that they're living where you know, they only eat this pre package freeze dried junk, that that they got

his rations from Earth. Whereas he picks you know, living fruits and vegetables from the forest, he picks cantle opes and he sits there eating cantle open and just like attacking them for putting that garbage in their mouths uh, and and talking about how they don't care about the trees and they don't care about the forest, and they really they don't seem to care. They're just not bothered by the fact that Earth doesn't have any forests anymore.

They just want to get home, and seemingly, uh, you are led to believe that they would be happy with the life of sort of bland synthetic consumer existence and entirely artificial environments with no exposure to plants their animals. So in a sense, it's it's like Bruce Tern's character is the spirit of the nineteen sixties speaking to these denizens of the nineteen seventies and saying like how can how can you do this? Like how can you abandon

these principles? Um? And uh? And in doing so? Yeah, Bruce Tern's character, his performance is very abrasive at times. You know, he comes off as a real curmudgeon. Uh. And uh, you know they're also an idealist and it's it is kind of an interesting experience experiment to sort of take that apart and figure out, well, what's why is he so abrasive? He is, he's supposed to be so abrasive. How are we supposed to feel about him? Um? Is part of this just what happens when you cast

a character actor like Bruce Dern in this role. Bruce Dern, who had just come off this was just on the heels of the film The Cowboys, in which he killed John Wayne's character by shooting him in the back. Yeah. I mean it's like the ultimate dishonorable scumbag move in the Western genre. Yeah, except maybe cheating by drinking clean water. Yeah.

He played a real real villain in that picture. Uh. And interestingly enough, I was looking around at reviews from when this came out, and Dern's casting is it seems to be a divisive aspect of the film, so some critics thought he was great. Like critics who maybe were a little lukewarm on other aspects of the film were like, well, Bruce Dern's terrific and though while others said, hey, it's

really difficult to empathize with this character. Uh, and that ultimately, perhaps during his performance ends up hurting the message of the film. I don't. I don't think I would go that far. But you know, obviously he's an actor who already had a career based on playing at times dislikable characters and uh, and he's still going strong in that

department today at age a D three. I wonder what the equivalent of this casting would be today, Like, who's somebody that you would cast in this role where they wouldn't be like this divine messenger of environmental hope but would come off maybe a bit abrace it. I would like to see a movie that's got an environmental conservation message where the champion of the environment is Michael Ironside, and that's even more difficult to picture. You can't destroy

these forests. Ironside is clearly an actor that was made to play the sort of character who gets who gets Jettis and a board and the forest and exploded, not so much the savior of the of the Pods. But they're different types of villain actors, right, I mean, I feel like Michael Ironside is the classic heavy He's the hinchman, the tough guy, the tough bad guy. Bruce Dearn is more kind of the scumbag. Yeah he played. Yeah, he did play a lot of like like sniveling scumbag characters

in his in his life, in his life. So yeah, this is something that I still don't have a firm answer for, like how how I feel about his performance. But I feel like one of the reasons I connected with the film so much as a kid is that like, here's this guy who he is a loner, you know, and and like here I am, you know, as a junior high kid who's you know, hasn't seems to have nothing in common with anybody else in my school, and and you know, I can, I can connect with him

on some level. And his only friends their robots. I would love to have had robots as friends, you know, at the time, and and so you know that kind of that that spoke to me as well, and of course, he's an idealist. He's trying to he's doing this thing that is that that he sees as very heroic, and I feel like everybody at that age especially connects with that,

and uh yeah. And then as as as you grow older, I think a role like this you keep coming back to, and maybe you end up being more forgiving of of of the character's faults because you're like, you agree with the basic idea. Maybe you don't agree with his use of murder, right, but still you're you you agree with his his basic ideology here that you know, the forests are worth saying, that nature is worth saying, that that

connection is is vital and human. Well, it really does ask you to think about something that that becomes more profound the more you think about it. What is the

inherent value of nature? And this is something we'll come back to as we discuss more about the movie later on in the episode, But we often today think about environmental conservation in terms of the material benefits to humans provided by the by environmental conservation, you you don't want to destroy natural habitats, you don't want to deforce the landscape and all that kind of stuff, because it does lots of bad things when you know they're they're cascading

negative effects throughout the world when you do that. Um. But there there's also a deeper questions, like what if there was just one forest left and a dome out in space and it wouldn't affect anybody on Earth, whether or not that dome state alive, would you fight to save that forest? Does the forest have value in itself? Anyway? We can return to that. So I thought maybe we should explore the sort of pure scientific question of growing plants in space. Could you grow a forest in space

inside the geodesic dome on a space ship? If so, how would you do it? And do scientists who think about space colonization take this idea seriously? What kind of challenges do they expect? So, just because it's a recent example that I read about, I want to talk for a minute about the the Chinese moon lander. I hope I want to pronounce this right. I think it's the chung U for yes, this is named for the goddess who who resides on the moon, uh, the the wife

of the great Archer. Right. So, the the archer Ye shoots down the nine surplus sons, leaving just the one son. As a result, he gets the elixir of immortality and his wife, Chunga is I think there are different versions of the story about how she drinks it, but she ends up drinking it and then goes to the Moon to live there. Um And so of course that's that's a good name for a lunar lander, right, And there have been four of these, now, these these four different

lunar missions from the Chinese Space Program. This is the fourth in the series, and in January of twenty nineteen, the Changa four lander set down on the far side of the Moon, at the side that always faces away from the Earth, of course, because the Moon is tidally locked. So it landed in this massive impact basin on the far side of the Moon called the South Pole Aitken Basin,

specifically within a crater called Von Carmen. And one of the experiments brought along on the Chongo four mission was a biological payload of cotton seeds inside a tiny biosphere which was supplied with soil, water, a small contained atmosphere chamber, and a heater, and after the spacecraft landed, the seeds hatched, and the Chinese Space Program even published a little photo from the inside of the chamber with green sprouts on the far side of the moon. And it's pretty cool.

I've got a picture here for you to look at, Robert. It looks like a little jungle of spinach underneath the plastic net. Yeah, and then the plastic net kind of looks like one of the domes from the from Silent Running Clear Bias. But of course it was not to be. It would not last very long. The heater in the little biosphere did not hold out, and so when the night set in on the far side of the moon.

Of course, the moon has you know, longer days and night cycles because of its tidal locking with the Earth. When the nights set in on the far side of the moon, local temperatures reached about negative fifty two degrees celsius from negative sixty two degrees fahrenheit, and the cotton sprouts froze and died about a week after or the

experiment began. And furthermore, the Chinese media reported that the cotton seeds were not the only species within the biosphere which also contained rape seed potato A rabbidopsis, which is a brassica plant that is often deployed in space missions and uh experiments with growing plants beyond Earth, as well as fruit flies and yeast, and apparently nothing except the cotton registered any growth. So it can be hard to grow life in space. And and this was in a

sealed container on the relatively nearby Moon. Like, wouldn't the problem get even harder if you're talking about trying to grow a whole ecosystem, an entire forest in a ship in deep space. It seems like an almost impossible problem, right right, Yeah. And of course in silent running like we begin with the forest being situated further away from the planet, and then developments in the plot just lead

it to greater distances exactly. So the Chung of four experiment was by no means the first attempt to grow plants beyond Earth. I think it was the first attempt to grow them on the Moon. There have been many experiments over the decades with growing plants in space. Lots of early space missions involved simply carrying seeds into space and then bringing them back to Earth to see if

they would grow normally. I think there was concern about how primarily radiation, but perhaps other space conditions, maybe micro gravity and so forth, how these would affect the seeds, you know, would they grow normally if you just brought them back and planted them. And in general, the seeds taken into space seem completely unaffected. You bring them home and they're fine. In fact, all throughout the United States

you can visit so called moon trees. These are trees planted in public spaces from seeds that were taken into orbit around the Moon by the Apollo fourteen command module, and they grew fine. You can actually like look up lists of these and see if you can visit a moon tree near you. But the first plants actually grown from seeds in space were of the species A rabbit Opsis thaliana, which is one of the same plants that Chinese lander brought this year, but which did not sprout.

And this was aboard the Russian space station the Salute in nineteen two, and since then lots of plant experiments have been conducted, and astronauts regularly experiment with cultivating plants on the I S S. So I guess the question is what have we learned from all these experiments? What's it like to grow plants in space? So a few takeaways as noted by Dr Anna Lisa Paul, an investigator on the Advanced Plant Experiment or APEX experiment UH number one.

Of course, seeds taken into space and then return to Earth consistently grow and don't show any changes. But if you let the seeds germinate in space, there are differences in how they grow. At first, we expected, like the trophic patterns, that the growth patterns in plant development to be different because of gravity. Right, you would think that the well gravity pulls the roots down and that's how they know to grow downward. But actually that's not entirely

what we find. Some experiments have found that that some plant are extremely sensitive to even very very tiny amounts of gravity and can detect very very weak gravitational fields and be manipulated by them. But also plants tend to just grow toward light, with their roots generally growing in the opposite direction from the light, but with individual patterns determined by their genes. Also, the directionality of light is very important and determining growth patterns for plants in space.

If there's a clear light source from one direction, like the sun would be on Earth, the plants tend to grow toward that. But if the light sources diffuse, like the sort of lighting the you know, the soft lighting you would get in a closed room. Then their growth patterns are often very different and can be altered from

what you would normally see on Earth. Now, despite the fact that we've discovered that healthy plants can grow in the absence of gravity, the lack of gravity and a space station environment can still present a lot of problems for growing plants. If you just stop and think about it for a second, you can probably imagine what some

of them are. Like. Think about this. You couldn't have a regular forest with a soil floor in micro gravity because the soil would float off everywhere, the water wouldn't sink into the soil when it was applied correctly. You'd have to have some kind of like you know, controlled surface or like sometimes when astronauts grow plants on the I s s, they grow them out of these sort of packets of soil that it's almost like a package. You see this that's closed, but it's got something inside

of It's like cat litter that's got fertilizer in it. Um. So you could maybe do something like that, but you couldn't have a totally natural forest type environment in the absence of gravity. So in order to have something like depicted in Silent Running. You would absolutely have to have artificial gravity, and you know from our previous discussions no magic fixes allowed here. Right as far as we know now,

you would have to simulate gravity through acceleration. And you can go back to our artificial gravity episode for more on how that might work. But I'll just say, short story, your best bet would probably seem to be some kind of huge rotating cylinder with the forests inside it. On the other hand, that does present additional problems for energy. Right.

Forests need sunlight to grow, and if you can't simply angle them towards the sun, because you know they'd have to be on the inside of the cylinder to benefit from the effects of gravity, then you need an appropriate artificial light source, or at least some sort of complex reflective system like something that would that would would give

them the cost of sunlight they need. Right. However, if you don't care about simulating a full natural environment with a whole equal ecosystem and a soil floor and all that, your options really do expand to include hydroponic containers and packet contained soil beds with growth via exposure to artificial grow lights and all that, but then again, also some of the benefits might be reduced by some of those limitations.

And this is useful for a lot of reasons. Researching plants in space is not just sort of a lark. I mean, it's useful for one thing, because knowledge about how plants growing space can actually be useful for agriculture back on Earth. You can isolate variables in space that you can't isolate on Earth. But it's also useful for long term space mission planning because, as Silent Running argues,

we really can't live without plants. Like any truly long term space colonization efforts, if they're ever going to be realized there, it's it's gonna be really hard to do them entirely in metal boxes with prepacked rations. Those things eventually expire. Rehydratable or radiated or thermostabilized. Shrimp cocktail is only going to take them so far. At the very least. Long term astronauts or Mars colonists need to be able

to grow their own food. And that's just food. That's not even talking about uh, you know, holy ecosystems, in the environmental benefits they bring beyond growing crops. This is just about what potatoes am I going to eat tonight? Uh? And I was reading a twenty nineteen article by Marina Corrin in The atlant Antic. Uh And I don't think I knew this fact before. Astronauts actually have been allowed

to eat plants that they grew on space station. Apparently the Russian cosmonauts have been eating stuff on space stations for a long time, since around two thousand three. I think they've been allowed to eat half the crops they grew in their experiments, including early crops of a type of lettuce called missouna, which is I think a type of Japanese mustard greens. They've been allowed to eat peas they grew there. I think they tried to grow tomatoes but the crop failed. Um and and there have been

others since then. In twenty fifteen, I believe it was yeah, yeah, to read from Marina's article quote, astronauts have already made a space salad. In astronauts on the space station were allowed to try the leaves of a red romaine lettuce that was cultivated in NASA's first fresh food growth chamber. They added a little balsamic dressing and took a bite. That's awesome. The NASA astronaut KELLN Lyndagrin said, then tastes good. Uh, And I love red romaine. It's my favorite for salads

at home. So that's a good choice there. Yeah. Well, a lot of the foods that we we gravitate towards, like the artificial ones. Uh. You know, the argument is that, like a potato chip is so satisfying because you know, it's fatty, it's salty and all this, but it also has a Christmas to it, as if we have discovered in the potato chip bag a crisp vegetable like lettuce

that is ready for our consumption. Well, one of the things when you look up these pictures of like the lettuce screens growing on the I S s, they look like really high quality to me. Maybe maybe I'm just hungry while I'm looking at the picture or something, but I'm like, yeah, I want to eat that. They don't look like, you know, limp and sad produce, the kind of limp and sad produce you sometimes find at the

grocery store when it's already been picked over. Uh. They look like really good, like the best stuff you could find in a really good farmer's market. Now, in mentioning the I want to go back to gravity for just a second, because I want to make it clear that what we see in silent running what is depicted there. There's no attempt to depict any kind of rotation or acceleration basis. It's just magic gravity. And ultimately, in science fiction we're off. We were often very forgiving of that.

I mean, ultimately sure, this picture is based in the sort of the more the metaphorical scenario here of here is a portion of the world's dead forests sustained within an artificial environment. They're just kind of attached to the sides of the valley forge. Yeah, in many ways, a science fiction film can, even a good one, can be kind of like a science experiment. You know, they isolate variables that they're not always gonna spend a lot of

time getting every detail accurate. They're more like focusing on some key themes and they want you to contemplate a scenario to you know, have you see what you think about it? Uh, sci fi films, I think are often like they're they're like the thought experiments that people do in philosophy classes. You know, when when you ask about the philosophy class like, wait, why was Donald Davidson walking in the swamp when he got turned into the you know,

by the lightning strike turned into the swampman. Well, that detail is not important. Just ignore that. And I think the gravity and silent running is kind of like that. It's just like a detail that they don't want to be bothered with. Uh they you know, some some audiences do get bothered by those things. Even so, and we're gonna bring up Carl Sagan in a minute, and that will be uh, that'll be a point that sticks with him,

I think. But anyway to sum up about growing plants in space, so I would say that summary is learning how to grow plants in space is very important for the future of space travel and uh and even just for knowledge that we can apply in the present day on Earth. Plants do seem to grow just fine in microgravity conditions, but they sometimes need a lot of special

care because of those conditions. Uh, special growing habitats, plenty of the right kind of artificial light, special applications of water and nutrients, atmospheric management because of course they need access to c O two to grow their bodies. Uh. And never forget you know that this is sort of a tangent, but you when you breathe out the you two in your breath is later taken in by a plant and made into leaves and wood plants are made of your breath. And we'll get back to that a

little later as well. But also, you know, growing entire ecosystems that simulate Earth ecosystems, like a full forest. It's not I would say, I don't know of any facts that make it impossible in principle, but you would encounter a lot more challenges related to energy and gravity and

environmental chemistry and the atmosphere and all that. And finally, just to point out, a lot of the future of extraterrestrial botany research is probably going to be focused on how to grow plants on Mars given those specific local conditions, rather than in microgravity. Because if you're going to Mars and you want to grow plants there, you can just

like freeze seeds and take them with you. You don't have to be growing plants all the way there, right, And uh, you know, based on you know, some of the recent discussions that I've I've been been been privy to regarding like traveling to Mars, like it's we we could pack enough. I mean, it's kind of a you know, that's a there's a lot of thought that goes into exactly how much you would need to bring and then how you're going to sustain yourself when you when you

when once you get there. But the trip to Mars is the sort of trip in which we yes, you could surround yourself with the plant, with the food and water that you would need, and actually surrounding yourself with the food and water would help protect you from potentially protect you from radiation. That's right, a hazard suit made out of sandwiches, yeah, made out of shrimp cocktail essentially, Yeah, or made out of water, I guess. And and the food's got a lot of water and yeah, yeah, but

basically have food, food and water is protecting you. So don't eat too much of it, don't. All right, we should take a quick break and then we come back. We'll we'll talk about Carl Sagan in Silent, Silent Running. Alright, we're back. Yeah. So one of the benefits of this being a major science fiction film that came out in the early nineteen seventies is that Carl Sagan around to

see it himself and to comment on it. Yeah, and he he mentions it in an article that was published in The New York Times on May nineteen seventy eight called growing Up with Science Fiction. Now, this article isn't focused on Silent Running, but he devotes a paragraph to it in the article, and more generally he talks about, uh, science fiction. And it's a great article, I think. Yeah.

It's collected in Broca's Brain, Reflections on the Romance of Science, which was published in nineteen seventy nine, still very very available. I picked up a copy of this in the last couple of years and read it. The whole book is an excellent read. And yeah, this particular chapter, this particular paper discuss his works that he both admires and criticizes.

And yeah, it's not only a great read in and of itself, but I would say it's also a wonderful place to get some fresh reading ideas, fresh in terms that they haven't been updated since the late nineteen seventies. But still he mentions a number of important works of

science fiction. Uh, you know, stuff that he grew up on as a kid, stuff that he learned about later, stuff that he thinks what he thought was really solid, and stuff that you know, he had other, you know, decent things to say about it, like I I have at times thought what we really need like a Sagan sci fi book club in which we just used this particular um chapter in the book as a guideline. Uh and just read everything that Sagan's discussing here, including the

stuff that he was critical off. He recommends Doon by the way there uh so say yeah. Sagan tells the story of how he fell in love with science fiction at the age of ten, and how his adolescent adoration for science fiction actually in the end led him to

real science. Like he tells stories of how there were these sci fi stories with unanswered questions and inconsistencies that he wanted resolved because they were intriguing, and found real science is basically is a way to get to the bottom of them, to get real answers to the questions posed by science fiction. But he also talks about his frustration with science fiction stories where characters don't know scientific facts that it makes no sense for them to be

unaware of. And one example he gives his silent running so yeah and to to to drive home what he's talking about here, though the lower character in Silent Running played by Bruce Dern is supposed to be a botanist and an ecologist. Yes he's Yeah, so he's a space botanist. He's space low Ax. Uh. I don't know if anybody's

called him that. Space low Axtleax and Dr Seuss Lotleax is also you know, he speaks for the trees in the environment and is perceived as being abrasive and obnoxious and in the way of of you know, of the the advancement of the corporate world. Right. Uh so, So Dern is a botanist who takes these plants out and he's flying them out into deep space farther and farther away from the sun. Uh, And the forests are dying and he doesn't know why, and he's trying to figure

it out. And I guess this is a semi spoiler, but it's a moving from the seventies. Eventually it's revealed that, oh, the problem was they need sunlight and they weren't getting enough sunlight because he, I guess, flew them too far away from the sun. Right. Even forgiving the character a little bit and thinking, well, he's recovering from an injury, he's super lonely and maybe you know, there's some mental health issues that are arising out of that, and perhaps

he's being bombarded with with cosmic rays. Still, that's a big one to miss as a botanist. Yeah, I would say so, and and uh Sagan thinks that too. So. Quote in Douglas Trumbull's technically proficient science fiction film Silent Running, the trees are dying in vast space born closed ecological systems on the way to Saturn. After weeks of painstaking study and agonizing searches through botany texts, the solution is

found plants. It turns out needs sunlight. Trumbull's characters are able to build interplanetary cities, but have forgotten the inverse square law, and that refers to the fact of radiation becoming exponentially we acre as he gets farther away from the source um and that has to do with the three dimensional nature of space. But also, he continues, I was willing to overlook the portrayal of the rings of

Saturn as pastel colored gases, but not this. Uh So, he's really bothered by the fact that that the Dern's character would not have been aware of this. It just he can buy a lot, but he can't buy that,

you know. And I suspect that I was reading about the origins of the story for Silent Running, and I think part of this might have to do with the fact that the the the original story like starting off early versions of the screenplay apparently didn't have the protagonist as a botanist, and he he basically like broke free and ran off with the forest, not because he cared about the forest, but because he just want to be left alone. He didn't want to go back to Earth,

which doesn't sound nearly as interesting. But I wonder if this is a case where you know, the story evolves, and as it evolves, it doesn't you know, completely um removed, or it creates some problems that might not have been there originally, such as this, like you have to have this character run away from the run further away from the Sun and then encounter problems, but it's complicated by

the fact that now you've made him a botanist. I mean, I would think that by the time you're at the orbit of Saturn, you're already sufficiently far away from the Sun for those uh, those solar rays to really not be helping your your forests like they should. So it's from Sagan especially, this is a this is a solid criticism of the film. I do also think it's always interesting just as a little thing about each individual person's personality. What's the breaking point for you in a suspension of

disbelief scenario. You're you're engaging with fictional narrative and you're okay with this, but not with that, And everybody's got those little things that they're not okay with. What is it about about the character lacking this important piece of knowledge that's the breaking point for Sagan, whereas these other things,

the fake artificial gravity and all that aren't. Yeah, I mean part of it is like there are certain things that are just so universally broken in our science fiction that we just don't think about it, Like they're being sound in space, like just open sound in space, or or or certainly the magical gravity scenario like those that's just all over the place and you just you just come to expect it um. But with this, yeah, maybe it's just a part of it just being more crude

central to the plot. Now, certainly this is not something I thought about when I watched it in junior high and uh and and and I'm very forgiving of the film I think overall, but in retrospect it does seem like a major blunder. Just a couple other notes from Sagan's article, just because I thought they were interesting and I wanted to mention them. One fact he points out is that science fiction authors are often quicker to adapt

to new scientific knowledge than supposedly true accounts of space are. Uh. I just want to read a quote here. It is satisfyingly rare to find a science fiction story written today that posits algae farms on the surface of Venus. Incidentally, the UFO contact mythologizers are slower to change, and we can still find accounts of flying saucers from a Venus which is populated by beautiful human beings in long white

robes inhabiting a kind of Cytherian garden of Eden. The nine degree fahrenheit temperatures of Venus give us one way of checking such stories. I do think that's kind of interesting. People intentionally weaving clearly fake narratives that are meant to be fiction are often quicker to adapt to new information about the planets and stuff than people trying to tell supposedly true stories are I wonder if if this is part of the reason that the John Carter movie Um

didn't do so well at the box office. Did you ever see this when it came out? No? I didn't. You know it's it's based on the work of Ed Grice Burrows was a to say Williams, which has been very been a very different film, but it's it's an entertaining film, but it is bit is based on this, this older, pulpy sci fi vision of Mars. And indeed it's based on books that Sagan discusses um in Uh

in the paper that we're discussing here. Sean loved them when he loved him when he was a kid, and he he mentions how he came back to them later and he was like, oh, this just is not working its magic on me anymore. But he still makes the case for the for the usefulness of science fiction, and not just in wedding the appetites of young people for education about real science. That that is part of it.

I want to read a couple of quotes here quote the greatest human significance of science fiction maybe as thought experiments, as attempts to minimize future shock as contemplations of alternative destinies. This is part of the reason that science fiction has so wide an appeal among young people. It is they

who will of in the future. No society on Earth today is well adapted to the earth of a hundred or two hundred years for from now, if we are wise enough or lucky enough to survive that long, we desperately need an exploration of alternative futures, both experimental and conceptual. And later he says, quote, I think it is not an exaggeration to say that if we survive, science fiction will have made a vital contribution to the continuation and

benign evolution of our civilization. I love that. I want to touch briefly on the concept of future shock. We have a couple of older episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind that dealt with this that I recorded with Julie Douglas back in the day. But this is referring to the book, the nine seventy book Future Shock by Alvin and Heidi toffler Um. I think Alvin alone had credited on the original publication, but his wife wrote it with him, and they had co author status on subsequent books.

But it was a very influential book that is talking was talking about just the idea that technology was a dancing and is advancing, you know, so swiftly that it it kind of reduces one to a state of shock, and it's uh, it's a little more nuanced than that, but that's the basic idea. There's also they're also also a wonderful TV documentary version of it, narated by Orson Welles. Uh, that is tremendously entertaining in its in its own right, but also kind of you know, hypes everything up a

little bit. Uh, this is funny from the nineties seventies, right, you know, from our perspective, it seems like technology is only accelerated since then, you know, especially in the realms of consumer technology. You know how much our individual lives

have been changed by especially communications technology. Yeah, but I mean the concept of future shock, I think, you know, a few years ago, like basically when I recorded that episode with Julie about it, I I kind of viewed it more as something that was archaic or something that was maybe maybe didn't match up with modern reality. But now years later, uh, now that I'm I'm forty years old, I I feel future shock a lot more yeah, like there's a there's enough advancement going on that I'm like,

WHOA hold on a little bit. I think sometimes I feel like things are moving a bit too fast. Not to criticize technology in the right of technology, but I wonder you have future shock to whatever extent it exists. Also depends on just how how long you've been in the stream of time. You know, in what level of technology you kind of grew uh comfortable with. Well, one thing that I do think is interesting about Silent Running

is that it in this main character. We've got a character who is a fierce sort of prophet of the woods. He is a priest to the forest and an advocate of the pure, undisrupted environment and and ecology. But at the same time he's not technophobic at least not like he he enjoys the company of the robots, even you can see him being technologically proficient, like he reprogramm ms

the robots himself and messes around with them. And I feel like in a lot of nineteen seventies visions of the future, I think you would probably see these two tendencies paired against each other. You would have the people who have an affinity for technology and the people who have an affinity for nature and that that's what's in opposition. But the movie actually identifies a different kind of opposition. It's just it's just the preservation of the environment versus

the destruction of the environment. And that's that's not really related to whether you also like technology or not. Like, can't you easily imagine the Horrible remake of this in which the humans have to protect the forest from the robots who have the program to destroy the forest, right, because they wouldn't want to be controversial, And I mean i'd see it probably chopped chopping mall meets silent running um in space, of course, but but i'd watch the

Terrible in its own right. Well, that does set way into another thing that I want to talk about with regards to this movie, which is the way that environmental conservation and preservation is presented as a public issue in

a public debate. So I think one maybe quibble I would have with this movie is that it seems to embrace a narrative um that I think unwittingly, But it does sort of fall into this common narrative, especially of past decades, that says human economic prosperity on the one hand, and the preservation of the natural environment on the other hand, are goals at odds with one another. And Dern's crewmates are fine with the world without forests. And they say

why they're fine with it. They basically say, because industry. You know, the industrialization of the world has made resources plentiful for everybody, and everybody has a job, and and you've got everything you need, right, So there's like economic prosperity on the one hand, but then you've got the preserve vation of the forests as this thing in conflict

with that, And Dern resists it. He takes a qualitative view that defends nature for its own sake and revels in the aesthetic qualities of nature over the synthetic landscapes. You know, it's all these qualitative judgments. How do you put that crap in your body? You know, when you eat that, you want to go back to that, You know, landscape where you never see a tree. It's all qualitative,

it's all aesthetic. And I don't think this classic narrative about environmental conservation versus economic flourishing is actually a very accurate diagnosis of what the what the risks and benefits of environmental destruction are now obviously there are cases where you can say, increase the efficiency of a business by dumping waste into a river rather than paying more to dispose of it, you know, in an environmentally friendly way.

But these tradeoffs are they're almost always I think temporary. They're like temporary individual ways to leverage destruction of the natural environment for personal gain. I don't think that overall destruction of the natural environment leads to widespread long term economic flourishing in general. It's more just sort of a temporary way for you to cheat, right, And I mean it basically comes down to a question of how far down the road are you kicking the cane is are

you are you going? Is it going to be like, you know, five years, ten years, is it one generation? Is it two or three generations? Yeah? What is the what's the cost? Yeah? And and so this is because destruction of the natural environment, of course, as we talked about on the show all the time, at least all kinds of costs and losses that are unpredictable and that

everybody has to bear. Just to to go back to the example of you know, dumping industrial waste in the river, imagine every factory upstream says, Okay, we can increase profits if we don't have to dispose of this stuff properly. We just dump it in the river. They dump it in the river. But now the farmers downstream can't use the river water to irrigate their crops, so they have to get their water in a way that's more costly and inefficient, or maybe they can't grow their crops at

all or something. And here is a net maybe a net economic loss actually from this, even disregarding all of the environmental devastation, this is just a loss to what what kind of wealth people are able to produce? Uh. And So for the specific example of deforestation used in the movie, because in the nineteen seventies, I think this was sort of the big environmental issue, right that people

talked about the most. It was the destruction of the forests, and that's why the forest geodesic domes or what the movie is all about. Luckily, we've got that all taken care of. There's no more forestation. No, it certainly is still a problem, but for some reason, it's not like the main problem that comes to mind when people think about environmental problems. Now. I think it's probably been supplanted

by the global issue of climate change, I guess. But any of this is also part of the problem, right, because because they're related, Yeah, they're related. But also the messaging of the forest is so so much easier because there's an emotional connection to a definite physical location. You can basically say, hey, you like going to the forest, don't you You like it? Even if you don't want to go in it, you're probably like looking out the window at it. Well, imagine if all that went away

like that is a mucher. That's far easier for us to wrap our hands it heads around, versus the realities of climate change. That as though some of the the the the ramifications of climate change you know down the road, I mean when they are described, when you're talking about uh, you know, rising ocean waters, I think that still creates some scenarios that definitely should have an emotional um uh you know impact on anyone who hears them. Yeah, But

the forest, I mean you can talk about today. It's a thing you have now. I mean people people feel losses more than they feel the loss of potential gains. Right, that's a psychological problem. And if you if you say, uh, sometime in the future there could be economic opportunities that would be lost because of you know, things about climate change is harder to picture. You can say, if you're in a forest right now, imagine this forest is gone.

Like that's that's immediate, it's visceral. I think it reaches people in another way though, I mean, yeah, I think you could make the same argument, like you're saying about about sea level increase if you're in a coastal area or something. Um. But yeah, just giving the example of deforestation, Uh, this is something that of course I would say. You know, there are sort of like maybe aesthetic and even people might call them spiritual reasons to value nature for its

own sake. But imagine you don't and you're just you're like a Dern's crewmates who only care about economic flourishing. They just want there to be resources for everybody, and everybody has a job and all that. I mean, even then, deforestation, I think reeks devastating effects on those kinds of things.

So deforestation leads to soil erosion. Roots you know, they hold soil in place, and then if you have deforestation, you get all these exposed surfaces everywhere without plant life to hold the soil in place, the soil of roads during exposure to weather and water, and that soil run off drains into waterways and clogs them and you know, washes away the good soil that you could be using for agriculture. And um, it's just so there's a lot

of economic catastrophe right there. There's disruption of the water table that happens through deforestation. There's like deforestation can lead to widespread flooding. You know, economic catastrophes from flooding, destruction of habitats and extinctions of course, which can lead to downstream effects like the you know rise of new zoonotic

diseases and things like that. Oh yeah, increasing like boosting the diseases that we're gonna have in the future, while at the same time removing various biological agents from the world that you know, which we could find potential cures and new antibiotics to help us battle those very diseases. Yeah. And then of course, not to mention the way that the big thing, the way forests can help contribute to atmospheric dynamics. Of course, deforestation contributes to climate change, global warming.

I mean, I think it's it is not accurate to frame. Deforestation is an issue of like, well, you've got wealth gains on the one hand, and you've got protecting the environment on the other hand. Like protecting the environment is a is a crucial investment in the future of human kind and economic investment. You destroy those forests and there will be so much lost wealth and economic potential from that. Yeah, exactly.

But then again, I don't want to discount the of course, the you know, the inherent value of nature for its own sake. Now, to place this film in the context of US environmental history, uh, which I think is is interesting. Uh. President Richard Nixon had only just created the US Environmental Protection Agency, the e p A in Nino and Uh it's interesting too. I was reading a little bit about this. I was looking at there was an Atlantic mini article.

Actually it's a gallery why Nixon created the e p A, which is the interesting read. And in the Science History out Org has Richard Nixon in the rise of American environmentalism, because we tend not Nixon comes up a lot recently. There are a lot of parallels being made today between our current in a political um uh situation and UH and Watergate and Nixon etcetera. So we tend not to

think about environmentalism and Nixon. But but it is interesting to look at this time because, you know, given how tragically politicized climate change has become in the United States, it's almost staggering to realize that the the National Environmental Policy Act enjoyed tremendous bipartisan support, uh, you know, and and politicians were responding to a very real pressing and environmental danger at the local and national level level, or dangers I should say. Was it in nineteen sixty nine

that the Cuyahoga River river caught fire? Yes? Yeah, there was actually heard a piece on NPR just this morning talking about that. And then of course you're talking about how that falls into this this whole situation with the creation of the e p A. Yeah, it's also interesting if you go back and look at exactly what was being said, even by Nixon himself and speeches and so forth, and there was there was kind of this holy reverence there for nature, even at times in Nixon's own words.

Not to say that Nixon himself actually felt any of this, uh, you know, he was very much and he and his people were very much responded just for the zecheist of the time and something that was again a bipartisan um issue. But at times Nixon cast such environmentalism as being in the tradition of Republican Theodore Roosevelt. Yeah. Well, I mean I think it was, yeah, and I mean the Republican Party, I think has changed changed a lot between the time

of Teddy Roosevelt in the nineteen seventies. Yeah. Absolutely, But but I think it is you know, it is I think helpful to to realize that environmentalism and environmental concerns, um, you know, have at plenty of times in our country's history been a bipartisan issue and something that we can

all agree on, is something that matters. And I think there's a huge case to be made that that's that's a part of of the American dream, you know, that is a part of some of the best of America, is what America has done, uh to sustain bits of our natural environments, such as with the National Park UH services. It would be amazing if someone could figure out a

vast sort of psychological program to just de politicize environmental issues. UM. It's really tragic the way they've taken on a partisan cast and of course that you know, that leads to these bit just obvious solutions to environmental problems becoming these impossible political battles. You know, one of the interesting things about Silent Running is that they don't spend a tremendous amount of time describing what life is like on Earth. Now they allude to it, you certainly never really see it.

And uh and it's I think that's tantalizing, and it makes this wonder what this world is like? What does this world become? Uh? And I think that the film is at least in part, you know, they're pushing the notion that humanity separated from nature is inherently sickened and it is lessened by that separation. And the other crew members don't mind eating tasteless feud cubes and nuking the

world's less forest because they have no connection to nature anymore. Um. You know, per a discussion we had earlier over email, you know, there's a there's a lot more focus in modern environmental discourses on you know, framing the production of the environment in terms of its material benefit to humans, which, as we were just talking about, I mean, environmental conservation

is not without material benefits to humans. But you notice that that's what people who advocate environmental conservation tend to talk about these days. They're thinking, like, no, it's in your interests to protect the environment. This was a different time. I mean, the film presents a very inherent case for nature. It's this like that the forest in itself is a holy and beautiful thing that must be protected for its

own sake. Yeah. The film, though, is is kind of pushing this more of a spiritual connection with it um which made me think of the microbiome in some ways. The micro microbiome and the effect you know, getting into the microbes that live inside us and their connection to the outside world. The interplay between us and our natural environment and it's microbiome. You know, a lot of this can feel kind of spiritual and kind of magic at times.

So I was reading about this a little bit, and we've certainly covered this on the show but in the past. But you know, with our growing understanding of the microbiome, you know, we realize that there's this interplay between our internal microbial legions, uh, and our exposure to the natural world for us and fields if we can get them, but even access to a pet animal that has access to the outside can provide some level of this natural connection.

You know. One of the things we often talk about with Charlie at home is that he brings us dirts your yeah, your dog, Charlie. Yeah. And that's something that's touched on in the book Never Home Alone by Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University.

In that book, he points out that, you know, we still have a lot to learn, but it seems as if families and urban environments with dogs tend to have kids who are less prone to allergy and asthma because the dogs may actually be serving as this kind of vehicle, this kind of connection for the natural world, microbes that the humans used to live in. So you know, we're not getting out as natures into nature as much as

we should. But if we're letting the dog do it, if the dog's really getting its nose into nature, then it's kind of rubbing some of that that that natural world, some of that microbiome off on us. Good reason to let the dog in the bed, right and you know, naturally there are microbes in the natural world to do his harm, others that are beneficial or at least seem kind of benign and the grand grand balance of things, And that's something we've discussed in the show before as well.

You know, our bodies are, our beings are a vast multi cellular system inhabited by microbial legions. And you can even make the argument that we are those microbial legions and they're us. Yeah, we might not share the same d n A as them, but they are in a sense part of us, right and they play into the like our our emotions and our our wants and needs.

Like this, this manifestation of self that we you know, have wrapped up an ego and think of as being separate from the world and separate from nature is all a product of of this interplay um in our artificial environment's mess with that balance, and and that's today here on Earth. So imagine a world such as the Earth of Silent running with with an even more severely damaged ecosystem, you know, one in which vegetation has been pretty much eradicated.

And now imagine that world spacecraft. Because even if Lowell and the Box continually track in dirt, and even as they they distribute plants around on the place and thrust melons at the other crew members. You know, it's uh, you know, it's it's still you know, a very artificial world outside of the uh, the the farm, outside of

the forest that they've sustained there. Well, I mean, I don't think this was envisioned by the filmmakers, But one thing you could say to interpret the film is it's long been a question of how would our microbiome be messed up by space travel? Uh and by being confined

to environments in space or on other planets. Even if we bring along a lot of our soil and plants with us, you know, there might just be some ways in which the gravity environment, maybe the atmospheric difference, whatever, the the different artificial environments somehow changes the microbial loads that were exposed to and that we take into our bodies. And this could this could change us. It could change

who we are. It could make us sick, It could affect our mental health, It could do all kinds of things that we can't anticipate fully yet. And so I wonder if maybe that's getting to Durn's character a little bit, like Durn's yelling people about a cantaloupe because he's even though he's the one out there in the forest. The forest and the dome in space doesn't have exactly the same kind of microbes that would back on Earth, and his his microbial his microbiome is off and he's he's

getting a little antcy. Oh wow. So this is it's almost like the idea of say a people who once had you know, an actual uh you know, visual or audible connection with God and then when that goes away, that you have to sustain faith and faith alone because there is no direct, visible sign of the Almighty and that could that's kind of what he's doing. He is a profit of the natural world that that via the loss of the biome, the microbiome, uh, microbiome, biomedic connection Uh,

must now rely on faith. He has faith in the fruit, faith in the cantaloupe, but that actual connection to nature is gone. All right, we need to take one more break, but we'll be right back to finish up the discussion. Than alright, we're back. Uh. You know, this film also made me think a lot about you know, Wilson's biophilia hypothesis. Uh. This, we did an entire episode on this in the last

couple of years. But this is basically the idea is that, you know, we we have this innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes and uh in in the more extreme versions of the hypothesis, there might even be a genetic component to that. Yeah. So he basically says, like, we're wired to want to be in and around nature and living things that completely synthetic environments are not are not what our minds crave. That there's an inherent predisposition

against that, and it's not just cultural. Right. So if if biophilia hypothesis is true, and I think it would be great if it were, and and EO. Wilson is and and and has been one of the I think the greatest minds writing and communicating about our connection with the natural world. But but if that we're not. You can see that in the way he shoves his hand into a mound of fire, ants, yeah, look at them

biting me. Yeah. And also an unlike Lowell in the film, like he's he's very believed, like you, you're like, yes, this this guy is not abrasive about it, like you just totally bindo everything he's saying. But if bio philiate hypothesis is true, it's difficult to imagine a species with such an innate connection to nature reaching such a fall in place as you see the world in Silent Running.

You know, because most of the characters that with most of the humans we meet in the movie, and then presumably most of the humans on Earth are totally okay with this, or they've become totally okay with this disconnection

from nature. Now, another way you could argue it is that Again, I don't think this was necessarily intended by the filmmakers, but you could also argue that Lowell's crewmates maybe are only they're they're only so happy to disregard nature because cause they are the few humans that are exposed to it, Like they're the fact that they can be walking through these forests or actually they generally tend to drive through them on little go karts, but that

they can drive through these forests and be exposed to nature, that is what makes them feel like they don't need it, you know, because you don't appreciate what you've already got, and that maybe all the people back on Earth are miserable. We don't hear from them, We don't know what life is like from from their point of view. But perhaps these other crewmates are just like there and and not appreciating the how lucky they are to be one of the like five humans who gets to walk among the trees,

you know. And this this brings us to another question that I had in thinking about the films, something I hadn't really thought about much in the past with past viewings of it. But I started wondering, like this, this earth that we're told about, an earth where like the vast majority of or if not all, botanical life it is over Like what would that even? Like? Uh? You know what? Because as we've discussed the connection between the botanical world and and the human world and the world

of animals, uh is essential. How would a planet exist without that? What would a world without plants be? Right? And I ran across a couple of sources on this. There's an article from New Scientists from two thousand seven titled I have all the oxygen producing plants disappeared suddenly? How long would it take for us to die? And then I also found a really good source on the website for the university. You see Santa Barbara at U, C. S. B. Dot E d U and Uh. Both of them get

into it. They start breaking down the numbers and there's no like definitive answer for this because you end up having to You're talking about an entire planet's worth of atmosphere, and uh, you know, and then the the interplay between the entire botanical world and the entire animal world and and other factors as well. Um, basically, the big take home is that of course, ultimately we would die, all die. It would be it would be a catastrophic That's that

much is for certain. I mean, the basic school grade explanation still applies. Animals breathe oxygen and excel c O two. Plants need the C O two and produce oxygen. We're in balance all of us and humans do not have a private privileged status in all of this. According to UCSB, if all the plants went away, just like magically they're gone, um, you know, it wouldn't be an end to oxygen on Earth. We'd still have an atmosphere's worth of oxygen. And that's

roughly two quintillion pounds of oxygen remaining. It sounds like plenty of right, But of course it's not just us, right, there are all these animals that need it to So to simplify it, okay, let's go ahead and go off all the animals, because it's not expressly stated in Silent Running, but we might well imagine that most of not all of the animals are gone as well. Why Okay, so if all the animals were gone as well, that would leave the human species with one thousand and four year's

worth of oxygen. Okay, that's one take on it. But they also break it down so that we might be looking at more like one thousand, two hundred years of breathable oxygen. But then the increase in C O two would elevate global temperatures and other concerns would also probably bring this down even further, and we'd be talking more

like one to four centuries of breathable oxygen. Now, another take is that we have several thousands of years worth of breathable oxygen because of the vast pools of oxygen in the atmosphere, the origins of which stem from microorganisms to begin with. Plus, there would be reserves of oxygen locked up in H two O and in carbon dioxide that we can conceivably, you know, breakdown using our technology. Certainly we have the technology to send for us into orbit.

Then maybe they also have the technology, uh, you know, to do some widespread breaking down of ocean waters into breathable atmosphere. But another huge issue, a huge issue, is that without plants, the entire food pyramid essentially collapses. Right, What would anything eat? Yeah, so I would. I would sure hope that those disgusting food food cubes that the crew members are eating on the valley forge are tasty and that they don't require plants or animal life. I

don't know what they'd be made of. I guess they could be made from what nutrients gained from microbial mats or Sanda bacterias like that. But but otherwise there's a there's a very strong argument to be made that we would starve before we ran out of oxygen um. Now,

other uh and estimates really kind of vary. James Lovelock, for instance, originator of gaia hypothesis, estimated we'd be looking at half a million years UM And then that New Scientist article I mentioned, they threw out a few different estimates by different folks, ranging from a few hundred years

to a few thousand years. Again with the food concerns and possible poisoned air concerns as well, Right, because we'd also be breathing out c O two and pumping CO two into the atmosphere of VR machines that would be not getting processed. But and of course all of this again is is just very broad and big, big picture and not getting into all the other challenges that would occur if all the plants died. How does this square with the sci fi Earth that is alluded to in

Silent Running? You know, could the leaders of such a world, could the people and the institutions actually allow uh, such a cataclysm to come to pass and then scuttle the key plan to correct it? Surely not. People would never let anything like that happen. Yeah, I will, that's the thing, you know, you would, You would hope not certainly. And I remember as a kid thinking, well, you know, at

some level, like, surely they wouldn't do that. Why would they do this, because there's never a real great reason given, right, They're just like, oh, well, we've got to put these uh the spaceship back into commercial use, So we're just jettisoning all these forests, even though presumably they're up there because they want to bring botanical life back to Earth in the future. So um, yeah, details of how we managed to destroy all botanical whole life on Earth side.

In this stuff film, I think we can well imagine us as a people, as a species, continuing on, satisfied with assurances from the more optimistic estimates that give us you know, many centuries or even you know, thousands of years to correct the problem. They'll fix it down, they'll fix it down the road. Look at these new technologies are talking about. You know, essentially, we just kicked the can down that that road for our children, for our

grandchildren to solve. We take comfort in the pending technologies of orbital for us and life on other world's oxygen extraction and whatever you know process produces those mucky little food cubes. You know. We so we'd grow complacent, we'd refuse to change, and one day someone might be in a position to say, you know, these space for us are incredibly expensive. Why are we we dealing with this? Uh,

let's just get rid of them. And I think all of that line falls in line with how we have been thinking about our environment, just despite you know a lot of tremendous environmental progress. Uh, you know, certainly just since you know, the since the nineteen seventy uh and despite all the you know, the very passionate voices and environmentalism. Uh, you know, I think, you know, collectively, we can still make these kinds of errors. You know, the world of

silent running, which is presented as a cautionary tale. It's not a it's not presented as a hey, what would happen of all the forest died? Uh sort of thing. It's like saying, here is what we do not want, but here is a here is a you know, an exaggerated circumstance that is in many ways very much in keeping with how humans think about the environment, or can think about the environment if they don't listen to the lolls of the world. I mean, we're obviously facing problems

like this right now. I mean, the most pressing global environmental problem now being climate change. And like it's one of those cases where it's it's pretty clear what steps we need to be taking right now, or you know, really need to be taking yesterday, what we absolutely need to be taking right now, and people that people just don't want to deal with it. They just rather I mean, you've got some people, I think, who managed to delude themselves into thinking nas you know, it's all a hoax

or whatever. It's Chinese hoax or it's whatever. It's just a bunch of alarmism. And then I think you've got a lot of other people who they don't really know of any reason to disagree with the science. They just rather not think about it, you know, they just rather kicked the can. And the day is a kick in the can, even as a as an opportunity grow mighty short. Exactly. Yeah,

I mean, I've I think it was. It was actually Alan watts Um, the Canadian science fiction author who you know who, who pointed especially to the nineteen seventies as being like the time when you know, we should have gotten really serious about environmentalism, and if we had gotten really serious about environmentalism, we could have avoided the even tensor scenario we find ourselves in today. Um, but here we are, but like the scenario in Silent Running, all

the forests have not been jettisoned into space. Yet. We're we're we're we're nowhere near there. Just yet we need a Joan Bias song to get everybody on the same page here. I know, I wish we could actually play one of those Joan Bias songs on the podcast, But I think that would be problematic. I found some some some music that has subtracts a similar vibe that perhaps we can lead out with here at the end of

the episode. So often we want to play a song on the podcast, but it all lies behind the door of the the intellectual property jail that we cannot free. The only place we would be able to play it would be in orbit bord. No, actually, probably not, because I think a lot of these these uh, the legal documentations for I P like they talk about the entire universe. I remember the first time I saw that. I'm like, really with the entire universe, Like I would go to

Mars and I still couldn't play this Joan Baez song. Um. You know, even if Joan Bayez gave me the thumbs up like a record company would be, would would just say no, I'm sorry. The label says the entire universe. So unless send a robotic probe to serve you, you would have to extend into an alternate universe in which the rights were different. Commander Lamb, you've been served, all right. Well there you have it. A silent running uh still one of my favorite films, very influential at this without

this film. We wouldn't have Mystery Science Theater three thousand either, because clearly modeled on ye. Joe Hodgson is is very up and forward about that that like he saw it in college and it was a huge inspiration to him. And uh, and that's how we ended up with a human and three robots in space watching terrible movies instead of tending to forest. The film is a yeah, films

out there. It's available wherever you get your movies. Uh and uh, you know we're gonna go ahead and call this episode, but again, we're trying to do one of these a month. We've had some wonderful suggestions from listeners already about what films we should consider covering in the future, but we want to continue to hear from you. And also if you have thoughts about Silent Running, did you love it? Did you hate it? Uh? Did it? What role did it have in your your own upbringing? Uh?

Share your thoughts with us. Did you see in the theater when it came out? I would love to hear about that experience as well. In the meantime, heading over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, Uh, that is that's the Valley Forge of our operations here. That's our mothership UM. It has links out to our very social media accounts, and it also has a module on it that, instead of being a forest, is our discussion

module UM on Facebook. That's just just a discussion group where a lot of folks hang out and discuss the show. It's the one lovely green place on Facebook. It is. Yeah, long, may it not be jettisoned into the black avoid of social media emptiness. But anyway, those are all wonderful things to to check out. If you want to support the show, just make sure you rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so. Leave us some stars,

leave a nice comment. It really helps out the helps out the show when it comes to the almighty algorithms that rule our world. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, Tori Harrison. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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