If you don’t have  time to watch the video you can read recaps and quotes from the panel here, here, here, here and here.

Big thanks to Jennifer at SEE, to all of our panelists, and to the Bad Astronomer, who found time to moderate our panel while he wasn’t partying with Hollywood starlets (Phil – we kid because we love).

Is technology a panacea that can deliver man from his own idiocy or a neutral entity used for good or evil and locked the same physical laws as mere mortals? Such are the themes that Snyder tries to mine further in the re-edited version, which hit stores July 21 and includes 25 minutes of additional footage.

“The movie, at its core, is a technological-philosophical exercise,” Snyder tells SciNoFi. “When the graphic novel was originally written, it was influenced by the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese and how it created this modern moral dilemma with the idea that you could kill hundreds of thousands to save millions and whether that was OK or not.

“The specific theme—more in the director’s cut than the theatrical version—is that the technology creates a god-man, and, by proxy, that technology is its own religion,” says Snyder. Yet this god is not above the laws of the universe. “He’s saying free will is an illusion and that he also is a slave to his own way of thinking. ‘Just because I’m a god doesn’t mean I’m not also a slave to the same rules.’” These layered and often contradictory elements of technology—personified by Dr. Manhattan—resonate as much today as when Watchmen was first published two decades ago.

“I was really fascinated with Dr. Manhattan’s revelation that he had lost touch with the humanity of things,” says Snyder. “The idea of technology taking us away from our humanity—we see that every day with the Internet and social networking. You don’t talk to people fact-to-face; the voice at the other end is becoming more and more abstract. Eventually, we may reach a point where they write a program that just responds to questions in such a way that it seems like there’s someone with a heartbeat on the other end. Those are the questions we face as we get more entrenched in technology”

“I think science fiction is the gatekeeper of our dreams of what we can be and where we can go as a people,” he adds. “There is a spirituality in humanity that I hope influences the scientists of tomorrow. You can dig down and take it apart, but don’t forget the ‘why’ of it.”

—Special Comic-Con correspondent Susan Karlin

Gilliam also seemed eager though to move on to a broader discussion of the movie, saying, “The picture is really Parnassus’s picture.”  In the movie, Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a Methusulan entertainer who has made a deal with the devil (Tom Waits!) that requires him to hand over his daughter on her sixteenth birthday.

It isn’t a stretch to see Parnassus as a stand-in for the director himself, a visionary who has had a famously difficult time working with Hollywood to get his films produced.  Gilliam seemed to encourage that line of thinking.  “[Parnassus] is a man with a traveling show trying to get people to explore their imagination and no one is paying attention.”

Surrogates—which opens September 25—features a world where people jack into robotic avatars and send the bots out into the world in their stead (trailer here). Not only was this Venditti’s freshman graphic novel, but it’s publisher Top Shelf’s first credit as a film producer.

“Bruce Willis is one of the few actors who can do the action sequences and personal moments,” Venditti told me during a break signing his novel at Comic-Con. “A big theme in the book is the relationship the main character has with his wife. He’s a police detective who can do his job without worrying about the hazards of his job. He’ll go home to his wife and she’ll only react with him through her surrogate, because she’s uncomfortable with aging. So it’s a strain on their marriage.”

The story (illustrated by Brett Weldele) mines the psychology of wanting to be something than who we are. Venditti got the idea from books on Internet addiction and TV shows like Extreme Makeover and Dr. 90210. But its theme was eerily prophetic.

“What would society be like if there was a technology that enabled us to stay in our homes and send these idealized versions of ourselves to the real world?” said Venditti. “Since I wrote the book in 2002, fans have sent me articles about some of this technology starting to take place,” such as long-distance surgery through robotic arms and electrodes that enable individuals to move items by thought. “Some sociology professors told me the used the book in their classrooms.”

His next project—The Homeland Directive, a political medical thriller out next summer, also from Top Shelf—examines another technology-oriented theme. “Do we live in a time when personal privacy and national security can coexist?” he said. “But that’s as much as I can tell you right now…”

One hopes he’s including a role for Willis—wouldn’t want to freeze out his big Hollywood connection.

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

Among the things we learned:

• X-Men’s Storm would need to consume 120,000 in food calories or have a nuclear reactor in her stomach to generate the minimum 500 million joules of energy needed to shoot lightning bolts from her body. On the plus side, such a metabolism definitely helps one stay in movie shape.
• In Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise survives a 2,200-g mid-air body slam (where g is the acceleration due to Earth’s gravity, 9.8 meters per second squared), but Newton’s second law doesn’t fare so well. “A force to the head exceeding 150 g’s is usually fatal.” Usually, sure. All that Scientology in his noggin probably helped cushion the blow…
• Best physics flick went to 2001: A Space Odyssey for the jogging sequence in the rotating circular space station, while raspberries went to Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow and The Core for such travesties as exploding fireballs on an asteroid with no atmosphere. Star Trek got a (dis)honorable mention for phasers that took a half-second to reach their targets. “You’d be better off with a gun,” he noted disdainfully.

After the session, Weiner noted the rising trend of scientists—James Kakalios (The Physics of Superheroes, Lawrence Krauss (Physics of Star Trek) and our own Phil Plait—using pop culture to teach science literacy. “The public’s view of the world is so shaped by popular culture, we have to start to make those connections and show what’s real and what’s not,” he said.

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

* Folks in LA can catch Weiner when he hosts “When Worlds Collide: The Science of Movies” panel at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Aug 6.

Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey is an animated film that makes use of data from NASA’s Cassini mission.  The movie tells the story of Dave, a solar surfing photo who battles his way through the solar system to save the Cassini probe from evil aliens.

Twelve years in the making, Quantum Quest has cycled through at least a couple of voice casts.  At last year’s Comic Con Quantum Quest panel, producer Harry “Doc” Kloor, a scientist and veteran science fiction writer, announced that he had lined up Digimax Inc., a Taiwanese animation studio, as his partner to finish the film.

At this year’s panel, featuring Bob Picardo, Doug Jones andJanina Gavankar, Kloor announced that the movie will see wide release in February 2010 and will include actual Cassini images, including Enceladus and Titan.

This morning, io9 demonstrated that in addition to putting out an awe-inspiring blog every day, they could also put on a mind-expanding Comic Con panel.  With no Hollywood celebrities and just a couple of special guests, our favorite sci-fi bloggers ran through the TV shows, movies, comics and books of the past year that “blew our minds without blowing up any giant robots.”

Here are a few of their recommendations:

Moon -Duncan Jones’s new movie topped the list for both Annalee Newitz and Meredith Woerner.  Like a lot of the works recommended by the panel, Moon explores what it means to be human in a rapidly approaching era where humanity can be technologically upgraded or artificially created (note: this is not a spoiler, the lead character realizes very early in the film that he is a clone).

Julian Comstock – In this novel, Robert Charles Wilson depicts a 22nd century American that has sunk into barbarism and theocracy.  In response, the hero undermines the regime in part through trying to popularize ideas about Darwin in a world that has forgotten about science.

Rest -  What if someone invented a pill that meant no one would ever have to sleep, with no adverse side effects?  Panel guest Bonnie Burton from StarWars.com picked the Devil’s Due comic Rest, which explores this idea and its implications on society, the environment and mental health.

Wonton Soup – James Stokoe’s comic, recommended by Graeme McMillan, investigates what humans would do if they had to be out in space for a really long time.  Apparently the answers are get high and cook alien recipes.

Infoquake – io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders picked a series of novels by David Louis Edelman.   In Edelman’s future, people can hack and upgrade their own bodies and brains, impacting human relations in both the literal and business senses of the phrase.

Given the awesomeness of science non-fiction that year, I might almost expect it to be a down year for science fiction. Not so. 1969 had some good sci-fi—maybe not as good as landing on the moon, but damn good nonetheless.

It was, for example, the year Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut challenged the idea that sci-fi wasn’t an appropriate genre for high-brow “literary-fiction” writers, tradition that has carried forward to become the “counter factual” fiction (sci-fi by any other name…) of writers like Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon. It was also the year Ursula K. LeGuin explored gender and identity in Left Hand of Darkness, and Michael Crichton scared the bejesus out of everyone with his  mutated virus in The Andromeda Strain. Ray Bradbury published a collection of short stories in I Sing the Body Electric (the title story of which became The Electric Grandmother), and Isaac Asimov collected some of his best stories in Nightfall and other Stories.

In June of that year, TV watching geeks saw Captain Kirk set his phaser on stun for what they thought might be the last time (oh, what they didn’t know!) when Star Trek went off the air. Perhaps in mourning, ardent fans held the first Star Trek convention before the show was even canceled, in March 1969 at the Newark public library. The Doctor (you know Who) regenerated for just the second time as Patrick Troughton made way for the 1970 arrival of Jon Pertwee.

In movieland, sci-fi screenwriters would have a hard time following up Barbarella, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes, all of which came out in 1968. Gregory Peck struggled to rescue stranded astronauts Gene Hackman, Richard Crenna, and James Franciscus in Marooned, which came out four months after the moon landing. The novel that provided the basis for the movie actually used the single-occupant Mercury capsule, but Hollywood updated it for the Apollo era. The space station in the film is based on NASA’s early drawings for SkyLab. In some ways the movie was ahead of its time, as producers decided not to include a regular score and instead use a series of beeps and hums to evoke the isolation of space. (Turner Classic Movies will be airing Marooned at 1:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 21. Check local listings and set your Tivos!).

Tough to compete with actual space travel when you’re a science-fiction writer or producer, but still, not a bad year to be a nerd.

DISCOVER: What kind of realistic technology could we use to get to nearby stars? Which stars would be feasibly reachable by such technologies?

Kevin Grazier: It’s a saying plastered on T-shirts and bumper stickers—the kind sold at both science-fiction conventions and physics departments nationwide:

186,000 miles per second:
It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

The speed of light, of all electromagnetic energy, in a vacuum is the ultimate speed limit in the universe. Nothing that has mass or carries information can travel faster.

This universal speed limit is a direct fallout from Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Special relativity implies that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, but values that we tend to think of as constant in our daily experience—mass, length, and the rate of the passage of time—are not. Depending upon the relative velocity of two observers, these values will “adjust” so that both observers see the speed of light as a constant. Two observers travelling at high speeds relative to each other will find themselves in strong disagreement about measurements like the length of each other’s spacecraft and the rate of the passage of time.

Another consequence of special relativity is that, as an object travels increasingly faster, it behaves as if it has increasingly more mass. Therefore the amount of thrust it takes for an incremental change in velocity (known in the space program as a delta-V) is vastly greater at high speeds than at low. This effect is also highly nonlinear: It takes almost an order of magnitude more thrust to accelerate from .9c (nine-tenths of the speed of light) to .99c than it does to accelerate from .5c to .7c. An object travelling at the speed of light would act as if it had an infinite amount of mass and it would, therefore, require an infinite amount of energy (read: an infinite amount of thrust/fuel) to attain it.

This is, of course, a shame for civilizations (like ours) who want to explore planetary systems around other stars first hand. The distances involved are, well, astronomical. Just within the Solar System, it typically takes NASA probes 6 months to a year to reach Mars; it took Cassini 6 years, 9 months to reach Saturn. The (currently) fastest object created by humankind, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, will take 40,000 years, give or take a few thousand years, before it makes its closest encounter with its first star: AC+79 3888—currently located in the constellation Ursa Minor. At that speed few Time Lords, and even fewer humans, would survive the journey to even “nearby” star systems.

Current chemical rockets, and even the more efficient ion drives, cannot propel humanity to the stars at a reasonable speed, but there are concepts for interstellar spacecraft drives that are promising, that could be constructed in a practical sense, and you may be surprised how long the designs have been around. Stanisław Ulam, a Polish mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project, proposed nuclear pulse propulsion back in 1947.

The idea is simple: explode a series of nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft. The explosions are directed against a thick steel “pusher plate”. The pusher plate is, in turn, connected to the spacecraft by a huge shock absorber to lessen the high G forces from the impulsive accelerations. In the straightforward terminology of Jimmy Johnson, the engineer on the Phaeton:

Basically, we gonna blow us up a bunch of big ass bombs off the ass-end of this here ship. Big ass bombs gonna vaporize some big ass alloy plates, and the translation of all that big ass energy’ll make us go real fast. Real fast. Yippe kai-ay, m…

The practical attempt to design and develop nuclear-pulse propulsion was performed by General Atomics in San Diego in the 1950s and 1960s. Ultimately the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the Unites States and Soviet Union made the testing for such a drive illegal, nevertheless over 50 years ago the design seemed practical and could be implemented within the bounds of existing technology. For more information, NASA and Star Trek designer Mike Okuda provided still more details on Project Orion, the U.S. government’s investigation into a nuclear-pulse spacecraft.

An Orion-style drive powered by thermonuclear explosions could theoretically reach speeds of .08c to .10c. That could get a spacecraft to the nearest stars within a human lifetime, but not within Phaeton’s 10-year mission. Virtuality is set in the mid-21st century, and it’s reasonable to assume some technological advances in the intervening time. Phaeton does not use thermonuclear explosions for propulsion, the charges dropped out the back are matter/antimatter charges (yes the thrust for Phaeton is, in essence, provided by photon torpedoes). The obvious assumption is that by the mid-21st Century, science has solved problems regarding the generation and containment of antimatter. One estimate has shown that Orion-style drive propelled by matter/antimatter explosions could attain speeds of .5c to .8c.

If Phaeton’s Orion Drive (named after the real-life nuclear concept) could propel it to 80 percent the speed of light, it could get to Sol’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri (4.4 light-years away) in just 5 years, 6 months. That’s certainly a vast improvement, and shortens the round-trip mission time to several nearby stars to less than a human lifetime.

Only, it gets better.

Special relativity, which bit us in the asteroid when it comes to top-end velocity, does our crew a favor as our spacecraft attains speeds that are a high fraction of the speed of light. Recall that for objects travelling at relativistic speeds, values like mass, time, and length appear to “adjust” to keep the speed of light a constant. At high speeds, distances that we measure at “rest”, or at low speeds compared to c, appear to be shortened. This effect is called Lorentz contraction or Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.

Moving at a snappy .5c, the distance to Alpha Centauri is only 3.8 light-years (down from 4.4), and the apparent travel time is a bit over 7 years, 6 months. At 80 percent light speed, the distance is 2.6 light-years, and the travel time is 3 years, 3 months—less elapsed time for the crew than it would take for light to make the same journey.

Travelling at a speed of 0.7c is the “break even” point, where the combination of spacecraft velocity and Lorentz Contraction means you are travelling at “functional light speed” (the distance to Alpha Centauri in that frame would be 3.1 light-years and the travel time 4 years, 5 months). Of course time passes at different rates based upon their relative speeds as well, a phenomena called relativistic time dilation, so if Phaeton were travelling at a speed of .7c, for every year that passes for the crew, a year and five months would pass for The Edge of Never viewers back on Earth. Billie Kashmiri alludes to this in her confessional near the end.

With the phenomena of Lorentz Contraction as an aid, many more star systems become potential targets of a 10-year mission. There are sound scientific arguments why astronomers believe that any star that could potentially have a planet with life, in particular intelligent life, must be similar to our Sol: from mid-F range on the Herzsprung-Russell Diagram to mid-K. There are several stars in that size/temperature range in Sol’s neighborhood. Below is a screen capture of a spreadsheet that the producers of Virtuality used to select the target star for Phaeton’s mission (text color corresponds to the star’s color):

On the spreadsheet are the stars’ distances at rest, and at various fractions of light speed—with the corresponding travel time.

Click image to embiggen.

Epsilon Eridani, the nearby star that the Phaeton is sent to explore, has one, perhaps two planets orbiting it, as well as at least three asteroid/planetesimal belts. If we assume that Phaeton’s Orion Drive can get her up to .8c, or 80 percent the speed of light, then because of Lorentz contraction the journey (normally 10.5 light-years) is only 6.3 light-years, and it takes just under 7 years, 11 months. So if the Orion Drive can reasonably get a spacecraft up to .8c, then Phaeton’s mission is actually closer to 16 years. If, however, the Orion Drive was capable of propelling Phaeton to .9c, or 90 percent the speed of light, then the distance to Epsilon Eridani is only 4.6 light-years, and the one-way flight time is 5.1 years.

So in order for Phaeton to get to Epsilon Eridani and back within the stated 10-year mission duration, we clearly see that the ship’s Orion Drive would have to propel her to over 90 percent the speed of light (.9c). For all the elements of Phaeton’s mission that might be practically attainable by the mid-21st Century, this is where a little science fiction enters the picture.

Thank you to Steve Cooperman, Doug Creel, and John Weiss for their helpful input and comments.

So, without further ado, here is what it would have looked like if a large object hit the Earth, during the 70’s, and many, many movie stars from that era (including Malden, Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Brian Keith from Family Affair and a presidential Henry Fonda) had to run around reacting to it.

But there’s plenty of room for a condensed run-through of all the latest technology, from motion capture to the ever-ubiquitous CGI. Which is reason enough to like the Science Channel’s Science of the Movies series,  premiering Tuesday, May 26. Hosted by AchieveNerdvana.com blogger and Geekscape columnist Nar Williams, it’s six episodes on the behind-the-scenes geekosity that’s responsible for everything from Terminator 3 to The Fast and the Furious to Dexter to, yes, Star Wars.

Of course, take away all the blockbuster jargon and Hollywood sheen, and what you’re really watching is a tour through the ranks of ironic T-shirted, scraggly-facial-haired dudes that create the world’s biggest movies. Williams hobnobs with the best and baddest, from John Dykstra (yup, the guy who blew up the Death Star) to the Strause brothers, whose visual effects shop, Hydraulx, dominates the CGI market (300, anyone?).

The other stars of the show are the gizmos, including the Dykstraflex—the motion control rig that carried us through those crevices during Luke’s assault on the main reactor—and Milo, the most popular motion control system on the market, known for creating the spider-sense scene that actually made us believe Toby McGuire could have superhuman powers.

Future episodes cover everything from the flying suit in Iron Man to the miniatures in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian to Jim Henson’s Digital Puppetry Studio.

As for Williams, it’s his big TV debut, and his eagerness to please oozes through every scene. Not that his job is easy: Hosting this sort of thing involves walking that fine line between Adam Savage and Ryan Seacrest. Wind up on the wrong end, and you’ll be stuck fleeing Gary Busey at awards shows. But Williams’s mildly self-promoting cheek doesn’t cancel out the pleasure of watching a Jesus-lookalike in a “Fear the Walken” T-shirt control a 1,200-pound camera racing towards an actor’s head. It’s riveting stuff for anyone who worships at the altar of gollums and Persian battles and exploding planets. Which includes all of us.

Image: The Science Channel

The Internet may be crumbling, but think of the time that would free up! [via Futurismic]

“Junk DNA” science may cure HIV, probably won’t create race of superhuman mutants.   [via SciFi Scanner]

Migrant workers may soon be able to telecommute.  [via SciFiWire ]

SciNoFi is not alone.  Terminator TV fans mobilize to save their show. [via eonline.com]

And the first Star Wars may have been 30+ years ago, but its spirit lives on in the hearts of harp music loving pre-teens everywhere [via The Website at the End of the Universe] :

But what’s wrong with rooting for a movie? I want Star Trek to be awesome again, to be all about adventure and a future where people get do interesting things other than hide from radioactive mutants left over from the apocalypse. Sure, rooting for a movie from the get-go has led to some pretty harsh disillusionment (The Phantom Menace, the second and third Matrix movies), but on the other hand The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2, and Lord of The Rings all turned out pretty well. So, in order of their release dates, here are the five movies I’m rooting for this summer:

• Star Trek (May 8th) I’ve already said my piece above on this one, leaving only one question: when is Star Wars going to get a reboot?
• Terminator: Salvation (May 15th) I think Christian Bale has the chops to pull off the adult John Connor, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the future war laid out on a big canvas after the glimpses we’ve gotten from the previous movies and the TV series.
• Moon (June 12th) I’m totally cheating here, since I already got to see a preview of this movie, and therefore know it’s good, but I included it because I want everyone to go see it—a thoughtful, wry movie in the style of Silent Running or the later scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• They Came From Upstairs (July 31st) Sooner or later you’re going to get dragged to a kid’s movie; hopefully you’ll enjoy it too—I started rooting for this tale of teens fighting off alien invaders the moment I saw Doris Roberts laying down the ninja moves in the trailer…
• District 9 (August 14th) Although I’m tired of the sort of alternative reality marketing campaigns being used by the movie’s promoters, and District 9’s “alien ghetto” premise looks to be borrowing heavily from Alien Nation, I’m rooting for this one because if it does well, The Powers That Be may finally cough up enough cash to let director Neill Blomkamp go ahead and make that Halo movie with Peter Jackson…

So what are you looking forward to this summer?

Teaching a computer how to learn is a perennial topic in artificial intelligence research, and one that’s long been mined in science fiction. The moment when the computer demonstrates it has learned how to learn is usually a pretty significant moment in any story it’s in, not least because it is one of the Laws Of Science Fiction that once a computer has started to learn, it will continue to learn at an ever accelerating rate. (A corollary of this Law states that if the computer isn’t already self-aware, sentience will arise by the end of the next chapter or act at the very latest.) Interestingly, the “My God! It’s learnt how to learn!” moment seems to be dwelt on by movie and TV shows (Wargames, Colossus, Terminator 3) much more than it crops up in literary science fiction. In literary science fiction, artificial intelligence is often simply presented as fait accompli. So does anyone have recommendations for a good literary treatment of the birth of an A.I.? (Frederic Brown’s 1954 short-short story “Answer” is of course taken as a given classic of the genre).

Alas, the year 2001 has come and gone without moon bases, or privately operated orbital shuttles, but we’re getting there — the International Space Station may not have a Hilton, or rotate to provide artificial gravity, but at least it did just get its last major array of solar panels in place. And although PanAm Airways doesn’t exist any more, let alone the Orion III Space Clipper, private spaceflight did take a step forward recently with successful test flights of WhiteKnight Two, the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo private suborbital spacecraft.

2001: A Space Odyssey’s influence on later science fiction is impossible to underestimate, and the balletic spacecraft scenes set to sweeping classical music, the tarantula-soft tones of HAL 9000, and the ultimate alien artifact, the Monolith, have all become enduring cultural icons in their own right. Still, for those barbarians who find the measured pace of the masterpiece a little slow, check out this awesome one minute version of the movie. In Lego.