First, in Jurassic Park 2:  The Lost World, it was a T-Rex rampaging through downtown San Diego munching on house pets. Now aliens have stealthily invaded the San Diego Air & Space Museum. This particular invasion, however, was invited–the Air & Space Museum is hosting the Science of Aliens traveling exhibit: a fun mix of science and science fiction.

The exhibit is broken down into four areas:

ALIEN FICTION

The alien fiction section was small, and had a collection of movie props, videos, and sections devoted to Roswell and the Alien Autopsy video.  Interestingly the content in the Roswell section was donated by the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM, so I felt it was slightly skewed in favor of the object that crashed at Roswell being of an extraterrestrial nature, while the content provided for the Alien Autopsy video practically screamed “THIS WAS A HOAX!”

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Think of the most complicated thing you’ve written. Maybe it was a report for your employer, or an essay while in college. It could even be a computer program. Whatever it was, think of all the stuff you packed into it. Now, pause for a moment to imagine creating all that without using a word processor or a paper and pen, or really anything at all to externalize thought to something outside of your head. It seems impossible. What we get with this technology–ancient as it is–is an amplification of our brain power. Besides their gorgeous techy looks, do interactive holographics like that shown in Iron Man 2, reminiscent of interfaces shown in Minority Report, offer up some of the same brain amping?

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Science fiction without science is merely fiction. There are gray levels in how well the science is portrayed in television and cinema, however. For the third straight year, Discover Magazine and the National Academy’s Science and Enterainment Exchange hosted a science-of-science-fiction panel at San Diego Comic-Con, and this year’s theme was “Abusing Science in Science Fiction.” Each panelist provided two video clips from sci-fi television or cinema: one of science done right, and one where the science, well, wasn’t done right.

I’ve always maintained that in science fiction TV and cinema good science should be jettisoned in deference to drama as a last resort only–and then when you have all your other  ducks in a row. If the science is solid in the large bulk of your work, we’ll make the leap with you when you get a bit more… speculative. Some works stick to grounded science well, some do not.

Therefore, for my clips, I chose two instances of the same type of  event–the impact of a comet/asteroid with Earth — one done well (Deep Impact), one that could have been done better (Armageddon).

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Christopher Nolan’s Inception is a film about a time when we have the power to enter into each other’s dreams, and actively steer the dream’s course to implant an idea in the dreamer.

The film raises the issue of how much we understand about the neuroscience of dreams. Due to its need for invasive experiments, neuroscience typically works with non-human animals, which raises a significant difficulty: how do you know that a rat is dreaming? You can’t wake it up from REM sleep and ask. (Well, you can, but don’t expect a cogent response.) There’s no accepted objective indicator that a person or animal is having a dream, as opposed to sleeping. But, we can still learn something useful by looking at the neuroscience of sleep.

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Though Thor is the story of a god who crushes his enemies with a magical hammer, Kenneth Branagh’s Thor movie is set in a scientific universe. Or so it seemed from footage we saw this weekend, especially of Destroyer.

Branagh, whose previous films include Frankenstein and Dead Again, is known for over-the-top theatricality and an emphasis on acting in his films. The 3D Thor is no exception, especially since the director says he loved Thor growing up and has even worked to include different versions of the first Avenger in his film. Though the hero’s iconic hammer is pure Jack Kirby, Branagh assured the audience that “there are some Donald Blake touches” too.

Natalie Portman plays Jane Foster, a minor character in the comics who has a very large role in the movie. She called her character a rare “real, frazzled, grounded female scientist – not the low-cut lab coat and sexy glasses kind of thing.” She added that she was happy to get back in front of a green screen with an actor-oriented director like Branagh, because “working with green screens is a skill – it should be something you learn in acting school.”

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Colonel Quaritch and his exoskeleton from Avatar

Science fiction is sometimes a playground to explore what it would be like to have a different body. Most recently, in Avatar and Iron Man 2 we saw people joined to exoskeletons, which are being developed in real life for the military and for rehabilitation. The biomechanics of these exoskeletons are a close mimic of our own but with much more power or size. In Avatar, we also witnessed people experience the novelty of inhabiting a three-meter-tall blue body with movable ears and a neural interface that conveniently doubles as a tail.

But why wait for the shapeshifting future? Corsets and girdles are the best known types of “foundation garments” or “shapewear,” but for me at least, they are more Jane Eyre than Madonna, despite the latter’s use of them in her performances over the past twenty years.

For those who actually use shapewear on a day-to-day basis, the most common types must be the padded bra and shoulder pads. But the past week highlighted two new ways of changing the shape of our body. The first was in a Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Dodes on padded panties that promise to give Beyoncé-level gluteus maximi to the large behind-inclined; the second is from Sylvester Stallone’s comment that “action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on.”

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Here at Comic-Con 2010 it is a standard and recurring complaint that the event has been taken over by branding: An event that started out as a grass-roots gathering of comic-book culture has been overrun by corporate money, corporate product, and above all corporate advertising. Sure, it’s easy to see what they mean. The entire exterior of my Hilton hotel is covered with an ad for Scott Pilgrim (“an epic of epic epicness” — it’s a comic, soon to be a game and a major motion picture starring Michael Cera). The hotel elevators are wallpapered with promos for True Blood. Other buildings are draped in similarly vast posters for the game Red Faction and the upcoming movie Skyline.

The overall effect is a little overwhelming. It is also kind of…awe-inspiring.

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You’ve been running for hours, chased by a crazed grizzly bear. Suddenly you lose your footing, and you’re balancing on the edge of a cliff. Your stomach lurches as gravity pulls you down. Instantly you’re jolted awake and find yourself teetering precariously over the edge of your bed in your New York apartment. You’ve been asleep for just 5 minutes.

Like me (or whoever I stole that bizarre-o dream about the crazed grizzly from), everyone has dreams that strangely intertwine with reality. That’s what makes Chris Nolan’s newest thriller, Inception, so fun to watch. It plays with ideas we’ve all experienced—how dreams can reveal our most guarded memories, feel like days when only hours have passed, or affect our emotions when we wake up.

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Where do budding, even experienced, science-fiction writers learn about the science behind the science fiction? Going back to school and getting a university degree in a scientific discipline is an option, but that’s going to take quite a while. You could short-circuit the process by spending a week at Launch Pad at the University of Wyoming!

Launch Pad 2010 Attendees

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

The workshop’s mission is to:

…teach writers of all types about modern science, primarily astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences. We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists.

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Okay, okay, accelerated pregnancy isn’t real (yet). It’s a (not-so) fictional assisted reproductive technology imagined by Tze Chun in his short film, “Silver Sling,” which is part of the FUTURESTATES project by the Independent Television Service. In addition to accelerated surrogacy, at 92Y Tribeca’s screening of FUTURESTATES films, I was treated to human-plant chimeras, self-aware androids, and a picture of just how much worse Arizona’s draconian immigration laws are going to be in 15 years. My favorite, “Silver Sling,” follows the story of a young Russian immigrant, Lydia (pictured above auditioning for potential parents). Faced with financial woes and no job, she plans to become a surrogate mother for the third time–a decision that could potentially render her sterile for the rest of her life. Lydia is forced to choose between her present problems and her future hopes.

While the film itself is wonderful, what made “Silver Sling” stand out was Chun’s treatment of the technology. Accelerated surrogacy in “Silver Sling” isn’t good or bad, it merely is, with the ethics being different for each person involved. The complicated issues Chun brings to light are those currently pressing some surrogate mothers: their own desire for children, the risks and burdens of the procedure, and the “no-other-option” mentality driven by the problem of economic need. Even with the science-fictional elements of “Silver Sling”–the accelerated surrogacy and the fact that surrogate mothers are cared for by the assisted-reproduction company–it still feels intensely realistic.

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