For All Mankind / Star City

fightingirish said:
but after just a few minutes, the episode turned IMHO dull and disappointing. :confused:
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This season is really disappointing me in all honesty. It has really degenerated into a "big government uber bad because notoil and little guy good because freedom". I get that the M6 as a concept forced it away from a quasi geopolitical impetus for conflict but that which took it's place is overdone and bland
 
Felocie said:
This season is really disappointing me in all honesty. It has really degenerated into a "big government uber bad because notoil and little guy good because freedom". I get that the M6 as a concept forced it away from a quasi geopolitical impetus for conflict but that which took it's place is overdone and bland
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Yeah. The excitement of space exploration has been reduced to a subplot with the Titan expedition storyline offering no reason at all why anyone would want to go there. Personally, I think, 'Yeah! Titan! Amazing!' but the presentation is pipettes and rock climbing - the dullest appearance of scientific procedure without the motivation.

Meanwhile, the Happy Valley stuff is dull as a rainy day in Hell. The struggle for Martian independence was done orders of magnitude better by Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars trilogy.

Nobody seems to give a damn about what the show was supposed to be about.

There's a great little film called Europa Report about to a mission to - guess where - with stakes, tragedy, heroism, sacrifice, and revelation that make it far more exciting.
 
Brett Davidson said:
Nobody seems to give a damn about what the show was supposed to be about.
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I will say that I think there’s a chance for redemption still. Personally I felt that season 2 (that messed up one with the weird Danny-Karen thing) went off the rails but season 3 brought it back to a more even keel. If they can reorient to space exploration and the conflicts that come with it instead of human conflicts in space for season 5 there’s real potential
 
Having watched the first episode, I have to say that it's a terrific waste of Niamh Algar.

Well done, well crafted, designed to appeal to fans of thrillers. Now the KGB and the dictatorship of the Soviet Union were evil, I assume we all agree... but why did the Soviets want to land on the moon? This doesn't address it at all. The idealism driving 'Chief Designer' Sergei Korolev can be dramatised, but isn't.

The ideal goes way back, to Tsiolkovsky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Chizhevsky

Showing how that ideal struggles to survive in Soviet bureaucracy would be a compelling story. For All Mankind got bogged down in soap opera and banal politics, but this seems to have them baked in from the very beginning.

OK, real life is like that, but why are you telling that story? I don't think that this series has anything to offer.
 
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Brett Davidson said:
The idealism driving 'Chief Designer' Sergei Korolev can be dramatised, but isn't.
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Idealism isn’t the least bit entertaining to modern audiences. Can anyone imagine a modern rendition of Horatio Alger? I’d argue that it would be far more interesting to dramatize Werner Von Braun towards the end of WWII, complicit in slave labor building V2 rockets while simultaneously making initial calculations for what became the Apollo program and planning to surrender with his staff to the Americans. Antiheroes are infinitely more interesting than heroes to the jaded modern mind.
 
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Brett Davidson said:
Sadly, a lazy cynicism looks to some like wisdom and worldliness. It isn't.
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Jaron Lanier addressed this (fleetingly) in a fairly recent "Star Talk" podcast. I've been ambivalent about posting parts of this discussion on one of the AI discussions and I guess, opportunity presenting itself, will yet do so. The commodification of stereotypical lowest common denominator identities has consequences. It affords those with the least qualms about acquiring wealth and power the most leeway, especially to try and manipulate the impressionable (not as a negative as such, but constant novelty has a certain power of its own) youth.

View: https://youtu.be/TTppvBU2rU4?t=2338


Star Talk said:
Lanier: Yeah. And they're they're they're both hollow. Let me ... so a couple things about AI.

Um, let me propose to you something. Uh, if I show you some object, there's more than one way to think about that object, right? Would you agree with that?

Like, if I say get me directions to this place, one way is with a map where you see it and another way is with step-by-step directions. And they're equivalent but they're different, right? Very, very basic.

So in the same way there's a completely different way to think about AI that's equally valid but I think is better in a practical sense. Technically it's equivalent and that equivalent way is you can think of AI as a new form of collaboration between a collection of people.

So let me explain what I mean by that. Uh, throughout history, uh, the ramp of technological capability improvement has been marked by people learning how to cooperate more and more.

Language was the biggest step way early but then you know, there's the Gutenberg press, and or there's, well, there's writing and then Gutenberg, and then there's radio, and whatever all these different these different things, uh. If you look at the Wikipedia as a little point on that ramp, it takes a bunch of people's work and they cooperate together and make this single document

There's some things about the Wikipedia I don't like but let's use it, there's a lot that's great about it you know, so let's now ... you can think of large language model AI - the kind that's on everybody's, uh, mind - as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into the single document like the Wikipedia.

Uh, it's much vaster. Their contributions and their efforts were much less voluntary. There's a lot of things that are different, but fundamentally it's the same kind of beast.

Right now, if you think of AI as a collaboration of a bunch of people instead of as some new entity, you haven't said a single thing technically. It doesn't make any technical difference. It it doesn't change any code. It's just a different perspective.

But when you have that perspective, suddenly new avenues open up that are amazing and it's a better way to think about it. I'd like to get into some of the reasons you'd want to think about it that way cuz they're very profound.

But why do people want it to be a creature? Why do they want that? Why do they want it to be an entity?

Well, there's a few reasons. One is you're a young man. You think the world owes you everything. You get paid a lot. You think you're the center of the universe. Of course, you think you're making God. You know, that's what you want. You're ... that's how you think. That's where you are. I kind of remember being that way when I was 20 or something.

Farsad: You're, you're describing a lot of men I dated in my 20s.

Lanier: On behalf of my gender, I apologize. You're right. We're wrong.

No, I mean, I remember like when we were starting VR, we thought a lot of ourselves. We thought this is the most exciting room in the whole universe ever. Like, I remember thinking like this is the most ... thing and you know, it was actually a pretty cool room at the time. It started to work.

But the thing is uh there's a lot of ego in it. But then there's another thing which is almost everybody in this is pretty young and they grew up on a diet of science fiction movies, and video games, and the stories that they have that are vocabularies for how they understand the world and how they can express the world are all just like this.

They didn't have, uh, the Star Trek of the 90s which was this cool positive world that was socially improving at the same time it was technologically improving. Instead, they had the Matrix movies and they had the Terminator and they had the Marvel universe and there's all this bleak bleak stuff over and over and over again where everybody the whole race dies, everybody's gone and the computers are intelligent. It's all gloomy and everything.

Tyson: (There's) soon to be an X-prize that will fund any project that will create a a positive outlook for the future of civilization as counterpoint to all of these negative futures imagined by sci-fi writers.

Lanier: And I, I don't know if you've ever been involved in ... I, I've been involved in a few attempts to pitch positive features in Hollywood. And it's very hard because everybody thinks, well, if you're conservative and if you're manly and if you really are serious about making money, you don't do positivity in science fiction. That's for the that's for the romcoms.

Tyson: Oh, wait.

Lanier: That's girly. That's girly.

Tyson: Interesting. So, they they divide the kingdom that way. Interesting. Yeah.

Farsad: So, are you saying we would have like a more, a better relationship with AI if we just like saw more Star Trek from the 90s and less of everything else?

Lanier: Yeah, I I'll go further. If Star Trek from the 90s had lasted another 10 years, there'd be many fewer teen suicides today.

O'Reilly: Wow. Jeez.

Tyson: Wow.

Farsad: All right. That's a claim.

Lanier: I really I can't prove it, but I believe that.
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I would watch @TinWing 's Von Braun feature though. If explored fully (and not, as you put it, "lazy cynicism") it'd have a healthy dose of resonance to the contemporary situation with space exploration and power coming together in (morally, and otherwise) challenging ways. Great contrast as to how fallible people through their fallible ideals can either combine their faults to produce horrors or combine their strengths to produce advances and outright exhilarating joys. How justness, rules and mercy relate to each other, to what extent one's deeds are unitary or can be mutually redeemable.
 
Hello folks, after watching episode 4, the first half of season 1 of "Star City" is now complete.
In my view, this series focuses more on espionage, Soviet-era paranoia, and brutalist architecture than on alternative space history from a Soviet perspective.
Anyway, I’ll keep watching this series, but I don’t have such high hopes anymore. :confused:
 
Hello folks, just finished watching episode 8, and that wraps up season 1 of "Star City.":cool:
In my opinion, this was the best episode so far, packed with plenty of space scenes, though the series leans more toward espionage and Soviet-era paranoia. I wish this series featured more alternative Soviet space projects. Sadly, there was no post-credit scene or hint about a second season. :confused: :(
 
I spent the first episode weirded out by everyone talking with British accents instead of Russian accents. After another episode I forgot about it, and started enjoying the show.

Its really good, though ironically probably the forum audience will be the most likely to take issue with some of the technical aspects of the events. Leaving that aside, an enjoyable show, and I hope it's renewed/
 
fightingirish said:
Hello folks, after watching episode 4, the first half of season 1 of "Star City" is now complete.
In my view, this series focuses more on espionage, Soviet-era paranoia, and brutalist architecture than on alternative space history from a Soviet perspective.
Anyway, I’ll keep watching this series, but I don’t have such high hopes anymore. :confused:
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I totally agree with the opinion by @fightingirish ..... the show should be enjoyed as a espionage series rather than space fiction ...
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
I spent the first episode weirded out by everyone talking with British accents instead of Russian accents. After another episode I forgot about it, and started enjoying the show.

Its really good, though ironically probably the forum audience will be the most likely to take issue with some of the technical aspects of the events. Leaving that aside, an enjoyable show, and I hope it's renewed/
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Having watched all 5 seasons of For All Mankind and how it evolves, I started watching Star City with the mindset that I am prepared for "unbelieveable" technical stuff ..... if the "unbelieveable" technicals help move the story forward, I think it is totally acceptable for an alternate space history show .....
 

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