Why are audiences so turned off by our planetary neighbor? They don’t seem to have the same hang-ups about the moon, which has factored into big hits like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Apollo 13 (as well as critically acclaimed movies like Moon), but that rock is movie-ready: Stories set there simply have to be told in romantic black-and-white. Meanwhile, setting your movie on red, red Mars is like staring into a Virtual Boy for two hours, and who wants that? (Evidently not John Carter director Andrew Stanton, whose Mars is more tan than red.) It helps, too, that the moon is such an ever-present presence in our lives, as well as a place that Americans have actually been. If NASA can’t motivate an administration to send a man to Mars, why should the average moviegoer get worked up about it?

Why should the average moviegoer get worked up over Mars movies if there’s absolutely no rationale for a movie to be set there? I have a fuller review of Disney’s sci-fi blockbuster John Carter coming tomorrow, but there is zero reason the events of that movie need to take place on Mars, which I assume is only the setting because Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the books on which the movie is based thought it was cool. Ditto on pretty much every other movie with a tie to Mars—it’s a little further away from the Moon, and we haven’t had human contact with it, so it’s easy to project ideas of wacky things onto it. But that doesn’t mean those wacky aliens or evil forces derive anything interesting or significant from the fact that they come from or are based on Mars.

By contrast, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy works because there are very specific reasons for the characters to be going to Mars—an international consortium has decided it can viably made habitable (as a way to make it potentially mineable and a population escape hatch for Earth)—and a great deal of the novel’s plot is drawn from Mars-specific forces. The amount of radiation the characters are getting both drives them close together in protected habitats and encourages the experimentation that leads to a treatment to reverse aging. The religion that develops on Mars, the areophany, is specific to the planet. The political and philosophical debates are directly tied to how people feel about Mars’ geography and geological history. It’s really a shame that we can get an infinite number of failed and hugely spectacles set on Mars, but we can’t make a series or a television show out of a fully-realized, very smart Martian adventure that (other than some special effects work to show the Martian gravity) could be made pretty darn cheap.

Gingrich tests virtual reality goggles in 1996

Indeed, Gingrich has had a long fascination with ideas that most Americans would probably consider science fiction. Gingrich’s top five science fiction ideas, beyond moon bases:

1. EMP attack: As the New York Times notes today, Gingrich has a unusual phobia for outlandish doomsday scenarios like an electromagnetic pulse attack, even though most nuclear experts dismiss the threat. He even wrote the foreword to a 2009 sci-fi thriller based on an EMP attack.

2. Space mirrors: Gingrich has proposed a “a mirror system in space [that] could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.”

3. Space lasers: Gingrich has flirted with several variations of orbiting death rays. For example, in 2002 he called for “directed energy weapons and laser pulsing systems that could actually [shoot down missiles] from space.” “If you go to a space-based system, we can almost certainly build a workable system,” he said in 2009.

4. Geo-engineering: Gingrich has suggested that instead of actually stopping global warming from happening (this was when he believed in global warming), we should use geoengineering to ameliorate its impact. “Geo-engineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year,” Gingrich said in 2008. Geo-engineering is the process of artificially altering the climate in fundamental ways and is considered so dangerous that it faced a ban from the U.N.

5. A better life through video games: Gingrich made a political speech to Second Life in 2007 in which he said that the “3-D Internet in all of its various forms” will help create a better “parallel country.” “It’s a parallel that enables us to do things that would be much more difficult to do in the real world.. [It's a] world that works.” Second Life has basically failed.

Gingrich’s “futuristic proselytizing” even earned him the nickname “Newt Skywalker” among the local press in his home state of Georgia in the 1980s and ’90s, Politico notes today.

But Gingrich’s fascination with science fiction goes far deeper than gadgets and to his core motivations as a politician. Ray Smock was the historian of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 1995 until Gingrich fired him as one of Gingrich’s first acts as Speaker. As Smock wrote last week for the History News Network, Gingrich’s “hero and role model” was the protagonist of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who invents a new field of history — Gingrich is himself a historian — and fundamentally changes the course of history for thousands of planets in the process. A tagline of the series is, “In a future century the Galactic Empire dies and one man creates a new force for civilized life.” As Smock writes, “Newt liked the idea of one man shaping the destiny of entire civilizations.”

Indeed, Gingrich has spoken often about his galatic inspiration. For example, as he wrote in his 1996 memoir, To Renew America:

Isaac Asimov was shaping my view of the future in equally profound ways. …For a high school student who loved history, Asimov’s most exhilarating invention was the ‘psychohistorian’ Hari Seldon. The term does not refer to Freudian analysis but to a kind of probabilistic forecasting of the future of whole civilizations. The premise was that, while you cannot predict individual behavior, you can develop a pretty accurate sense of mass behavior.

Gingrich’s sense of grandiosity is by now famous, but his reverence for Seldon underscores the planet-sized ambitions Gingrich held, as helps elucidate his fascination with grand, futuristic projects. In a doodle of Gingrich’s recently published in Slate, the then-Speaker wrote that his two primary missions were to be an “Advocate of civilization” and “definer of civilization.” Another doodle “shows Gingrich (the “system designer”) at the hub of concentric circles featuring his staff, key supporters, the media, constituents, and the public.”

Just 20 years ago, scientists had yet to find a single planet beyond our own solar system. Now the count of confirmed extrasolar planets tops 550, with many more about to be added to the list. In February, for example, scientists announced that NASA’s Kepler space telescope had detected 1,235 candidate alien worlds in its first four months of operation. Of those, 54 likely orbit in their host stars’ habitable zone — the range of distances that could support liquid water. These candidate planets need to be confirmed by follow-up observations, but NASA researchers have estimated that at least 80 percent will end up being the real deal. And last year, astronomers reported strong evidence that the Saturn moon Enceladus likely harbors a huge and salty ocean beneath its icy crust. Subsurface oceans are also suspected to occur on other moons, such as Saturn’s Titan and Europa, a satellite of Jupiter. In short, the prospect that life exists beyond Earth — and perhaps even beyond our solar system — is becoming more and more likely. This is big news that affects the way many people view our species and its place in the universe.

All of that is true, though I’m not sure how much it penetrates the public consciousness. Our public space program is a policy afterthought, our anxieties about the math and science performance of American students in comparison to their foreign counterparts are more about winning the future on this planet than about building it on another one. If terrorism is our great foreign policy fear, that lends itself less to grand invasion metaphors and more to stealthy, unnerving small invasions and quick strikes. I wonder instead if some of the rise in alien movies comes from a sense of unease about what it means to be human.

One of the few interesting things about Cowboys and Aliens was the prospect, before it became clear how Daniel Craig acquired his nifty, alien-killing bracelet, that in captivity he’d become something other than entirely human, that he was standing between two species and two worlds but part of neither. Whether it’s Jason Silva calling for humanity to embrace the grandness of its ambitions and its potential; SyFy shows like Eureka and Alphas that suggest that rather than dividing us into binary categories of men and superman we’re all somewhere on a continuum; or the increasing integration of technology into our lives, affecting the way we live and think, increasingly, the aliens are us.

With the exception of Dora, who is a small business owner, and Raven, who’s back to school, finding career paths seem like fairly low priorities for your characters. Is that an intentional decision to leave a clear path to focus on their emotional lives? A function of time moving more slowly in the strip than it is in the real world? Is it a function of living in a college town without a lot of non-academic industries or a terrible economy? And whatever happened to Hannelore’s counting business?

A lot of it is based on who I was in my twenties, and the Northampton folks I know who are that age now. When you’re living in a college town and all you’ve got is a liberal arts degree, you’re pretty much gonna take whatever job you can get that pays the bills and isn’t too demanding. I think the philosophy is that working a job that is relatively low-responsibility and low-committment gives you more time and energy to focus on the stuff you REALLY care about. That’s certainly how I felt about it when I was 23!

But I also think that is a bit of an illusion and a trap that you can get caught in. Even if it’s a low commitment job, you’re still giving it hours and days and months and years of your time — suddenly you’re 25, or 29, and you haven’t really “done anything” with your life, and you’re not entirely sure how that happened. And that’s something I’m planning on exploring more in the relatively near future, with Marten in particular.

I imagine that Hanners still does the counting business on the side. With her family connections, she probably doesn’t actually NEED to work to support herself, but it’s important to be at least somewhat free of that kind of a family dependency. Working at CoD is more of an enrichment exercise for her than a means to make money.

Speaking of emotional lives, I’ve always really liked Faye’s interactions with her therapist. Did you do research to make those scenes realistic? Are they drawn from personal experience? What impact does having a lot of your characters in therapy, all probing fairly painful things, have on your thinking about how the cast as a whole interacts and how they make decisions?

The therapy strips are really hard for me to write, actually, because therapy is such a personal thing — everyone’s process and relationship with their therapist is going to be different. Mainly I just try to make sure the therapist doesn’t do or say anything that seems patently false or unrealistic, and hope for the best. I do exaggerate things for humor’s sake — a lot of the stuff Dr. Corrinne tells Faye probably wouldn’t be “ethical” in the real world, but WHATEVER IT’S MY COMIC AND I CAN DO WHAT I WANT, *DAD*

The characters spend so much time talking to themselves and each other about their Problems anyway that a lot of their interactions are a kind of weird, codependent group therapy. When it comes to decision making, there’s always a temptation to have characters always make the best choices, because I like them and want them to be happy. But that’s unrealistic and boring, so I do my best to have them fuck up now and then.

On a less-realistic note, you’ve obviously toned down some of the science fictional elements of the strip over the years. One thing I’m curious about, though: is this a world where the rules of how things work are significantly different? Or our own world, just with a few extras? Or set a bit in the future?

I would say it’s significantly different, but in subtle ways. It’s set in the present day, but a lot of the technology is further along or went down different paths. They developed true AI back in the nineties, so intelligent machines are as commonplace to them as mp3 players or DVDs are to us. They’ve got space stations that people permanently live on, you can raise a kid on one. Space technology also developed a lot more- the attitude of “space is the future, we have to get there NOW” that America had back in the 50s and 60s never really abated in the world of QC. I think a lot of the reason the QC world seems more “advanced” is because they never lost that emphasis on space exploration and development- so much of our technology comes from that field, and it’s been dying a slow death ever since the end of the Apollo missions, which is a real shame. The pessimist in me doesn’t think we’re ever going back to the moon, let alone getting to another planet. Which kind of means we’re doomed! I hope attitudes change. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and no real replacement in sight.

The sci-fi elements generally get pushed into the background because the character-driven stuff is more compelling for me. I have plans for a side-project that, if it ever gets of the ground (ha ha ha), would be set in a similar world but a lot more fantastic in focus.

I spend a lot of time writing and thinking about fandom and community, so I loved the way Toto references shaped the narrative around Faye and Angus getting together, and the way common interests have brought together characters like Marigold and Dale. Has spending time at conventions shaped any of those storylines or the way you think about how people build communities around the art and culture they’re passionate about? To what extent do you think fandom and cultural interests can be the basis for strong and meaningful friendships and relationships?

I don’t know that conventions have shaped them so much, the way you interact with people at a convention is, in my experience, radically different than how you do it in the outside world. But if you’re passionate about something and you meet someone else who is also passionate about it, you’re either going to make a new friend or a new enemy.

The concept of fandom actually bothers me a bit — it seems like describing yourself as a member of a “fandom” means you’re more invested in the community that has grown around a given thing than you are in the thing itself. And while I can appreciate the sense of community and enrichment that being part of that community brings, it also prevents people from trying new things. Doctor Who is a great show, but there are so many people out there doing Doctor Who fan work when they could be making stories of their own. MS Paint Adventures is a great comic, but there are so many people out there making troll versions of themselves when they could be making comics of their own. Of course I’m probably biased. Because I’ve been “making things of my own” for years now, I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t do that.

I think you can make a meaningful relationship out of just about anything, if both parties are interested in doing so. There’s no reason why mutual interests in popular culture wouldn’t work!

And on that note, you have a passionate fanbase of your own, and folks have strong opinions about what should happen in this universe you’ve created. Are there times when you shape storylines or character arcs based on fans’ interests? How do you decide if fan feedback is useful or not? Are there decisions you’ve made based on fans’ requests and critiques? Or do you separate out that kind of information from your own creative process?

I have a pretty strong filter for what feedback is useful and what isn’t. People on my forums posting “omg Dora is such a bitch Marten needs to man up and slap that ho” is not particularly useful.

But if I’ve done something stupid and didn’t realize it, then it can be a godsend. I’ve gotten some flack over Tai’s promiscuity and how it could be interpreted as being anti-feminist or anti-lesbian, and while I don’t agree with the most extreme things people have said about the subject, it is something I think I’ve mishandled a bit in the past, and I’m going to be more thoughtful about it in the future.

Positive feedback is ALWAYS useful — I’ve been trying to be a little more ambitious with my artwork lately, and the response to that has been extremely encouraging.

Reihan Salam talks to the Economist:

DIA: What are some areas where you think Republicans can successfully work with Democrats in the future.

Mr Salam: In the far future, I imagine that there will be bipartisan cooperation on space colonisation and efforts to terraform Mars. In the nearer term, I’d like to see Republicans work closely with the Obama White House on education, an area where Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, agree on everything important. I’d also like to see cooperation on Medicare reform, but that won’t happen. Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree on giving states and local governments more flexibility when it comes to designing transportation initiatives and welfare-to-work programmes. Efforts to decentralise government united congressional Republicans and the Clinton White House, and perhaps we’ll see more of that under Barack Obama.

On space colonization, I’m afraid I have to strenuously disagree. The problem is that the Spacers will inevitable become politically independent of earth, and then use their command over superior natural resources and robots to oppress us.

On education, I’m basically in agreement. There are, however, fundamental limits to the potential scope for cross-party cooperation on much of anything as long as conservative activists succeed in making it all-but-impossible for Republican politicians to embrace taxes of any kind. Their current stance toward fiscal issues points in the long run toward their not being any money with which to fund education programs of any kind.

Revisiting Barack Obama’s education speech, this bit near the beginning touched on some interesting themes:

I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time. They forget that Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of Civil War. Likewise, President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. And we don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

I agree with Obama’s conclusion, but this Moon analogy seems terrible. It’s true that there was no zero-sum tradeoff between civil rights and the moon, but at the same time we obviously did have the luxury of just not going to the moon. The point I would make about education is that the quality of the education the current generation of children receive is critical to the economic well-being of the country 20, 30, and 40 years from now and if screw it up, you can’t get the kids back in school. We really don’t have the luxury of choosing, but Kennedy did.

The Lincoln business, meanwhile, is one of congress’ great untold stories. People generally don’t think about this very much, but one important consequence of secession was to radically shift the balance of power in Congress since almost every southern member was gone. Suddenly, the super-empowered northern-based Republican majority could pass all sorts of legislation on all sorts of topics. And legislate they did—Homestead Act, all kinds of trade protections, railroad schemes, etc. Just imagine would happen in congress today if the South seceded? It would change everything! And, obviously, it’s not as if there was less regional polarization back then. Conversely, what if Southern Democrats hadn’t seceded back in 1860-61 and had just instead decided to mount a ton of filibusters of all Lincoln’s key legislative priorities? Of course back then we didn’t have the present-day understanding that routine filibusters are okay. But just for fun, project today’s alleged supermajority requirement back to the election of 1860 and a Southern decision that obstructionism was a better path to the preservation of slavery than secession.

Max asks about the great beyond:

I, sir, would like to now what your issue with the space program. And by issue, I mean, what exactly are you beefing about? NASA itself? Launching people into space in general? The ‘no waste’ argument of black boxing the solar system (already done, actually)? The argument that the money could be spent on other expensive science projects (known as ‘we could fund MY project with that money instead’ argument)?

The first place to start is that, of course, we have two different space programs — one military and one civilian. The existence of some sort of military concern with outer space is natural for a great power, but this is an area in which we tend to go too far. Instead of agreeing to abide by and help enforce the existing international law on the demilitarization of space, the United States has in recent years been pushing the envelop toward the militarization of space complete with a Bush administration National Space Strategy that sets perpetual military hegemony in space as a national goal. The upshot of this sort of policymaking is to help create a self-justifying “space arms race” with the Chinese in which Chinese responses to our moves become the justification for further moves that lead to further Chinese responses and further moves. It’s bad for you, it’s bad for me, it’s bad for the world, but it’s good for the aerospace industry.

Then you have the civilian space program for science and exploration purposes. This is a fine idea. My only beef with it is that the program has been disproportionately focused on the idea of manned space exploration. Human beings, being fragile creates who evolved on the planet earth, turn out to be hard to send into space. They also, being humans, tend not to be interested in taking extremely long trips even though many interesting things in space are very far away. Under the circumstances, it’s just not very practical to send human beings into space unless there’s something important that only human beings can do. And in recent decades, there just having been the sort of compelling projects that justify the difficulties of manned space flight. Instead, we’ve been making up missions — most recently the preposterous idea of a manned mission to Mars — in order to justify the human-oriented space program.

But what we ought to do is leave the manned space flight to eccentric billionaires looking to do something weird, and focus our civilian space activities on doing science and exploration through unmanned probes and telescopes and the like. There’s lots of perfectly legitimate things for NASA to be doing, including sending vehicles to other planets to tell us more about them and establishing better systems for tracking (and better understanding) the asteroids and comets that are flying around.

Dr. Joseph Romm, a Center for American Progress Senior Fellow, has well documented that Easterbrook knows nothing about global warming and environmental policy, as have other bloggers. More simply, Easterbrook knows nothing about science. To wit, in his weekly Tuesday Morning Quarterback sports column, Easterbrook digressed into other matters of his purported expertise, science and space policy:

A few columns ago, I speculated that even if there is never any way to exceed or circumvent the light-speed barrier, relatively nearby planets might still fight by hurling nuclear bombs at each other at 99 percent of light speed — with existing technology, something moving that fast wouldn’t even be seen until nearly here. Let’s hope any world advanced enough to build near-light-speed stardrive will also have become wise enough to forswear war. But based on the only model we know, human society, technology and wisdom do not go hand in hand. Anyway, John Duezabou of Helena, Mont., adds this creepy postscript: “A bellicose or paranoid extra-solar civilization that could accelerate an object to 99 percent of light speed wouldn’t need to launch bombs at us. They could shoot anything with devastating results, because the kinetic energy of a moving object is half its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity, or KE = 1/2 mv². Thus, one pound of anything — a pint of vanilla ice cream, for instance — accelerated to 99 percent of light speed has an energy of about 4.8 megatons, roughly the blast yield of the largest hydrogen bombs.” A moderate-sized object, say a small asteroid, if accelerated to 99 percent of light speed, could conceivably shatter the Earth.

Ignoring many of the obvious problems with Easterbrook’s thought experiment, the science here is simply wrong. The kinetic energy of a moving object is actually m₀c²(1/(1-v²/c²)^1/2 – 1) (where m₀ is the rest mass, v the velocity, and c the speed of light) which the Newtonian formulation closely approximates only for non-relativistic speeds. A one-pound mass accelerated to 99 percent of light speed actually has a kinetic energy of about 68 58 megatons of TNT, greater than the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated.

This isn’t grad-school level physics — this element of relativistic mechanics is taught in high schools across the nation and is of course readily available online.

This kind of scientific illiteracy is of no great shakes for a sports columnist, and science fictional scenarios are an excellent learning tool for non-scientists. But under no circumstances should anyone who writes this be considered a science expert, let alone by one of the most august think tanks in the nation. Or, as the Poor Man Institute bloggers write, “Dear God make it stop.”

(H/T Eschaton.)