A city on the Moon?

Lunar transport vehicle, film 2001

Building a lunar colony is a favorite theme in science fiction. I would cite one of my favorite stories featuring such a colony: The Menace from Earth by Robert A. Heinlein (1957). A lunar colony also appears in the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.

Recently, with the return of humans to the Moon (still in its early stages, as astronauts have only orbited the Moon), there has been renewed discussion about the possibility of building a permanent lunar facility. There is even talk of establishing a city, with a population of over 100,000.

A piece in Physics World—referencing another article published in Frontiers in Space Technologies—addresses this issue by examining the needs of a lunar colony and the potential cost of maintaining it.

The lost worlds of 2001

Arthur C. Clarke

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is one of the most representative science-fiction films in the world of cinema. Its script, which took several years to develop, was elaborated jointly by Arthur C. Clarke, a renowned science-fiction writer during the golden age of this genre, and Stanley Kubrick, a famous film director. While he was working on the script, Clarke wrote a book with the same title as the film, which was published after the film’s release.

In 1972 Arthur C. Clarke published a book entitled The Lost Worlds of 2001, where he mixes reminiscences about the elaboration of the script with discarded chapters from the book. By reading this book, we can follow the process of the construction of the film by Clarke and Kubrick and the successive stages of the plot. I agree with them that the final script was much better than the intermediate versions. Reading this book has led me to the following two comments:

The best sci-fi films

As usual, there are lists of the best movies for all tastes. In this article I will focus on three:

• The 100 best films in history, the result of a vote among seven film critics, organized by the newspaper La Vanguardia in 2007.
• The 100 best films in history, the result of a vote among hundreds of thousands of users of IMDb, the largest database on cinema.
• My personal preferences: the 230 movies I have liked best.

The three laws of Robotics

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was a prolific science fiction and popular science writer who published in the 40s a series of stories about robots, later compiled in the I, Robot collection. In these stories he invented a word that has become a part of the technological vocabulary, as the name of a discipline: Robotics. He also formulated the three famous laws of Robotics, which in his opinion should be implemented in every robot to make secure our interactions with these machines that, when Asimov formulated the laws, were simple future forecasts.

The three laws of Robotics are the following:

First Law: A robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey any order given by a human being, except those that conflict with the first law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first two laws.