Well, trying to kill the waiting time up to the Phoenix lander, I wanted to ask which is Your favorite movie with an UMSF related theme?
Mine is CONTACT, for several reasons...
Attached is a photo of the exhibit at the Very Large Array visitor's center.
Does anybody know if a simular exhibit exists at the Arecibo National astronomy & Ionosphere Center in Puerto Rico?
During 5 days, scenes were shot at the Very Large Array site near Socorro in New Mexico, but I gues they filmed longer at the Arecibo location of the 305 m radio dish on the island of Puerto Rico...

OK, not a movie, but an episode of Outer Limits. An unmanned (unaliened ??) probe lands in the ocean and 'samples' some people during a storm. The spacecraft analyzes our sea water and and parts of the life raft the humans were on. The people are able to access the data the probe has already collected and determine the craft is next headed to Venus, where they suspect they will die. They are able to 'convince' the probe to release them, and then the probe self destructs.

Interesting sci-fi viewpoint in that our reactions to a probe sent here are examined, while in real life at the time we are in the early attempts of landing our first probes on the moon.

IIRC, the episode title was 'The Probe' and it was one of the the last episodes of the original series.


Far more cogent than most alien abduction 'stories' portrayed in movies.

Not a movie either, but it had to be the original ST episode "The Changeling". The probe Nomad crashed into an alien UM spacecraft (yes, very likely indeed... ) and is now busily sterilizing planets with imperfect life forms.

ST did this sort of thing twice; I think the first movie was the one where "V'ger" came back to blow us all to hell and gone? Guess we'd better put highly redundant algorithms for Asimov's Three Laws on all outbound spacecraft...

I don't know if the "Manned" part kills it, but the entire HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon" is excellent on all fronts. It makes engineering and geology look heroic.

I really enjoyed the story in a movie entitled « The Dish «
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/index1.html

Dish was good, Contact superb.

As an unmanned sort of guy, I actually have a certain fondness for the
(in some ways quite flawed) Silent Running, in that one felt real empathy
for its robots, much as one does now for our real various Mars landers
and rovers.

I'm another Star Trek : The Motion Picture guy. I LOVED the concept of V'ger. Of course, part of that was being a kid in the early 80's when I first saw it and looking forward to the real Voyager 6.

Oh well.

Contact, though... argh. Here's a recap of my thoughts while watching the movie:

"This is cool... wow... that would be awesome... that IS awesome... wait... say WHAT?!?"

Any movie that ends up with "wait... say WHAT?!?" won't make my list of favorites.

UMSF related videos?
Try:
http://www.astroshorts.com/

Yeah... ...I felt terrible when poor "Louie" got ripped off of the Valley Forge during the passage through Saturn's rings. (It was just on one of the cable channels here last week.)

Not really a movie, but a great presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxXa9pxwzoY

Much better to have it 'at home' at the brilliant TED site : http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/carolyn..._to_saturn.html

Look out for Burt Rutan's superb talk (as well as Einstein the Parrot)

Thanks for the point out Doug! Carrolyn's talk is particulary impressive and i've liked the other 2.

Einstein doing a Penguin impression is my personal favorite.

This is because you've never heard how I do it !