Daily Archives: November 18, 2023

Warning! This article contains spoilers for A Murder At The End Of The World.

Although A Murder at the End of the World does not explicitly mention which guests were invited by Andy and which ones by Lee, one can guess who was invited by whom based on some hidden clues and details. In A Murder at the End of the World's episode 1, Martin, Sian, and David speculate whether Darby was invited by Lee or Andy as they make their way to the retreat. While Martin believes that Andy must have invited her, David disagrees and claims that Andy would only invite people who have built something from the ground up. Martin also explains that Andy Ronson invited five of the nine guests while his wife, Lee, invited four.

Episodes 1 and 2 of A Murder at the End of the World do not resolve this mystery, and it remains unknown whether certain characters were invited by Lee or Andy. However, the episodes drop several subtle clues that allow viewers to become armchair detectives and deduce who was invited by whom. Given how Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's shows and movies are written intricately with attention to every little detail, the guest list alone could offer answers to several underlying mysteries.

RELATED: New Murder Mystery Show Is The Perfect Replacement For Hit Netflix Drama Canceled 4 Years Ago

In A Murder at the End of the World, Sian is introduced as a Brazillian woman who started her career as a doctor but later went on to become an astronaut. When Darby first meets her on the plane to the retreat, she mentions that Sian even stepped on the Moon. Later, in A Murder at the End of the World's episode 1, Andy Ronson commends Sian by saying that she could be the one saving humanity's future with her research on the colonization of the Moon. Given how Andy Ronson takes the time to specifically mention Sian's achievements during the welcome dinner and even calls her a close friend, it seems evident he invited her.

Considering that Bill Farrah is known for being an artist who criticizes technological advancement with his artwork, he likely would not have received an invitation for the central retreat in A Murder at the End of the World if it wasn't for Lee. Andy and most of his guests are proponents of technological developments, especially AI. This puts Bill at odds with them, making him unworthy of being on Andy's guest list. However, for hacker Lee Andersen (Brit Marling), Bill seems to be the perfect guest for the retreat not only because they used to be close friends but also because Lee has faced the dire consequences of unchecked technological developments in the past.

As her backstory reveals, she was doxxed after she published a critical manifesto about how misogyny was destroying the early promise of the internet. Her haters even posted fake AI-generated videos of her to ruin her online reputation. Given how Bill creates activist art that denounces technology, it makes sense for Lee to invite him.

A Murder at the End of the World does not initially reveal much about Lui Mei. Andy Ronson also does not explicitly mention that he invited her to the retreat. However, since Lui Mei is one of the biggest players in the world of AI technology, it would be logical for Andy Ronson to invite her to the retreat and show her the advancements he and his people have made in recent years.

Darby seemingly gets a last-moment invitation to the retreat in A Murder at the End of the World after she mentions Lee Andersen as one of her inspirations in her book, "The Silver Doe." This alone establishes that she was invited by Lee. However, there could be a deeper reason why Darby was called to the retreat because it seems strange how her ex-boyfriend, Bill, was also invited and murdered on his first night at the venue. Although the exact reason why Darby received an invitation remains a mystery, Lee likely had some hidden motives when she decided to call Darby to the retreat.

As established in A Murder at the End of the World's episode 1, Ziba is among the few guests Andy specifically acknowledges during the welcome dinner. He praises Ziba for pioneering the use of end-to-end encryption during her activism in Iran, confirming that he invited her after being impressed by her work. Ziba, however, seems immensely critical of rich folks like Andy Ronson who hoard money. She claims she would not have attended the retreat but only showed up because she wanted to meet a like-minded activist like Bill.

Lui Mei mentions that she is a big fan of Martin's movies, which establishes that he is a gifted filmmaker with an impressive line of work. Unlike most other guests invited by Lee, Martin seems relatively neutral about technology. In A Murder at the End of the World's episode 2, he even takes Andy Ronson's AI assistant's help to create a movie, which portrays how, despite being invited by Lee Andersen, Martin is the kind of person who can get along with both proponents of technology and its critics.

RELATED: Is The Silver Doe Based On A True Story? A Murder At The End Of The World's Real Inspirations Explained

David's initial interactions with Darby and other guests on the plane to the retreat suggest that he is an arrogant businessman who takes immense pride in his high net worth. Although Andy Ronson does not explicitly mention that he invited David, David seems sure that it was Andy's idea to have him at the retreat because, according to him, the distinction between the people who build real businesses in the world and the ones who don't is important to Andy. David's pompousness and pride confirm that Lee Andersen would not have invited him since her guest list includes more grounded people like Rohan, Darby, and Bill.

A Murder at the End of the World introduces Rohan as a climate scientist, which is enough to confirm that he was on Lee Andersen's guest list. While Rohan does not openly criticize technology like Bill and Ziba, he likely has deep concerns about its long-term impact on the planet because of his profession. Rohan's reaction to Bill's death in A Murder at the End of the World's episode 2 also suggests that he had a history with Bill.

Oliver is another guest at the retreat who gets acknowledged by Andy Ronson at the welcome dinner. Ronson says that Oliver's work in robotics is beyond what he read in science fiction as a kid. Ronson's admiration for Oliver's work in A Murder at the End of the World's episode 1 not only establishes that he invited him to the retreat but also suggests that he has been following his work in robotics for quite some time and has even collaborated with him to develop relevant technologies that could save the planet in the future.

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A Murder At The End Of The World's Retreat Guests Explained: Who ... - Screen Rant

Perhaps entirely by accident, Sofia Coppolas Marie Antoinette (2006) turned into one of the best and most prophetic films about celebrity decadence, rampant income inequality, and the widening gulf between elites and everyone else that defines contemporary America. Ostensibly a sardonic, womens history retelling of the last queen of ancien rgime France, the movie unfolds more like a costume party than a costume drama. Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Marianne Faithful, Asia Argento and a host of other actors prance around playing their more-or-less-clueless selves, drenched in champagne, eating gateaux, and trying on Manolo Blahnik shoes to an anachronistic punk soundtrack. The party scenes look gloriously unscripted, like were watching royals just hanging outthe film even predated (barely) Keeping Up With the Kardashians. This is how it felt to be young, glamorous, and afloat on seas of unearned wealth and celebrity during the early 2000s. Watching it is akin to experiencing a translation or transposition of time periods and mores: Was the whole purpose of the French Revolution to replace the aristocracy of birth with the aristocracy of celebrity? What was the difference?

A similar gestalt characterizes the outset of Adam Thirlwells fourth novel, The Future Future. Celinethere are no last names or titlesis a young aristocrat, wed at 18 to the abusive and violent Sasha, who is 27 years her senior; when the novel opens she is the subject of prurient rumors and flat-out pornography, which circulate in the form of pamphlets. One of them imagines her and several Jewish billionaires conspiring to take control in America during their orgies. Defenseless, Celine at first responds in the only way she knows how: to dress with an increased sense of alertness, her private idea of armour. Shed started to sew little slogans into the sleeves of her dressesfragments like AS IF or IF YOU MUSTor to add extra folds and loops multiplying a system of false openings.

Thirlwell refers to these as punk outfits, part of an array of intentional anachronismsbillionaire is another, as is the epithet fascist applied to Sasha, and the endearment babyeach of which serves to unsettle and displace the readers sense of time and place, even though its gradually revealed that we are somewhere in France, in or about the year 1775, in a universe similar but not identical to both the universe of Coppolas Marie Antoinette and our own.

In one of many highly recondite jokes played on the historical record, Thirlwell has Celine hatch a conspiracy to bring together the first lady, Antoinette, with her friend, a Jewish stockbroker called Rosen. This is done by staging a drawing room theatrical with the successful aim of getting Rosen appointed finance minister. Rosen here stands in for the historical figure of Jacques Neckerthe banker tasked with saving Louis XVIs tottering state from bankruptcy in 1777and the father of the noted salonnire and early feminist novelist Germaine de Stal. The joke in this case is that Necker, a Swiss Protestant, was subsequently labeled a Judeo-Mason by reactionary Catholic conspiracy theorists after the Bourbon restoration, which in turn fed various streams of 19th-century European Jew hatredthe myth of shadowy Jewish bankers controlling capitalthat would later stimulate the 20th-century Jew-hating ravings of the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Cline, namesake of Thirlwells maligned heroine, who becomes a de Stal-like figure of literary resistance.

None of this, however, is directly mentioned in the novel. Whether from residual modesty, good comic instincts (jokes are only funny if they dont have to be explained), or a reluctance to avoid anything that might look like mansplaining in a work that tries very hard to prove its male authors feminist bona fides (more on that later), Thirlwell doesnt risk the sort of knowing footnotes that appear in David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest ormore relevant to this kind of counterfactual historical novelVladimir Nabokovs late masterpiece Ada, or Ardor.

Its this latter novel that The Future Future finally resembles most. Ada is set in an alternate historical universe where Russia never sold Alaska to the United States, time is reversible, and death is imagined as just one more form of emigration. The novel is also an old aristocrats last fantasy of good breeding in every sense, an overstuffed Faberg egg into which the aged exile poured all his multilingual wordplay, genealogical obsessions, passions for butterflies and other pretty things, along with his enduring consanguineous sexual fantasies. Thirlwell, likewise, comes across much of the time as a sensualist. His previous novel, Lurid and Cute (2016), was indeed both: a tale of a marriages unraveling after a one-night stand gone wrong, but also an enthusiastic homage to the partying habits of Britains gilded, Euro-hopping bright young things of the pre-Brexit 2010s. The setting was a vague no-place place that combined elements of London, Oxford, and Berlin with various Mediterranean holiday destinations into a trans-European, radiant city of the privileged.

Behind every historical novel, even a counterfactual historical novel like The Future Future, is a philosophy of history and an implied politics.

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Thirlwells prose can feel like being tickled, precious and pointed at the same time: He had brought a giant pale green ice cream as a present. It was already melting and subsiding ... This is how the head of the secret police shows up to visit Celine to discuss the matter of the revenge-porn pamphlets. The scene goes on in this register, advancing through a series of staccato, short sentences where Thirlwells mid-20th-century precursors would have gone with longer, lugubrious legatos: "[Celines] dress felt sticky. A plate of pastries had gone stale. A congealed bowl of pici cacio e pepe was on the floor, being licked by Martas dogwho Marta had left behind while she went out of town for a while. In packing crates around her was a newly delivered set of porcelain, a series of circles and rectangles, severely painted in an international blue. Each of these figures, the melting ice cream, the stale pastry, the overly precise Italian pasta dish being eaten by the friends lap dog, the porcelain, are more than just signifiers of class or atmosphere, but also allusions to a saturated, thickly descriptive style that has come to feel out of reach in recent novels: either reduced, staled, congealed, or, quite literally, chintzy.

Here, too, Thirlwell echoes late Nabokov in the desire to carve out a space for intimate and sensual aesthetic experience in the midst of a literary moment and publishing climate oriented to the supposedly engaged and ethical. Everything that is flippant in this novel is also serious, and vice versa: Its a fearful thing to fall into the hands of something this supernatural ... the way its also fearful when youre left alone at a party with a celebrity and suddenly cant see your friends, so Celine thinks during a comic set-piece voyage to the moon where the lunatic inhabitants are tall with darkly colourful skin, dine on pills, have transcended gender and say things like Hang out with us. The objects speak in human voices and engage Celine in philosophical dialogues on the nature of reality and appearance. The episode is a mashup of 18th-century interstellar voyages (in the style of the Adventures of Baron Munchausen) with the later Alices Adventures Underground, and a revision of both. Ada, its first line an infamous inversion of Anna Karenina (All happy families are more or less dissimilar, all unhappy ones are more or less alike) also shares this meta-literary playfulness, offering a counterhistory of the modern Russian novel the way Nabokov would have preferred it, with the strictures of 20th-century socialist-realism neatly excised, along with the troublesome moral melodramas of Dostoyesky and late Tolstoy.

Thirlwell comes across as less grandiosely revisionist but is up to something similar with respect to both literary and political history. It all began with writing, is the novels first sentence. Another chapter begins, There was literature everywhere. The world was a jungle called writing. In this world writers became politicians and politicians wrote for newspapers and meanwhile everyone wrote to each other every day, as if an experience were not an experience until it had acquired its own image in words ... Thirlwell is describing the atmosphere of late-18th-century print culture: an era in which Thomas Paines democratic pamphlets Common Sense and The Rights of Man coexisted alongside aristocratic epistolary novels like Choderlos de Laclos Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which mimicked the everyday living art of intimate letter writing of a kind found in the 17th-century correspondence between Madame de Sevign and her daughter. But his description is blurred in a way that could just as easily refer to the Twitter-saturated culture of Thirlwells native time and place, 21st-century Great Britain, where a foppish journalist-politician or politician-journalist (Boris Johnson) eventually became prime minister.

Even though Celine and her adventures remain always at the center of the novel, Thirlwell also uses her to stage an exhibition and clash of literary subcultures: the salona space governed by women where people perform plays and write letters and novelsagainst the caf"a space governed by misogynists who write the libels and tracts that become journalism. One of these antagonists, Yves, is an improbable portmanteau of the incendiary Jacobin journalist Camille Desmoulins and the cold-blooded lawyer, Robespierre, along with every caricature of a cultural commissar in every possible historical iteration thrown in for good measurean ugly man devoted to stamping out beauty wherever he sees it.

In addition to trying to abolish privacy and establish a perfect system of information retrieval (fans of Terry Gilliams Brazil will enjoy Thirlwells evocation of the cubicles at the new Ministry of Information), Yves also targets literature itself. At a conference in a room that smells of terrible meatpork skin and hot sauce a detail with more than a whiff of Cultural Revolution ChinaYves accuses the playwright Beaumarchais (of The Marriage of Figaro fame and one of several real historical personages in the novel) of having produced counterrevolutionary work in part because he has been friends with too many women. Yves ultimate public sanction of Beaumarchais plays the typical activist tune about novels and literature that are somehow too feminine, too focused on private experience and the interior, there was no sense of the revolutionary army as an entire mass, there was no attempt to represent thousands of armed soldiers advancing like lava, he yells, just individual people, with their own neuroses.

Behind every historical novel, even a counterfactual historical novel like The Future Future, is a philosophy of history and an implied politics. Sometimes its laid out in the open: Sir Walter Scotts early Whig Progressivism animated his Waverley novels, the prototype of the first modern historical novel, and Tolstoys War and Peace offers several explicit refutations of Hegelianism. Thirlwells philosophy and politics are harder to track. On the one hand, The Future Future might be the first novel written explicitly from the standpoint of writing systems or discourse networks, a way of looking at literary history in particular and history in general that enjoyed a brief vogue in British and American literature departments during the mid to late 1990s, spearheaded by the German critic Friedrich Kittler. Literature as well as events, in this view, were as much a creation of social networks, informal institutions, and techniques of dissemination (the post office, the news kiosk, etc.) as any single authorial consciousness. A timely zetz to the patient scholarship of the Germans was then delivered by the Franco-American literary critic Pascale Casanovas World Republic of Letters (1999), which reframed literary history both in terms of network systems and as a struggle for institutional domination in an endless war of positioning and posing that criss-crossed national and linguistic boundaries. Literature for Casanova wasnt a politics by other means, just another institution subject to a logic of petty politickingan argument familiar to anyone who has ever spent time in a university literature department. What had begun as an attempt to write the history of sociability, as carried out in writing, had taken the cynical form that has come to color so much contemporary criticism of literature and the arts, where everything is seen through the lens of careerismand careerism is then elevated to a necessary realpolitik of artistic and even physical survival.

Thirlwell, then, as an aesthete making a case for aesthetics in an age of near total cynicism about the arts, has nonetheless made the choice to write from within the perspective of one of the more cynical theories of literary production currently in circulation. Literature is just another power game, with the cultivation of certain writers and the demoting of others being part of that game. At the beginning of the novel, Celine is a woman trying to make her way in a mans world, so her instrumentalization of literature and the authors she patronizes to get what she wants makes a certain sense. But the more power Celine acquired, the more she realised how little she actually had. It was possible, she was discovering, to have power in one context and in another to have none. To make moves was a very delicate process.

And heres where Thirlwells distant mirroringthe past as present, the present as past, the future as repetitiontakes a fascinating turn that elevates the novel out of the realm of ordinary curiosity into something, well, truly new. On the surface, at the level of plot and jacket copy, The Future Future can sound like a dutiful post-#MeToo novel by a man trying rather hard to show that he knows how to write women. The novel pleads a case for its author: He, just like poor old Beaumarchais on trial, should be allowed to continue publishing in a climate in which male writers (the zoologism male is telling on its own), especially so-called cis-white-male writers, face historically unprecedented skepticism about the social utility and market viability of their work. (That Thirlwell and many of his white male contemporaries happen to be Jews is a distinction without a difference to most publishers; and for some it is no doubt worse.)

Thirlwells feminist novel thus returns us to another moment in time when women effectively ruled the literary world, that of the late-18th-century French salons. He chronicles Celines intense female friendships, sometimes turned into love affairs; the men are secondary characters, abusive husbands, absent fathers, including the man with whom Celine eventually has a daughter. This allows Thirlwell to display his ability at scenes of intense mother-daughter bonding. Men are obstacles: Sasha, Yves, eventually Napoleon; writerly allies like Beaumarchais and Lorenzo Da Ponte, another famous Judeo-Mason; moneymen like Rosen; or loyal servants.

To make this setup even more complicated, the novels progressive feminist politics comes with a dose of apparently reactionary class politics. Celine and her friends are all aristocrats, and the feminine space of the literary imagination is that of the salon, the boudoir, or the beautiful country houses where Celine takes refuge from persecution. The enemies of this beautiful world are apostles of the Enlightenment andnominally, at leastgreater equality: They are measurers, improvers, explorers, and would-be engineers of history, like Napoleon, who gets a star turn in the novels final act. To further stir the political pot, Thirlwell includes two weird parallel subplots: the first about a Mohawk translator and his daughter, who Celine meets when exile takes her to America, and the second about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. These dangle in short chapters, pseudo-meaningfully, as if to suggest that neither aristocracy nor Western Enlightenment liberalism are truly sustainable once you take out colonization and slaverybut its pretty clear which party or parties have the authors sympathies.

Yet Thirlwells focus on censorship, the post-revolutionary reprisals of the terror and the states control over literature and lives cant help but awaken parallels to contemporary cancellations and decanonizations of male writers. In the contemporary reputational economy of the internet, where anyones life can be made miserable by a rumor or tweet, Thirlwell seems to be saying, we are all women nowor, perhaps, writers are women, too, meaning writers of any gender. The Future Future teaches you to read it as both a historical novel and an act of literary transvestism. The surrogate or analogue of the sensitive aesthete and nominally not-queer male author who would still try to get published in 2023 turns out to be a woman from the 18th and early 19th centuries whose life resembles Madame de Stals. Only by putting on this costume can the novelist appear as himself.

This is indeed an ingenious solution to the perils and pitfalls of contemporary male writing, but at what price? The Future Future is a work of doubled assimilation: on the one hand, an assimilation to the ethical demands of the woke novel to provide us entertainments featuring virtuous women and awful dudes in settings critical of the limits of the near enemy that is Western Enlightenment liberalism. On the other hand, the novel performs a counterassimilation, by borrowing the tropes and trappings of feminism to stage the precarious balancing act that a would-be contemporary Beaumarchais must pull off in order to succeed and be recognized (or be misrecognized and therefore succeed) in todays virtue-driven world of arts and letters.

It helps that Thirlwell is a British Jewish writer and already comfortable with this kind of self-effacement. Unlike American Jewish writing, postwar literary novels by native-born British Jewish writers, with the exception of Howard Jacobsons comedies, have been mostly assimilated from their origins. Anita Brookner, Muriel Spark, Will Self, Alain de Botton, are all British Jewish novelists, but you wouldnt necessarily know it by reading them. Literature, for British Jews, has mainly been a way to suppress or submerge the Jewish aspects of their authorial identity, rather than, as with the masters of the postwar American generation, a means toward its vibrant assertion.

Jewishness in British literature, and also in Thirlwells novel reimagining of the literary sphere, functions instead as a kind of privileged ontological status, like the inhabitants of Thirlwells lunar pavilions, who have been cured of desire and other lesser human emotions through sexless, omniscient voyeurism. It should go without saying that these abstracted moon people are stateless cosmopolitans of the highest refinement, true aristocrats of the spirit, and all quite happy in their own way.

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The Moon People: Assimilation and the Jewish Literary Transvestite - Tablet Magazine

Overview:

The Apollo astronauts are elderly and dwindling, and the Artemis astronauts haven't yet left Earth's atmosphere. There's only a narrow window of time remaining when different generations of space explorers have a chance to meet.

[Previous: NASAs Artemis: Its time to walk on the Moon again]

Frank Borman has died at the age of 95. Borman was the commander of Apollo 8, the first crewed spaceflight to orbit the Moon, which happened on Christmas Eve, 1968.

Although they didnt land or walk on the Moon, Borman and his fellow astronauts took one of the most famous photographs ever: the Earthrise image that showed our pale blue-and-white marble hanging above the lunar horizon, surrounded by the infinite void of space.

As Borman said of the experience:

The Earth looked so lonely in the Universe, Borman said in a NASA oral history. Its the only thing with color.

With Bormans passing, there are only eight Apollo astronauts still alive, out of an initial 24. Five of them are in their 90s.

After a fifty-year gap, NASA has begun new lunar missions under the banner of Artemis. And its not a moment too soon.

Artemis 1 launched in November 2022. It was an uncrewed mission, testing the new Space Launch System and the Orion capsule. The mission went off as smoothly as we could have hoped for, successfully orbiting the Moon and making a safe return to Earth.

Artemis 2 is scheduled to launch in November 2024 with a crew of four. Like Apollo 8, the mission plan is to orbit the Moon and return to Earth without landing. Artemis 3, scheduled for 2025, will land astronauts at the Moons south pole. But these dates are still tentative, and theyre at the mercy of weather, technological problems, cost overruns, and bureaucratic schedule slip.

In one sense, theres no rush. The Moon has been our companion for four billion years. It isnt going anywhere. No mission objectives are at risk if we wait a little longer.

But on a human scale, there is a reason for urgency. Namely, its been five decades since any human orbited or walked on the Moon, and the surviving Apollo astronauts are elderly. Statistically, we only have a few years before none of them are left.

The United States is the only nation thats landed human beings on the Moon. Although China and others are catching up, the U.S. is still the only one that has any chance of making a return voyage in that timeframe.

If two generations of Moon explorers are ever going to meet, this is our only shot. Will the Artemis astronauts get a chance to shake hands with their predecessors? Will they be able to swap stories and anecdotes? Will they be united by that shared experience that only a tiny handful of human beings have ever had?

If we delay, well be letting that heritage lapse. The thread of memory and continuity that connects one generation to the next will be broken. That wouldnt be the end of space exploration, of course. But it would be like a runner in an Olympic relay finding no one to hand the torch off to, and watching the flame die out. You can always relight it later and continue but its not the same.

Humans are great explorers and travelers. Thats part of what made us successful as a species, what drove us to spread out across the planet. By taking the next step into space, wed be heeding that spirit of adventure and discovery thats beckoned us throughout the generationsfrom Africans who walked into other continents, to Polynesians who crossed the ocean on outrigger canoes, to Native Americans who braved the Bering land bridge.

Colonization is a term thats acquired ugly connotations. But the fault of past colonizers isnt that they wanted to explore or travel or discover new places. Its that they discovered places where people were already living and then proclaimed the right to conquer them.

This isnt a concern in space exploration. The Moon, Mars and the rest of the solar system are true terra nullius, in a way that Australia and the Americas werent. Mars might have its own native microbesand if so, that would be an epochal discovery, with profound significance for the question of our uniqueness in the universe. But other than that, these worlds have no ecosystems to despoil, no inhabitants to subjugate. Theres no harm we can do there.

Besides, were nowhere close to establishing a permanent presence on any world other than our own. For now, at least, wed only be making brief visits. If we go, it will be to learn and to explore, not to settle.

You could argue, as you can always argue in any question of priorities, that it would be better to spend this money on things that more directly benefit humans. On the other hand, if nations have to compete for prestige, this is the right way to do it.

Rather than pouring our intelligence into coming up with new ways to kill each other, or new things to sell to each other, we can spend that energy on science and the quest for knowledge. There are no weapons in space, nor are there riches. If we go, it will be purely for explorations sake.

The dream of space unites us. It draws our gazes upward. It fires our imaginations with a sense of unbounded possibility. It makes tangible what we instinctively sense every time we look up at a starry sky: Were not just part of nature, or part of the Earth. Were part of the cosmos. And its our destiny to return there some day.

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Will two generations of Moon walkers shake hands? - OnlySky Media

This morning, SpaceX is set to launch its revolutionary Starship vehicle for its second ever test flight. The highly anticipated launch is scheduled to take place at SpaceXs Starbase site in South Texas. The window for liftoff opens at 8 a.m. EST, with coverage expected to start at 7:25 a.m. EDT. You can watch the live action on Space.com or directly through SpaceXs website.

The Starship, touted as the largest and most powerful rocket ever, is a key component of SpaceXs ambitious plans for interplanetary travel. With aspirations to send humans and cargo to the moon and Mars, as well as undertake various spaceflight missions closer to home, SpaceX is revolutionizing the way we approach space exploration.

NASA has already selected Starship as the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, highlighting the spacecrafts capabilities and potential for future missions. Additionally, several private moon missions are in store for the Starship.

Comprised of two main parts, the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage, this towering vehicle stands at approximately 400 feet tall. Both components have been designed for full and rapid reusability, a groundbreaking feature that ushers in a new era of space travel efficiency.

Saturdays test flight is a pivotal moment for the Starship program, aiming to overcome the challenges encountered during its maiden voyage. The previous flight experienced difficulties when the two stages failed to separate as planned, leading SpaceX to terminate the mission. SpaceX hopes to rectify those issues and accomplish a successful launch and landing this time around.

If all goes according to plan, the Super Heavy booster will make a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship upper stage will achieve orbital velocity before descending into the Pacific near Hawaii. These critical test flights pave the way for future missions and bring SpaceX one step closer to realizing its vision of human habitation on other planets.

What is the purpose of the Starship vehicle? The Starship is being developedSpaceX to facilitate human and cargo transportation to the moon, Mars, and other destinations in our solar system.

What makes the Starship unique? One of the notable features of the Starship is its fully and rapidly reusable design, which allows for increased efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Has the Starship flown before? Yes, this upcoming launch will be the second test flight for the Starship. The previous flight encountered issues during separation of its stages and ended in termination.

How does this launch contribute to space exploration? By successfully testing and refining the Starship, SpaceX is pushing the boundaries of space exploration and paving the way for future human space travel and colonization of other celestial bodies.

Where can I watch the launch? You can watch the launch live on Space.com or directly through SpaceXs website.

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SpaceX Prepares for Second Starship Launch as it Eyes Moon and ... - OPP.Today

In Invincible Season 2 Episode 3, This Missive, This Machination, Mark is off to college. Last episode, he shares his grief with his mother, confronts his fear of becoming his father, and shows that he can be a good boyfriend to Amber so long as hes being honest. Weve seen glimpses of Marks social life and relationships at the start of the season. With Amber and William in on his secret identity, hes able to talk with them about his superhero escapades but also gets a chance just to be a college freshman. This is how Invincible Season 2 Episode 3starts.

Things between Mark and Amber are heating up, and the audience gets a chance to see them just being college freshmen in love. But truthfully, Invincible Season 2 Episode 3is about the people around Mark and not him specifically. More importantly, its effectively split into two episodes, the first focusing on Allen the Alien, the Unopans, their colonization by the Viltrimites, and Allens role in the Coalition of Planets.

Dont know who the Unopans are? Well, its Allens (Seth Rogen) people. Remember the guy who talked with Mark on the moon? Yup. The first section of the episode is about their resiliency and ultimately stands to build Viltrum into something more than just what weve seen with Nolan as Omni-Man. Through Allen, the audience gets the chance to see the brutality of the Viltrumites and how Nolans choice to flee at the end of Season One was one that went directly against his mission from Viltrum.

It would be easy forInvincible Season 2 Episode 3to just be an exposition, but it isnt in the least. Allen is charismatic, and the story around the Coalition is intriguing and tense, with large implications that will ripple forward through the season. Superhero origins, a dive into the Coalition and mission of the Viltrumites, some romance, and finally, betrayal are all on display in This Missive, This Machination!

It all amounts to a story within a story that adds context to the world of Invinciblefantastically. Despite being shown through Allen and the Coalition, Mark is still at the center, and the hope he brings to destroying Viltrum and its control in the universe is undeniable. Not to mention, Allens place and fate in it all are surprisingly emotional.

The second part of the episode deals with the Guardians of the Globe and its growing pains and shows small romance blossom and acted upon by Rudy (Ross Marquand) and Monster Girl (Grey Griffin). But more importantly, Invincible Season 2 Episode 3highlights Debbie and her struggle to find normalcy after Nolans crimes. This episode is astonishingly emotional.

Debbie joins a support group for those who have lost loved ones, and when she goes to a bar with one of them, she realizes that the reason he is a widower is because of Nolan. Its hard to watch, and the moment plays out in an intimate way. You can feel the hole that that revelation blows in Debbies heart. Nolan disrupted Debbies life brutally, and now, she cant even heal from it because of the harm those who would understand her to blame her for their pain.

InInvincible Season 2,Debbie is given such a huge role and burden to carry and Sandra Ohs performance perfectly captures every emotion. She is vulnerable, she is lonely, and she is stuck perpetually thinking that she should have stopped Nolan, that she should have known, and because he is not dead, she cant even grieve and move on.

With a tight 46-minute runtime, its amazing how much the series can pull off in so little time. We see science fiction and superheroes but we also see real human emotion and fear. It even ends with Mark flying to a new planet to save a race of bug people who have embraced a man they call the Monarch, his father. There is an astounding amount of ground covered in such a small amount of time that you have to commend the writers for pacing the developments and emotional crescendos perfectly.

Invincible Season 2 Episode 3is a kick in the chest, but it also captures the superhero elements that the series has come to be known for. Adult animation at its best, Invincibleis an emotional triumph as much as its a bloody good time.

Invincible Season 2 Episode 3is streaming now exclusively on Prime Video.

9.5/10

TL;DR

Invincible Season 2 Episode 3is a kick in the chest, but it also captures the superhero elements that the series has come to be known for. Adult animation at its best, Invincibleis an emotional triumph as much as its a bloody good time.

See more here:
Invincible Season 2 Episode 3 Review - But Why Tho?