James Cameron and Google Guys Reveal Plan to do Something in Space

April 23, 2012

James Cameron was married to Sarah Connor, and that was cool, but then he made Avatar, and that was uncool, but if he saves the world by mining asteroids, that would make him cool again. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yeah, it sounds like a bad science fiction movie, and maybe that’s what it will turn out to be. A bunch of corporate guys team up with a loony (but successful) movie director and together they explore space with a bunch of madcap adventures along the way. Maybe somebody pitched this to James Cameron as a movie idea, and he decided to do it in real life.

The name of the (alleged) company that James Cameron and some guys from Google are putting together (or working with) is Planetary Resources (PR), and supposedly the plan is to use private investors to finance space exploration and mining asteroids for really nice reasons (like alternative energy sources and environmental cleanliness) instead of bad reasons (like intergalactic domination).

The first thing a company with such grand ambitions needs is some public relations (PR). So the first thing they do is call a press conference to announce the details (investors, time tables, probably a lot of boring stuff). If PR’s PR is good, maybe this private company can do great things, but if PR’s PR is bad, look for other companies (like Facebook) or the government to fill the void.

Good PR- Technological advances that provide cheap energy and environmentally pure lifestyle.

Bad PR- Smuggling dangerous/hostile aliens just to make money (and die horribly in the process when aliens turn on them).

Any awesome discovery or advancement that’s made by PR is going to be grabbed up by some government, whether it’s the United States, or China, or Russia. Yeah, Planetary Resources will have a lot of high priced lawyers with the law (maybe) on their side, but governments have big guns, and big guns beat high priced lawyers (even if the high priced lawyers are right).

And if the government doesn’t want to use big guns, they can declare eminent domain or interstate/international commerce or public interest or any nonsense they want and lock everything up in the courts until they can find five judges on the Supreme Court to agree with them.

This development has to make Mark Zuckerberg feel insignificant. A few guys from Google create a grand venture to explore the final frontier, and all Zuckerberg has done is create a silly social network that gets people fired from their jobs.

Has anybody that works for Facebook ever been fired for what they put on Facebook?

*****

It’s easy to make fun of stuff that I don’t understand, which is why I wrote about this before Tuesday’s press conference. I was afraid that if I waited, I would be in such awe of this project that I would never be unbiased enough to mock it again. As a former fanboy, I once worshipped James Cameron (1^st two Terminator movies and Aliens made him almost a deity in my eyes), but Avatar was dreck, and I have since punished myself for false idolatry.

If these guys from Google and James Cameron can pull this off and do what the United States government (NASA) can’t do, I might have to rethink my position on false idolatry once again.