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February 22, 2005
Aliens of the Deep
Aliens of the Deep (2005), James Cameron, Steven Quale:
IMAX is always great. The huge screen even made the trailer for Robots look great. It took a little bit to get used to the 3-d glasses, but man does that look good.
Anyway, this is basically James Cameron with a gaggle of marine biologists, geologists, astro-biologists and nasa people going down into the subphotic zone to study life not dependant on the sun's sweet sweet loving. Most of the focus is on the chemosynthesis that occurs around these geothermal chimneys. Bacteria convert the latent energy through chemical reactions, amazingly hardy shrimp feed off the bacteria, these albino crabs eat the detritus.
The subject really deserves the IMAX resolution and 3-d treatment; the swarming herds of shrimp and weird jellyfish were astounding. It's a little disappointing that they didn't show more deepsea life, but I guess the focus was on the basic forms and formation of life, not the diversity of advanced life at those depths.
Cameron and crew do a surprisingly good job of analogizing these explorations with any future attempts at finding life inside and out of our solar system. Should life be able not only to survive off geothermal energy alone but to originate in such an environment, there are any number of places in our humble solar system that might not only harbor basic life, but have the potential for more advanced organisms.
13/15
Posted by bing at February 22, 2005 10:46 AM
Comments
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Posted by: Alissa at February 22, 2005 11:51 AM