Warning: Some spoilers for “Life” are ahead if you haven’t seen the movie.
Big-budget science-fiction movies aren’t supposed to be documentaries.
However, they are meant to take us on a journey to faraway places, immerse us in bright realities of exchange, and ask us “what if?”
But reality itself is a powerful filmmaking spice that, justly applied, helps suspend our disbelief — and sometimes scream our guts out.
Such is the case with the new film “Life,” whose filmmakers consulted a NASA-trained doctor, a Martian spacecraft engineer and a geneticist to produce their gruesome show.
While the film, directed by Daniel Espinosa, whiffs on quite a lot of science, it does go far enough to be wildly entertaining. In fact, Business Insider’s Jason Guerrasio even argues it may be a cult classic in the making.
We join the story just as a Mars sample return spacecraft is being caught by a small crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS). With red dirt in hand, NASA astronauts go about analyzing the grit behind several “firewalls” of protection.
After an extraterrestrial microbe is discovered in the soil, it’s revived in a soup of water and nutrients. Then, to the astonishment of the crew, it springs to life. “Calvin,” as the life form is soon called, quickly divides and grows into a starfish-size creature with incredible strength and intelligence.
What can happen wrong?
To find out what doses of truth were added to the movie, we called Dr. Kevin Fong, a doctor, an area medicine expert trained at NASA and ESA for about a decade, and a paid clinical representative for the new movie. Sony Pictures.
And to answer some of the “what if?” questions For questions about aliens, we spoke with Catharine A. Conley, NASA’s planetary policy officer who is paid to assist humanity in real-world extraterrestrial disasters.
“Life” features one plus two medical characters, so the filmmakers turned to Fong to answer their burning questions.
A lot of the early work happened by email, he says, but soon enough Fong was invited to join the set: an elaborate and modular reconstruction of the space station inside a giant green-screen studio.
“They paid more attention to detail than I had noticed at agencies in the area,” Fong told Business Insider. “Although the modules were different from the local station, it was very close. ”
The producers asked Fong to lend his expertise in body structure and emergency care to actor Jake Gyllenhaal (who plays astronaut David Jordan), actress Rebecca Ferguson (who plays the Miranda North Center for Disease) and others in various scenes.
He was inspired by a scene of a cardiac arrest and said it “as faithful as you can get” in a movie.
Although he hadn’t set his sights on the film, at least at the time Business Insider interviewed him, Fong didn’t go away thinking it would be a documentary.
“I think it’s good for any film producer to go as far as possible while putting aside their disbelief,” he says. “But I don’t expect ‘Apollo 13. ‘ You have to make the drama more realistic without interfering with the story. “
Fong also said that while there are parallels to the area’s horror film franchise “Alien,” “Life” is imminently more believable.
“When ‘Alien’ was created, you had to think about a faraway place,” he says. But with the ISS floating just 250 miles above Earth, he added, “it’s falling right next to your door. “
Fortunately for us, NASA has put decades of thought into protecting planet Earth.
At first glance, the concept of a project to return to the Mars pattern might seem far-fetched, but NASA researchers hope to do just that in the future.
In fact, both Congress and President Trump essentially codified that mission for the space agency by passing the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 into law in March.
The first line of defense for a Mars sample is Catharine Conley, who is NASA’s sole planetary protection officer. She has worked in that role since 2006, and helps ensure Earth’s microbes don’t reach other worlds — and other worlds’ microbes don’t reach Earth, at least in an uncontained way. (And that includes keeping dead bodies off of other worlds.)
“The word we use is ‘breaking the chain of contact with Mars,'” Conley told Business Insider.
However, before such a capsule leaves Mars, he says, a committee of multi-governmental and multi-space companies needs to meet to review the project and advise on the measures to be taken.
“The foreign network is interfering because this is a pretty serious concern,” he said. “There are a lot of checks and balances. “
A Mars sample return mission — ostensibly to seek fossilized signs of ancient life, not actual microbes — wouldn’t be the first to test the mettle of protections for Earth: Apollo 11 astronauts had to stay quarantined for three whole weeks in a trailer before emerging.
In fact, she says, planning for a Mars sample return mission started with the nuclear-powered Viking landers of the 1970s and has been going ever since.
The plans “were developed with wonderful care” in the early 2000s, he said, but until then it had long been ruled out to bring a pattern to the station.
Thereason? It seemed far too expensive to ship equipment and experts into space, where they’d be ask to excel in a free-floating (and very foreign) environment). Also, containing a disastrous microbe inside the ISS seemed like a pointless step.
“The space station is going to fall down at some point,” she said.
Instead, Conley says scientists would make sure an extra-robust capsule carefully reenters Earth’s atmosphere, is quickly retrieved, and hurried away to a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory — the most high-security grade of research facility on the planet. There, scientists could meticulously analyze their invaluable prize to no end.
“I would love to find life somewhere else,” Conley said, compared to life here on Earth, where the organisms we know of exist. “If life on Earth and Mars are linked, things become much more complicated. “
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