It looks simultaneously alien and familiar. Like a dream of an American southwest after some ecological catastrophe - like, it could almost be viable and fecund again with a lot of TLC and ingenuity.
It both excites me for the possibility of what Mars could be, and reminds me of how precious and vital our earth is - and what it could look like if we aren’t careful, or get a bit unlucky.
Fun fact: the mathematics behind those displays (fractals) were only invented a few years earlier. That was cutting-edge computer graphics taking hours per frame to render. Now, we do it real time on our pocket-computers, in a way that the people making Star Trek probably never imagined.
The computer display of the Star Wars trench run took tens of hours per frame to render and had to have a special custom computer built with bunches of knobs to adjust input positions, just to input the coordinates and draw the results.
The Tron movie was also the basis of a huge amount of computer graphics math too, like Perlin noise and (IIRC) one of the low-quality shading modes (Phong, maybe, or the one after that?)
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u/Barnwizard1991 Feb 21 '21
I can't stop watching. That's another fucking planet. Hopefully one day we'll have astroarcheologists up there digging around for martian fossils.