Just watched “Superman Returns” with my brother and my dad yesterday and I find it bizarre that the city of Metropolis is New York City (while Gotham City is depicted as Chicago.) I found the Messianic allusions a little disturbing (although more sincere than most of the insanity spouted off by Christian fundamentalists) <rant style=”post-modernist post-colonialist” method=”deconstruction” tone=”hyperbolic ironic”>What person-of-color would feel comfortable with their savior depicted as a square-jawed, blue-eyed, tall, and muscular specimen of the Aryan race, who is omnipotent and all-seeing? (At least the bad guys aren’t homogenously depicted as blacks and Chicano/Latino.)</rant>

I am intrigued by the idea that the “planet” Krypton may in fact be a terraformed (kryptoformed?!?) black dwarf star, tamed by the ridiculously advanced nanotechnology created by the Kryptonians, and my interest is piqued by the brief allusion to the idea that Krypton is part of a vast interstellar empire.

What I found most haunting is the image of the (red?) giant star Rao turning into a singularity, in the meantime blasting Krypton into smithereens (In contrast, when Earth goes, it will merely be seared to a crisp by the rapidly expanding Sun, with everything on the surface completely evaporated, but still orbiting serenely around the cooling stellar remnant.)

The image of a blast-wave emanating from a star reminds me of Iron Sunrise by Charlie Stross, which features an interstellar terrorist act demonstrating the applications of string theory, involving plucking out the very heart of a star, wrapping it in a space-time bubble, letting this hydrogen core futilely fuse itself finally into cold iron, then dropping this iron back into the star, resulting in the supernova of an otherwise unremarkable G2-type (or similar) star. The supernova completely blasts the world of New Moscow into its constituent elementary particles, killing billions.

It also reminds me of Arthur C Clarke’s 2010 (the sequel to 2001), which was actually made into a movie (that paled in comparison to Kubrick’s “2001”.) Nonetheless, one of the most dramatic scenes, which I saw as a child, and which probably influenced me in ways unrealized, was the ignition of Jupiter by the power of the nanotechnologic monolith, turning the Solar System into a binary star system. (The monolith and the crystals from Krypton probably have a lot in common, namely, the ability to program matter to split into elementary particles and reform into whatever you wanted, a McGuffin that I wanted to steal for my own pocket universes.)

Strangely, the cities on the otherwise sterile world of Krypton remind me of Fata Morgana, complex mirages that frequently appear to be cities sitting on the horizon.

What is significantly changed, however, is that the original destruction of Krypton involved the fissile explosion of Krypton’s uranium/transuranic core, which is not what is depicted in the opening scenes of “Superman Returns” unless I have misviewed it. (Those scenes are sort of the only things I want to watch again, because of my sick fascination with stellar evolution.)

I also enjoyed the idea of piggybacking the Space Shuttle on a 747. Incidentally, this is exactly how the Space Shuttle gets transported from Edwards Air Force Base in California back to Cape Canaveral in Florida. Launching from 40,000 feet probably will not really save much fuel, since the fuel cost is spent mostly by escaping the Earth’s gravity well, which extends many times over and above 40,000 feet—the troposphere is only a small fraction of the atmosphere, and you still have to clear the atmosphere to end up in a stable orbit. But it’s an interesting idea nonetheless, and maybe I’m wrong.

I look forward to reading The Science of Superman (in the fine tradition of The Physics of Star Trek) I know most of comic book physics and biology makes no sense, but a scientist can dream about (pseudo)accuracy, can’t he?