The Doomsday Ark

By RobGrant | Published: 08/08/2010

The Doomsday Ark

I came across this story at The Daily Galaxy a couple of months ago and thought it was a tremendous source for a story idea.

According to the news piece, plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” to be built on the moon by the European Space Agency. The Ark will contain the essentials of life and human civilisation and will be activated in the event that Earth is devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war – or, for us writers, alien invasion or zombie apocalypse – destroying the human species. This lunar information bank would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

Earthrise seen from the Moon during Apollo 17

A Doomsday Ark is being planned for the Moon.

Ark 1.0 would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and useful instructions such as how to smelt metal or information about agriculture. It would sealed in a vault and be buried just below the Moon’s surface with transmitters sending the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survive, the ark will continue transmitting the information until new receivers could be built. Ark 2.0 would later be extended to include a diversity of species from the biosphere, natural material such as microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores. Presumably version 2.0 will also have social networking.

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Rent a White Guy

By RobGrant | Published: 17/07/2010

If the original source story this is based on is true – and I've no reason to suppose it isn't – then it's great material for the basis of a number of stories and it could go pretty much any direction.

Basically, for a lot of companies in China, recruiting fake businessmen or having foreigners around in nice suits, gives the company 'face' and is a good way to create the image of 'connection' that these Chinese companies crave. For the foreign 'recruits', the only qualifications are a fair complexion and a dark suit, that and a burning desire to be put up in a swish hotel, be chauffeured around, wined and dined and come out the other side having earned a grand a week for doing sweet fanny adams.

Rent-A-White-Guy

The only qualifications are a fair complexion and a dark suit.

In fact these rent-a-white-guys are so important for some companies that it's not unusual to keep a couple of them around on contract for a number of months, rolling them out for a week or so every month for some press junket, grand opening or dinner-do where all they have to do is deliver a carefully prepared speech and then stand and smile while confetti is blasted over the stage and fireworks go off above them as they pose for photos with the local mayor. And so we have the basis of many fish-out-of-water stories…

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The Antikythera Mechanism

By RobGrant | Published: 26/06/2010

In 1900, a sponge diver named Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of a Roman cargo ship located near to cape Glyfada in Potamakia, 60m undersea and 30m from the shore of the small island of Antikythera, near Crete, Greece. What made the greatest impression on him as he returned to the surface were the statues lying on the sea bed, but further investigation revealed an incredible cargo of luxury goods that included jewellery, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes that dated back to the first century B.C. As astonishing as this find was, the most important discovery turned out to be a few green, corroded lumps that, when they eventually fell apart, revealed an astonishingly intricate mechanism comprising a few large gears and lots of smaller cogs annotated with a few engraved words in Greek. This, the last remnants of an elaborate mechanical device now known as The Antikythera Mechanism, represents the most sophisticated piece of engineering ever found in antiquity.

The Antikythera Mechanism

Advanced Imaging Reveals Computer 1,500 Years Ahead Of Its Time

Early studies suggested it was some type of astronomical time-keeping device and establishing initial tooth counts suggested that it followed the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern commonly used to predict eclipses in the ancient world. But recently, advanced imaging techniques have allowed researchers to read more of the inscribed Greek text, and X-ray imaging has helped to create full 3-D computer models of the complex device revealing the full function and beauty of the Antikythera mechanism. Using an ingenious system of gears, operated by turning a crank on the side, the device can perform a number of functions. It can predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, even accounting for leap years, it can predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac and it has a gear train that rotates a black and white stone to show the moon’s phase on a given date. Very possibly it could also show the astronomical positions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the planets known to the ancients.
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Russians To Offer Pirate-Hunting Cruises

By RobGrant | Published: 12/06/2010

I loved this headline as soon as I saw it because the screenplay possibilities are almost endless. At the time that it first surfaced it was syndicated and referenced and copied all over the web, and although it has subsequently been unveiled as a satire courtesy of this fake USA website (which just goes to show that there’s no substitute for due diligence and proper research) as a story, no-one could possibly argue against this having action/adventure/thriller written all over it.

Somali Pirates

According to the report luxury ocean liners in Russia are offering pirate-hunting cruises aboard armed private yachts off the Somali coast. Wealthy clients each pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous stretch of coastline from Djibouti in Somalia to Mombasa in Kenya at deliberately slow speeds, hoping to tempt an attack by Somali pirates. Once attacked, and in case the raiders are bit slow to respond the cruise ship will keep going until they do, the craft is equipped to respond with heavy machinery – RPGs, large caliber machine guns and rocket launchers – and if that wasn’t enough fun for the passengers, an extra £5 a day gets you your own AK-47 and £7 buys 100 rounds of ammo, and in case things get a bit out of hand they are also protected by a squad of ex-special forces troops.

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Girl Gangsters Of 19th Century Manhattan

By RobGrant | Published: 01/06/2010

The criminal gangs of New York in the 1800s were predominantly made up of young men, but they also had female members, some of whom were notorious fighters. I came across this fascinating snippet at Ephemeral New York, and given all the hoop-la around Gangs Of New York when it came out, I can’t believe that no-one has taken this and run with it as the gender-bending equivalent.

Girl gangsters of 19th century Manhattan

Drinking at a Five Points tavern in the 1870s. (NY Public Library)

It really starts to come to life when you read the names these women had, like Hell-Cat Maggie, whose base was the notorious Five Points slum and whose teeth were supposedly filed into sharp points while she clawed rivals with brass fingernails. Then there’s Sadie the Goat, who reportedly robbed East Siders by head-butting them in the stomach and Ida the Goose, a prostitute and Lady Gopher, part of the Gophers of Hell’s Kitchen.

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Zip Shotgun

By RobGrant | Published: 29/05/2010

This is a zip gun or “improvised firearm” to give it its proper label. Actually it’s a zip shotgun if we’re being pernickety. The barrels are made from iron bedposts and the charge is made of pieces of lead from curtain tape and match-heads which somehow are ignited by a couple of AA batteries and a broken light bulb – MacGyver eat your heart out!

prison made shotgun

On May 21, 1984 two of the inmates of a prison in Celle, Northern Germany, having manufactured this little beauty and then demonstrated its effectiveness by letting fly at a pane of bullet-proof glass, took a prison guard hostage and escaped by car. Amazing! The ingenuity of human beings when confronted by a situation that has them (almost literally in this case) up against a wall never fails to astound me.

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A Face In The Crowd

By RobGrant | Published: 29/05/2010

This is one of those images that immediately strikes you.  It’s a little bit gross at first admittedly, then it’s strange and oddly compelling, then after a while it’s just plain weird but one thing’s for sure, you won’t forget it in a hurry.

pre-packed supermarket faces

But from a writing perspective, what does it suggest?  If you were writing Science Fiction it could be a freezer full of body parts you can shop for, but where do they come from?  Is it the intact parts of dead folk that can be recycled?  And why is that one face staring directly at you? Maybe it isn’t dead yet, or in some morbid way, they are all alive, just sealed in for that fresh taste you know and love and if that’s the case, maybe there are other body parts you can buy, or they’re special-ordered in some way.

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