Is space fiction inspired by science - or vice versa?

(Photo: Venni Ahlberg)

The topic of Saturday's matinee Space and Climate in Film at the Sodankylä council hall was the relationship between space and climate research and cinema. Three experts presented themes on the topic with illustrative examples. The matinee was opened by coordinator Kaisa Kortekallio according to whom the goal of the matinee was to combine the worlds of humanistic art and the natural sciences. Both fields are ultimately concerned with creative thinking and inspire each other towards new discoveries.

Director of the Sodankylä geophysical observatory Esa Turunen began the matinee by talking about Jakov Protazanov's Aelita (1924), which has also been screened at the Midnight Sun Film Festival. At its time, the film inspired The Soviet Union's space programme. Fact and fiction were also merged in the aurora borealis research of Finland's Karl Selim Lemström and in American Percival Lowell's fictional maps of Mars's canals. Both researchers were active in the 19th century.

Sini Merikallio, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, also talked about visions concerning the conquest of Mars. She presented technology with which the issues of vacuum and great distances involved with space travel have already been resolved, but which can not be utilized yet for a long time because of its great costs. At the end of her presentation, Merikallio called for more realism to films such as The Martian (2011), provoking interesting conversation regarding the relationship between fact and fiction.

Timo Vesala, professor of meteorology at the University of Helsinki, illustrated scientific facts concerning climate change with a variety of film clips ranging from Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970) to Béla Tarr. The presentation was characterized by fascinating and idiosyncratic thought processes. For example, Vesala connected the 1815 volcano eruption in Indonesia to Europe's cold summer of 1816 and the Frankenstein monster. The professor finished his speech by showing the ending of Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove, which depicts an irreversible cataclysm.

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, who has researched science fiction tv series in her doctoral thesis, got to talk at the panel discussion that ended the matinee. She compared science fiction to a mirror that reflects a distorted version of reality. It was concluded that the most interesting topic of research is after all the human mind. To finish up the event, Esa Turunen poignantly summed up that unlike Tarkovski's philosophical Solaris, a film such as The Martian, which handles space travel in a mainly entertaining fashion, is not likely to stand the test of time - unlike the topic itself.