Stanley Kubrick: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview) by Stanley Kubrick & Playboy

Author:Stanley Kubrick & Playboy [Kubrick, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Playboy
Published: 2012-09-25T07:00:00+00:00

Kubrick: I find it difficult to believe that we have penetrated to the ultimate depths of knowledge about the physical laws of the universe. It seems rather presumptuous to believe that in the space of a few hundred years, we’ve figured out most of what there is to know. So I don’t think it’s right to declaim with unshakable certitude that light is the absolute speed limit of the universe. I’m suspicious of dogmatic scientific rules; they tend to have a rather short life span. The most eminent European scientists of the early 19th century scoffed at meteorites, on the grounds that “stones can’t fall from the sky”; and just a year before Sputnik, one of the world’s leading astrophysicists stated flatly that “space flight is bunk.” Actually, there are already some extremely interesting theoretical studies under way—one by Dr. Gerald Feinberg at Columbia University—which indicate that short cuts could be found that would enable some things under certain conditions to exceed the speed of light.

In addition, there’s always the possibility that the speed-of-light limitation, even if it’s rigid, could be circumvented via a space-time warp, as Arthur Clarke has proposed. But let’s take another, slightly more conservative, means of evading the speed of light’s restrictions: If radio contact is developed between ourselves and another civilization, within 200 years we will have reached a stage in genetic engineering where the other race could transmit its genetic code to us by radio and we could then re-create their DNA pattern and artificially duplicate one of their species in our laboratories—and vice versa. This sounds fantastic only to those who haven’t followed the tremendous breakthroughs being made in genetic engineering.

But actual interstellar travel wouldn’t be impossible even if light speed can’t be achieved. Whenever we dismiss space flight beyond our solar system on the grounds that it would take thousands of years, we are thinking of beings with life spans similar to ours. Fruit flies, I understand, live out their entire existence—birth, reproduction and death—within 24 hours; well, man may be to other creatures in the universe as the fruit fly is to man. There may be countless races in the universe with life spans of hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, to whom a 10,000-year journey to earth would be about as intimidating as an afternoon outing in the park. But even in terms of our own time scale, within a few years it should be possible to freeze astronauts or induce a hibernatory suspension of life functions for the duration of an interstellar journey. They could spend 300 or 1,000 years in space and be awakened automatically, feeling no different than if they had had a hearty eight hours’ sleep.

The speed-of-light theory, too, could work in favor of long journeys; the peculiar “time dilation” factor in Einstein’s relativity theory means that as an object accelerates toward the speed of light, time slows down. Everything would appear normal to those on board; but if they had been away

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