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Q: What science fiction premise is the best example of irony?
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What are some examples of cosmic irony?

Cosmic irony is irony envolving fate. Examples: The Titanic, said to be 100% unsinkable, sunk in 1912. At a ceremony marking the end of relief efforts of cleaning the Exxon Valdex oil spill, two seals were finally returned to inhabit the wild. Minutes later, they were eaten by a killer whale.


What does the a in the sky mean in chapter 12 the scarlet letter?

It's a bit of irony and symolism. Pearl asks Dimmesdale if he'll stand with Hester and herself tomorrow at noon, thus revealing his secret, and he tells her he won't. Then, a second later, the sky is engulfed in light from the meteor overhead and Dimmesdale lets go of Pearl's hand, breaking his connection from the two. When Dimmesdale looks up to the meteor, you can see a bright "A" in the sky. To the Reverend it means that he should wear a mark of shame as Hester does, but to the townspeople, they all believe that it means "Angel" and represents Governor Winthrop's entry into heaven.


What did Professor Errol Morris investigate?

Part detective, part philosopher, part poet, part iconoclast, Errol Morris is one of the most important and influential non-fiction filmmakers of his generation. Like such documentary masters as [http://www.answers.com/topic/jean-rouch Jean Rouch] and [http://www.answers.com/topic/wiseman-frederick Frederick Wiseman], Morris delves into vexing philosophical issues of death, identity, and society. But, unlike many other non-fiction filmmakers, Morris challenges the very presumptions of the "documentary" by incorporating multiple points of view and giving his works a stylistic polish usually reserved for mainstream fiction films. His movies have largely achieved great critical success, and he has received a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.Born in 1948 in Hewlett, Long Island, to a Juilliard graduate and a doctor, Morris was well on his way to getting a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley until his obsession with movies overwhelmed him. He landed a job programming shows at the Pacific Film Archive, where he watched three or four films a day. Intrigued by a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle that read "450 Dead Pets Going to Napa Valley," Morris scraped together money from his family and his fellow graduate students to make [http://www.answers.com/topic/gates-of-heaven-1 Gates of Heaven] (1978), a brilliantly nuanced portrait of a bankrupt pet cemetery, edged with humor, pathos, and irony. Not merely a work about dead dogs, the film is a meditation on the human experience that never condescends and never fails to entertain. The film met with great critical acclaim and a strong cult following; Roger Ebert exuberantly declared it one of the ten best films ever made. The film also prompted German director [http://www.answers.com/topic/werner-herzog Werner Herzog] to eat his shoe after losing a bet with Morris that the film would never get made.He followed the success of his debut with the wonderfully bizarre [http://www.answers.com/topic/vernon-florida-film-1 Vernon, Florida] (1980). Originally titled Nub City, the film was to have been an exposé of residents of a sleepy swamp town who dismember themselves for insurance money. A number of death threats soon convinced Morris to rethink the film, and he instead recorded several of the town's more eccentric citizens: one believes that her collection of radioactive sand is growing, while another extols the virtues of turkey hunting. As with [http://www.answers.com/topic/gates-of-heaven-1 Gates of Heaven] and his later works, Morris focused on people lost in their own eccentric worlds and managed to convey their sense of wonder about their obsessions, be they turkey hunting or astrophysics.In the years immediately following [http://www.answers.com/topic/vernon-florida-film-1 Vernon, Florida], Morris' funding dried up. Through family connections, he briefly got a job as a private detective, working primarily for the Wall Street set. This experience would later prove invaluable for his masterpiece, [http://www.answers.com/topic/the-thin-blue-line-documentary The Thin Blue Line] (1988). Dubbed by critics "a murder mystery that actually solved a murder," the film was directly responsible for saving the life and gaining the release of Randall Adams, a man wrongly sentenced to death for killing a police officer. (Adams' gratitude did not last long after his release, however, as he soon sued Morris for a share of the film's profits.) The film was also a landmark of documentary cinema. Instead of envisioning a non-fiction film as an objective, authentic document of reality, [http://www.answers.com/topic/the-thin-blue-line-documentary The Thin Blue Line] self-consciously questioned the limits of documentary film in both style and content. The movie featured lush cinematography, slick re-enactments, and a score by noted experimental composer [http://www.answers.com/topic/philip-glass Philip Glass], all of which heightened its artificial quality. Blue Line never directly asserts that one testimony is more correct than another. Instead, the film's lack of narration and multiple points of view raise the specter, like [http://www.answers.com/topic/akira-kurosawa Akira Kurosawa]'s [http://www.answers.com/topic/rashomon Rashomon](1950), of the impossibility of objective truth. The film garnered international acclaim and was also relatively commercially successful for a documentary, a genre that rarely achieves box-office success. Though the film failed to get an Oscar nomination (an extremely controversial snub), it was voted best documentary of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle and received a Golden Horse, the Chinese equivalent of an Oscar, for best foreign picture. It has since been widely recognized as one of the finest and most influential movies of the '80s.Fresh off this success, Morris stumbled with his first foray into fiction film. [http://www.answers.com/topic/the-dark-wind-1 The Dark Wind] (1991), starring [http://www.answers.com/topic/lou-diamond-phillips Lou Diamond Phillips], was stymied by studio politics and eventually shelved, only to be released on video two years later. In 1992, Morris regrouped to adapt Stephen Hawking's best-selling book on cosmology, [http://www.answers.com/topic/a-brief-history-of-time-film-1 A Brief History of Time]. The result was pure Morris. The film is less interested in Hawking's groundbreaking theories on the origin of the universe than in his connection and disconnection to the outside world; his interior world is dominated by theories about black holes and entropy while his body slowly atrophies from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease). The film received nearly universal critical acclaim and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, even if it was -- again -- ignored by the Academy.For his next feature, Morris further experimented with the documentary form in the unusual Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (1997). The film links seemingly unrelated stories of a quartet of obsessed individuals: a lion trainer, a topiary gardener who carves animal shapes out of hedges, an MIT scientist who designs robots, and an expert on blind mole rats. Just as [http://www.answers.com/topic/the-thin-blue-line-documentary The Thin Blue Line] let the audience draw its own conclusions as to who really killed the policeman, [http://www.answers.com/topic/out-of-control-film Out of Control]'s editing and structure, which deftly juxtapose one interview with another, allow the viewer to make connections among the four narratives. As in [http://www.answers.com/topic/gates-of-heaven-1 Gates of Heaven], the film's seemingly mundane stories soon devolve into a compelling and profound exploration of human evolution and humans' need to control their environment.In 1999, Morris released his most provocative work since [http://www.answers.com/topic/the-thin-blue-line-documentary The Thin Blue Line], Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter. Originally titled The Accidental Nazi, the film focuses on Leuchter, an electric chair designer and Holocaust revisionist. Instead of making a straightforward depiction of bigotry and hatred, Morris provides a much more harrowing exploration of the sources of evil. Though he is no ideologue, Leuchter is so enamored of his own expertise that he asserts the Holocaust never happened based on the evidence of his own flawed research. Leuchter is both a concrete example of Hannah Arendt's truism on the banality of evil and the dark side of Morris' obsessed characters. Though Mr. Death was the talk of both the 1999 Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals and opened to widespread critical acclaim, it went mostly ignored by year-end awards groups, including the forever Morris-averse Academy Awards documentary committee.Shifting his focus to television in 2000, Morris created the weekly, hourlong documentary series [http://www.answers.com/topic/first-person-1960-tv-series-1 First Person]. Though smaller in scope than his theatrical-release films, the show allowed the director to explore subjects both minor and monumental, from a pilot who miraculously landed a troubled passenger plane to a philosophizing bodybuilder. By allowing his subjects to tell their stories directly to the camera without the intrusion of other points of view, Morris perfected an even more intimate process of documentary filmmaking.Such a process proved to be a perfect fit for the subject of his next film, 2003's The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Focusing exclusively on the life and times of the controversial former Secretary of Defense under President Kennedy, Morris subjected his at first reluctant subject to over 20 hours of interviews. Combining this material with artfully compiled images from McNamara's life, the director culled a portrait of a brilliant statistician who became one of the most influential men in Washington -- a man whom many blame, at least partially, for the Unites States' involvement in Vietnam. After a strong Cannes premiere, [http://www.answers.com/topic/the-fog-of-war-1 The Fog of War] collected numerous year-end prizes from critics' groups, and even a Best Documentary Oscar for its heretofore snubbed director -- who took no small pride in chiding the Academy for taking so long to award him.


Is planet x true?

Please don't be alarmed but yes, Planet X is true! The search for Planet X runs parallel histories and there is the standard scientific search for a Planet X, or the unknown planet and there is a paranormal or mythological hunt for Planet X or Nibiru. One is very most likely true and found in standard historical accounts. Very most likely true because history is subjective and there is always the possibility that what history has recorded is not the whole story. The true believers that "the truth is out there" and there exists an evil dark twin to our sun, a dark star that lurks in the outer orbit of our solar system patiently plotting Earths demise, they believe that history has not recorded the whole truth and that government agencies have conspired to suppress the truth in order to prevent panic amongst the population. Panic because if everybody knew what deep, deep, doo-doo this planet is in because of Planet X's eminent arrival nobody would bother to show up to work tomorrow.This is the true story, unless you're a conspiracy theorist, then here's the propaganda. In the mid 1800's a scientist by the name of Urbaine Le Verrier hypothesized that there might be an unknown planet causing perturbations in the planet Uranus. Using Newtonian mechanics he analyzed these perturbations to predict the location of this unknown planet he believed was the source of the perturbations. On September 23rd, 1846, the night after German astronomer Johan Gottfried Galle received Le Verrier's calculations he found the planet Neptune exactly where Le Verrier had predicted it would be.The discovery of Neptune, however, did nothing to resolve the perturbations as discrepancies of Neptune's orbit suggested there was still another planet out there causing all this perturbational noise. In 1906, Percival Lowell of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona began a massively funded project in search of the ninth planet, which he coined "Planet X". He began this project in a hopeless bid to repair his damaged reputation because of his public belief that the channel like crevices on Mars were actually canals built by an intelligent civilization. These beliefs were publicly derided by the scientific community and Lowell had hoped a discovery of the ninth planet might purge his scientific soul of the blasphemous assertions of intelligent beings being out there.Upon his untimely death in 1916, the search for planet X was derailed because of legal battles over matters of estate with the widowed wife of Lowell. In 1925, George Lowell, brother of Percival, funded the Observatory anew and the project of finding planet X ultimately went to a 22 year old Kansas farm boy Clyde Tombaugh, in 1929. By early '30 Tombaugh had found evidence of motion in a plate photograph and after finding several other photo's that confirmed this object in motion, on March 18th 1930 the Lowell Observatory went public with their findings. Later it was discovered that this object, the planet Pluto, could be found in photo's dating as far back as 1915. A fitting tragic irony given friends of Lowell insisted his failure in finding planet X "virtually killed him".Lowell had ultimately predicted that planet X was roughly 7 that of Earth, (or half of that of Neptune.), and a mean distance from the sun of 43 AU. Lowell assumed that, like all gas giants, Planet X would have a low density, meaning large size and a high albedo. The albedo of an object is the extent to which it diffusely reflects light from the sun. This meant that Planet X would show a disc with diameter of about one arcsecond and an apparent magnitude of between 12-13, which is certainly bright enough to be spotted. The Observatory was sadly surprised to discover that Pluto showed no visible disc. At only 15th magnitude it was 6 times dimmer than Lowell had predicted and appeared fuzzy and indistinct, no different than a star. This meant that Pluto was either very small or very dark. Because so many astronomers had assumed that Pluto was massive enough to perturb planets it was also assumed that the albedo was .07 giving Pluto a diameter of about 8000 km.All throughout the mid 20th Century the downsizing of Pluto became the name of the game until 1978 when James Christy, (of the Lowell Observatory if you can believe that!), discovered Pluto's moon Charon. Based on observations of the moons speed around Pluto a direct measurement of the Charon-Pluto system was finally settled and it was determined that Pluto was roughly 0.002 times smaller than that of the Earth. Much too small to be the source of all those perturbations. Lowell's prediction had turned out to be coincidence and if there is a Planet X, Pluto was certainly not it.Tombaugh continued his search and found hundreds of asteroids, comets and variable stars but no more planets. There were others who kept the search for Planet X, now a search for the tenth planet, alive but in 1993, Myles Standish, using data from Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune in 1989 which had revised Neptune's total mass downward by 0.5 % to recalculate its gravitational effect on Uranus. When the newly determined mass was used the "discrepancies" in Neptune's orbit vanished. There are, also no discrepancies found in the trajectories of any space probes and today conventional wisdom amongst scientists is that Planet X, as Lowell defined it, does not exist.Now, the other history of Planet X begins with Sumerian Culture which spanned from about the 5th to 3rd millennium BC. The Sumerian Culture, according to ancient Sumerian text, was brought to the great city of Eridu, all ready fully formed by their god Enki. This claim of a preexisting culture brought to the Sumerians by their gods was fully realized and transcribed by Zacharia Sitchin in 1976 when he published his book The 12th Planet which put forth the theory that the Sumerian's were genetically engineered by their gods who were in fact celestial travelers from a mythical planet called Nibiru. According to Sitchin who translating the cuneiform text of the Sumerian's, this mythical planet follows a long, elliptical orbit, reaching the Earth's vicinity every 3600 years. Given the time from Sumerian culture to today Sitchin Claims we are due for a disastrous arrival of this planet of the gods, this Planet Nibiru.In this legend of Nibiru, a planet that once collided with Tiamat, (another mythical planet), broke Tiamat in two scattering half of the planet out into the outer edges of the solar system creating the asteroid belt and the other half forming what we now call Earth. The Annunaki, the gods of Sumer were supposedly inhabitants of this planet Nibiru which had evolved into who they were after the collision with Tiamat. The Annunaki came to Earth to mine for gold which was necessary for their planet which had been damaged both by the collision and by the radiation of the sun. The gold was needed to reflect light from the sun. While here on Earth these gods genetically engineered homo-sapiens by using Annunaki DNA combined with Cro-magnon or Homo-erectus or some other prehistoric version of humanity.This outlandish and all together fascinating story told by Sitchin generated a huge following of "true believers" who have faithfully kept the Niburu mythology alive, combining it with Mayan culture and using the end date of 2012, the last year of the Mayan calender purportedly because the shaman who foresaw "the most accurate" calender in history could "see" no more time after 2012 to create a super scary story of doom and despair. Sitchin also cleverly draws comparisons between the Annunaki of Sumer and the Nephillum of the Bible suggesting there is a universal mythology of ancient astronaut gods. The comparison of course allows the Book of Revelations to play into Sitchin's dire warnings that death and destruction are near and the Planet Nibiru is coming and there is little that humanity can do about it.Is this story true? At the time Sitchin wrote the 12th Planet there few people who could translate the cuneiform text, but today there are many and many of those translators have found many, many, problems with Sitchin's translations. While the Orpheus Theory or giant impact hypothesis is now the dominant scientific theory as to what created the moon, the idea of a large planet colliding with Earth is largely dismissed by the scientific community as a whole. There are many web sites dedicated to scaring the bejeezus out of you and indeed they effectively can if you too are a true believer. There is one particular web site that exhibits photographs of a setting sun and hovering eerily behind the sun is another sun like object, smaller in mass just two o'clock of the sun. As this series of photographs depicts the sun disappearing the other sun like object can be seen even more clearly. There is definitely something bright and shiny hovering behind the picture of that setting sun and it is disturbing to be sure. However, that sun like object could have very easily been the planet Venus that when at its closest to the Planet Earth can look like a big ball of fire hanging around just outside our sheltering sky. It's fun to be scared, and if you like to be scared these Planet X web sites can be a whole lot of fun, but is it true?


Related questions

Which science fiction premise is the best example of irony?

The desire to keep people secure leads to a future in which the military controls everything.


What is an example of verbal irony in fiction?

When it is raining outside, and someone says "Oh! What a beautiful day!"


what is an example of halloween irony?

what is an example of halloween irony


What is an example of irony from the book Go Ask Alice?

There is no irony in this book...


When the sound of a poem contrasts with the subject matter this is an example of?

Irony


What is an irony?

Irony punctuation is a type of notation that is used to express sarcasm or irony in written format. An example of irony punctuation is the reverse question mark.


Difference between Situational Irony and Verbal Irony with example?

Situational irony occurs when there is a difference between what is expected to happen and what actually happens. For example, a fire station burning down is a case of situational irony. Verbal irony is when a character says something that is different from what he or she really means, or how he or she really feels


A sarcastic remark would be an example of irony?

Actually, a sarcastic remark is an example of verbal irony, where the intended meaning is different from the literal meaning. Irony involves a contrast between expectations and reality.


What is a non example of irony?

A non-example of irony could be a straightforward statement or situation where there is no contrast between what is expected and what actually happens, such as stating the sky is blue on a clear day.


More example of irony?

A person who claims to be vegan but will eat a slice of pepperoni pizza is a great example of irony. Another example is a cop who gets arrested for breaking the law.


Is somebody asking what the definition of ignorance means an example of irony?

No, it is not an example of irony. Irony typically involves a contrast between what is expected and what actually happens. In this case, asking for the definition of ignorance is a straightforward request for information.


What is an example of irony in a song lyrics?

An example of irony in song lyrics would be the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette. This song is an example of irony because although Morissette sings about all of these supposed ironic things, none of them are ironic, they're all just bad luck.