openspace4life

battlestar galactica:
It's pretty depressing much of the time, but very well-made and has good characters, plus the space battles are largely soundless and otherwise super-realistic (Zoic is a truly awesome effects house). Plus, you gotta love a show that says "in your face" to the network censors by simply replacing every instance of the F word with "frak." (For those who haven't noticed, I'm talking about the Sci-Fi channel revisioning of the original series. I have not seen the original series, nor do I wish to.)
carl sagan:
If you haven't seen the Cosmos series, trust me, you need to. This guy was a prophet of the Space Age. Some phrases of his that you may have heard are "We are all stardust" (meaning that all of our heavier atoms were forged in supernovae), and the description of Earth as a "pale blue dot." You probably also heard that he said "billions and billions" a lot, but this is actually an urban legend. The movie based on his sole work of fiction, Contact, is also pretty awesome (and I've interned at the company that did most of the effects for it!)
dyson spheres:
If you think overpopulation is a problem now, imagine a species that has such a huge problem keeping its population in check that it has to build a sphere two hundred million miles across, completely surrounding its sun, so they can live on its inner surface. (Alternately, they might just want to harness all that solar energy for some even crazier science project--that was Freeman Dyson's original idea.) Now imagine that the species I'm talking about is actually a species of BACTERIA, and you get a sense for the kinds of wacky ideas I like to come up with.
gaia theory:
James Lovelock's controversial theory says, in a nutshell, that our planet is alive. Oh, not all of it, mostly just the sum total of the organisms on its surface plus some biogeochemical cycles that they influence. Whether the idea of a planetary superorganism really makes sense, I still haven't decided, but it sure makes a wonderful metaphor. In particular, science-based Earth worship is about what our civilization needs to get out of our current mess with the climate intact.
homestar runner:
Because I still have an inner lame-joke-loving child, gorramit. I've watched absolutely everything on the site, most of it at least twice over. (homestarrunner.com is the website that's been called "the gold standard in Flash animation," for those who don't already know.)
monoculture:
Have you ever flown over the Midwest and wondered how on Earth we've managed to make it look so BORING? Mile after mile after mile of washed-out green-and-brown checkerboard, every square filled with row upon row of utterly identical plants. That's monoculture in a nutshell. Turns out that if we grew multiple crops together in the same field, more closely mimicking a natural ecosystem, the field would be more productive--but much harder to harvest using giant machines.
rendezvous with rama:
This award-winning Arthur C. Clarke novel is about what sci-fi fans call a Big Dumb Object, something that just sits there in space and engenders a sense of wonder simply because it's so big and interestingly shaped. I'm not sure why I like the book so much--probably just because it's a novel take on the powerful idea of exploration. What if you had a world to explore that instead of being natural and chaotic, was a perfectly ordered artifact of a mysterious alien intelligence? Doesn't that just make your brain tingle? (That's also basically why I love the Myst series, of course--and appropriately, Rama has also been made into a Myst-style puzzle adventure game.)
space elevators:
Rockets are bulky, expensive, polluting, and dangerous. What if instead of a rocket, we had a cable stretching vertically from Earth into space, which we could climb using a simple electric motor powered by sunlight or a ground-based laser? This audaciously simple concept is actually closer to being feasible than you think. All we need is to take a material we already have, carbon nanotubes, and find a way to bind it together into a hundred-thousand-kilometer-long ribbon while still maintaining most of its strength.
the matrix:
I'm not an anarchist or a Christian, yet I still find the Wachowski brothers' anarchist fable of humans laboring unknowingly for a giant Machine, energized by a heap of recycled New Testament material, to be a pretty awesome movie (except for that one scene in the lobby that's just an obscene glorification of gun violence). Maybe I just like virtual reality a bit too much. Or maybe, as a Democrat who tends to see corporations as bad guys, I just enjoy the idea of beating up guys in business suits a bit too much. Either way, it's probably something of an unhealthy fascination. I'm currently more than halfway through writing a revised version of the two lame sequels.
ursula k le guin:
Le Guin is the best female science-fiction author I know of, and she lives in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up. Her specialty is inventing entire new cultures and making them feel perfectly believable. (It no doubt helps that her dad was an anthropologist.) She also writes fantasy, particularly the Earthsea series, which has been favorably compared with The Lord of the Rings.