Let me guess, is it the surface of the sun?
Only dream I ever have.
Every time I shut my eyes, it's always the same.
Our sun is dying.
Mankind faces extinction.
Having left the Earth in a solar winter, the crew of the Icarus II is on a mission to reignite the sun.
Although the premise is highly improbable,
it does form an interesting reflection of the dynamic between the sun granting us life,
and we using that life to give meaning to the sun.
At this distance of 36 million miles, you are observing the sun at 2 percent of full brightness.
2 percent?
Unlike any other film, Sunshine gives us a visceral experience of our relation to this star.
It introduces us to a power so overwhelmingly fierce, so unimaginably violent,
that we cannot even stare directly at it despite being millions of miles away.
Icarus, I'm gonna reset the filter to 3.1 percent.
It is especially humbling to consider that compared to the intense burning of this central star,
its orbiting planets are but tiny dots.
While here it is Mercury that passes the Icarus II, the scene recalls the ‘Pale Blue Dot’;
the photo of our own planet taken by the Voyager I at the request of Carl Sagan,
who refers to it in his book of the same name;
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits
than this distant image of our tiny world.
And yet, like a moth to a flame, we are drawn to the great light,
we can’t help but develop a relation to it.
This becomes clearly evident on board of the Icarus II where the astronauts, each in their own way,
deal with the tininess of mankind and the grandeur of the sun in this great cosmic dark.
These attitudes are expressed in the more rational, scientific acknowledgements of the sun
as the primary source of life and as a necessity for our survival;
We have a payload to deliver to the heart of our nearest star.
We are delivering that payload cause that star is dying and if it dies, we die, everything dies.
So that is our mission, there is nothing, literally nothing more important than completing our mission.
But it also goes deeper than that as ever since our humble beginnings,
our relation to the sun has also been symbolic, spiritual even.
There is a strange longing to connect to it, to become one with the light;
You and the darkness are distinct from each other because darkness is an absence of something,
it's a vacuum.
But total light envelops you.
It becomes you.
It is here, in this deification of the sun, that we also find the origins to many of the world's religions.
Are you an angel?
Has the time come?
We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes.
"What a man desires, he also imagines to be true," said Demosthenes.
"The light of faith makes us see what we believe," cheerfully admitted St. Thomas Aquinas.
However, the closer we get to this God-like power, the more dangerous it becomes.
And as our physical limitations show themselves through blisters and burns,
we realize that to become one with it, is to be destroyed.
All our science.
All our hopes, our dreams, are foolish!
In the face of this, we are dust, nothing more.
And to this dust, we will return.
The implications of this fact become evident
when a human error turns the astronaut’s journey into a one-way trip;
As it stands now,
we do not have enough oxygen reserves to survive the return journey.
It emphasizes that while the mission’s chance of success,
and thus the future of humanity as a whole, remains unknown,
there is one certainty;
they’re all going to die.
Of course, as mortal beings, the certainty of death was there all along,
but it was still a rather abstract notion of mortality,
it was not yet close enough to really be accepted as an undeniable reality.
This impending doom however doesn’t just relate to the fate of the individual;
it also extends to the ultimate transience and insignificance of our existence as a whole;
At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains.
Then the moment will pass.
Man will be gone.
There will be nothing to show that we were ever here, but stardust.
What I find most interesting about Sunshine
is how it not only presents the variety of attitudes towards our inescapable fate,
but also explores the interplay between them;
explores how different outlooks can lead to the same virtues and vices,
to courage as well as cowardice,
to both hope and despair.
We see how a spiritual attitude can lead to religious fanaticism
in which the destructive force of the sun becomes a pathway to heaven;
For seven years I spoke with God.
He told me to take us all to Heaven.
We see how the fear of a non-believer can lead to a sense of self-centered entitlement
that overpowers the voice of reason.
There is no choice. - No, There’s no choice for you.
Capa I order you to remove that suit.
Get out of the suit!
We see how both spirituality and atheism can lead to humility,
Hey Capa, we’re only stardust.
and inspire selfless acts of incredible bravery;
Do it Capa!
Do it.
We see how, despite the universe’s constant attempts to prove our insignificance,
we can still appreciate the sanctity of life,
we can still be caring and merciful to each other.
You make it easy for him.
Find a kindness.
We see how death is not necessarily something to be feared,
how we can be in awe of the cosmos without God or religion, and even find beauty in it.
And then a spark, will pop into existence,
and then, it will split into two, and those will split again, and again, and again.
Detonation beyond all imagining.
A big bang on a small scale.
A new star born out of a dying one.
No, I'm not scared.
I think it will be beautiful.
Like all great sci-fi films, Sunshine uses the spectacular to tell a distinctively human story.
It shows how the infinite is captured in the finite,
how the endless universe is reflected in fleeting constructions of meaning;
competing and cooperating,
longing for affirmation,
longing for significance.
It’s a cosmic struggle on the smallest of scales,
all taking place in the hearts of these strange creatures,
existing for the briefest of moments on a pale blue dot.
Consider again that dot.
That's here.
That's home.
That's us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,
every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering,
thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines,
every hunter and forager,
every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,
every king and peasant,
every young couple in love,
every mother and father, hopeful child,
inventor and explorer,
every saint and sinner in the history of our species
lived there,
on a mote of dust
suspended in a sunbeam.