It has been a while since I have seen sci-fi movie or tv series about space travel. After watching the Ark I was pleasantly surprised. Space travel seems to be a topic that has been explored many many times, and similar stories repeat over and over. At the same time the topic so vast and limited only by our imaginations. In the past space travel was only in our imaginations, books and movies. Achieving such height of technology seemed too far away. Today that doesn't seem so anyway. Sure we are not space travelers yet. We don't have any awesome space craft that would take us far far away. We don't have the technology yet. But the advancement in robotics, AI, and hardware makes us wonder we may be very close to this future.
The Ark is a sci-fi tv series brings back our imagination about space travel. It is about journey of hundreds of crew members on a spaceship traveling to a new planet to start a new colony. It does repeat some of the same stories from before, but does it better than previous attempts. It also adds something new. It keeps the viewers continuously engaged with the story, rooting for success of the crew through various troubles. At times it seemed there was no way to recover from the situations the Ark crew found themselves in. Writers did a great job telling the story. Actors did awesome work performing their roles. Produced created something very unique, and definitely worth watching and talking about.
Spoiler Alert: This post may contain spoilers. If you haven't seen the Ark yet, and planning to watch it, please stop reading here. Feel free to return to share your thoughts after you have watched the series.
The series was released in 2023 on Syfy. The full first season is available on platforms like Peacock and Hulu. The new second season has just started. There only first episode of the new season available. I think they will air the episodes once a week. Watching the first season and the first episode of the second season is good enough to get good story. The future episodes will tell another chapter of the Ark's journey in space.
The main idea of the Ark is something we have heard man many times before. Earth is dying, Earth has problems. It is time for humanity to find new home and start from scratch. Some tech company builds spaceships and names them Arks, as in Noah's Ark. The founder of the company is a kinda genius inventor, but also a huge narcissist. Kinda like Elon Musk, but looks like Steeve Jobs and wears similar outfit. William Trust is the name of this inventor and visionary. Together with his wife Helena Trust they lead the Ark project. Not only William is planning to bring first humans to new planets, but he also has a huge library of DNA for animals and plants to recreate in the new place. Those days cloning is advanced, and they can recreate animals form DNA samples.
The series start with a catastrophic event on the Ark. Entire crew is in sleeping pods, and system should wake them up when they get close to the destination, otherwise the spaceship is on autopilot. Something causes a big damage to the ship, especially to the section where sleeping pods are, and emergency protocol activated which wakes few crew members who start waking others up. The chamber is losing oxygen and they all need to run to other sections of the ship to survive. Due to this many don't make it and die while they are in the sleeping pods. It turns out the most damage was in the area where senior crew members were. Now the fate of the Ark is in the hands of less skilled and knowledgable crew members.
The Ark program had planned to launch multiple Ark ships. This one was the first one, Ark-1. Later the crew will encounter Ark-3 and Ark-15. We find out that Ark-15 was many times more advanced and was able to travel to the original destination faster than all other Arks. It seems like most other Ark either didn't make it, went to another destination, or were destroyed by Ark-15 who didn't have intentions of sharing. The damage Ark-1 took when crew members woke up was because of Ark-15's attack on the spaceship. However, it is not clear why Ark-15 just left after initial attack. Later Ark-1 and Ark-15 will have some battles, and also become sort of friends temporarily. Even in space humans continue causing trouble to each other and keep fighting. What is wrong with you? I guess if we didn't have such plots, movies would be boring. Maybe? Maybe not. It would actually be interesting to see such missions in picture when humans actually get along and support each other, instead of continues struggle for power.
I think we will make it to space. I think there will be human missions to discover what's beyond our solar system. However, I don't think it would be because Earth is dying and we are destroying it. It will just be the right time with the right technology, and another step forward in our collective knowledge. Space travel is impossible without AI and robotics. Humans will not be building massive space ships. That's what robots are for. All parts will probably need to be put together somewhere near orbit. That's where the advanced robotics and AI software will become super important. When we get such technology and tools, we will be able to fix a lot of things here at home. We can clean oceans, we can plant trees, we can build sustainable cities, we can solve many current problems in massive scales. This future is not too far away. We should just stop killing each other. There is plenty for all.
I enjoyed the first season, and looking forward to seeing the season 2. I will probably wait until all episodes become available. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.