Could humans eventually fly to exoplanets on massive "generational" spaceships? <em>Last Exit: Space</em> explores such a hypothesis with intriguing and sometimes darkly hilarious results.
Last Exit: Space is a new documentary on Discovery+ that explores the possibility of humans colonizing planets beyond Earth. Since it is produced and narrated by Werner Herzog (director of Grizzly Man, guest star on The Mandalorian) and written and directed by his son Rudolph, however, it goes in a different direction than your average space documentary. It's weird, beautiful, skeptical, and even a bit funny.
In light of the film's recent streaming launch, father and son Herzog spoke with Ars Technica from their respective homes about the film's otherworldly hopes, pessimistic conclusions, and that one part about space colonists having to drink their own urine.
“My accent is a joke”
Enlarge / Writer/director Rudolph Herzog (left) poses with producer/narrator Werner Herzog (right). Lena Herzog
"[As a narrator], I always spoke in a deadpan [voice], and of course there's a certain humor in it because listening to my accent is a joke already," Werner says from his current home in Los Angeles. His son Rudolph, phoning in from Germany, scoffs at this, to which Werner replies, "Well, to some!"
Werner notes that the script is his son's, who says that "all of my films are comedies, even if they don't look like comedies." Rudolph's inclination for dark humor is seen throughout Last Exit: Space, which is largely anchored by interviews with researchers, engineers, and ex-astronauts, though the director is also eager to feature skeptics, futurologists, and voices that he admits he "politely disagrees with."
Werner, as narrator, periodically clarifies certain points about humankind's interest in space colonization. In rare instances, he editorializes, such as when Werner describes the efforts of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic as humans "venturing out into space in a testosterone-fueled competition." Other times, Werner opts for dryly funny narration of how bleak certain space colonization efforts may turn out.
"The reality of life on Mars would be sobering," he says. "Astronauts would hunker down in radiation-proof bunkers, enjoying drinks of recycled urine."
"I knew when I speak about [drinking] your own urine, if I say it deadpan, it becomes hilarious," Werner tells Ars Technica. "If I had made a big fuss about it with my voice, it wouldn't have worked." He then tells Ars that he's familiar with an ecosystem of comedians and YouTube creators that parody his voice, acknowledging that he gets the comedy of it. "I made a film in Antarctica once, and before I even started editing, there was already a satire out—about a film I hadn't really started yet!" he says.
Though I was unable to find the satirical video in question, the finished product leans into Werner's proclivity for darkly funny deadpan, both in narration and visual content. Here's an example from the gorgeous 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World:
Excerpt from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World.
Matters about antimatter
In Last Exit: Space, Rudolph puts his own spin on his father's filmmaking pedigree by alternating between hard science, firm skepticism, dark humor, beautiful filmography, and surprising moments of awe at the human spirit. For most of the film, Rudolph focuses on two options for where humans might travel, land, and establish space colonies: Mars or an exoplanet in the Alpha Centauri system.
Along the way, Last Exit: Space follows a pattern. First, it lists a problem that might make a certain space travel proposition impossible. Then it briefly explains the most promising solution to that problem as developed by modern science and engineering. Finally, it brings the interstellar dream crashing back down to Earth with a grim recounting of why the solution won't work.
In one scene, a futurologist seen floating on a small boat over an idyllic Idaho river explains his wide-eyed hope for accelerating space flight by combining matter and antimatter, then capturing the resultant photon energy. The film warmly acknowledges that this wild idea does have some scientific merit. The crew travels to the sweeping, beautiful CERN particle accelerator complex in Geneva to have one of its staffers explain the concept and point to physical evidence that his team has indeed captured antimatter, which is held in a tube buffered by electromagnetic shielding.
Soon after, though, the hypothesis is shot down, at least for the time being. The CERN staffer explains that current antimatter generation methods not only consume massive amounts of energy but are also so slow that the amount needed for legitimate rocket propulsion would require billions of years—or, as he counts it, from the moment the Big Bang erupted until the theoretical end of the Universe.
“Good luck with that”
Last Exit: Space official trailer.
Near the film's end, the camera crew visits a Brazilian commune whose members believe they are direct descendants of an alien species that originated centuries ago from a planet light-years away. Yet when Rudolph asks this group how Earth's denizens might ever travel to another planet, its members respond with a warning: human biology is in no way designed to withstand millennia of space travel or extreme radiation. Stay on Earth.
Werner agrees with the Brazilian commune. "We know the next planet outside of our solar system is at least 5,000 years away," he tells Ars. "It's very hard to do that, and [whatever is there is] probably uninhabitable. And we know that on Mars, there's permanent radiation that will force us underground in little bunkers. We know that we have no breathing or water [on the surface], and Elon Musk once suggested exploding nuclear bombs at the poles to melt the ice and then, of course, with gigantic systems of pipelines, bring it somewhere to a city."
He pauses. "Good luck with that," he says.
Enlarge / An international crew is simulating Mars in the Negev Desert, just south of Jerusalem. Discovery+
Last Exit: Space visually communicates this pessimism by showing its interviewees marveling at their work on Mars-compatible spacesuits, which are tested in a sweeping crater south of Jerusalem. "This is our first glimpse of our future as space colonists," one of the team members gushes while we watch two testers walk awkwardly over a barren, burnt-red expanse.
Moments later, space anthropologist Taylor Genovese, who routinely serves as the film's loudest skeptic, makes his own impassioned plea about privatized space colonization. Without any regulation in place, and with private firms controlling something like a bunker-filled mineral-mining operation on Mars, the denizens of such a colony could grow frustrated and start making demands of their overseers. In such a case, Genovese asks, "What's stopping Papa Elon [Musk] from turning off the oxygen or restricting food shipments or water shipments?" He points to "similar tactics used today in Amazon fulfillment centers to quash justifiable worker grievances," alluding to Blue Origin being owned by the same man who founded Amazon.
As Rudolph says in our interview, "Space is the Wild West at the moment. Anybody can just go out and shoot stuff up there!"
He mentions a recent conversation he had with a satellite company leader who had to contend with a professional freakout. "A different satellite company shot a satellite into their orbits so that they would eventually collide," he says. "They had to get on the red telephone."
“We shouldn't behave like locusts”
Yet the film is careful not to focus on low-hanging fruit like satellite tech, let alone the likes of Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson, beyond a cursory mention of their well-documented space-flight tests. Rudolph tells Ars that's intentional. "I wasn't interested in regurgitating what they had already said so many times. I'm far happier to speak to space sexologists or someone who creates a radiation-resistant human of the future or something like that," he says.
Indeed, as Last Exit: Space explores the logistics of a possible 5,000-year journey to Alpha Centauri, the film asks wild questions that touch matters of the human spirit, each with a diverse pool of optimistic and pessimistic answers. Is hibernation feasible? Could a non-hibernating skeleton crew function in a sane way? And how would the human act of copulation play out—both mechanically, in terms of being a reduced-gravity exercise, and genetically, in terms of possible in-breeding if a ship can't hold at least 40,000 colonists to keep the gene pool diverse?
When pressed about Werner's most recent experience in the pop-culture spotlight as a villain who contends with Grogu on a distant planet in The Mandalorian, the elder Herzog describes what, for him, is a clear delineation between the human spirit and the cold realities documented in his son's film:
[Science fiction] is beautiful because it is storytelling. This is poetry. It's sheer fantasy. That we can depart into poetry, into realms of science fiction and invented worlds. It's wonderful. It's so good for cinema. But when it comes to attempt this in reality, to move a million people to another planet, that's utopia, and it will inevitably come to its end. You have to make the distinction, and it's very easy to make that—but I'm very much for science fiction, and although I do not know the world of Star Wars—I've never seen the films—I still welcome and gladly accepted to be a villain in the Mandalorian.But as you hear it from Lucian Walkowicz, an astronomer in the film, it's very clear that we take their position: We shouldn't behave like locusts who are grazing everything empty here, then move on to the next planet. There's something not right to shift, to move our population to other planets, and it's a part of all these ethical questions. It is a utopia, and you do not need to be a scientist or expert researcher [to understand what will pass]. You just sit back, twiddle your thumbs, enjoy your beer, and wait until it fails. [Space colonization] will fail. It is inevitable. You cannot travel to the next [Alpha Centauri exoplanet] that is 200,000 years away. Period. Good luck.
Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz serves as the documentary's neutral anchor, balancing wide-eyed wonder about the mysteries of space and acknowledging the importance of our own planet's survival.
Rudolph and Werner each namecheck Walkowicz a few times in our chat, and Rudolph praises their balance in being both a Kepler Telescope researcher and an advocate for ecological preservation. The filmmakers make it clear that they admire and appreciate efforts to understand space and our universal neighbors. But in describing "space colonization" as "a dirty word," Rudolph paraphrases Walkowicz's film-ending pitch: "There is already a cross-generational spaceship operating right now—and we're already on it. Earth is a luxuriously furnished, wonderfully self-rejuvenating place, so we'd better treat it well."
Last Exit: Space's determination to capture beautiful moments and locations on Earth while talking to tinkerers and engineers with designs on the stars serves two purposes, Rudolph admits: to sell our planet as an operational spaceship worth prioritizing over space colonization and to impress a certain someone.
"I wanted to find the craziest things out there because I'm doing this together with my dad," Rudolph says. "He has seen so much stuff, but I just wanted to see that he's going to have a good time on the trip and that we're going to surprise him—like, around every corner, there's something even more surprising, so he'd be really impressed. It's obvious: sons want to impress their dads, right? That was a very hedonist approach."
At this point, Werner admits that he does have some interest in space travel. "I would love to go out on Mars on a mission... if I had a camera with me," he says.
Rudolph immediately interrupts: "Yes, but I want to stop my dad. Don't encourage him on this, please. I want him to stay on Earth."
Last Exit: Space is now streaming exclusively on Discovery+.
Listing image by Lena Herzog