First poster of the film.
("Sometimes reality is stranger than science fiction")
"Proxima" is there!
Planet from movie "Proxima" has been found by astronomers.
In his delirious speech at a conference of science fiction, the writer Felix Cadecq (inspired on Philip K. Dick and his delirious speech in Metz in 1977) announces to audience that he has discovered a way for travel to a planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. Nobody believes him except the hero of the film, who will start from that moment a tortuous journey to the exoplanet.
The film of which I am talking is "Proxima". Written and directed in 2006, it was released in a public screening in 2007, when the genre of science fiction was still a rather unusual thing in Spain. The last third of the film takes place in a deserted rocky, Earth-like planet, endowed with breathable atmosphere and bathed in radiation from the flare star Proxima Centauri , forcing the humans who go there to cover their eyes and part of face with rudimentary protections.
We shot these sequences in the Corta Atalaya, spectacular surface mining (once the largest in Europe) located in the Rio Tinto mines (Huelva) , a landscape with truly extraterrestrial appearance that frequently hosts visiting scientists who research the possibility of life in harsh environments. We ventured into the depths of a vast crater dug for centuries. Nobody has made a movie before or after us on the very edge of the acid lake that covers the bottom .
Well, in August 2016, ten years after the shooting and nine after the première, the journal Nature announcing the discovery of a planet very similar (time will tell if identical) to the one shown in the film. Or rather, they have discovered the very same planet of the film. They have baptized it as "Proxima b" (in the film we refered to him only as "planet Proxima"), it is rocky, it has a similar size to Earth, it is orbiting in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri (a distance that allows the existence of atmosphere and liquid water) , its surface receives large dose of X-rays and ultraviolet radiation from the star and even artistic recreations that come in different articles spreading the news surprisingly coincide with the appearance that the planet shows in his film version.
If we add the Stephen Hawking's plan to explore our neighboring system by sending nano-starships (as Felix Cadecq could proclaim too), which was once a science fiction production will end looking more like a documentary.
SIGN THE PETITION: A CRATER IN PROXIMA B FOR CARLOS ATANES.
© Carlos Atanes
Madrid. August 25, 2016
P.D.: Thank you very much to researchers Guillem Anglada-Escudé, Pedro J. Amado, John Barnes, Zaira M. Berdiñas, R. Paul Butler, Gavin A. L. Coleman, Ignacio de la Cueva, Stefan Dreizler, Michael Endl, Benjamin Giesers, Sandra V. Jeffers, James S. Jenkins, Hugh R. A. Jones, Marcin Kiraga, Martin Kürster, Marίa J. López-González, Christopher J. Marvin, Nicolás Morales, Julien Morin, Richard P. Nelson, José L. Ortiz, Aviv Ofir, Sijme-Jan Paardekooper, Ansgar Reiners, Eloy Rodríguez, Cristina Rodrίguez-López, Luis F. Sarmiento, John P. Strachan, Yiannis Tsapras, Mikko Tuomi and Mathias Zechmeister for have found my planet.