Check Out BAD Science In Movies
Sci-fi movies don’t usually follow the rules of physics and science, that’s just how it is, because if they did, those movies wouldn’t be as entertaining. Let’s face it, there wouldn’t be much you could do in a soundless space and on planets that don’t have gravity like earth’s, it would be a boring movie.
Check out the report card below, via io9, that shows 18 movies and the science laws that they’ve broken. Star Wars franchise has broken almost all of them..
* There’s no sound in space
* Not all planets have Earth gravity
* Planets should have diverse climates, instead of one unified climate across a “desert planet” or “forest planet.”
* It shouldn’t be too easy to communicate with alien creatures, without some kind of high-technology “translator” explanation.
* And it definitely shouldn’t be too easy for humans to interbreed with aliens.
* Humans exposed to vacuum without a spacesuit shouldn’t explode or shatter. And a “hull breach” where the ship’s crew is exposed to vacuum should kill everyone instantly.
* You can’t have fires in space, unless there’s oxygen leaking out somehow.
* Asteroids or other objects shouldn’t be able to float close together without falling into each other’s gravity
* People shouldn’t be able to dodge lasers and other speed-of-light weapons
* And there’s no reason why someone would move in slow-motion in zero gravity.
* Faster-than-light travel is probably not ever going to be possible.
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And I’ll bet there are no alien bars where we can meet to have a drink and hire a mercenary, and no space councils either. Well! That’s just no fun.
I always thought that teleportation (beam me up Scotty) was the worst of the “bad science” offenders, but since Star Trek isn’t on the list I guess it doesn’t really count.
Forgot to mention how often it seems that alien races are bipedal humanoids in appearance.
I wish I could remember who said the following, “Aliens are usually uglier but smarter than we humans.”
“One climate planet-wide” is a bit of a bad rap for most movies, though. If you only go to one location on-planet, there’s no reason to spend time explaining that “it’s not all like this”. (As opposed to Star Wars, which actually says that Hoth is “the ice planet”.)
Ditto for “all planets have Earth gravity”. That’s an unfortunate side effect of not having a non-Earth planet to film on.
The rest of them seem like legitimate complaints, though.
2001 treated vacuum exposure accurately, according to Air Force tests.
Also, the 2001 Pan Am hostess aren’t moving slowly in free fall, they’re peeling and re-attaching velcro shoe soles (for real, I’ve read.)
Go back and watch it again.
In Serenity, it is made clear that the reason that the planets (moons, actually) had such similar climates was because those climates were the end result of a standard terraforming process which was initiated by humans in the distant past.
Presumably, the reason that the gravity was so similar from moon to moon was also a a consequence of which moons were selected for colonization. Humans aren’t going to bother terraforming a world which has 5 times normal Earth gravity.
Some minor comments:
1. Sound in space I always felt could be easily explained as the effects of shockwaves on the air inside the observer’s vessel. If you assume all camera angles are within a vessel you can be safe with most of it though I assume that only the explosions would be able to be heard and not that brilliantly.
2. It may be a retcon, but many of the Star Wars source books merely call the larger shipboard weapons turbolasers, however, all of them are explained as bolt (blaster, bow-caster, ion-cannon) based weapons that are firing fast travelling comets of energy (which elongate and look like a beam but are not because they have separation one can see) They aren’t faster than light ray based weapons. I think the only time I’ve seen a semi-accurate ray based laser in a movie was in Bond The Man with the Golden gun when the seaplane is destroyed by a silent invisible laser. Phasers are also energy flow based weapons, not beams. The technology consists of a field based pipe being formed (unknown tech) and then constituents of the impulse engine being pumped through that like plumbing towards the target.
3. Faster than light travel will probably not happen because of the astronomical amounts of energy required to do it in its most technically likely fashion.
Additional Film for Weird Depictions of vacuum (in this case partial as it’s a depiction of low pressure atmosphere):
Total Recall
Arnold would probably have just wheezed himself to death during Martian daylight hours.
I assume that should really say “No reason to move excessively slowly”. There is actually a good reason to limit your speed in a microgravity environment. Stopping. Once you start moving, you are effectively falling toward whatever is in your trajectory. The faster you are moving, the more energy your body has to dissipate upon impact.
sorry, but some of your conclusions are wrong.
(1) Apart from polar regions and “night and day”, many planets do have a single climate. In fact, earth is the only planet in our solar system that has a varied climate.
(2) The creatures in “Aliens” are parasitic and use the DNA of other animals. They also have bred with Predators and Dogs.
(3) The depiction of exposure to vacuum in 2001 is accurate. It is possible to survive exposure for short periods, although there is usually rupture of veins in the face and eyes. If a breach in a ships hull is small enough it will not instantly such all the air out.
(4) Asteroids can float close together if their “orbit” around each other is fast enough.
(5) Most “FTL” travel in SF movies is Warp travel, which (in theory) uses different rules of physics. Also some recent experiments with photons has shown that FTL travel may be possible.
(4)
Interesting that you ding people on the bad science of dodging “faster-than-light” weapons (diagram; you say speed-of-light in the text) _and_ faster-than-light travel; the both should be equally impossible.
It is a nice list and have laughed at many of the mentioned movies, but still, the list is far from perfect. I have a few comments, lessee:
All planets have Earth gravity – Well in some of them at least (e.g. Serenity and Stargate, the original movie, that is) there is a reason for this: The planets selected are not random, but chosen among the ones that could hold Earth-like life.
Easy communication with aliens – In Stargate (the movie!) it is explained at least. We share ancestors.
Easy interbreeding with aliens – In some of the movies (e.g. Stargate) the interbreeding is among humans spread out from the same ancestors. I do not remember any interbreeding between the humans and aliens here, unless the symbiotic relationship between the Goa’uld and their hosts are considered interbreeding. It is strange, though, that such a symbiotic relationship can exist between species so far apart in distance. Does Star Wars have alien/human interbreeding? I cannot remember that. Star Trek, yes, but Star Wars? Somebody please jog my memory.
Faster-than-light weapons – Where?
Faster-than-light travel – Not with technology known to man, but hey, the same was said about heavier-than-air flight. Oh, and why is Stargate not mentioned in this section? And Contact? (OK, the last one is disputable, did she actually go anywhere or was that just a figment of her imagination (and video recorder)?)
Where is Battlestar Galactica? It has faster-than-light travel and Earth gravity everywhere, including on the space ships.
What about the violation of the laws of acceleration and inertia in space travel (Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Star Trek, …)? You would think that people would be smashed against the walls or the hull during the manoeuvres performed.
And light sabres?
And recoilless guns?
And …
This is stupid. It’s internally inconsistent, as well as just being plain wrong about its facts and interpretations of events in some of the films. This chart gets an “F” for lack of accuracy and interesting content.
To the NASA “geniuses” — FTL is not “impossible” — there is NOTHING that says it is impossible in known physics. The only question is “how to get there from here”, for which there is currently no known technique, aka “The Einstein Wall”, which says that one must apply infinite energy for mass to attain the speed of light — AFTER reaching the speed of light, the amount of energy required to speed up REDUCES by our current mathematical analyses.
It’s not like this is rocket science, so NASA should have a clue. There’s a whole area of speculative physics involving so-called Tachyons — faster than light particles — and I’m not talking “fiction” — people get grants to research this stuff.
Additionally, it’s not like modern SF just “magically” travels FTL — they usually have SOME reasonable explanation of how they are overcoming that issue. “Warp Tech”, as described in Star Trek is an entirely possible notion that you create a localized space-time bubble around you which moves faster than light, while the ship itself remains at comparative rest inside the bubble. While one may grant we have no idea how to do such a thing, it’s certainly plausible, and arguing “it would take too much energy” is absolutely clotheaded. If you have no idea how to do it, you have no possible idea of how much energy it would take.
Another concept is to “fold space” — that is, you utilize the notion of 3D space having “folds” in four dimensions and transition from one adjacent “touching” part of space to the next. This is where a lot of “warp gate” notions operate from, as in Babylon 5.
This crap from NASA shows just how utterly they lack any semblance of an imagination any more.
In addition to acceleration and inertia in UnderinformedAtBest’s post, I’d add the unrealistic ship manouvers, especially in Star Trek/Wars (and others). These include banking moves that would work great for an airplane in an atmosphere. If your ship is moving, and you fire the port thrusters, your ship will not turn as if following some aerodynamic path of least resistance.
In defense of Star Trek, at some point it explains the need for the “inertial dampers,” lest the crew wind up as puddles on the back wall when entering warp.
Yuck.
Many people already weigh in on these issues, but I thought I’d reiterate a few points.
1. Slower motion in zero gravity. In, as an example, 2001, slower motion doesn’t occur if people aren’t suited up. Pressure suits, however, restrict movement. Further, without the typical resistence of gravity, human movement would be more uncertain (cautious.)
2. Planet-wide climate, earth standard gravity. As people point out, many planets in the solar system actually do have a homogenous climate. The moon and venus are two great examples. Mars has variety, but outside of the poles it’s muted, and would be difficult for a casual observer from space to distinguish.
In both Serenity and Aliens, homogenous environments are never established. That’s some weird assumption that the person who wrote this article made, for no reason I can ascertain.
As for gravity, once again in both Serenity and Aliens, as examples, the planets in question had been selected specifically for permanent populations. They had been selected, obviously, because they were within the colonization “sweet spot” when it came to things like gravity. All sorts of flaws in the “science” of the article here.
3. No, asteroids wouldn’t instantly yank one another in due to gravity. Remember that gravitational influence is an exponentially diminishing field based on the size (the mass defines the strength, but the size defines the strength of the field,) of the object. You have to get really close to most asteroids for their gravity to start having a significant “yank”.
4. Aliens don’t interbreed with humans, they just gestate inside them, rather like various parasites lay their eggs in other organisms. There is some talk of Aliens incorporating other species’ DNA, but this is never established in the movies.
There’s more, but the basic point is that while this was a fun article, it wasn’t very well researched at all.
* There’s no sound in space
—Lucas tried this. The scenes were BORING. It’s an essential surrender to the requirements of human dramatic tension. We ARE telling stories, here, not documentaries.
* Not all planets have Earth gravity
—Indeed, but the ones humans pay attention to — build on, colonize, whatever — for the most part almost certainly will.
* Planets should have diverse climates, instead of one unified climate across a “desert planet” or “forest planet.”
— Someone covered this above… All the planets in THIS system except our own have this. Upon what basis are you going to justify this claim? We have limited knowledge of other planets as yet. “Hey, the only planet I’ve ever lived on has Earth gravity!! All planets must have Earth gravity!”? Wait… what? We know next to nothing of extrasolar ecologies. To claim any grasp of what is “typical” is pretty imbecilic. Oh, right, that’s NASA to a ‘T’.
* People shouldn’t be able to dodge lasers and other speed-of-light weapons
—How are they “dodging” these in any of the vaguely serious movies (Moonraker, The Black Hole, they don’t count) like Star Wars? They are anticipating them, using inherent short-term prescience abilities gained from “The Force” in Star Wars, for example.
* Faster-than-light travel is probably not ever going to be possible.
—Oh, jeez, see previous missive. NASA has been taken over by dunderheaded ignorant poltroons. Note to NASA ‘scientists’: Bumblebees can’t fly, either.
> In addition to acceleration and inertia in UnderinformedAtBest’s post,…
You’re BOTH woefully underinformed and overpresumptuous about what you know. These systems in question all involve engineering and physics we can only speculate about. Claiming something CAN’T work a certain way is foolish.
As to Star Trek, this issue is actually specifically dealt with — they repeatedly refer to things called “inertial dampers”. Given their clear capacity to generate artificial gravity, it seems quite obvious that one should be able to use this capability to produce the nominal equivalent of what is done by modern “noise cancelling headphones” — create a counter-field to deal with acceleration effects.
Star Wars? Though the films don’t mention it, I could obviously explain this away using the inertial damper concept above, but speculate that it’s too expensive to do in a generalized direction, that you bank the ship to keep the inertial forces in a single direction so as to maximize its ability to overcome the inertia for the occupants… The novels written about SW might have some other explanation. In short, “Duh”: Your failure/inability to make reasonable extensions for yourself does not constitute bad SF.
Bad science is Chain Reaction, in which, during the opening presentation by a so-called physics professor to a 1st year physics class (yeah, RIGHT!), the professor’s own monologue shows a lack of understanding of the difference between chemical reactions and nuclear reactions. A discussion of the notion of getting nuclear-style energies from hydrogen-oxygen combination is suggested.
Bad science is a visual effect in Pitch Black, in which a planet is shown with stacked rings. A cool visual effect, to be sure, but anyone who has even a high-school physics understanding of orbital mechanics knows this is utterly, completely impossible, one or both of the rings in question could not have its “ring” centered on the planet’s center of mass, which -must- be true of -all- inertially based orbits, no exceptions allowed — and which include ring systems. You can get weird orbital interaction effects, but this is not going to be one of them.
Bad science is The Core:
“The only way to save Earth from catastrophe is to drill down to the core and set it spinning again.”
…”Set it spinning again”? Really?
Bad science is Sunshine:
“A team of astronauts are sent to re-ignite the dying sun 50 years into the future.”
…re-ignite… **THE SUN** ?!?!? Only 50 years into the future? Even IF this were VAGUELY either “needable” or “possible”, I believe it is patently beyond ludicrous to imagine humans -capable- of such a massive task only 50 years into the future. The energies involved would be literally GODLIKE in nature. If you could control those kinds of energies you would truly be as A God — the Roman/Greek kind, not the Xtian kind.
“There is some talk of Aliens incorporating other species’ DNA, but this is never established in the movies.”
Actually, it is, with the dog/alien in Alien 3.
Aside from the physics related shortcomings of the list…
In Star Wars, most of those species have been interacting with each other for thousands of years. Them being able to understand one another doesn’t seem so out of line.
And in Stargate, the “aliens” spoke ancient egyptian. Communication with them wasn’t exactly easy.