LambertTlepolemus

Darkweave

[forums.fark.com]

Zapp Brannigan's Girdle

a) They only went to ONE planet. A planet that was colonized by Ra because it had earth gravity.

b) The inhabitants of that planet weren't aliens, they were human. The only alien in the movie was the Ra parasite, and he spoke the same language as the Egyptian humans because he inhabited a host that knew the language.

c) Again, they're still human, of course Daniel was able to get his groove on.

Now, if you expand that to the tv series, they've broken a lot of those rules. Notable exceptions:
No human on the show has ever mated with an alien.
The few times a living creature has been jettisoned into space, they simply froze.

Chiper

foolish-rain

FrankenPC

Ghinn

SavannahJack

wig

IrisMR

-'All planets have Earth gravity': Duh. They've been terraformed to be just like Earth, as stated at the beginning of the film.

-'All planets have one climate': This was never suggested, as we only saw single sections of each planet. Even if it had been suggested, it could still be put down to terraforming.

-'Fires in space': Again, no. In the Collector's Edition commentary, Joss Whedon specifically states that the ion cloud, referenced earlier in the film by Mr. Universe, acts as a partial atmosphere for the planet, and contains oxygen, which allows for fire to occur. Whilst it was admittedly a ploy (in Joss's words, "We need big, loud, flashy explosions, and we need an ion cloud to justify it"), it's still a good explanation, and way more than what other sci-fi flicks ever do.

BreakAtmo

New movies should know better. I'm not going to go after Cat Women of the Moon.

Here are some offenders off the top of my head that are insultingly stupid (not confining myself to conservation of motion and spaceship physics):
Sunshine (no, that can't happen)
Outland (an idiotfest of imaginary physics and improbable engineering)
Total Recall (cool masks, though I doubt if your face would be much use after all that near-vacuum stretchy shit)

victheremin

* 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.

***actually you can survive for between 30 to 60 seconds in vacuum, provided when you decompress you open your mouth to let the air out of your stomach and lungs. Sure, you'll be really messed up with bleeding all over your skin, frostbite to the extremities, perforated ear drums, and bleeding inside your mouth, throat, lungs, eosophasus, rectum and other sensitive parts. You'll need serious trauma care, but you'll live - I've read reports of Soviet cosmonauts that have been exposed to vacuum and lived to write about it***

* You can't have fires in space, unless there's oxygen leaking out somehow.

***Actually you can - a lot of metals commonly used in space burn extremely well. Aluminium burns well in space if it has been machined on earth. That's because when Aluminium is exposed to air, it forms a layer of Aluminium oxide on the surface, and that can react with other materials. What's scariest is Titanium. This is a wonderful material for the superstructure but burns insanely well in hard vacuum. Hell, you can even get steel to burn in the right conditions.***

* Asteroids or other objects shouldn't be able to float close together without falling into each other's gravity

***actually it's a lot more complex than that, what with stable orbits around combined centres of mass, rotating at trojan points, mutual attraction, kinetic energy and the rest make it a nightmare to predict on anything other than a case by case situation***

* And there's no reason why someone would move in slow-motion in zero gravity.

***there are two main reasons that humans move slow in microgravity in the real world. The first is that because once you start moving, you can't stop unless you have something to brace against, or unless you have something with which to damp your momentum like a rocket pack, or something that you can 'throw away' in order to provide thrust. The second reason is that to make yourself start spinning or moving in one direction, you have to push something in the other. A guy in a spacesuit pushing against a spacecraft pushes himself away from the spacecraft as well as pushes the spacecraft away from him (technically they both move away from their combined centre of mass)***

fizz_gig

Not to mention the Serenity universe is in one galaxy and it takes them weeks or even months to travel between colonies sometimes.

Also, regarding sound in the film, I'm pretty sure all sound in space is supposed to be coming through head sets etc.

The space battle at the end takes place in atmosphere so naturally there is sound. That was the whole point of putting it in atmosphere, so they could justify having sound in it.

Serenity only visits one location on each planet in the film so naturally it does give the impression that each planet is one climate. But as others have said, they don't. The TV series revealed multiple climates on planets. A bit of an unfair grade I think.

Kizzafreak

The whole point of the book is to explore the impact of a VALIS on poor pitiful humanity, which makes this sort of nitpicking seem kind of silly.

Reader-X

RobynH

daveNYC

Serenity

Sound in Vacuum
When Mal fires the cannon at the Reaver ship, you hear the multiple concussions of the gun firing because Mal's suit is in contact with the hull, (sound conduction), but no explosions from the detonations at the Reaver ship (vacuum, no sound).

The Reaver-Alliance battle takes place in the upper atmosphere of Mr. Universe's planet, hence they have sound. Notice that Serenity is using her atmo scramjets, not the Firefly drive that is used in space.

Fires/Explosions in Vacuum
Presumably the warships in the Reaver-Alliance battle could carry both propellant and oxidizer for propulsion; as well as ordinance carrying its own oxidizer and designed to detonate in vacuum, otherwise they'd be pretty poor warships.

All of this stuff would burn very nicely in space. Ask the crew of Apollo 13 if oxidizer can explode in space.

All Planets Have Earth Gravity
In the movie, we saw eight landfalls on planets where gravity was at least similar to Earth (River at elementary school on Osiris, River/Simon at the Acadamy torture session, Bank Heist outer rim planet, Mr. Universe's location, Shepherd Book at Haven, Fanty/Mingo at Maidenhead, Inara's Training House, and Miranda) out of "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons". How do we know ALL of them have Earth gravity. People gravitate (snicker) to where the conditions are comfortable, so they are going to choose to live more often where the gravity is "homey"

2001: A Space Odyssey

Exposure to Vacuum
Frank Poole's suit is breached by the collision with the EVA pod that HAL caused and he dies of hypoxia. Dave Bowman is exposed to vacuum momentarily while reentering Discovery from his own pod without his helmet and has no lasting ill effects. These are commonly cited as moments of exacting scientific accuracy in the film. The only "d'oh" moment is, do we really expect an astronaut to forget his helmet, even in a moment of crisis.

Sidenote: In Arthur C Clarke's novel of "2001", Dave Bowman had a more believable encounter with vacuum from a plot driven point of view when HAL chose to open Discovery's airlocks to intentionally kill Dave. There are several pages of depiction of the action as Dave struggles to survive and reach an evergency pressurization shelter. Extreme technical accuracy and very scary besides.

Slow Motion in Zero Gravity
Have you watched a NASA or ROCKOCMOC spacewalk recently? One unplanned move can kill you. People tend to move slowly in that situation.

All Movies
FTL Travel Impossible
Modern physics says nothing about travel FASTER than the speed of light being impossible or even particularly difficult. It is travel AT the speed of light that causes the problems.

We just need to go from slower to faster without ever being AT the forbidden value. Amazingly, this sort of tunneling is just the sort of seeming magic that quantum physics effects excel at. Problem solved. Building the FTL drive is left as a simple engineering homework problem for the class.

Just over 100 years ago it was impossible for humans to build airplanes. I think saying that FTL travel is "impossible" limits our vision for the future. Who is to say that we "canna change the laws of physics" 500 years from now given our limited understand today.

Maybe we can't break the laws, but there are endless ways of evading and reinterpreting and extending.

RobynH

Alas, this has an upper bound of c, the speed of light in vacuum. There's no way to make anything faster. The theory of electrodynamics which govern light have been tested to a really high precision - they're pretty much certain to be right.

And the scientific community actually loves being wrong. It's the only way to progress!

And about Serenity and the sound in space issue, note that when they destroy the Reaver ship in the ship graveyard around Miranda, the only sound is the dull thud of the cannon transmitted through the hull of Serenity, but it's otherwise totally silent.

The sounds of the battle are justified by that funky ion cloud.

aiusepsi

gnomedad

tkw

MaxTwice

Charlie Jane Anders

Annalee Newitz

And yes... Star Trek violates every one of those rules and more. :)

TomXP411

In nearly every science fiction movie I've seen, spacecraft fly like airplanes: whichever direction the spacecraft is pointed, it goes. When you turn off the engine, it stops moving. This is completely wrong, yet Hollywood special effects departments continue to propogate this bad bit of "science". Real spacecraft keep moving in the direction they were last moving, and changing course isn't instant (or nearly so) like an airplane or a car.

As to "warp drive" and other forms of FTL travel: I think everyone would agree that one of the principal draws of science fiction is alien planets and aliens. You can't have either, and you certainly can't move the plot along, if you don't have a way to get to those planets in less than a human lifetime.

Mission to Mars also had a MAJOR hole in its plot line: the spacecraft is approaching Mars SO FAST that it can't get in to orbit. So the occupants can hop out and smash against a satellite to stop moving. WHAT??? If the ship has so much relative velocity that it can't hold orbit, the people IN that ship are going to splatter like water balloons when they hit that satellite!

The new Battlestar Galactica TV series gets spacecraft flight right about half the time, but even BSG is inconsistent about it. (You *should* see them landing backward, using their engines to slow down as they approach the landing bay.)

TomXP411

wraith808

1.Gravity had to be similar in the first place for the humans that were taken there to survive
2.Language in the movie was difficult as it was an alien egyptian dialect (and Ra is a gould which is a super intelligent race, bit of a grey area)
3.There is no interbreeding in the movie, ra is a gould symbiote in a human body he acquired in egypt, the rest of the slaves are taken from egypt and moved across to Abydos
4. for those that dont understand the stargates role compared to light speed: stargate is a wormhole which bends space/time on itself so that u can travel vast distances in an instant as you have brought the 2 positions next to each other.. there are clever diagrams to show this

- the tv show has to violate most of the these rules for smooth weekly viewing pleasure you know how it is

Tera89

Also, the thing that gets me about all this "debunking" of filmed SF is that a two-dimensional screen and speakers is not the most effective method for depicting a three-dimensional universe inside an audience's mind. "Virtual Reality", "Sensurround", etc. were all attempts at creating a more immersive experience.

Certain audio-visual cues are helpful, if not necessary (IMHO), for bridging the gap between people's everyday lives and the alien environment of Outer Space.

There is no sound in space, and laser beams are invisible: Shooting a firearm soundlessly in space at a target off-camera looks fine if there's a muzzle flash, but firing a laser off-camera would look silly without a visible beam.

@rechelon: "(Firefly's biggest moment of abject shame is the electric arcs jumping back and forth --SPONTANEOUS PLASMA IN A VACUUM ?!-- seen in Our Mrs Reynolds and the Pilot ("the net" and the reavers)."

How else to convey the presence of superhigh voltages?

cljohnston108

No. Light slows down when it enters matter. The electric and magnetic fields in the light wave interact with electric charges contained in atoms. To make light faster, you take away some of the electrons it is impeded by. When you reach a vacuum, there is nothing more to take away so light can't go any faster than that. You can't think of it as an object that can be accelerated or decelerated because photons have no mass.

pjcamp

annafdd

Anyway, my first issue is with Stargate, I wasn't particularly fond of the movie, but I loved SG-1. I don't know (or care) if the spin-off series matters, but they do make reference to a droid being sent ahead to each planet to determine the climate and gravity.

Then I have to wonder why Stargate doesn't get a check for "faster-than-light travel". Isn't teleportation across the known universe "faster-than-light"?

Third issue on Stargate, communication wasn't exactly easy. As I recall, it was one of the few Sci-fi movies to acknowledge a language barrier and they explained it with an alien race that influenced the ancient Egyptians and had a similar language, for which the services of a linguist and historian are put to good use... although the educational mission trip seems to be wildly successful as everyone adapts to English rather quickly.

As for the speed of light, I beg to differ. Light can be slowed, so it stands (in theory) that light can be accelerated and, perhaps, travel at speeds faster than the current documented speed of light could be made possible (without teleportation). That said, I must also acknowledge that the scientific community does not like to be proven wrong and, as a contingency plan, the speed of light will be updated to equal the fastest moving matter (in any form, including energy) under theory that light could be accelerated.

... I'm done for now.

zaidestudios

Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders

Zantor

aosagi

Also I don't remember any breeding of any kind in the movie and either way every one was human.

The TV show violated every one speaking English but in the movie the "aliens" Were actually transplanted humans and spoke a language similar to ancient egyption and it took the first half of the movie for the egyptoligist to figure out the basics of the language.

Heffae

MaxTwice

"Artificial Gravity" - like FTL, a device you feed energy into and produces a true gravity field within a spaceship (just to make it easy to walk around) is probably inconsistent with the universe we inhabit.

"Spaceships move like airplanes" - bank into turns, take a long time to accelerate to a given speed then stop on a dime. Babylon 5 is of course the grand example of a space opera that avoids this. (Doesn't mean it's more fun, tho.)

One of my favorite SF movies isn't on the list but does rather well: "Pitch Black". The ship appears to have both FTL* and AG, but it avoids most of the other traps. I'm not sure *what* is up with the planetary rings, though.

* The passengers and crew are in hibernation, but at slower-than-light speeds the journey would take years of objective time, and I believe it is implied this is not the case. The Aliens Series needs a checkbox for FTL as well - Ripley's gig on the Nostromo must be less than a few years, since she's expecting her daughter to still be young when she returns. Similarly, the Sulaco sets off for LV-426 expecting to rescue colonists with whom Earth has lost contact - Newt hasn't been hiding in the air ducts for years.

InexorableTash

While on the surface of Earth, when you reach out with your arm while holding a heavy tool your body stays still, because the weight of your body is producing friction against the ground which resists the motion. Without such a resistive force, the motion would be around the center of mass of the system, i.e. your body would move "backwards" just as far as your arm moved "forwards". (Roughly speaking, depends on the masses involved. Work with me here.) Neither your experience nor instincts will make you particularly nimble, so going slow is important. You also really want to avoid moving quickly, as friction is not available as a convenient means of slowing down... you're left with slamming into the bulkhead. This certainly forgives 2001, possibly Space Cowboys (haven't seen it), and Mission to Mars (trying to forget). Moonraker was still pretty lousy and the effect was probably overstated.

Re: "All planets have one climate" - Star Wars is the prototypical example here. For Serenity, Solaris and the Alien series, I'm not aware that we see enough of the planets to make that claim.

Re: "All planets have earth-like gravity"

This is an example of a selection effect. Planets with gravity uncomfortable for humans are less likely to be utilized by humans. (In the sort of SF we're talking about here, where the nature of humans has not been fundamentally changed by technology. Personally, once I'm up the well I won't necessarily want to come down again.) This quite plausibly accounts for all of the examples given perhaps Serenity (if you assume no FTL, and semi-plausible rationalizations are presented by other posters in that case). One could argue about probabilities - how many such worlds exist within the range of space reachable by the FTL drive presented in the film. In both Stargate and Star Wars, the volume of space (at least a galaxy) and number of worlds (less than a million?) is perhaps feasible. Dedicated fans will presumably provide details.

InexorableTash

spacebum

matthall28

Wubbytoes

Actually, you can logically retcon that by assuming the pureed food is in a elastopolymer sack, so that when the food is sucked up via the straw, after the partial vacuum is released, the sack expands, pulling the food down the straw a few centimeters, in order to prevent any leakage into the cabin via capillary effect.

tuckerch

MyEasyTV

I'm deeply skeptical of a list that includes as an item "Dodging faster [sic}-than-light weapons (e.g. lasers)." Lasers ARE light, they are not faster than light. There is nothing faster than light so being able to dodge nothing is not really an error.

While you're at it, you should add "Spaceships flying in space as if they were in an atmosphere" which Star Wars violates left right and center. Lucas designed the battle scenes based on World War II dogfight footage, but space is not air and a spaceship is not an airplane. A spaceship cannot, for example, make a turn by banking. That requires lift and lift requires air. Babylon 5 was impressive to me because they got this item exactly right -- the spaceship engines only fire when they want to change the movement of the spaceship. Otherwise, they coast. Very Newtonian.

Other than that, nice list. And I should know. I'm a physicist.

pjcamp

Plague

Ihoss

in some of these movies you could say that there isn't necessarily sound in space, but sound in atmosphered areas such as inside the ship or a suit, which is caused by an event in space.

the energy which makes the sound in the atmosphered area hasn't necessarily travelled from the event to the listener as sound, perhaps it was intense electromagnetic energy which is vibrating the hull of the ship, and converting some of the energy into sound within the atmosphered area? (like a speaker)

compoundeye

antisocialite

Gopherit

BOOSH! and/or Kerkow!

Plague

Garrison Dean, King Awesome

Gopherit

ElasticPlanet

Jeff-Minor

First, what in 2001 counted as a weird depiction of exposure to a vacuum? Bowman didn't explode and Poole died in about 30 seconds. Speaking of Poole, he flails around pretty lickity-split when his cord is cut, a point against moving slowly in a vacuum.

As for Contact, I wouldn't call that *easy* communication with aliens. On the one hand the message was meant to be universally decryptable and on the other it's made clear that it takes humanity months to do so. That, to me, seemed a realistic depiction of an intentional message from another species.

graymalkn

Also, it's not breeding.

castewar

EBone

I also thought the insides of the Space Slug in ESB should have been more vacuum-y, since Han and co. just flew right in there from space. But then again, I don't know much about how the anatomy of spaceborne creatures works...

StrangelyBrown

Ideas like an alien chemical bio-compound altering the entirety of human existence, space "folded" purely through mental effort, force fields and other doozies should've ensured it's being added to the list......

dave-the-destroyer

nuromansr

foolish-rain

Marcelo

Thud

PhebeVespillo

donv69

Right. . . ?

Dresarius

Garrison Dean, King Awesome

Tim Faulkner

-spoiler alert-

the dude that gets the damaged suit and floats off into space freezes almost instantly and then shatters a bit - this wouldn't happen in space for quite a while, like 90+ mins I think.

goldfarb

Sam Glover

Git Em SteveDave

And I have to say, the one-gravity on all planets category is a pretty cheap shot, since Hollywood only has access to one gravity field, or two if you count freefall in the vomit comets they filmed Apollo 13 in. Anything else is just way too clumsy, complicated and expensive to be practical.

NelC

In Firefly (first episode) they're quite clear that the planets do not all have Earth-norm gravity... they have to be magically terraformed in some way to provide such at the surface. And while this is cheap vauge handwaving, they DID mention it, which according to standard SF arithmetic should get them bumped out of shame on that one, considering their company. Serenity/Firefly's one truly impossible tech is its artificial gravity, but since EVERYONE does that (with a few honorable exceptions)... At the very least it should be moved to an alternative column of shame.

(Firefly's biggest moment of abject shame is the electric arcs jumping back and forth --SPONTANEOUS PLASMA IN A VACUUM ?!-- seen in Our Mrs Reynolds and the Pilot ("the net" and the reavers).

Most unjust, however, is Serenity's mark of shame under "one climate". How such a thing is measurable, especially on almost dry just-terraformed planets that are seen once, in one location, is unfathomable. But the series has a couple examples to the contrary: Persephone is shown as both dry and arid (the docks), clear and urbany (the city), and lush and swampy (mal's sword fight). The whores' planet also has dry un-developed western desert and lush meadows (the funeral).

The "unrealistic explosions" is contentious because the only "fireball" explosions that've taken place in Serenity/Firefly did so in that huge magical cloud around Mr. Universe's rock. This was the producer's trick to create a pseudo-atmosphere to allow for what the audience expected in terms of sound and fire. Whether that's legit, it was a conscious distinction, and you don't see those George Lucas esque explosions anywhere else in the movie/series. What light-generating chemical reactions are shown almost instantly dissipate as the molecules exit into the vacuum.

Aside from 2001, in space SF movies Serenity gets best science props by far in my book.

rechelon

HJungle

Buis

icelight

The implication is that Weyland-Yutani actually knew that the alien ship was there, and what was in it. The distress signal was likely faked, or falsely attributed as a distress signal.

As for aliens interbreeding, they've always latched onto carbon based vertebrates, and I believe evolutionary biology has stipulated in some form that there is a certain set of criteria that this kind of life form would meet, which would also imply a certain level of biological compatibility. So I would contest most of the issues attributed to the Alien movies. Except for the Alien Resurrection thing.

aegies

(Not that I'm advocating this movie as being great or realistic)

misteral

Garrison Dean, King Awesome

CmdrHunt

"OH HAI. hit a snag. little help. when you get here, don't go downstairs. END."

boosh

Garrison Dean, King Awesome

Nimravus

Zantor

The distress signal for the Navy is SOS for a reason: it's the simplest, most unambiguous signal you can send with morse code.

It's not like the alien distress signal in Alien was like, "Oh, hey, alien craft landed here. I'm in distress! Also, I've got some hideously dangerous cargo on board, so watch out for that."

I don't think it's especially unrealistic to assume that aliens who have built a giant spaceship might also have developed a simple radio transmission that could easily be interpreted as a distress signal.

braak

The aliens spend an untold amount of time (although centuries are implied, at a minimum) studying mankind, learning about them and then following a well-tested procedure for inducting new races into their hegemony...and then using advanced psionics to talk down to one of mankind's representatives...AFTER they construct a giant device the alien riddle tells them to build whose exact function we don't really understand.

If that's 'easy' communication...I'd hate to see what hard was like.

WizarDru

Garrison Dean, King Awesome

@blackeyedgurl: I'm fairly sure what they're talking about is a fire, burning in space, not a fast-fading explosion that ends when the oxygen's gone.

I'm thinking it was an episode of B5 where somebody observed you could always tell who was winning a space battle by the color of the explosions. Orangey fires were oxygen fires from human ships; greenish fires were more sulfaric atmospheres from alien ships.

Rus

Just like how we'll never fly.

Mister Adequate

Mercury would be the molten lava planet.
Venus would be the "swamp" planet.
Mars would be the desert planet.
Jupiter would be the storm/wind planet.
Etc.

I guess Earth would be the "garden" planet?

steven522

monomyth

Given an atmosphere and a lot of other assumptions, sure. Otherwise, I disagree; in our own solar system, we know that Venus, Mars, etc., have pretty uniform geography and climate over the whole shebang. As do the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune.

PhilipFry

Garrison Dean, King Awesome

Gospel X

Also Universal made Joss put sound into the space battle in Serenity, he was against it as there is no sound in space (except for your screams!!!!), this was accurately portrayed on Firefly.

In Serenity it is never stated or implied that all of the planets have "earth gravity," nor has enough of each planet been seen to state that there is no climate difference around the planet. In Serenity/Firefly the planets are terraformed to create artificial gravity and climate, so if there are technically "machines" or something controlling this, wouldn't it logically mean that climates planet-wide would be almost indistinguishable from each other? When they thought that Miranda was a "black planet" it was implied that it was thought that the terraforming didn't take on the planet, further suggesting that such planetary manipulation was necessarily perfect and that some planets didn't successfully terraform to be inhabited by people.

Not that I'm a dork who spends too much time thinking about Firefly/Serenity or anything...

blackeyedgurl

Zantor

Benjo

Easy interbreeding? Um why shouldn't humans be able to mate with other humans.

Easy communication? The whole movie was about Earth humans having trouble communicating with the Abydos humans. Oh wait the mega technological Ra who created Earth society spoke english, gee, can't imagine why.

Earth gravity?
Well, you'd probably only use humans to mine a planet if that planet matched earth in ways that made humans adept at mining it.

And speaking of Stargate. Did anyone watch the SG-1 movie that came out this week? My god, that was crap!

theOmegaMan

According to the show "MANSWERS" that runs on Spike TV, A human being could live up to one minute-thirty seconds in space before he finally dies.

This data was compiled by nasa doing research involving human corpses and test dogs in space. After about thirty seconds major damage occurs to the cardiovascular system and outer layer of skin. Depending upon the outside temperature, after then, you either freeze or fry. They did not say anything about blowing-up or your eyes bugging out.

Zantor

Stephanie A Fox

aarchiba

this of course, would still be quite painful, and would still really, really suck. :)

cloudburst

Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz

Maybe. Like I have good communication with my lunch...

foolish-rain

Stephanie A Fox

Frozen-Tex

1) NEVER is it indicated that all planets have the same gravity (Earth-level); the series only depicts two planets (three if we count Earth in AvP). Since the tech level of the series clearly shows that terraforming/colonization is still a very difficult process, I think it makes sense that humanity would deliberately settle on planets as similar to Earth as possible (feasibility of finding them notwithstanding).

2) Again, only two planets are depicted; neither of them shows a great deal of exploration of the surface - in Alien, they are within walking distance of the ship. In Aliens, within driving distance. In Alien 3, they are indoors for probably 99% of the film. I think it is fair to depict relatively small distances with no significant changes in the environment.

3) Interbreeding isn't the word I would use here, but I'm not going to argue.

4) Weird depictions of exposure to vacuum? In Aliens, Ripley opens the doors, explosive decompression, the alien is sucked out. She was wearing a space suit. Only instance I can think of where a vacuum was involved.

IconoclasticFlow

Isn't this reasoning a little obtuse for a science fiction fan? Sure we'll probably never have warp coils specifically or spooling FTL drives specifically, but to say that ALL of the technological innovations that will EVER take place will still fail to allow ANYONE to EVER travel even slightly faster then that speed of light is something a really old person would say.

yayaja67

Frozen-Tex

I think laser should be recategorized from faster-than-light weapons to fast-as-light weapons ( which are still pretty fast).

upwithgravity

B

yayaja67

Rus

designguybrown

Rus

aspiringexpatriate

Charlie Jane Anders

Annalee Newitz

No clue.

Also:
"Weird depiction of what would happen if a human is exposed to vacuum without a spacesuit, or a "hull breach" to vacuum which doesn't instantly kill the ship's crew"
Didn't io9 post about a month ago on the 'real' effects of space exposure? How it wouldn't be instantaneous death or even instantaneous freezing. In fact, after reading the article I was almost convinced that Farscape was semi-accurate [given advance enough tech to heal what would be a torn up and dehydrated body quickly.

aspiringexpatriate

Agreed, 2001 was highly researched for accuracy. The only problem was when Dr. Floyd, on the trip to the Moon, was sipping his meal through a straw. When he stopped sipping, the fluid peas in the straw fell back into the container. In zero g the stuff would stay in the straw.

AlfaCharger

Of course the planets all have at-or-near Earth gravity. Why would humans attempt to colonize non-gravitationally-compatible planets?

Also, how can you, based on only the snippets of each planet viewed, state that the planet's ecology and climate are planet-wide?

Jack

I didn't see Serenity, but I would assume they have some kind of FTL drive it they visit other planets.

EBone

Let's see some super stat-crunching, io9, and tell us if movies with "space" in the title tend to have a better grasp on physics than movies with "star" in the title!

GentlyClubBillPart2

Why couldn't highly advanced aliens have figured out communications issues?

TommySez

I think that check box should be over one to "sounds in space"

jrishel

regis

The one thing that always stuck in my head and gets me thinking about almost all films now is that in Independance Day, the aliens would never have had to attack us because merely having ships with that much mass, that close to earth, would screw up our ecological system and oceans etc that we'd all be dead from that before they fired the first shot.

In anycase.. fun list, thanks.

Garrison Dean, King Awesome

zerofritz

and communication with aliens too.. too much plot-lag if you gotta deal with this..

i like the 'people move in slow motion in zero gravity' thing -- it would be better if their voices slow down too just likes in bugs bunny in "Hair-Raising Hare" (y'know, with the red, furry tooth-shaped monster and evil scientist): "s-s-s-t-t-t-t-t-o-o-o-o-o-p-p-p-p-p-p-p...............t-h-h-h-h-a-a-a-t-t-t-t-t-t-t...........r-r-r-r-r-a-a-a-a-b-b-b-b-b-b-i-i-i-i-i-i-t-t-t-t! ! !"

designguybrown

there is extensive reasearch on this...
2001 got it just about right.

[www.sff.net]

and as for people moving in slow motion in zero gravity...
setting aside creative license, I think generally it's wise to move 'carefully' in zero-G

goldfarb

and it was just a massive ship sailing through space. when asked where the explosions, laser or fire were, he goes:
"that's silly. why would that happen?"

mitchel_stevens

darcymcgee