Good Science and Bad Science And Lack Thereof In Science Fiction Films and TV Series

[BAYLOR]

Which Science fiction feature films and tv series and tv movies make the best and worst use of science or disregard science completely in their quest to tell a story an giving the audience thrills What are the examples of improbable science balderdash that you've observed ?

 

[BAYLOR]

There is no air in space therefore no medium with which to carry sounds. Lots of science fiction films ignore this one and tv science fiction series as well.

2001 a Space Odyssey didn't do sound in space , did try to keep things within the realm of science.

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

There is no air in space therefore no medium with which to carry sounds. Lots of science fiction films ignore this one and tv science fiction series as well.

2001 a Space Odyssey didn't do sound in space , did try to keep things within the realm of science.

Abrams acknowledged this about Star Trek Into Darkness. He said that they tried it without sounds, and it just didn't work, except in a few places. There's a scene where a crewperson gets sucked out a hull breach and it then goes silent. THAT was effective.

That recent one with Scarlett Johansen -- Lucy? -- had some real howlers in it.

 

[BAYLOR]

The Black Hole 1979 and how does the Cygnus manage to hang over the black hole ?

 

[Venusian Broon]

The Black Hole 1979 and how does the Cygnus manage to hang over the black hole ?

A black hole is just like any other massive object - like a star - in most respects. You can easily safely orbit them (aren't all galaxies supposed to have supermassive black holes in their centres? And in the same way we all don't get sucked into the mass of the sun, do we?) It's only if you reach the event horizon that you reach the point of no return and they can be very small. The event horizon for a black hole the mass of the sun would be of radius 3 km - although the Sun's mass would be insufficient to actually create a black hole - a larger star that would theoretically make a black hole could have an event horizon not that much bigger. Very easy to avoid in a spaceship

 

[BAYLOR]

Space 1999 I love this show, but it's got it's share of implausibilities and not just season 2 How is is that traveling at less then the speed of light do they manage to visit other planets?

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

I don't think there's one single thing about Space 1999 that didn't make me cringe. It was one of the first science fiction shows that I refused to watch.

 

[BAYLOR]

I don't think there's one single thing about Space 1999 that didn't make me cringe. It was one of the first science fiction shows that I refused to watch.

The whole knocking the moon out of orbit very implausible .

 

[Faisal Shamas]

Lack of actual science or explanations of phenomenon in sci-fiction books is something I have been pretty worried about. Games and Movies which are supposed to be more superficial, I have found to be based around good science rather than the books. I blame the need for strong characterization for this, every agent in the market is seeking voice and character, nobody seems to care about plot or basics of science, basically I find science fiction books undeserving of that science tag. There are actually very few writers who use science in their books

 

[BAYLOR]

Star Wars, The way the fighters and ships swoop through space like they were flying through air.

 

[mosaix]

There is no air in space therefore no medium with which to carry sounds. Lots of science fiction films ignore this one and tv science fiction series as well.

2001 a Space Odyssey didn't do sound in space , did try to keep things within the realm of science.

There is no air in space - correct, but where there is an explosion then there is an expanding gas cloud so you would hear it as soon as that gas cloud reached your ears. 2001 a Space Odyssey got it wrong. Remember the exploding bolts to get back into the air lock? No sound from the explosion? Would there really be no affect on the ear drums from the explosion? Also, no sound until the air lock was repressurised? What was it that that blew the astronaut into the airlock - pressurised air from the pod expanding into the vacuum of the airlock. As soon as that air, no matter how low the pressure, reached your ears then you'd hear it.

 

[BAYLOR]

There is no air in space - correct, but where there is an explosion then there is an expanding gas cloud so you would hear it as soon as that gas cloud reached your ears. 2001 a Space Odyssey got it wrong. Remember the exploding bolts to get back into the air lock? No sound from the explosion? Would there really be no affect on the ear drums from the explosion? Also, no sound until the air lock was repressurised? What was it that that blew the astronaut into the airlock - pressurised air from the pod expanding into the vacuum of the airlock. As soon as that air, no matter how low the pressure, reached your ears then you'd hear it.

And could David Bowman have really held his breath in the vacuum of space? Wouldn't it have caused his blood to boil, wouldn't he have exploded and frozen solid in the absolute zero of space?

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

And could David Bowman have really held his breath in the vacuum of space? Wouldn't it have caused his blood to boil, wouldn't he have exploded and frozen solid in the absolute zero of space?

There is no absolute zero of space. Space doesn't have a temperature. You can gain or lose heat by radiation or conduction (convection is a special form of conduction). Conduction requires you to be touching something, to conduct heat. So in space, all you have is radiation. So you will lose heat as fast as you can radiate it, which is not very fast. Things in space that are cold, are cold because they've been there a while and have radiated away all their heat. Not because space is cold.

 

[BAYLOR]

There is no absolute zero of space. Space doesn't have a temperature. You can gain or lose heat by radiation or conduction (convection is a special form of conduction). Conduction requires you to be touching something, to conduct heat. So in space, all you have is radiation. So you will lose heat as fast as you can radiate it, which is not very fast. Things in space that are cold, are cold because they've been there a while and have radiated away all their heat. Not because space is cold.

What about Bowman holding his breath in space? That's actually survivable ?

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

What about Bowman holding his breath in space? That's actually survivable ?

NASA actually did studies of how long people could survive vacuum. It's not instant death, but then it's not minutes either. I'm pretty sure he'd have survived for the 15 seconds or so he was in vacuum. As for "holding your breath", have you ever tried hyperventilating then forcing all your breath out before going underwater? I used to do it as a child. You can last almost as long underwater, and you can move faster because of lower buoyancy. Not that buoyancy would have affected Bowman, but he could have forced all the air out of his lungs before popping the hatch.

 

[Mirannan]

What about Bowman holding his breath in space? That's actually survivable ?

I would imagine not, for the same reason that sailors escaping from a submarine shouldn't attempt to hold their breath. The unbalanced pressure inside the lungs would probably do fatal damage to them.

 

[BAYLOR]

A black hole is just like any other massive object - like a star - in most respects. You can easily safely orbit them (aren't all galaxies supposed to have supermassive black holes in their centres? And in the same way we all don't get sucked into the mass of the sun, do we?) It's only if you reach the event horizon that you reach the point of no return and they can be very small. The event horizon for a black hole the mass of the sun would be of radius 3 km - although the Sun's mass would be insufficient to actually create a black hole - a larger star that would theoretically make a black hole could have an event horizon not that much bigger. Very easy to avoid in a spaceship

Too small to be a gate way which brings up another point. How they could possibly be gateway into another universe? It seems to me that it's a dead end, quite literally. Whatever flies into it is going to crushed down to nothing .

 

[Venusian Broon]

I don't see how it possible that they could be gateway into another universe. It's a dead end, whatever flies into it is going to crushed down to nothing.

This is off the top of my head, but there have been certain theories that suggest some sort of gateways (possibly like a 'wormhole' but generated near the event horizon of the blackhole) that if a spacecraft were to survive the tidal forces of extreme gravity and flying in at the right angle, could access.

Where that spacecraft would end up....???? Why not another universe.

Also, again this is from some dim and distant memory, there are theories that our entire universe is in fact contained within the event horizon of a parent black hole and that in fact there is some sort of 'evolutionary' process, because each black hole that forms spawns a new universe - and there will be a high probability that we will be in a universe that can generate lots of black holes.

Both lovely SF ideas, but I don't see how we can really test them

 

[BAYLOR]

Independence Day They fly a captured alien ship to the main mothership (which is a stretch in and off it self) , download a virus which disables the shields on all the invading ships so that we can defeat the aliens Considering how different the hardware and software is, there is no just no possible way that this works.

 

[mosaix]

Independence Day They fly a captured alien ship to the main mothership (which is a stretch in and off it self) , download a virus which disables the shields on all the invading ships so that we can defeat the aliens Considering how different the hardware and software is, there is no just no possible way that this works.

Yep, complete nonsense. As if two man made computers could establish a comms link straight off and without problems, never mind a man made computer and an alien computer.