Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[Codraroll]

Ad Astra.

Most of it. The movie is pretentious, slow and boring, don't see it. Minor spoilers ahead.

• An antenna built to search for extraterrestrials(?!?) is built to reach way up into the upper atmosphere. Humanity has bases on both the Moon and Mars, with commercial flights routinely making trips to both. Why bother building such a large antenna on Earth, if that's the case?
• A tiny little space station near Neptune can apparently send "electromagnetic surges" that wreak havoc on Earth and "threaten the stability of the solar system". Antimatter is involved. How it's obtained, nobody knows. Why the Earth's magnetosphere doesn't redirect it, nobody knows. And apparently a guy on that station has been trying to turn the transmitter off for thirty years without succeeding.
• The entire center core of a rocket (think a full Saturn V stack with side boosters for getting to LEO) is sent to the Moon. Where a tiny, Orion-style capsule detaches from it and lands. Why bother with the giant translunar stage?
• Who is the best suited man to guard a VIP on a tour from Earth to Mars? An octogenarian, of course!
• The best way to travel from one lunar base to another is by Apollo-style lunar rover. Just beware of pirates. The way they are dealt with is hilariously pathetic, a combination of words you don't see often.
• Lunar gravity is only weak outdoors. If you are indoors, gravity will be exactly like on Earth. Who knew!
• For some reason, Brad Pitt needs to go to Mars to record a message being broadcast to Neptune. 
• The words "why are we stopping?" are uttered on a flight between the Moon and Mars. Stopping in space, that's a good one. A few minutes later, the audience will also wonder what the hell the reason for that scene was. A research station was in distress. We never find out what happened to the station, but a baboon on board kills the captain of Brad Pitt's ship so that Brad Pitt can be the hero and land it safely when the second-in-command panics over having to do a landing on Mars. 
• Martian gravity isn't weak at all. Too bad Mars is a bit of a hellhole.
• An anechoic chamber is used to record a message for Dad Pitt. Anechoic apart from the large glass window into an operator's booth, that is. Kinda defeats the purpose of the padded walls in the rest of the room.
• Said message is sent "by laser" from Mars to Neptune. Everybody is bummed out that they don't get a reply in 30 seconds. Neptune is 2.5 light-hours from Mars even under optimal planetary alignment.
• The way to hijack a space ship launching from Mars is to climb in via the flame trench (which is filled with water - full of leaves) as it launches. A funny background detail: some numbskull apparently put a high-voltage electrical cabinet in the flame trench too.
• A zero-G fight scene ensues inside the hijacked space ship. During launch. The three stooges on board mostly manage to kill themselves while Brad Pitt tries to reason with them. The firing of a gun is involved, and a canister full of toxic gas. 
• Flying from Mars to Neptune will always send you past both Jupiter and Saturn. Talk about convenient planetary alignment! At least they skipped Uranus.
• Locating a space station parked in an orbit of Neptune is easy. Brad Pitt can do it manually, while government search probes have failed repeatedly.
• Apparently the rings of Neptune are only a couple hundred meters thick! Who knew! You can park your ship above the rings, see a station parked below the rings, and jump between them through the ring itself. It is filled with debris, tennis-ball-sized rocks every half meter in every direction, but that can be easily overcome by holding a metal plate in front of you as a shield while you jump. Won't the impact with the rocks slow you down, or throw you off course? Rather the opposite, in fact, you will hit the station at greater speed than you left your ship!
• Space stations are equipped with big, spinning radars now. You know, for searching in a flat plane. It is mounted right outside the crew hatch, close to the main hub node of the station.
• If you cry in zero G, a tear will stream down your face. 
• One guy can maintain a space station for 30 years alone after all his crew mates have been killed. Makes you wonder why they bothered giving it a crew of 27 in the first place...
• You can surf the shock wave of a nuclear explosion in space, and use it as a method of propulsion to get back to Earth from Neptune. Never mind the hundred-meter thick debris field/Neptune's rings between the explosion and yourself.

Bad movie. Bad, bad movie. Not for the science (mind you, Gravity is full of bull too and still great), but for its overly repetitive narration, complete lack of emotion, and slow pace. Don't see it.

Edited September 23, 2019 by Codraroll

[magnemoe]

On 9/15/2019 at 6:22 PM, kerbiloid said:

San Andreas Mega Quake (2019)

When San Andreas starts cracking an earthquaking, the first thing you should try is a 2000 lb BLU-117 bomb.
You should drop it from a chopper or so, to create a volcano which will safely release the quake energy.
(Unless you have a cannon to do the same.)

***

Necrotronic (2019)

(spoiler)

  Hide contents

I suspected long ago that captured souls are passing along the internet cables...
Just from the screaming dial-up sounds.

 

That makes perfect sense. Note that you can transfer kerbals tround KAS cables and struts. 

[DDE]

14 hours ago, Codraroll said:

The movie is pretentious

14 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Bad movie. Bad, bad movie.

I knew it...

 

 

[kerbiloid]

Why do these two stand right in the beam tunnel? On a narrow platform without railings?

Say, nobody cares about the meatbags themselves. But if one of them falls into, his atoms ions will partially absorb the beam energy and re-emit it as a hot plasma cloud, then these ions hit the tunnel walls.

[Gargamel]

Have we talked about "Another Life" yet?    Cause it's bad.

I can accept the somewhat stretched advances in technology they are pushing, FTL drive, suspended animation, AI.  I dig it.  Sci-fi at it's best.  But the complete lack of protocols or logic in the show are killing me.       Hey, we just had a serious bio hazed contamination on the ship, let's go land on another planet and completely ignore any safeguards at all.    Lack of uniforms?   Maybe that's why there was a mutiny.....

And nervous systems can't move on their own, although that scene was pretty epic. 

The show has it's moments, but then it falls flat on it's own face writing.  The are forcing every starship sci-fi trope into a condensed format.

 

[magnemoe]

On 9/28/2019 at 7:00 PM, kerbiloid said:

Why do these two stand right in the beam tunnel? On a narrow platform without railings?

Say, nobody cares about the meatbags themselves. But if one of them falls into, his atoms ions will partially absorb the beam energy and re-emit it as a hot plasma cloud, then these ions hit the tunnel walls.

Very good points, note that this was an major issue for battleships, firing the main guns created shock waves who could kill or at least take out people outside like the AAA gun crews all over the place. 

This would be far worse as the effect would be like an plugged barrel on an main gun who 8x can kill planets. You are not an planet you are 80 km in diameter. 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Hey, we just had a serious bio hazed contamination on the ship, let's go land on another planet and completely ignore any safeguards at all. 

The ship is infested with psychos, what can a virus add?

4 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Lack of uniforms?

In the future the uniform will be individual, reflecting everybody's personality instead of turning the crew in a gray, faceless mass.

Also when they can see the onboard AI as a virtual human, at least it wasn't a catgirl.

4 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Maybe that's why there was a mutiny.

That wasn't a real mutiny, that was a protocol of natural hierarchical rearrangement. They do this in future to avoid excessive administrative pressure in assignments.
To help this process, it's important to put together a team of people hating each other and despising the captain.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I read about 2 of the 69 pages in this thread so I might be repeating what others have already mentioned, but:

Tenuous space connection (and spoiler alert of sorts)- Godzilla king of monsters (the newest one): first they fire an 'oxygen destroyer' which can somehow destroy oxygen but not water (which is mostly oxygen) and produces a massive green mushroom cloud and which manages to almost kill Godzilla, which runs on radiation and therefore shouldn't need oxygen, but leaves the (spoiler) giant alien three-headed dragon unharmed. Then to jump-start Godzilla again they set off a multi-megaton nuke literally in its face. I know it's not exactly trying to be realistic with the whole radiation-powered monsters, but still...

- Sunshine: the sun is fizzling out and Earth is freezing, so let's fly a ship really close and chuck a fusion device a few hundred metres wide into it to try and reboot it to exactly the same level it was at before, by flying to Mercury and orbiting for a while, having an oxygen garden module with windows (which immediately goes on fire when the sun shield points the wrong way and the sun shines in- so why have the window at all!?) and the entire ship somehow has full gravity in it so the guy in the heat shielded suit manages to trip and faceplant in a compartment open to space.

- Geostorm: to counter catastrophic climate change, all you need is a space station the size of a town, a globe-spanning network of weather controlling satellites (including one that uses sound waves, in space!) all linked together by what looks like girders and which would be a real hazard to fly through, which can somehow freeze tropical oceans and airborne planes instantly and create lightning storms, and almost no efforts to counter the cause of said climate change beyond a handful of electric self-driving taxis. And the space station has full gravity inside it AND you can fly a shuttle into a hangar and as soon as the doors close the gravity instantly turns back on and the atmosphere reappears.

- Gravity: if George Clooney hadn't wasted so much propellant in that jetpack chair he could easily have made it into the ISS. How did he keep floating away from the space station when they were already stationary to it and why did those parachute cables ping back like elastic bands when he let go? How did they even get to the ISS from Hubble in the first place, and why tow Sandra Bullock at the end of a really long cable when she could just hold on the back of the jetpack and wouldn't keep pulling them off course, wasting more propellant and ultimately leaving Clooney to drift away in space. Apparently the Kessler Syndrome event wiped out direct communications with the ground too for some reason.

- Oblivion: Sorry, but how did the Moon get split open and how could that then cause earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions if nearly all of the material stayed where it was? Where did all the sea water go after those floating rigs hoovered it up? Why are the drones so poorly equipped with just one 'eye' and one sensor on the back that will cause the drone to spin out and explode if it gets shot? Why are there glaciers just outside New York and yet there are deserts less than 50 miles away? And who in their right mind would try and set up a colony on Titan!? It's covered in seas of liquid methane with mountains made of water-ice, over a billion miles from the Sun so photovoltaics are useless, and is orbiting a gas giant that throws out considerable radiation and makes navigation trickier, and which will pull passing comets/asteroids towards it potentially causing a collision with Titan in the process. Mars is much closer, has more favourable gravity for human survival, plenty of raw materials including water and in some areas is above freezing during the day; melt the CO2 caps at the poles and you've got a slightly thicker and warmer atmosphere to work with.

- Oblivion and Independence Day, and to some extent Edge of Tomorrow but that's not targeted at Earth in particular: so you're an interstellar space-faring alien civilisation/robotic-type thing that needs resources to survive. There are literally HUNDREDS of moons in the solar system you could harvest and nobody would really care- in fact, they could probably have removed the entirety of Uranus and Neptune, moons and all, and gone away without us particularly noticing or really caring. But no, they HAD to go for the one planet that's actually inhabited even though they don't need its habitability and actually want to destroy it, which is harder to get to from outside the solar system and also harder to leave the solar system from, apparently for no better reason than spite.

- Star Wars: sooooo many massive hollow things with nearly infinite drops and yet no guard rails anywhere! Why have so many hollow spaces inside space stations etc. anyway, they're literally a waste of space and presumably the bottoms of them are littered with stormtroopers that slipped on a freshly-mopped floor and plummeted to their deaths. How can the Death Star go at hyper-speed or indeed move at all when a) there are no thrusters and b) it's the size of a small moon, and if the weapon in Star-Killer base is faster than light, why can people see it coming? Star-killer base is a big problem for me: it somehow pulls material out of a sun from tens of millions of miles away, which would take hours to get there, and yet is completely frozen and actually depletes the sun after just the second time charging it up- what use is that? It's effectively drifting in empty space at that point, but yet it's still light enough to see outside. In Episode 8, why wait until you're running on fumes AND 3/4 of the shuttles have been destroyed before going all Ben-Hur on the flagship- why not move everyone to the main rebel ship and immediately warp the two smaller ships at the First Order fleet, causing immense damage and forcing them to slow down while the main ship gets away, or at least has time to drop off the shuttles unnoticed and lure the surviving FO ships away before ramming them in empty space? (Not really a bad science point so much as a poor plot point but it's always bugged me)

- Interstellar: again, Mars colonies, or in this case Moon colonies since that's vastly closer to Earth and easily accessible (relatively speaking). But no, flying to a wormhole beyond Saturn and going to a star cluster in another galaxy with a supermassive black hole in the vicinity then hoping to find a vaguely habitable planet there instead is a much better idea even if it takes hundreds of years, so let's throw a dozen people at those planets with nothing but a robot for company in the hope that one of them can be used as a colony. The backup plan for Endurance is to use 5000 frozen embryos with some kind of electronic wombs to grow babies in batches, leaving the crew of 4 to somehow create a functioning colony while looking after dozens and then hundreds of babies and children of varying ages at the same time, on another planet that might turn out to be unsustainable after all. Instead of doing something sensible like starting a colony on the Moon and moving hundreds of people there at a time in a 3 day trip, building underground/domed habitation facilities and growing food using hydroponics etc. and with everything being thoroughly sterilised to remove this strange nitrogen-breathing plant pathogen that's apparently depleting oxygen from the atmosphere and destroyed every crop except corn.

- Meteor Apocalypse: that might not be the right title, I can't remember it as I only watched it once and laughed at the outright nonsense in it. First, throwing dozens of nukes at a comet (NOT a meteor, as the title suggests!) manages to not only fail to divert it from its collision course to Earth at all but also create a cloud of shrapnel that travels ahead of the comet itself but straight at the Earth as well, raining fireballs in all directions at regular intervals and somehow poisoning the water supplies with something that was chemical, or possibly biological depending on who was talking about it. And of course the only place on Earth affected by the fireball rain (and indeed hit by the comet itself) was the area of California directly around Los Angeles, which conveniently is where the main characters were at the time. And of course the main character manages to stumble across a lab which happens to have an antidote ready-made and then blunders around in the mountains for a while before miraculously finding his missing wife/daughter and deploys that same antidote to save said daughter with seconds to spare. Then they have a big happy family hug time despite literally standing and watching a comet destroy the whole of Los Angeles seconds earlier...

- Passengers: The spaceship is going at half of light speed, yet everything on board occurs at real time and a message sent to Earth will take 55 years total to get a reply back despite that pesky relativity time-slowing thing that wreaked havoc in Interstellar. They also fly directly past a very large star, apparently within one diameter's distance, at half of light speed, while two people stand at a huge window and watch but don't get instantly turned to dust by the effectively compressed radiation, heat, gravity etc. along with the entire spaceship as it ablates into ions and scattered across the cosmos.

- Avatar: why is the toxin used on the arrows lethal to humans AND native life? What's in the air that kills humans? Mile-high trees and floating rocks because unobtainium? Somehow life on Pandora uses the same genetic structure and more importantly the same genetic encoding system that life on Earth does (which is next to impossible in reality) and the  Na'vi(?) have a very human-like social structure and behaviours, only with an Internet of Trees and a conspicuously environmentally sensitive way of life to deliberately contrast with the land-grabbing humans and their smoke-belching, hole-digging, forest-levelling industry. And a plot hole- why not immediately take out the shuttle and the heavy gunship in the first attack instead of leaving them until last? A few well-placed gun bursts by Jake to the cockpits of both and the whole plan goes out the window, most likely resulting in a brief and one-sided air battle with most of the helicopters downed within a minute and the ground troops left unsupported and with no real chance of either completing their mission or getting back to base. No need for the suicidal cavalry charge, no major characters lost (probably) and no need for the wildlife to intervene. It might not fill the time out as much or be as dramatic as the real version, but it makes much more sense.

- other films I can't remember the names of: there's one where a lump of dark matter the size of a tennis ball hits Mars and utterly wrecks it, but hits Earth and simply drills a very neat hole completely through it, somehow stopping the planet's rotation dead (with none of the effects you'd expect from stopping an entire planet's 600+mph rotation speed, obviously, that would just be a distraction). With the spin gone, the magnetic field starts failing and only a pair of magic satellites can either restart the planet (if you're the main characters) or provide a shield for a small habitable zone (if you're the self-interested military/government types making walk-on appearances, I'm not sure if this one had some recognisable actors in it or if it was some obscure thing amazon dug up to stick on prime video to fill it out) and those satellites get repositioned on a second by second basis with a gleeful disregard of orbital mechanics or any form of physics at all. Oh, and the hole in the planet causes massive storms because all the air gets sucked into it thus causing killer lightning storms with a whole lot more than the 1.21 gigawatts needed to send a certain DeLorean 30 years into the future...
There's another (might be called apocalypse earth or something similar) which involves questionable high-speed travel, this time at 99% of light speed and yet it can slow down again when they arrive (spoiler alert) back at Earth but don't realise it because the Moon has again been destroyed and is now a large ring around the planet, which obviously means all the mountains have sunk and the whole planet is jungle.
There's another one, might be apocalypse now or deep impact or something similar, where a comet is going to hit Earth (again) and the only way to stop it is to fly around the moon in two space shuttles, fly through the comet's tail (which is full of random chunks of debris that wipes one shuttle out) and land on the comet itself, then drive a rover to a specific site and drill several miles into the comet to drop a nuke in and break it in half, which despite a few setbacks like one rover getting launched into space by a random gas burst and the drill breaking repeatedly, manages to succeed and split the two halves to travel either side of Earth with, as ever, seconds to spare.
Another one I can't remember the name of had a manned mission going to mars to find out why the algae and cyanobacteria they had bombed it with a while ago had disappeared (the obvious answer, because they couldn't live on a planet with negligible atmosphere, no surface water and sub-freezing temperatures pretty much everywhere, wouldn't make a good plot it seems). The orbiting ship had a huge fire on board and had to vent all the air which put it off course, the lander crashed miles from the landing site, the pre-deployed surface outpost was destroyed but somehow the atmosphere had oxygen in it and could support humans with no breathing gear. Turns out there were little insects all over Mars that were eating the algae and emitting oxygen (because science, apparently) which then ate most of the astronauts on the surface too, leaving the one survivor to hotwire a Russian sample return mission to get back into orbit and intercept the spaceship before it either crashed or had to return to Earth. Oh, and there was a military robot on board the lander that got dumped to save the crew capsule, but survived the crash with some damage and went to 'military mode' and started hunting the crew down one by one. A cameo from Pathfinder and some dubious DIY fuelling of the sample returner rocket later and of course everything ends fine with the two surviving crew heading back to Earth with some little oxygen-emitting beasties to save the Earth from some kind of climate disaster that meant the oxygen was running out (they never bothered to explain that bit).
And to cap it off, what's the best way of staving off a tectonic cataclysm that will end humanity? Why, shooting nuclear torpedoes at the fault lines under the sea of course! Never mind the fact that the submarines are literally sailing through the deepest trenches in the ocean, many miles deep when the best military subs out there don't go more than a few hundred metres down, or that they travel straight into the blasts from their nuclear torpedoes without ill-effect but yet one of them gets hit by a rock fall that smashes a hole in the hull while somehow not immediately imploding.

I've seen plenty more dodgy sci-fi films but can't remember them due to their mediocrity or plain rubbishness, if you want some really questionable science in films then amazon prime video has loads of low-budget and low-credibility sci-fi stuff, or just scour the movie channels on TV for anything vaguely sci-fi-ey as odds are it'll be heavy on the 'fi' but cherry-pick the 'sci' bits for the sake of what little plot there is.

[jimmymcgoochie]

On 9/9/2019 at 9:34 PM, Vanamonde said:

Yes, it did appear that some of the escaped dinos were single examples of their species, leaving one to wonder how they might breed and take over the world. Presumably life would... uh... uh... find a way. Or something. I gave them the benefit of the doubt on that because it's one of themes of the movies. 

Same trick they used in the original Jurassic Park film(s)- parthenogenesis within exclusively female populations, followed by some random reverting to male because some types of reptiles don't rely on genetics to determine gender (crocodiles use temperature of the egg, for example). None of which applies to badly hybridised dinosaurs that were created by extracting DNA from the stomach of a mosquito that then got preserved in amber (which would utterly destroy any DNA several times over) and mixing it with a frog genome (and some other stuff apparently, especially in the newer ones) to plug the gaps while still magically preserving the original body as opposed to ending up with a very large frog with tiny front legs, pointy teeth and a very growly sounding croak...

[ARS]

On 11/25/2019 at 1:08 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

- Sunshine: the sun is fizzling out and Earth is freezing, so let's fly a ship really close and chuck a fusion device a few hundred metres wide into it to try and reboot it to exactly the same level it was at before...

I don't know about whether it's just overlooked or I might be wrong, when the sun starts creating iron on it's core, it's done. Iron will absorb the energy and starts the countdown death of a star. I doubt the giant metal cube they throw into the sun didn't contain iron

On 11/25/2019 at 1:08 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Independence Day

I'd really like to point out the (long lists of) mistakes in this movie, but it would be too much for me to type it all

On 11/25/2019 at 1:08 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

What's in the air that kills humans?

At first, I thought that it's impossible for lush jungle planet with plenty of oxygen to be deadly for humans, but then I realized it might be the concentration of oxygens itself that kills human. Plenty of oxygen is good, but excessive oxygen above 30% concentration is deadly

On 11/25/2019 at 1:08 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

There's another one, might be apocalypse now or deep impact or something similar, where a comet is going to hit Earth (again) and the only way to stop it is to fly around the moon in two space shuttles, fly through the comet's tail (which is full of random chunks of debris that wipes one shuttle out) and land on the comet itself, then drive a rover to a specific site and drill several miles into the comet to drop a nuke in and break it in half...

That's Armageddon. The most egregious is probably what the hell a freakin' gatling gun doing on rover in the first place? What's the purpose of carrying that on asteroid? It'll be dead weight and useless. Not surprisingly, the movie actually used as a recruitment tool for NASA personnel and managerial training (by asking the recruits to point up the mistakes or errors in the movie, and it's a very long list, with an average of 6 errors per minute)

On 11/25/2019 at 1:08 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Another one I can't remember the name of had a manned mission going to mars to find out why the algae and cyanobacteria they had bombed it with a while ago had disappeared (the obvious answer, because they couldn't live on a planet with negligible atmosphere, no surface water and sub-freezing temperatures pretty much everywhere, wouldn't make a good plot it seems). The orbiting ship had a huge fire on board and had to vent all the air which put it off course, the lander crashed miles from the landing site, the pre-deployed surface outpost was destroyed but somehow the atmosphere had oxygen in it and could support humans with no breathing gear...

That's Red Planet. Funnily enough, during the production, they actually consult an expert about Mars condition for advice, but the plot writer and the expert keep arguing between each other about "what's interesting for plot" and "that isn't possible on Mars". Eventually the expert gave up and say "screw this, you want make a movie, make your own, I don't care anymore" (which also results on bad science it delivers)

And now, for my review of bad science, a thriller monster movie: Deep Star Six. The plot is like this: The crew of DeepStar Six, an underwater naval facility tasked with deploying nuclear missile launchers on the sea floor, explosively opens an undersea cavern (with nukes no less) while hurrying to complete the last week of their tour. In doing so, they unleash an extremely large, aggressive arthropod that proceeds to make mincemeat out of the facility and the crew. Here's some of the bad science the movie delivers:

-20 megatons worth of nuclear bombs going off within knife-fight distance would have vaporized the base. Even if the fireball didn't reach them, the resultant shockwaves caused by the collapse of the bubble would have absolutely shredded it. Either would have put the whole crew, as well as the audience, out of their respective misery (of enduring the rest of bad science).

-When the base's nuclear reactor coolant loop is compromised, they start talking about it going "super-critical" - i.e., that it would explode like the nukes they just set off. Nope. They'd certainly get a steam explosion, but it would be ridiculously puny compared to the exploding 20 megaton nuclear bombs they just set off right outside their window.

-Nobody seems to understand what decompression means. The problem isn't decompression - that'll happen as the base loses gas pressure. The problem is keeping the atmosphere compressed enough that they don't decompress too fast. Divers decompress at or close to the surface, not inside the undersea base, because you are decompressing to ambient (atmospheric) pressure. And speaking of that, Snyder's escape capsule would have had to have been at base pressure or explosive decompression would have resulted, and would have had to maintain that pressure as it rose, no problem for a heavy steel box. If someone got it attached to a decompression chamber topside, he would have been fine, and even if he'd been stupid enough to vent the pressure to atmosphere, he wouldn't have just popped like a balloon. And also, they wouldn't have needed a JIM suit if they were at ambient pressure. If they were at atmospheric pressure, they'd have had to have the armored diving suits to prevent implosion, but then decompression wouldn't have been a factor!

-The Deepstar Six base is nominally a Navy base but none of the occupants act remotely like Navy personnel. Gets really egregious when Snyder detonates the nuclear missles; triggering a nuclear detonation requires all kinds of safety interlocks and multiple officer concurrences in reality. It's possible that Deepstar was a civilian defense contractor, but the chance that the Navy would put nuclear detonation controls in the hands of a bunch of civilian wackos was nil.

Edited November 26, 2019 by ARS

[Space Nerd]

3 hours ago, ARS said:

At first, I thought that it's impossible for lush jungle planet with plenty of oxygen to be deadly for humans, but then I realized it might be the concentration of oxygens itself that kills human. Plenty of oxygen is good, but excessive oxygen above 30% concentration is deadly

Maybe sulfur dioxide?

3 hours ago, ARS said:

I don't know about whether it's just overlooked or I might be wrong, when the sun starts creating iron on it's core, it's done. Iron will absorb the energy and starts the countdown death of a star. I doubt the giant metal cube they throw into the sun didn't contain iron

Actually, the iron core has to be over 1.39 solar masses to kill a star.

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, ARS said:

At first, I thought that it's impossible for lush jungle planet with plenty of oxygen to be deadly for humans, but then I realized it might be the concentration of oxygens itself that kills human. Plenty of oxygen is good, but excessive oxygen above 30% concentration is deadly

Think 100% oxygen is ok for short term, pure oxygen under pressure is dangerous. Read about they used pure oxygen re breathers during WW2, problem was that you could not dive more than 10 meters with them and it was plenty of accidents with this, yes the divers was trained and probably breathed in an way to reduce intake. 

Atmosphere on the moon was higher pressure than on earth, combined with high oxygen level this could be it however as I understand oxygen poisoning make you drunk and then you pass out. 
They was unable to breath, how about co2 levels was very high? 

[Treveli]

I want to say Avatar's atmosphere thing was because there was something like cyanide in the air. Or something else that was fatal to human biology.

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, Space Nerd said:

Actually, the iron core has to be over 1.39 solar masses to kill a star

Actually all you need is time and every star will die. 1.39 solar masses will get you a black hole.

I'm pretty sure when our Sun collapses into a White Dwarf our poor descendants will consider it - or at least themselves - dead.

And this of course has nothing to do with the fact that they won't even consider tossing a nuclear bomb into the Sun to kick start it.

Edited November 26, 2019 by 5thHorseman

[kerbiloid]

28 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

when our Sun collapses into a White Dwarf our poor descendants will

have winter holidays every day, due to the orbital period!

Edited November 26, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Treveli]

3 hours ago, Treveli said:

I want to say Avatar's atmosphere thing was because there was something like cyanide in the air. Or something else that was fatal to human biology.

Ok, checked Google. High co2 levels and hydrogen sulfide in the air. Unconscious in seconds, dead in minutes.

[kerbiloid]

So, Pandora smells like rotten eggs.

[kerbiloid]

In the Orwell's 1984 they didn't have advertisements, popup windows, blinking banners, and band limit.

[magnemoe]

13 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

Actually all you need is time and every star will die. 1.39 solar masses will get you a black hole.

I'm pretty sure when our Sun collapses into a White Dwarf our poor descendants will consider it - or at least themselves - dead.

And this of course has nothing to do with the fact that they won't even consider tossing a nuclear bomb into the Sun to kick start it.

1.39 solar masses gives an neutron star, you need to get into 3x for black holes. 
And obviously you could dump Pluto into the sun, this might give you an sunspot.  

What you want to do down the line is to make your star an red dwarf removing 3/4 an solar mass of hydrogen, this give you 50 billion years of solar power. 
You will need to move your dyson swarm closer in but this is trivial. 

the next 3 strips are related http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1200/fv01162.htm
Are you open Wednesday? not sure have problems planning so far  

[kerbiloid]

Why build a Dyson sphere around the Sun when we can divide the Sun itself into several red dwarves and build a whole pack of Dyson spheres?!

[kerbiloid]

3022.

Caution, spoilers, if this is applicable to this movie.

Spoiler

If make a space station interiors so dark that lights blind you even when you are watching the movie on display, the crew will get kooky even before the Earth bursts.
Especially when they are four in a large dark station.
Especially when the doctor is mentally unstable and the shift lasts for ten years.
Especially when there's nobody around anymore to make his brain instead of each others'.

Also any canadarm needs its sections to be attached, not just put together because what if you want a canadarm handshaking in space.

 

[DDE]

On 11/24/2019 at 4:49 AM, Gargamel said:

Have we talked about "Another Life" yet?    Cause it's bad.

If anyone wants an hour-long, spoiler-filled review:

 

On 11/24/2019 at 9:08 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

again, Mars colonies, or in this case Moon colonies since that's vastly closer to Earth and easily accessible (relatively speaking).

Sci-fi authors have this obsession with "Earth-like" planets.

On 11/24/2019 at 9:08 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

In Episode 8, why wait until you're running on fumes AND 3/4 of the shuttles have been destroyed before going all Ben-Hur on the flagship- why not move everyone to the main rebel ship and immediately warp the two smaller ships at the First Order fleet, causing immense damage and forcing them to slow down while the main ship gets away, or at least has time to drop off the shuttles unnoticed and lure the surviving FO ships away before ramming them in empty space?

You're not going to get a satisfactory answer because they had a cool shot in mind, but no idea on how to close the can of worms they opened.

[RealKerbal3x]

I’ve never posted about Star Trek here because it’s so far removed from actual science that I don’t see any reason to connect it to reality, but there’s one thing that annoys me more than it really should.

99% of the planets they visit are Earth-like, with a nice oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and 1G gravity. Sure, Starfleet may mostly be interested in these types of planets (probably for colonisation), but surely they can’t be THAT common. We only rarely see them visiting gas giants or atmosphereless rocky planets/moons, which is actually what they would likely be doing most of the time.

Then again, this is Star Trek, so I probably shouldn’t question it...

[Treveli]

1 hour ago, RealKerbal3x said:

I’ve never posted about Star Trek here because it’s so far removed from actual science that I don’t see any reason to connect it to reality, but there’s one thing that annoys me more than it really should.

99% of the planets they visit are Earth-like, with a nice oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and 1G gravity. Sure, Starfleet may mostly be interested in these types of planets (probably for colonisation), but surely they can’t be THAT common. We only rarely see them visiting gas giants or atmosphereless rocky planets/moons, which is actually what they would likely be doing most of the time.

Then again, this is Star Trek, so I probably shouldn’t question it...

I've taken it as being Starfleet mission assignments. Ships crewed by species that can survive and operate in a given planets environment are sent to study that planet. Enterprise (with Earth/Earth compatible species on board) would get sent to Earth-like worlds, Venus-compatible crews are sent to Venus-like worlds, etc.

RL reason; easier on the FX budget to fill the galaxy with Earth-like worlds.

Although, the Federation does have terraforming programs (first or second season TNG had an episode), and it's possible previous civilizations before the Federation TF'ed all those worlds.

[magnemoe]

29 minutes ago, Treveli said:

I've taken it as being Starfleet mission assignments. Ships crewed by species that can survive and operate in a given planets environment are sent to study that planet. Enterprise (with Earth/Earth compatible species on board) would get sent to Earth-like worlds, Venus-compatible crews are sent to Venus-like worlds, etc.

RL reason; easier on the FX budget to fill the galaxy with Earth-like worlds.

Although, the Federation does have terraforming programs (first or second season TNG had an episode), and it's possible previous civilizations before the Federation TF'ed all those worlds.

Except we don't see species able to live on Venus in starfleet or other major civilizations who is all earth like.  
And give star trek an clear pass here, planets with life is the juicy part and complex life is likely to be on earth like planets, more so for civilizations. 

An conflict intensifies this, you want to grab as many of them as you can. Not sure if outposts like Midway is useful in the star trek universe 
An ST listening post don't really need an planet or star, while any atoll is an aircraft carrier you can not sink.