What is your biggest science pet peeve in movies?

[todofwar]

19 minutes ago, AngelLestat said:

heh, in spanish: Titerote, From:  mundo anillo.

------------------------------------------------

Agree with mostly, but something that I hate, is when a story broke its own rules.
They describe certain mechanic of how that universe or fantasy work.. but later they contradict themselves as a clear example that the story does not have sense even in their minds.

I saw it recently in the Daredevil series,  Rule: he can use their ears as sonar to detect where the walls, objects, people are..  Later in the series, some ninjas learn to not use their swords because they learn that daredevil can locate them by the sound of their swords with the air... so they use punches and he can not see them   

That annoyed me so much! They clearly established he can "see" with sonar, the whole world on fire thing. I calmed myself by saying the ninja's clothes dispersed sound waves so they didn't show up to his sonar either. But yeah, I don't usually care about science when a movie clearly is not trying to be accurate, but if you have a race of space unicorns that feed on living stars do not try and build suspense by having one of them in danger of burning to death in a mundane station fire! 

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

Just curious, are you familiar with these guys?

A paranoic ET from Niven's novels. Hi-Tech, making opaque spaceships, with his/her brain between necks and mouths instead of hands.

3 hours ago, cubinator said:

-Oversized humanoid heads: Why should the brain be in the head? It might actually have made more sense for it to be in the middle.

-Big eyes: There are many types of eyes that could appear. Compound eyes, single large eyes, light-detecting patches of skin...

Brain is in the head because it appears from the biggest cluster of neurons, and so the .main sense organs do. Large eyes are just bulges on the brain,
So, when the organ of decisions is close to the organs of sense, you get the fastest reaction.
As all creatures are initially worm-alike, because there is a compact creature itself (an input side from one end, an output side from the opposite one) - and numerous primitive additional segments in between.
So, if the "input end" becomes enough large and separated, the biggest ganglion is placed somewhere there.
Arthropods have their brain not in the "head", but in the second body segment just because their "head" is in fact just a "face",

The eyes of vertebrates are just the most evolutionarily advanced eyes.
Cluster eyes are just an intermediate primitive form between the primitive eyes of the lowest creatures (and also too poor for a space pilot)  and the complex eyes of insects and vertebrata.
Faceted complex eye of an insect is just a primitive futureless solution with a very limited distance of view, Enough for a tiny creature with exoskeleton, but almost blind at the human-sized scales and distances.
Our complex eyes is, like a faceted one, a reticulum of sensible cells, but united in a single and complex optical system with a great scalability, adjustment speed and with weak evolutionary limitations.



 

Edited April 13, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Stargate525]

1 hour ago, todofwar said:

...if you have a race of space unicorns that feed on living stars do not try and build suspense by having one of them in danger of burning to death in a mundane station fire! 

You could theoretically be immune to immense temperature, but vulnerable to actual combustion/oxidation in an atmosphere. Just saying.

[Hary R]

7 hours ago, cantab said:

Some of these are justifiable. Real mobile phones usually do have an option to make noises, or vibrate which makes a noise too, when you touch the screen or push a key. And I recently set up some EPOS system which by default made a LOUD beep every time you touched the touchscreen. (I turned that off because it was annoying as heck.)

Using the PC keyboard a lot is justifiable in certain settings, in particular if the user might reasonably be using the command line a lot. And yes, the command line is still useful, on Linux I use it on a daily basis.

Nowadays Google usually *does* give me the result I want on the first try, sometimes without even needing to click through to the website - the one sentence in the search results tells me what I need.

ok for google, with the advance of technology it way more plausible. I was thinking of movie in the mid 2000.

For the keyboard if what they were doing was a commend line i'll be ok but most of the time, in movie, they use a graphical user interface, no commend line ever appear on the screen and by frenetically taping on the keyboard, suddenly they got what they want.... general a loading bare a slow one for tension... worst case i've seen, an animation appeared as the character tape the keyboard (in real time)....

some other one

- Have anybody mention the epic walking away from a (pretty close) explosion?

- Any planet killer that destroy the planet.

- planets being (visually) very close to one another (yeah force awakening, you are the one i'm talking about)

 

Edited April 13, 2016 by Hary R

[p1t1o]

8 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

He still should've bloated up, though. Along with gas releases and blood vessel popping.

Nope. Bloating and gas release that is actualy *visible* would represent a pretty extreme event, dead dead dead.

There is empirical evidence for what happens if you are exposed to vacuum. There was an incident where someone was in a pressure chamber of some kind (can't remember what they were up to but for some reason it wasn't all that dramatic that the incident occured, think they might have been testing spacesuits or something).

The person experienced the saliva in his mouth bubbling, then oxygen deprivation caused him to pass out after about 10 seconds. The elasticity of skin is enough to provide enough pressure to keep your blood from boiling. Really a drop in pressure of 1atm isn't that arduous, but the lack of oxygen is, and it just evaporates from your lungs in the same way it normally does.

Ooh, update:

" But there are at least a couple of human exposures to whole body vacuum that ended happily. In 1966, a technician testing a space suit in a vacuum chamber experienced a rapid loss of suit pressure due to equipment failure. He recalled the sensation of saliva boiling off his tongue before losing consciousness. The chamber was rapidly repressurized, he regained consciousness quickly, and went home for lunch. Another man was accidentally exposed to vacuum in an industrial chamber; it was at least three minutes before he was repressurized. He required intensive medical care, but eventually regained full function. These instances show that ebullism is not inevitably fatal — and the body holds together just fine. "

"Explosive" decompression to vacuum might be a little more damaging, but considering there are plenty of examples of explosive decompression from 0.7atm to about 0.1 atm in aircraft accidents with no exploding heads or anything, I think you'd be somewhat ok-ish (assuming you were then saved afterwards).

There ARE examples of disastrous pressure accidents which caused gross damage to people, but it involves deep-diving and decompression.

WARNING: its a bit awful...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_accident

Edited April 13, 2016 by p1t1o

[kerbiloid]

Experiment with dogs

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660005052.pdf

http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html

 

Edited April 13, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Jovus]

18 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

In many cases, the conclusion being reported would require months-long double blind tests with hundreds or thousands of test subjects. The best we get is that it's "99% likely" or "one in a million", which is probably close enough, but even that's too rare.

And that's assuming your distribution model has a reasonable chance of being correct, which, with anything alien, is not a good assumption.

 

Edited April 13, 2016 by Jovus

[Bill Phil]

3 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Nope. Bloating and gas release that is actualy *visible* would represent a pretty extreme event, dead dead dead.

There is empirical evidence for what happens if you are exposed to vacuum. There was an incident where someone was in a pressure chamber of some kind (can't remember what they were up to but for some reason it wasn't all that dramatic that the incident occured, think they might have been testing spacesuits or something).

The person experienced the saliva in his mouth bubbling, then oxygen deprivation caused him to pass out after about 10 seconds. The elasticity of skin is enough to provide enough pressure to keep your blood from boiling. Really a drop in pressure of 1atm isn't that arduous, but the lack of oxygen is, and it just evaporates from your lungs in the same way it normally does.

Ooh, update:

" But there are at least a couple of human exposures to whole body vacuum that ended happily. In 1966, a technician testing a space suit in a vacuum chamber experienced a rapid loss of suit pressure due to equipment failure. He recalled the sensation of saliva boiling off his tongue before losing consciousness. The chamber was rapidly repressurized, he regained consciousness quickly, and went home for lunch. Another man was accidentally exposed to vacuum in an industrial chamber; it was at least three minutes before he was repressurized. He required intensive medical care, but eventually regained full function. These instances show that ebullism is not inevitably fatal — and the body holds together just fine. "

"Explosive" decompression to vacuum might be a little more damaging, but considering there are plenty of examples of explosive decompression from 0.7atm to about 0.1 atm in aircraft accidents with no exploding heads or anything, I think you'd be somewhat ok-ish (assuming you were then saved afterwards).

There ARE examples of disastrous pressure accidents which caused gross damage to people, but it involves deep-diving and decompression.

WARNING: its a bit awful...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_accident

That wasn't what I was refering to. Space is a more intense vacuum than vacuum chambers. The inner pressure of the body would cause the skin to expand. Blood vessels near the surface, capillaries and the like, would likely pop. Gas would escape since that's just what it does. I'm not referring to a huge bloating or anything. It'd be slight, but noticeable.

There's actually a spacesuit design that simply holds the body together mechanically and provides atmosphere to the areas that need it.

[p1t1o]

Just now, Bill Phil said:

Space is a more intense vacuum than vacuum chambers.

Oh yes, by a good 0.001% or so...

Some earth-bound chambers are, on the atomic density level, a good deal MORE vacuum-ey than space, but pressure-wise the difference is still vanishingly small.

If "true vacuum" is a zero, it doesn't really matter if you are at 0.0001 or 0.000001, the difference will be negligible on the human body. Otherwise you might have extreme problems climbing stairs.

[cubinator]

9 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I think evolution demands that the eyes are close to the brain, so that visual threats are perceived quickly. Come to think of it, smell and hearing are close to the brain as well, in most if not all species. At the same time, eyes tend to be near the edge of a body, to minimize the body's exposure while looking for threats (among other reason). For that reason, I don't think that some of sci-fi's proposed alternate anatomies, where brains are better protected, are viable from an evolutionary perspective

Good points. Aliens probably have heads containing sensory organs and brains. That doesn't eliminate the possibility of other extreme differences, though.

8 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

I think the practical difficulty for sci fi is how to do that in a convincing and plausible way without working out the details of billions of years of alternate evolution like some kind of exobiologist Tolkien, both in your head and on the page. You can toss in "two heads, one eye and mouth on each, three legs, kind of fuzzy" without disrupting the flow of a story overly much, but if their line of descent diverges from the familiar at or before the eukaryote stage, we might be talking about pages of exposition when one of those things shows up.

Not necessarily. When a large mammal shows up in a story, is an explanation of the Cretaceous mass extinction necessary to explain how they got to be that way? No. So if an alien shows up in a story sporting a beak, segmentation, tentacles, and fur, it would only really be necessary to explain what it's like, especially if it's the first time anyone has encountered one, because we will only know their features, not their evolutionary background. 

[todofwar]

@cubinator and it's actually quite logical anyone encountering an alien for the first time would try and describe it by comparison to terrestrial animals the observer had seen, so especially in books it's ok. But when movies make them clearly little more than a half assed mash up it gets a little less excusable.

[PB666]

18 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Oh yes, by a good 0.001% or so...

Some earth-bound chambers are, on the atomic density level, a good deal MORE vacuum-ey than space, but pressure-wise the difference is still vanishingly small.

If "true vacuum" is a zero, it doesn't really matter if you are at 0.0001 or 0.000001, the difference will be negligible on the human body. Otherwise you might have extreme problems climbing stairs.

With water in a vacuum, I can only give empirical evidence. Lyophilization requires a vacuum below 100 microns to keep the water frozen, that means that the vacuum has to about 0.0001 Atm. of pressure for the vapor pressure of water at freezing to be 0.0001 ATM, although the process will generally be slow. To get something to freeze solid you need about 10 microns. Inside a space suit that has a small leak, the pressure differential suffices to keep the vapor pressure of water at the skin high enough that water evaporates but does not boil, but not so high that the water under the skin is boiling, and still fast enough as to create a dynamic pressure. 

If you space someone, that means the dynamic pressure has no buffer, and exists exactly at the surface of the skin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11

Quote

On opening the hatch, they found all three men in their couches, motionless, with dark-blue patches on their faces and trails of blood from their noses and ears.

The valve opened at an altitude of 168 kilometres (104 mi), and the resultant loss of pressure was fatal within seconds.^[16][18] The valve was located beneath the seats and was impossible to find and block before the air was lost. Flight recorder data from the single cosmonaut outfitted with biomedical sensors showed cardiac arrest occurred within 40 seconds of pressure loss.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11#Death_of_crew

 

 

[p1t1o]

10 minutes ago, PB666 said:

<snip>

Makes sense.

[sevenperforce]

One thing that is excusable but ultimately pretty unrealistic is that alien species end up having two equal sexes. Human beings, with equal male/female birth ratios and relatively similar body plans, are the exception on Earth already. Granted, there are plenty of scifi worlds where this is not the case, but it usually is (especially in more recent pop scifi).

As far as vacuums are concerned: holding your breath is probably the best way to get massive immediate observable damage during a decompression event. Otherwise the chances of physical trauma anywhere other than your face is quite low. 

[p1t1o]

Anyone ever catch that program "Defiance"? It is supposed to be "quite good", but the whole "Really? That is supposed to be an alien?" thing is precisely why I couldn't get into it.

Basically there are aliens on Earth now, after some kind of conflict, but darned if I can pick them out, oh there's the alien bounty hunter who has a sliiiiiiiiightly enlarged nose-bridge, but apart from that...ugh.

Star Trek is the only program that is allowed to do this IMO.

 

How many alien species in this picture? (Hint: there's more than one)

 

I know special effects are budget-limited, but imagination isn't, at least stick some horns on there or something...

 

Edited April 13, 2016 by p1t1o

[PB666]

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

I know special effects are budget-limited, but imagination isn't, at least stick some horns on there or something...

 

Zephod! Back with both heads intact. Never saw this version of HHGTTG. Do you notice one inconsistency, Zephod doesn't carry a towel, he needs to be all panicky. 

 

 

[KSK]

Zaphod's such a hoopy frood that he doesn't need a towel.

[Nuke]

16 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

Well, I think the hooves would rule out canine or kangaroo, and none of the sexes have mammary glands (their life cycle most closely resembles that of a spider wasp). What made me think of it was your comment about the location of the brain, which is supposed to be in the hump between the necks, as I suppose is not at all clear from a picture or drawing.

But yeah, in hindsight I do wish they didn't have hooves, legs/bones, hair/fur, eyes, mouths, etc. Even that novel of a body plan is not so much evolving an alien species as it is playing cross-species Frankenstein with raw materials from Earth.

i kind of think the brain needs to be close to the eyes to reduce neural latency. if the signals have to propagate through about a meter of neck (and nueral impulses are slow) then a predator whos eyes are closer to its brain would have a serious advantage in image processing and reaction time.

[cubinator]

7 hours ago, todofwar said:

@cubinator and it's actually quite logical anyone encountering an alien for the first time would try and describe it by comparison to terrestrial animals the observer had seen, so especially in books it's ok. But when movies make them clearly little more than a half assed mash up it gets a little less excusable.

Agreed.

[kerbiloid]

6. Those little LEDs or lamps inside the spacesuit helmets. I hate them. They make a serious, clever and brave human look like a moron and a target at once.
The only exception: Prometeus. In this movie it's OK: they are indeed morons. And targets.

On 13.04.2016 at 4:40 PM, p1t1o said:

How many alien species in this picture?

From whose point of view do you count? Indogenes or Castithans?

Here are Stahma Tarr with her spouse (they rule this movie), one ET girl adopted by a brutal mass murderer (the main hero),  and four humans (well, more or less after all).

[YNM]

Mostly the inaccuracy of orbital mechanics. But hey, KSP was not around when films start to be made (mind it's effect on knowledge of orbital mechanics)... and if we have more script writers, producers and directors playing KSP we'd see more KSP cinematics !

[p1t1o]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

6. Those little LEDs or lamps inside the spacesuit helmets. I hate them. They make a serious, clever and brave human look like a moron and a target at once.

Agreed - I've always wondered how they even see out! All they'd see is a reflection of their own face!

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

From whose point of view do you count? Indogenes or Castithans?

I'n unashamedly speciesist, humans are the only non-aliens 

Is it weird that even though I'm joking about, I still feel a bit guilty about saying Im "speciesist"? Sorry aliens. Uh, I mean, you people. Oh god, help me out here.

[kerbiloid]

10 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Sorry aliens. Uh, I mean, you people

Afaik, they are "alternative humans".

[magnemoe]

On 13.4.2016 at 6:30 AM, kerbiloid said:

A paranoic ET from Niven's novels. Hi-Tech, making opaque spaceships, with his/her brain between necks and mouths instead of hands.

Brain is in the head because it appears from the biggest cluster of neurons, and so the .main sense organs do. Large eyes are just bulges on the brain,
So, when the organ of decisions is close to the organs of sense, you get the fastest reaction.
As all creatures are initially worm-alike, because there is a compact creature itself (an input side from one end, an output side from the opposite one) - and numerous primitive additional segments in between.
So, if the "input end" becomes enough large and separated, the biggest ganglion is placed somewhere there.
Arthropods have their brain not in the "head", but in the second body segment just because their "head" is in fact just a "face",

The eyes of vertebrates are just the most evolutionarily advanced eyes.
Cluster eyes are just an intermediate primitive form between the primitive eyes of the lowest creatures (and also too poor for a space pilot)  and the complex eyes of insects and vertebrata.
Faceted complex eye of an insect is just a primitive futureless solution with a very limited distance of view, Enough for a tiny creature with exoskeleton, but almost blind at the human-sized scales and distances.
Our complex eyes is, like a faceted one, a reticulum of sensible cells, but united in a single and complex optical system with a great scalability, adjustment speed and with weak evolutionary limitations.
 

Agree here, you want short signal delay so it makes sense to put the brain in the head.
The eye design has evolved multiple times, Squid and fish eyes evolved independent but is very similar. Insect eyes suffer from low resolution as in thousands of pixels. 
You use large eyes to gather more light, animals who are active during night have oversize eyes. 
Now you could have other numbers of eyes, two is an minimum for stereo view for judging distance and also give decent field of view. 
However, lots of stuff was set then fishes evolved, two eyes, no good place for extra useful eyes. four fins becomes four limbs. 
Hard to get more limbs or eyes later. 

[cantab]

On alien biology, there's one thing I feel reasonably confident in predicting. If the general group of alien life has n recognisable legs, the technologically advanced species in that group will have at most n-1 legs - because at least one will have been repurposed evolutionarily as an arm. If the group has bilateral symmetry, expect n-2 legs and 2 arms.

There can be exceptions, if some other part of the body evolved to be a dextrous manipulator, something I consider essential for a species to develop technology and intelligence. But the limbs seem like an obvious choice.