Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[MaxwellsDemon]

1 minute ago, radonek said:

True. I will cut heaps of slack to, say, the City on Edge of Forever. I won't  touch the reboots with an insulated pole for exactly same reasons.

"City" is a classic.   The original Harlan Ellison went into issues of drug abuse also, but that was too "hot" for NBC at the time.  But something of it still survives in the cordrazine references.

[radonek]

6 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Total coastline length is hard to calculate because they are fractal, but google gave me an estimate of 372000miles of coastline.

Lets be generous and say "swimming distance" is 10miles.

So 3.72million square miles of valid landing area, in a total area of 197million square miles. So theoretical probability is around 2%

This is just a very broad guess though, as she was bound to land somewhere close to her orbital track, and without knowing more about that, and the land that lies underneath it, its harder to say - but 2% seems like an adequate guess. Not impossible, but she got pretty lucky!

You forgot to add inland water area. Because she did not land in sea, but in a lake. This actually happened at least once, on one of early Soyuz test flights. And cosmonauts train water landing extensively. 

[p1t1o]

2 minutes ago, radonek said:

You forgot to add inland water area. Because she did not land in sea, but in a lake. This actually happened at least once, on one of early Soyuz test flights. And cosmonauts train water landing extensively. 

Good point. Im not sure what was taken into account, got the figure from here:

https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-ocean

 

[Sorabh]

 In 2001: A space Odyssey, the spaceship Discovery does not have radiators. So where's the heat going?

Answer: 

Spoiler

Originally, Discovery had radiators. Arthur C Clarke wanted radiators damn it!

But Stanley Kubrick's art and design team did not accept this. Why? Because Stanley did not want to explain movie watchers what use a 'pair of Wings'  could possibly have in the vacuum of space.

Discovery : 'Dragonfly Mode'. This was the first design by Arthur Clarke and this too was rejected faster than my proposal last Valentine's......

Also, Armageddon is probably another movie that can be added to the list. When the technical issues about the movie to the director Michael Bay, he said he was aware of most of the issues. But his objective was to make that movie a profitable venture, not a science documentary.

Spoiler

In the commentary track, Ben Affleck says he "asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut [snip] up, so that was the end of that talk."

In modern times, very few movies can manage the Sci and the fi aspects of a SciFi movie. But hey, as long as it makes money, who cares?

Nerds like us do care, but we are in a shockingly small minority.

Edited February 3, 2018 by Vanamonde

[kerbiloid]

Gravity.

Total delta-V of the MMU (i.e. (hu)manned maneuvering unit) is 25 m/s.
The loaded clown flying here and there would spend the fuel much earlier. And far from the shuttle. And he's the only one with MMU (probably they gave it to him to hold him far from the Hubble so they can do their job).

01:16:00 The heroine is aerobraking in a Chinese capsule: shaking, burning, airdragging.
But look at her shoulders. They are not pressed into the seat, but they are several centimeters far from the seat back. At several g.  Only shaping and yoga can give such abs!
And she's speaking! Don't smoke and you will get such lungs!
Though I don't understand why a helmet floats across the cabin at the same time. And a belt on the seat to the left.
Probably I'm wrong. That's not aerobraking, there is still zero-g. That's the heroine's hysterical laughing shakes the capsule, while her but hurt burns it through.

1 hour ago, radonek said:

Because she did not land in sea, but in a lake.

Maybe she was targetting at some land, so fell into some Titicaca rather than into ocean.
I was expecting some lake crocodiles or piranhas to make her journey more interesting, but probably they were frightened to death.
(Or this is not a lake, but Styx. Charon was crushed by the splashing.)

Anyway, after on 01:22:00 the heroines' shorts first appeared from the water and on 01:23:00 (exactly a minute! a contract condition?) disappeared from the view, getting replaced with her feet (for exactly 10 seconds), then letting the top part of heroine get exposed (for exactly 30 seconds), we had exactly 10 seconds more to ensure that the heroine has no open wounds from her rear side, and the movie finished.

 

I believe, Gravity is a realistic film. A shuttle visits the hubble with a repair mission.
No ISS, no Tiangong around.
On 00:16:15 the heroine goes to faint. Next 1.5 hour we are watching not a sci-fi, but just her hypoxia.
This explains and ISS/Tiangong/Shuttle/Hubble rendezvous, and flights on fire extinguisher, and recurring returns of an astronaut looking like Clooney.

P.S.
Though, one thing still makes me confused. Maybe Bullock's broom flight experience from Practical Magic works with fire extinguishers as well?

P.P.S.
The zero-g embryo pose rotation stops exactly on 00:40:00 after undressing since exactly 00:39:00 after exactly 10 seconds since the spacesuit top is off.
What a fantastic sense of time has the heroine!

P.P.P.S.
Not about Gravity.

Spoiler

Not really a sci-fi like a fantasy with some technical background. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.

At 01:02:00 they show the armory, including several old-style mega-pistols and a minigun with multiple barrels.
Not that I'm against steampunk multi-barrel miniguns, but does it use two kinds of industrially made shells of two calibers (7.62 and some another) with almost visible facility marks on the shell bottoms?
Is a time machine possible?

 

Edited February 1, 2018 by kerbiloid

[tater]

1 hour ago, KG3 said:

what are the odds that she would have landed in water within swimming distance of land? 

She landed in Lake Powell, or the Great Salt Lake or something, right?

Movie was absurd on many levels, but was visually impressive.

[p1t1o]

I[snip]

To stray back on-topic, nuclear weapons in sci-fi are a mixed bag for sure. Some example pop into mind:

Indiana Jones 4 - Safe in a fridge? I dont care about the "lead lining", but he was close enough for a man-filled fridge to be sent tumbling. Thats too close for my comfort.

Broken arrow - just because you tossed that strategic-level device down a mineshaft, doesnt mean you will live through it. Gotta love that little shockwave "hump" that travels at approx 40mph and gingerly rocks their jeep up and down.

Many instances of ICBMs in space, with all stages intact, even on re-entry.

 

But some representations are very good, "The Sum of All Fears" springs to mind, including the way they were able to analyse the debris to identify the device (real) and the "hotness" of the impact site after the fact, as well as fallout.

 

One thing - if you are wondering about movies where they are very careful with nuclear warheads, and you're thinking "Silly them, it wont detonate if you drop/shoot/damage it". Actually there were some very unsafe designs in service in the early days, some of which could have resulted in a significant nuclear yield if merely dropped sufficiently hard. Nowadays of course they are much safer. One assumes.

 

If nobody had guessed by now, yes, nukes are a bit of an obsession of mine.

Edited February 2, 2018 by Vanamonde

[Racescort666]

[snip]

Anyway, on topic: things that annoy me in movies is when a nuke randomly goes off (or a major plot point is that it might go off). Wrong, they have to be set off, they're basically a miracle of precisely timed explosions and neutron injection. 

[Nikolai]

7 hours ago, p1t1o said:

(assuming George is a 100kg mass)

That seems drastically small, considering that Clooney is wearing a spacesuit.  The Shuttle EMU alone massed 115 kg without an occupant, and Clooney had his magic thruster pack on top of that.  Add Clooney's mass to that -- let's say 250 kg total, just to be generously small.  That brings us to 95 N at 5 deg/s, about two and a half gallons of milk held by one hand.  It's not trivial to exert that kind of force, especially when you're drained from adrenaline and oxygen-starved and maintaining a grip in a spacesuit against vacuum -- and you've already been on EVA for several hours.  (Story Musgrave will happily tell anyone who will listen how quickly EVAs can become exhausting, especially trying to maintain a grip, even with much smaller forces than this.)  Honestly, she sounded kind of groggy and sluggish even while servicing the panel on EVA before the real action got started.

7 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Sandra doesnt drop him, he lets go on purpose.

Because he saw that the lanyard around her foot was slipping.  That's pretty clear in the movie, too -- there are several shots directly on her boot with the lanyard slipping before he grimaces, decides to unhook himself, apologizes, and lets go.

5 hours ago, radonek said:

I actually like Gravity because it get a lot of things right. Zero-G is not just people flying around - it's also about lack of reference point. Spacecraft interiors are properly claustrophobic. People are using tethers.  The guy who got hit has frost on face…

For me, it's the feel.  They got the feel of space right -- it's not like being submerged in water or like anything we're familiar with.  It's alien.  And that alien nature is what will kill you if you don't watch out.

That said, I think the movie gets a lot more grief than it deserves.  True, there are a decent helping of things that they got obnoxiously wrong, but they clearly tried, which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of other "space" movies.

[p1t1o]

[snip]

 

On 2/1/2018 at 10:15 AM, Nikolai said:

That seems drastically small, considering that Clooney is wearing a spacesuit.  The Shuttle EMU alone massed 115 kg without an occupant, and Clooney had his magic thruster pack on top of that.  Add Clooney's mass to that -- let's say 250 kg total, just to be generously small.  That brings us to 95 N at 5 deg/s, about two and a half gallons of milk held by one hand.  It's not trivial to exert that kind of force, especially when you're drained from adrenaline and oxygen-starved and maintaining a grip in a spacesuit against vacuum -- and you've already been on EVA for several hours.  (Story Musgrave will happily tell anyone who will listen how quickly EVAs can become exhausting, especially trying to maintain a grip, even with much smaller forces than this.)  Honestly, she sounded kind of groggy and sluggish even while servicing the panel on EVA before the real action got started.

Because he saw that the lanyard around her foot was slipping.  That's pretty clear in the movie, too -- there are several shots directly on her boot with the lanyard slipping before he grimaces, decides to unhook himself, apologizes, and lets go.

Fair points, the EMU is much heavier than I expected, but it feels reachy. Yeah I can believe that there is some combination of events somewhere that would have necessitated Georges suicide, but none of them are evident in the movie, unless you use your imagination.

For one thing, his weight was taken by the carabiner on the tether, not his hand.

It doesn't make no sense, the lanyard was slipping for sure, but I would still say that going from what is presented, there is no/very little force there at all, not even a mere 95N. A 5-deg/s rotation is just an example and is significant, when I examined two screenshots 8 seconds apart there was only tiny angular differences, not the 45-deg shift you'd get from 5d/s.

I would accept "poorly shot" if its not "bad science", either way its grating.

Edited February 2, 2018 by Vanamonde

[_Augustus_]

20 hours ago, DDE said:

Am I reading it correctly? Are you suggesting a Zubrin-style Mars surface-Earth surface return craft with no Battlestar Galactica in between?

No, I'm saying that having the MAV and MDV as separate vehicles when you have in-orbit refueling available is stupid.

[Nikolai]

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

For one thing, his weight was taken by the carabiner on the tether, not his hand.

I meant to refer to the weight Bullock's exhausted hand was taking.  Of course, if you go back to the multiple exposure or the clip, you can see that she wasn't the center of rotation, either... which lessens the weight on her hand as well as the angular displacement she has to go through.  I tend to think Clooney was rotating much faster than that 5 deg/s, though, if you watch the stars in the background during the close-ups; I suspect that that's because the station was rotating some amount itself, possibly because it had some initial non-zero angular velocity after being abandoned (which seems likely; what are the odds that it was left at exactly zero?) and/or possibly because some angular velocity was imparted to it by Clooney's and Bullock's interactions with it.

But these seem like trifles.  From one point of view, attempts to punch holes in this scene seem like attempts to make petty complaints; from the other, attempts to defend this scene seem like attempts to imagine things that aren't there.  Since space is a place where motion can be deceptive and counterintuitive to senses honed with long experience on Earth, maybe I gave it more credit than it deserves.  Or maybe things that seem poorly-shot are a matter of subjective taste.  Or something.  I have to admit that this particular bit didn't break my mimesis, though; even seeing it in the theater, I thought they were rotating right away and that Clooney was in trouble.  I also tend to see switching back-and-forth between close-ups less as sequential and more as "Here are the expressions the other person was making while the camera was looking away", for whatever little that matters, and maybe that factored into the duration of the scene bothering me less.

(What did break my mimesis was the station-hopping.  But then, I guess, you'd have a much less engaging story, or at least a much less lengthy one.  "One day, debris hit the Shuttle in the middle of a servicing mission.  Every crew member died.  The End."  Ninety minutes between debris encounters also seemed pretty bogus.)

(P.S. Apparently, the mass of a dry MMU was 136 kg, if that helps with figuring out the force on Bullock's hand; we'd have to add that to the mass of the EMU and Clooney.  So 350 kg total?   )

Edited February 1, 2018 by Nikolai
Added "during the close-ups" for clarification

[ARS]

While Gravity feels realistic enough, as a space enthusiast and a scientific nerd, some things feels... jarring for me:

1. The Tiangong space station is stably upright as it enters the atmosphere, though it would have begun to tumble due to the increased drag of the atmosphere on such a not-aerodynamic object.

2. Kowalski telling Stone to detach from the manipulator arm, which has been hit by debris and is rapidly spinning away from the shuttle. He tells her she needs to detach before the arm carries her too far and he will not be able to reach her, so she detaches. The problem is she would have still had all the angular momentum of the arm itself, so detaching may have flung her away from the arm, but like a baseball pitcher releasing a baseball, she would have still kept moving, and not just stopped dead in space while the arm kept going. It may have been possible for her to release at the exact moment in the arc where she would have been flung back towards the shuttle, but that's an extremely iffy, one-in-a-billion chance that she clearly isn't trying for, as she releases when Kowalski tells her she has to hurry up and do it.

3. Even if we assume this film takes place in an alternate universe where the Tiangong and the ISS are in the same orbit 100 miles (or even just 100 kilometers) apart, thrusting directly toward the Tiangong wouldn't actually get her there. At 100 miles distant, she'd need to do an orbital rendezvous. She would have to thrust away from Tiangong by just the right amount, which would lower her altitude on the opposite side of her orbit, then wait for their orbits to re-intersect and thrust in the opposite direction to re-circularize her orbit. If she'd thrusted toward Tiangong, as shown in the movie, she'd actually end up pulling farther away from it.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

One of the most absurdly bad science that I've ever seen is undoubtedly on The Core, the story about journey to the center of the earth to restart the earth core with nuclear bombs because it apparently stops moving for... Reasons. To list some of them:

1. Let's start with the fact that in real life, the Earth's core rotates once every 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds, just like the rest of the Earth does. Relative to somebody standing on the Earth's surface, the core doesn't appear to move at all. If the core "stopped spinning", it would appear to spin in the opposite direction relative to the Earth's surface. (And where would all that angular momentum go? At the very least, the rest of the Earth would have to speed up.)

2. The Earth's outer core weighs in at 1.8 sextillion metric tons. You'd have to throw one hell of a monkey wrench into the path of that spinning freight train to brake it from one-rotation-every-24-hours to a dead stop. Not to mention we haven't developed a single nuclear warhead powerful enough to even break 6.0 on the Moment Magnitude scale. Krakatoa laughs at our most powerful nuke. So how can you expect a nuke to even give so much as a nudge to all that molten iron?

3. On the subject of the core's weight (and thus, density), at some point they get the surprise that the core is supposedly of a different density than they thought (emphasis added) it had. The movie handwaves it with a variant of "hey, nobody has ever been down there to measure the core's density" (again, emphasis added). Never mind that said density has been accurately measured by how it affects the propagation seismic waves (from earthquakes of known origin), a measurement that has been verified by how it's used to accurately calculate back the position of new quakes by their seismic waves' propagation through the core.

4. The Virgil encounters an underground equivalent of an asteroid belt composed of gigantic diamonds. Diamonds cannot form as deep at the ship's level, since carbon could not possibly crystallize in those kinds of temperatures; the crystals would be constantly breaking down before they could fully form. Plus, carbon is far too light to remain below the mantle for very long; it would be like popping a balloon at ground level and expecting the helium to remain where it was.

5. When the Virgil descends through the Earth's crust and into the mantle (and, later, when it has to travel upward through the mantle to escape), the mantle shown is clearly supposed to be a liquid, thereby not requiring the use of their drilling laser. In real life, the lower and middle mantles are semi-liquid goop that flow like pitch (at best), and the upper mantle is most decidedly solid.

6. A cavernous gas-filled geode, surrounded by 800,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at several thousand degrees, would never be able to form in the first place, much less endure for the years or millennia before the Virgil encountered it. This one gets some babbling in the movie, with two of the scientists discussing how it should be impossible. It eventually gets a justification that boils down to "look, it must be possible, as it's right here."

7. When the impeller is jammed by a fallen amethyst crystal and the geode starts leaking magma from above, the team keep right on cutting through the crystal at the cost of one member's life, even as the pooled magma gets closer and closer. But amethyst melts at the kind of temperatures which liquefy magma; it's only compression that keeps such crystals intact, and the geode's open interior should give heated minerals enough space to deform freely. By all rights, the crew should have just gone back inside and waited for the magma (which their vessel is designed to withstand) to engulf the Virgil and melt the thing loose.

8. The geomagnetic field protects the surface of the Earth from charged particles (like the solar wind and cosmic rays), but it has no effect on electromagnetic radiation such as microwaves. If the Earth was hit by an evil microwave death ray from the sun, like the one shown in the movie, we'd be fried whether the Earth's magnetic field was there or not. (And if space really was filled with that much microwave radiation, every one of our satellites would be fried instantly.)

9. When the Virgil begins its journey toward the core, it begins at the Marianas Trench, which rends itself apart to form a whirlpool that sucks the ship downward. The problem: the Marianas Trench is on a convergent plate boundary.

10. The 5 bombs in the movie have a yield of 200 megatons each. No real life nuclear weapon larger than 50 megatons (The Tsar Bomba) has ever been detonated, and no weapon larger than a theoretical 100 megatons has ever even been built. Even using the most compact bang-for-your-buck nuclear weapons technology available, a single 200 megaton device would be larger than a whole compartment on the Virgil (Which about the size of large freight train).

11. Our hero has to boost the warhead yield of the last bomb (the 5th bomb) by 30%. How does he do this? By taking 6 pounds of plutonium from the Virgil's nuclear reactor and placing it next to the bomb. It's doubtful the writers were aware that multimegaton nuclear devices use the nuclear fusion of heavy-hydrogen isotopes as their primary energy source, and only use the nuclear fission of plutonium-239 (which has to be weapons grade, not reactor grade) to set the fusion reaction off. Now, fission-fusion-fission bombs do employ a uranium-238 tamper around the outside, which absorbs the neutrons generated by the fusion reaction and undergoes spontaneous fission. This doubles or even quadruples the warhead yield. At the 200 megaton level, it's likely that all the bombs had to be fission-fusion-fission devices. However, the uranium tamper must surround the fusion core to do this. Having a chunk of uranium (or plutonium) sitting off to one side would only create some atomized uranium (or plutonium) shrapnel. In other words, placing anything "nuclear" or "radioactive" near the exploding nuclear bomb won't improve the bomb's yield, and a reactor-grade plutonium is not the same with the one with weapon-grade.

12. Sound waves do not change frequency when they pass from one medium to the next. (They do change wavelength, though, since the speed of propagation always equals the frequency times the wavelength.).

13. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, in particular, takes a mighty shellackin' in this movie. Even if unobtainium were a perfect insulator, so that no external heat could get in at all, the interior of the Virgil would still generate an enormous amount of its own waste heat from human bodies, life support systems, electronics, the motors running the impellers, and so on. Just look at how hot the nuclear reactor's core was. The only "heat sink" they brought along was some liquid nitrogen. Even if half the entire payload mass was liquid nitrogen, it would certainly have absorbed all the heat it could within the first hour.

14. Likewise, generating electric energy simply because it's hot outside won't work. You can only generate power if there's a temperature difference, and heat is allowed to flow along that temperature difference — unobtainium or no unobtainium. Any theoretically-possible scheme for using the hull to generate impeller power would have fried the contents within seconds.

15. Not only does the Space Shuttle not rely exclusively on a magnetic compass for navigation, a magnetic compass isn't even part of its navigation package. Earth's normal geomagnetic field changes not only with latitude and longitude, but also with altitude; and at the altitude for Low Earth Orbit, it's very different than it is down here on the surface. The shuttle determines its location partly by data fed to it from the ground — which also doesn't rely on magnetic compasses — and partly by extrapolating this data via its very limited onboard computers. (And nowadays, one would suppose, from GPS.)

16. The sun does not emit evil microwave death rays that can boil San Francisco Bay and melt the Golden Gate Bridge. (And if it did, a magnetic field wouldn't stop them.)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

And in the side of plot, some of them just doesn't care at all about anything "scientific" part in "Sci-Fi". The 2014 film Asteroid vs Earth hinges on stupidity that may not even be quantifiable. Faced with an Earth destroying asteroid 1/4th the size and weight of the moon, one of the characters correctly informs the military that firing nukes at it won't work. He soon loses these "did his homework" points by raising another plan, that requires that nukes be set off in and around the Ring of Fire in the Pacific. By doing so, he hopes to create a magnitude 18 earthquake that will move the planet out of the way of the asteroid. That would be 18 on the Richter Scale. For reference: every step up on the scale releases 31 times more energy. A little math shows that an earthquake of magnitude 18 would release a force equivalent to 12 zettatons (zettaton = 10 ^ 21 tons) of TNT. The crater from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs only released 100 teratons (teraton = 10 ^ 12 tons). At this point, the plot is a non issue: no matter what is done, everybody on Earth is going to die.

Personally though, I do love sci-fi movies, even if some scientific accuracy had to be ignored for the sake of the plot. What I don't like is when the movie treats it's own "science" as if it was a real scientific fact. This can lead to a misunderstanding and I personally do not like that

Edited February 2, 2018 by ARS

[Just Jim]

Oh, man... This is about bad science in sci-fi movies? I am so stupid!!!

How could I let this go for 7 pages without remembering to mention....

 

.... wait for it...

 

.... Every Godzilla Movie ever made!!! 

Brwarrrrrr  hehehehe

 

[MichaelPoole]

[snip]

What's with the ridiculous hate for Interstellar? I'd put it in one of the best movies ever made. "You can make enviroment controlled enclosed spaces on Earth, why go to space?" well making enviroment controlled habitats for a small crew is 1 thing, for whole humanity is other. Yes, it is not quite scientifically accurate, but people here seem to be obsessed with hating it.

Not about Interstellar now, but in general, many people here seem to think that only present day science qualifies as "possible". By that standard, Jules Verne should have written about steam engines, smog and abject poverty, with no airplanes or water purification. And there were many people at that time who would prove to you with elaborate theories and justification why a good living standard for most people is impossible, how the internal combustion engine is impossible, how heavier than air flight is impossible etc. Yes, things like wormholes are speculative, but you are wrong to make claims like "nothing can go through them". First, as of now, they are theoretical, second, metrics that would allow for wormhole travel are allowed by theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Traversable_wormholes . Can we make them now? Of course not, but we cannot make ANY wormholes right now.

Now, I'm not saying that stuff like interstellar spaceships flying like WW2 airplanes are realistic, far from that. I am just puzzled by the amount of hate that people here seem to have for "80 percent accurate" fiction. You're the type of people who'd drone on endlessly how the internal combustion engine is a stupid idea and how people could never travel in vehicles whose engines are effectively in a constant state of explosion in the 19th century. It is science FICTION, not a crystal ball, it includes speculative science else it's not science fiction. It may or may not turn out to work, or it may work in a different way (for example Baxter's Manifold series had foldable portable computers by 2010, we didn't get foldable ones yet, but the average smartphone has more power than your average laptop from 2009). Of course, some things are just plainly done, but normal people are not going obsessive over them.

I think some people just enjoy to be "that guy" and instead of using their supposed brainpower to actually improve science they go to online boards to explain why x isn't possible, even if they turn out to be wrong later. It isn't a new phenomena, after all, The Times called airplane research a waste of time and stated rockets cannot fly in a vacuum. An IBM executive stated in 1943 that the world will never need more than 5 computers.

On topic, The Core crosses my suspension of disbelief, and I really like Farscape, which is completely soft scifi, but I like the characters, story, and refreshing lack of technobabble. I would put many ridiculous disaster movies into "the science is too bad" category as well. But overall, if I'm watching a soft scifi series, I honestly don't care about the "scientific accuracy". What mildly irritates me in some space opera is Star Trek style technobabble, for example the endless contradictory statements about Warp Drive - Farscape just says the ships go FTL using "hetch drive", and leaves it at that, without making 3 incompatible Warp factor schemes and complete repurposed bovine waste like the Threshold episode where the crew mutates into salamanders and slugs after going to "infinite velocity".

Edited February 2, 2018 by Vanamonde

[SnailsAttack]

when people in sci-fi movies take their helmets off on other planets with absolutely zero knowledge of any of its atmospheric or biological properties.

that excrements could be composed of 98% nerve gas and space aids for all you stand-up guys know

@ARS I'm moderately glad to know that I wasn't the only one peeved by The Core

[MichaelPoole]

4 minutes ago, SnailsAttack said:

when people in sci-fi movies take their helmets off on other planets with absolutely zero knowledge of any of its atmospheric or biological properties.

that excrements could be composed of 98% nerve gas and space aids for all you stand-up guys know

Now this is a legitimate complaint (through IMHO, this is justified in space opera as most planets visited are civilized in some way and their properties mostly known).

[ARS]

30 minutes ago, SnailsAttack said:

when people in sci-fi movies take their helmets off on other planets with absolutely zero knowledge of any of its atmospheric or biological properties.

that excrements could be composed of 98% nerve gas and space aids for all you stand-up guys know

@ARS I'm moderately glad to know that I wasn't the only one peeved by The Core

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/core.html

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/TheDayTheEarth.htm

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

This will make you laugh (Also contains several bad movie physics such as Avatar, The day the earth stood still, etc. and explains common physics mistakes in the hollywood movie)

Edited February 2, 2018 by ARS

[Just Jim]

30 minutes ago, SnailsAttack said:

when people in sci-fi movies take their helmets off on other planets with absolutely zero knowledge of any of its atmospheric or biological properties.

that excrements could be composed of 98% nerve gas and space aids for all you stand-up guys know

Or, conversely... It could be a remarkably pure atmosphere...

... and you idiots just contaminated the crap out of it, and doomed any and all native lifeforms... 

 

Edited February 2, 2018 by Just Jim

[Superfluous J]

A meta-peeve, I hate it when people say "what would you rather have, good science or a good movie?" as if you can't have both.

The Core could not have been made using realistic science in any way shape or form. Armageddon could have, though, with a massive rewrite into basically a totally different movie. And Gravity just needed a few changes in the logistics without any real change in the plot to work.

That nobody bothered in any of those cases (and yes, I'm blaming the people who didn't bother to decide to not make The Core) is sad, to me.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, SnailsAttack said:

when people in sci-fi movies take their helmets off on other planets with absolutely zero knowledge of any of its atmospheric or biological properties.

that excrements could be composed of 98% nerve gas and space aids for all you stand-up guys know

Its easy to get atmospheric composition from orbit with spectography. This is an routine operation like going to the toilet before putting on an space suit. 
Yes you would miss stuff like poisonous pollen, but atmosphere would be known. 

[PB666]

Spectroscopy could not measure the level of radioisotopes in the gas. In addition even small traces of gases like HCN would be lethal with an hour of exposure, you would hardly notice that level.

But there are other issues HCl even in small concentration will acidify the membranes in the lungs causing disabling conditions. Most atmospheres of planets will be toxic to humans, either in what they have or in what they don't have.

As of yet we have not discovered a single planet that has >10% oxygen in its atmosphere.

MOst sci-fi exaggerates the frequency of livable planets and planets with sentient life by many magnitudes. That usually part of the prop device, to bring aliens that are otherwise way far away from Earth, close enough that we can visit them by spaceship. Its not bad physics per say, it just bad chemistry.

[DAL59]

2 hours ago, MichaelPoole said:

we didn't get foldable ones yet

 

[kerbiloid]

What is the main message which Gravity tries to bring to us?

If an idiot spends MMU fuel for acrobatics, a little later he will float away with depleted MMU.

P.S.
I got an idea!

Let's first drop a 10 kg probe onto the unknown planet before landing!

It will provide us with exact info about the atmosphere.

Edited February 2, 2018 by kerbiloid

[PakledHostage]

5 hours ago, MichaelPoole said:

What's with the ridiculous hate for Interstellar? I'd put it in one of the best movies ever made. 

That's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but not everyone has to agree with you. Sure it seems, based on the reviews, that a lot of people do agree with you, but you can count me (and many others here) among those who thought it was cringe-inducingly bad. Our hatred for Interstellar and/or Gravity isn't ridiculous. Art isn't universal.

Edited February 2, 2018 by PakledHostage