Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[Nazalassa]

21 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

(The 3rd semester of Hogwartz, I guess.

Already has an idea, but yet hasn't realized the scientific base of the magic.)

Nonono, it's about the magic plane and the manas of the world of Armyllia which i invented and should become public when I'd finish my fantasy story in it (featuring magic) (no it's not Lord of the Rings or anything from Tolkien).

Anyway that's not rocket.

[Admiral Fluffy]

There is a new movie called “Moonfall”

I saw the trailer, and it has a shuttle around the Moon. Shuttle doesn’t have enough deltaV to do that.

[kerbiloid]

According to google, the Moon is hollow there, so maybe shuttle just made a crosswind maneuver in the space aether like a space glider.

[jimmymcgoochie]

On 1/7/2022 at 5:11 PM, DDE said:

It was never advertised as anything else.

I never saw it advertised as anything, it just popped up on Netflix and sounded vaguely sci-fi-ey from the one sentence blurb that came with it.

[Codraroll]

On 1/8/2022 at 1:53 PM, Admiral Fluffy said:

There is a new movie called “Moonfall”

I saw the trailer, and it has a shuttle around the Moon. Shuttle doesn’t have enough deltaV to do that.

On the other hand, from what I've seen, I'm pretty sure that's not the weakest point of the film from a scientific perspective.

[magnemoe]

On 1/8/2022 at 1:53 PM, Admiral Fluffy said:

There is a new movie called “Moonfall”

I saw the trailer, and it has a shuttle around the Moon. Shuttle doesn’t have enough deltaV to do that.

They did that in for all humankind to, however here they launched an second orange  tank with an sea dragon. Yes reentry will be an issue unless they did an partial powered one or had beefed up the tiles a lot. No its not efficient but shuttle has repair capability no  current crafts has and if you have an shuttle so you use a shuttle not some more efficient craft you don't have.  

 

[SunlitZelkova]

7 hours ago, magnemoe said:

They did that in for all humankind to, however here they launched an second orange  tank with an sea dragon. Yes reentry will be an issue unless they did an partial powered one or had beefed up the tiles a lot. No its not efficient but shuttle has repair capability no  current crafts has and if you have an shuttle so you use a shuttle not some more efficient craft you don't have.  

 

Actually I think they said that they refuel at a space station and carry a tank inside the cargo bay. Sea Dragon is just a big dumb booster for even larger cargo.

For All Mankind has bigger issues though, like firing air cooled rifles in vacuum and closing the Shuttle bay doors during spaceflight.

[magnemoe]

12 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Actually I think they said that they refuel at a space station and carry a tank inside the cargo bay. Sea Dragon is just a big dumb booster for even larger cargo.

For All Mankind has bigger issues though, like firing air cooled rifles in vacuum and closing the Shuttle bay doors during spaceflight.

You are correct about the tank in the cargo bay. Using an rifle in space should work, its just that it will cool down way slower, now you would need to modify an gun to be used in an space suit anyway as in how to aim with the bubble helmet. 
As for closing the bay, why and an shuttle going to the moon needed to be very different anyway. 

[kerbiloid]

The rifle grease would freeze, they need to use something instead, like the graphite.

Also the sight would work only for direct fire, as the gravity and the air pressure are changed.

Of course, the finger would make to cut off the trigger guard, and the suit could make to replace the stock,

Of the small finger-sized buttons and switches probably only the forward assist would be usable on AR-15, lol.

(While AK has only two handles designed for winter gloves, and Valmet did even more for that.)

Edited January 10, 2022 by kerbiloid

[GuessingEveryDay]

Watched Hidden Figures today, and realized they used Gemini Stage separation footage for John Glenn's flight, and SECO callouts...

[Spacescifi]

 

This is one of those blink and you will miss it moments.

For all the high brow coversations that the Matrix sequels loved to feature, they apparently did not use words as featured in the dictionary (yes, I am a dictionary nerd).

For example, Smith is called a sentient program.

What is a program?

Dictionary: Instructions that a computer can understand and process to achieve expected results. If all is going well you should not have to wonder what will happen when you click a program icon. Programs are SUPPOSED to be predictable.

Sentient is to possess intelligence.

So a program in the matrix equals Intelligent instructions? No. That would be the height of stupidity. You do not give free will and intelligence to instructions that a computer needs to understand to process it unless you WANT unpredictability and are  keen on NOT getting what you expect when you click the program.

Humans are unreliable on occasion at least. That's why we do not make programs like us... because doing that would be redundant in all the wrong ways.

You may as well have a child lol.... same thing.

Computers use programs, because programs are their input to get output. Without a program a computer can do nothing at all.

So more properly, the Matrix has what amount to sentient AI living in a simulation. AKA virtual sentient computers living in a simulation.

Edited January 20, 2022 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

The programs can be written in procedural, object, and declarative language.

Both human and "Smith" follow the declarative language rules on high level, but operate with entities and their instances in object language encapsulating the procedural language for simple actions.

[Nazalassa]

Spoiler

#include <stdio.h>

int main(){

    printf("Would it hurt someone to check Wikipedia during the making of Sci-fi films?");

    return(0);

}

:p

[kerbiloid]

14 minutes ago, Nazalassa said:

"Would it hurt someone to check Wikipedia during the making of Sci-fi films?"

:p

Wiki has been founded in 2 001, while The Matrix had been filmed in 1 999, young gentleman.

When some of us had watched The Matrix first time, there was no wiki even as a project.

[DDE]

30 minutes ago, Nazalassa said:

  Hide contents

#include <stdio.h>

int main(){

    printf("Would it hurt someone to check Wikipedia during the making of Sci-fi films?");

    return(0);

}

:p

Oh, you think it's this easy. Unfortunately, merely reading an article on an unfamiliar topic does not provide you with the knowledge required to depict something fully realistically. You need a correct wider context to put the tidbits in, and feeding a few facts to a layman can just encourage the Dunning-Krüger effect.

That at least takes reading a lot of Wikipedia, on topocs that are alarmingly obscure.

[Shpaget]

On 1/20/2022 at 5:45 AM, Spacescifi said:

Humans are unreliable on occasion at least. That's why we do not make programs like us...

Humans make unreliable programs all the time.

I know I've made a few.

[Nazalassa]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Oh, you think it's this easy. Unfortunately, merely reading an article on an unfamiliar topic does not provide you with the knowledge required to depict something fully realistically. You need a correct wider context to put the tidbits in, and feeding a few facts to a layman can just encourage the Dunning-Krüger effect.

That at least takes reading a lot of Wikipedia, on topocs that are alarmingly obscure.

When I said "check wikipedia", I meant "see on the net, in stackoverflow etc." or "searching internet" (aviable since 1988 or so). 

[shimmy00]

I'm not sure - because there's like 94 pages on this thread - that this has not been said before but I felt like saying it: it's amazing how much playing Our Favorite Game has ruined most sci-fi stuff, especially all this pop stuff, for me. Almost having a physics degree did some of it, but there's a difference between learning the stuff on paper, and having a real hands-on simulator (that even, itself, is not 100% accurate, but still is vastly more accurate than virtually every, if not really "every", pulp Sci-Fi movie that has ever been made) to play with and see how all the little things work in and of themselves. I can't stand to see a spaceship that is mostly crew space, and not propulsion-related equipment, particularly fuel tanks, and with no radiators on it (not seen so much in the stock game, but try the half-decent nuke power mods and ...). That really rubs me especially when they go to the trouble of putting rocket-like "thrusters" on the back yet seem to ignore where all the stuff they "thrust" with comes from.

Also, if we are going to talk a specific sci-fi program, I can't help but think of my old fave: Stargate SG-1, and where they talked about how that "recreating a nervous system on the molecular level ... I know it defies the uncertainty principle!" when referring to how that the titular team's minds got copied and "uploaded" into robot bodies. Besides the obvious shades of Heisenberg Compensators(tm), the real problem here is that the uncertainty principle doesn't really get to apply to begin with. If you are making a digital system to mimick a nervous system, you don't care about "replicating it down to the molecular level" because that would literally mean making organic, biological "wetware" and you are making a computer. You need functional, not physical, replication, e.g. a suitably-advanced neuromorphic chip, though to be fair that show was made around 1998 I believe (But even then, while we may not have had at least first-generation commercialized ones, it wouldn't have taken any science not then already known to know what a "molecular level reconstruction" entailed and why that was not the same as a robotic reconstruction.).

(And even if you were, on the scale of whole molecules at least, thermal fluctuations that inevitably occur anyway mean that UP-related effects aren't really relevant to viability so again, it still wouldn't matter.)

But that episode actually wasn't the biggest casualty for me - the biggest ones were ones that tried to at least give a "shout out" to realistic physics. For example, there was one where they had a craft accelerate using the typical magic engines to some huge velocity, likely a few percent of "c", on a "slow boat" course out of the Solar System to its creator's home world. For some reason, the path the craft was on happened to take it right past Jupiter which - while admittedly not at all impossible, depending on the relative positioning of the "home" star, is just unlikely - then lead the rescue team to attempt a "slingshot" by trying to use some little missiles attached to the craft (the magic engines were apparently disabled and booby trapped so they could not be used to simply reverse the initial maneuver). Yet at, say, 10% of c, the delta-v you can get from that is utterly pointless that they should have immediately discounted the option and just told him "hey, you'll get to see Jupiter at least". (At the end, they managed to rescue using another magic craft. But the butchering of non-magic physics in an attempt to try and get it better really gets me now.)

 

Edited January 30, 2022 by shimmy00

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Nazalassa said:

When I said "check wikipedia", I meant "see on the net, in stackoverflow etc." or "searching internet" (aviable since 1988 or so). 

stackoverflow - 2000, wiki - 2001

1988 = mostly dial-up + FIDO

[KSK]

On 1/20/2022 at 4:45 AM, Spacescifi said:

 

This is one of those blink and you will miss it moments.

For all the high brow coversations that the Matrix sequels loved to feature, they apparently did not use words as featured in the dictionary (yes, I am a dictionary nerd).

For example, Smith is called a sentient program.

What is a program?

Dictionary: Instructions that a computer can understand and process to achieve expected results. If all is going well you should not have to wonder what will happen when you click a program icon. Programs are SUPPOSED to be predictable.

Sentient is to possess intelligence.

So a program in the matrix equals Intelligent instructions? No. That would be the height of stupidity. You do not give free will and intelligence to instructions that a computer needs to understand to process it unless you WANT unpredictability and are  keen on NOT getting what you expect when you click the program.

Humans are unreliable on occasion at least. That's why we do not make programs like us... because doing that would be redundant in all the wrong ways.

You may as well have a child lol.... same thing.

Computers use programs, because programs are their input to get output. Without a program a computer can do nothing at all.

So more properly, the Matrix has what amount to sentient AI living in a simulation. AKA virtual sentient computers living in a simulation.

As a counter-argument, I give you Conway's Game of Life.  Completely deterministic, yet achieves unexpected results. Is also Turing complete so, theoretically, can be used to simulate any other computer.

[Nazalassa]

Yes I know @kerbiloid...

Search SOMEWHERE, in encyclopedia (paper version), or the like. That existed by the time, didn't it?

[kerbiloid]

Just now, Nazalassa said:

Search SOMEWHERE, in encyclopedia (paper version), or the like. That existed by the time, didn't it?

Mostly. Unlike the C++ standard, Windows, DOS 5, cell phones, and many other things, including the programming paradygms and conceptions.

The object-oriented programming was an ugly duckling of programming even in early 1990s.

[Nazalassa]

Maybe @kerbiloid. C exists since 1975 and something (thrust me, it's true). Befunge is from 1993. Etc.

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

Maybe @kerbiloid. C exists since 1975 and something (thrust me, it's true). Befunge is from 1993. Etc.

C++ doesn't. At till late 80s everyones was using his own corporative standard,  AT&T, MSC, Borland, Watcom, etc., which were differing very much.

And I was using paper books, believe me. Nothing even remotely comparabe to googlowiki.

P.S.
Btw C exists since 1969/1970, like *nix.

Edited January 31, 2022 by kerbiloid

[Gargamel]

8 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

When I said "check wikipedia", I meant "see on the net, in stackoverflow etc." or "searching internet" (aviable since 1988 or so). 

Prior to ~2000, the internet was not a reliable source of info on pretty much any topic.    Yes you could find stuff, but it was usually easier to find comprehensive info by looking in the card catalog in your local library.   
 

But that’s not the real issue.   We’re the .1%.   The vast majority of viewers won’t pick up on a lot of the details we do.   Heck, some of the things we see, only like 10% of us even noticed them because that is what we specialized in.   
 

Most movies are made to make money.   And that means appealing to the biggest audience possible for a given story.   So they have to have a bit of creative license to make it work dramatically.     And what’s a movie without some creative license?   A documentary.    I love me some good documentaries, but honestly Ken Burns is the ultimate cure for insomnia.