“What’s going to happen?”
“Something wonderful!”
— Heywood Floyd and Dave Bowman, 2010: Odyssey Two

When I heard the news, I was floored. One can usually point to what got you into SF, which in my case was Star Wars, but what got me into science fiction was Arthur C. Clarke. 2001: A Space Odyssey certainly drew me in, but it was reading his short stories along with Isaac Asimov and others who helped me appreciate the beauty of well-written science fiction — fiction based solidly in science.

Of course, I also think Clarke was a pretty good writer. If you’ve ever read 2010: Odyssey Two, then you have to remember the suspenseful ending that starts with Dave Bownman sending an instant message to Heywood Floyd. And the redemption of HAL is one of the best scenes in science fiction, IMHO of course.

In the awful TV series Space 1999, there was an episode [The Last Sunset from Season One —Travers] where a probe lands on the moon and makes an Earth like atmosphere.

Fair enough.  But there is a scene, where Commander Koenig opens a window to breathe in the fresh air.

Really, Moonbase Alpha, purpose built on the moon where there is no air, but manufactured with opening windows (just in case).

Ouch! Good one, except that according to one of the episode guides, there were omitted scenes that would have explained the opening windows were specially added after the atmosphere was created, and a poignant scene where Koenig orders the openable windows replaced.  Which makes it sound like they knew what they were doing except: The Moon doesn’t have enough enough gravity to hold an atmosphere.  That’s why it was airless in the first place.

The Moon’s low gravity plus it’s lack of protection from the solar wind means that any gases that didn’t evaporate away from the Moon would have been blown away by the solar wind.  On Earth, we have the Van Allen radiation belts (courtesy of our Earth’s magnetic field) to protect us from the solar wind.  The Moon, having virtually no magnetic field, can’t protect its surface from the high energy particles from the Sun which would give the heavier gases (like oxygen) the kick it needs to escape from the Moon’s gravitational pull.

But maybe the probes provided some sort of atmosphere protection?  Either way, it’s definitely silly.

Further Reading:

• “Why doesn’t the Moon have an atmosphere like the Earth?” from madsci.org

The sirens are going off. The space ship has just been hit by an asteroid. The air-tight bulkheads slam shut. But look! Someone’s trapped behind. He bangs furiously on the door while his comrades try desperately to override the locks, but suddenly, there’s an ominous clang. He looks over his shoulder and suddenly the panel gives way and he’s sucked out into space where he freezes solid…. or explodes. Maybe both.

Only problem with that… it ain’t so…

Barry Spencer wrote in this suggestion:

One of my pet peeves is people instantly freezing solid when exposed to the vacuum of space. Tim Robbins instantly freezes solid after removing his space helmet while hurtling towards Mars in the movie Mission to Mars. One of the bumbling operators of the spacecraft in the movie Sunshine likewise freezes solid after a ham-handed attempt at a 2001-style airlock-to-airlock transfer. Later his frozen arm shatters like peanut brittle when struck by debris. One of his luckier idiot crew mates survives but suffers instant symptoms of severe frostbite.

Yes, it’s cold out there in space, but there’s no air, therefore no heat loss by conduction or convection. The only way to lose body heat is through radiation. So if you found yourself ejected, wearing only your underwear, from a spaceship airlock, you wouldn’t instantly freeze. Your skin might not even feel terribly cold. Your biggest problem would be the lack of air to breathe, along with very irritatingly dry eyes due to moisture instantly evaporating from the surface of your corneas.

You would freeze eventually, but it would take much, much longer. It’s not instant freezing as you see in the movies. There are three types of ways for heat to move from one thing to another: conduction, convection and radiation. Conduction and convection require something to be touching the body, but in a vacuum, you have, by definition, nothing touching it. Then you’re left to radiative heating which would take quite a bit longer. Flash freezing is done with conduction or convection, usually a little bit of both by dunking the item in liquid nitrogen.

A closely related pet peeve is people exploding when exposed to a vacuum or partial vacuum such as the atmosphere of Mars. In the movie Total Recall people blow up like balloons, their eyeballs bulging out of their heads, when exposed to the naked atmosphere of Mars. I suppose the writers figure that if sucking on someone’s neck causes a hickey, then the vacuum of space must be like getting a super hickey all over your body all at once. But in space nobody can get a hickey; it’s atmospheric pressure that pushes your blood through your capillaries and into the surrounding tissues to form a hickey. No atmospheric pressure, no hickeys. And, though the living human body is pressurized, it won’t explode when the atmospheric pressure drops a mere 14.73 psi, that is, decreases from the pressure at sea level on Earth to zero pressure; the human body is strong enough to hold together in a vacuum. Which means you wouldn’t explode on Mars, either.

Far more importantly, your skin and blood vessels provide tension to help keep your bodily fluids liquid. There will be some boiling (called ebullism), but it won’t be enough to explode you. You will puff out and turn nasty colours though.

There were some unfortuante live human victims of massive decompression, and some of them survived (see Ebullism at 1 million feet linked below for details).

The best thinking is that you could in fact survive in the cold, hard vacuum of space for at least 90 seconds, but you’d probably pass out after 10 seconds.
Further reading:

• Ask an Astrophysicist: Human Body in a Vacuum
• Ebullism at 1 million feet
• Explosive Decompression and Vacuum Exposure by Geoffrey A. Landis

Something’s been bugging me since… the damned mini-series.

How come it’s so hard to detect the new Cylons?  They can interface with computer networks with their left arms, their spines glows, have superhuman strength and indurance and can somehow download terrabytes of information wirelessly just before death.  And no one can tell them from humans without really hard tests using radioactivity.

Anyone care to take a crack at this one?

Found this today:

http://listverse.com/movies/top-10-errors-in-science-fiction-movies/

I gotta disagree on some of these.

10. Simplicity

The examples of exotic scenarios are, at best, extreme science. At worst, impossible. Life around a pulsar?? After a supernova, the only planets remaining are the lumps of rock & gas that re-form after the explosion. The environment around it is hostile to life:

“Pulsars emit a tremendous amount of high energy radiation, yet within this harsh environment we have a disk that looks a lot like those around young stars where planets are formed.” Dr. Deepto Chakrabarty, “Pulsars Form Planets Too”

The scenarios he describes are definitely science fiction.

9. Simplistic Planets

While it’s a good point, I think we’ve all seen plenty of worlds in media SF with variety. The reason he probably remembers this one is because film makers will create an extreme world for artistic reasons, and that will stick in our heads more so than Naboo.

8. Alien / Human Breeding

Gotta agree with him there.

7. Alien / Human communication

This one is harder to discuss for the simple reason that we haven’t encountered extra-terrestrial intelligence yet.  But we do share a common reality and experience the same phenomena.  If they can build a civilization & technology, they would probably have a similar concept of  mathematics and science.  Which is exactly what the movie Contact showed.  So this isn’t so much an error as a failure of imagination.  There may indeed be other novel forms of communication that can evolve and could be interesting premises.

6. Instant Communications

Yeah, this one is amusing.  Star Trek takes the attitude they are using sub-space and are those using FTL communication all the time.  But in movies with combat ranging over a solar system, like Star Wars, the time lag would definitely be noticeable.

5. Humanoid Aliens

While over used in SF movies, I take exception to his idea that the humanoid form (1 head, two arms, two legs) would be unique to Earth.  The humanoid form is pretty amenable to a tool manipulating species.

4. Explosions in Space

I agree with him to an extent, but there are exceptions.

3. Superluminal Travel

I prefer to think the jury is still out on this.

2. Earth Gravity

To be fair, most movies & TV shows these days recognize the concept of artificial gravity.

1. Sound in Space

OK, we agree there too.

I thought this was pretty funny.

 http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Commandments.html

Hooey! Sorry for the gap, but I was busy/tired/sick/tired/tired/tired (who ever came up with working for a living should be… well…) Anyway…

Talk about spoiled for riches. After what seemed like a drought of SF (Speculative Fiction in this case) on TV, we’ve got a bunch of them all at once.

I’ll talk about the ones I’ve been watching.

Bionic Woman (NBC, Wednesdays at 9 pm)

I was never a big fan of the original series. I only remember one scene from my childhood: Linsey Wagner ripping a phone book in half. I also remember hearing that Linsey Wagner was an awful interview because she just sat there and gave one word answers. But I digress. This time, the bionics are a little Ghost in the Shell‘ish with micromachines and high powered cybernetic body parts in the service of a top secret military operation.

You know this series is stretching credibility when an truck smashes a tiny compact car at high speed and wraps it around the pole. The passenger received the full force and lost her legs and right arm, eye and ear. Near fatal apparently. The driver? A couple scratches and he’s ready to perform neurosurgery within a couple hours. What the fuh…?

The problem with most cyborg stories is they create a person with high powered bionic parts but the rest of them is still organic. Although in the first episode, she didn’t do anything that seriously stretched her organic parts limits, but eventually, you know she’s going to lift something really heavy. With her natural spine. This flaw has been pointed out since the original Six Million Dollar Man. Kevin Smith wrote a screenplay for an updated version of that series and had Steve Austin given a titanium spine. But so far, nothing to stretch that credibility.

The other part no one talks about is energy source. The human body does a pretty decent job of generating mechanical energy from food. But I always wondered how much power do cyborg parts require to jump that far? In one case, Jamie Summers jumps across a street. Ha! I’ve even seen Jackie Chan do that. But this was a major street. She has two choices: speed or height. Either way, how is her bionics getting that much power? Does she have to plug in at night or does she have some nuclear battery?

Exercise for reader: Calculate the power output required for Jamie Summers to run at 50 mph (as per the pilot) and to jump across a street to another building.

Chuck (NBC, Mondays at 8pm)

Wired was calling this season “Geek TV“. Mild mannered Chuck working for Best Buy’s Buy More’s Geek Squad Nerd Herd gets an e-mail from a long, lost college buddy. A buddy he hated for stealing his girlfriend and getting him kicked out of Stanford. Turns out his buddy is a rogue CIA agent and the e-mail is the entire contents of the CIA & NSA’s joint database. Somehow, Chuck’s mind absorbs the entire sequence of images and video clips. And later, the CIA agent who breaks into his apartment to steal the PC accidentally destroys the hard-drive. So the CIA & NSA have to keep Chuck alive and find the trigger words & images to get the information out of him until the database comes back on-line.

Oh, come on!! The CIA & NSA somehow don’t have ready backups and fail over systems. OK, maybe. The hard drive shatters and they can’t restore it. The CIA & NSA have entire departments that can re-assemble shattered hard drives and read your e-mails. Somehow, a simple drop on the floor that can be fixed by a whole host of companies baffles the U.S. Government. (Where’s the rolling eyes emoticon when you need one?) Wait it gets even more fun…

The file was sent by e-mail. The NSA monitors our e-mail. Also, the e-mail would have been uploaded to Bryce’s ISP and then sent across to Chuck’s ISP before going down to his machine. No where along that line, apparently, can the NSA find the file.

Given all this, Chuck is somehow able to store the entire contents in his brain with accurate recall? The mechanism for retrieving the information is plausible: human memory is associative so seeing a face or hearing a code word could cause a recall cascade for Chuck. In fact, having all that raw data in Chuck’s head would be even better than most AI programs because his brain can make more connections and faster than our most sophisticated data mining tools. So I’ll give them that one, but seriously: they can’t do data recovery at the NSA??

Journeyman (NBC. Mondays at 10am)

A San Francisco reporter starts leaping around time with no apparent cause or mechanism and making right what once went wrong. I did love Quantum Leap, but I gotta admit, QL had some hokey writing. Jorneyman’s marginally better, but it is amusing watching the obvious time paradoxes.

He goes back in time, changes something, comes back and sees the result, then goes back in time and makes a different change, comes back and sees the result has changed. The paradox is the information that caused him to make the final change is now gone. It’s only in his memory. This is possible under one condition: parallel quantum universes. The theory is that time travel is following the outcome branch tree of the universe to a point in time. You make changes there and go forward in time following a different outcome path. The you that made the change still exists in a parallel universe thus no real paradox.

But at any rate, I do think his wife, Lydia, is hot.

Pushing Daisies (ABC, Wednesdays at 8 pm)

This series is fantasy, pure and simple, but I like it. More importantly though, it does reflect something about our real Universe. Conservation.

The universe seems to have a universal rule about conservation. The sum total of matter & energy must be preserved. In Pushing Daisies, Ned, our hero, can bring people back to life. But only if someone else dies in the nearby proximity. That little trick makes the series interesting, and gives him an incentive to undo his magic touch in under a minute. But it’s just so nice seeing the laws of conservation being respected in a fantasy show.

I thought this post captures the problem in movies & TV shows quite accurately.

The Starship Enterprise slows to one quarter impulse as it meets a new alien race. The alien ship pulls closer and after hundreds of light years, has the same orientation as the Enterprise.Why? Solar systems scattered throughout the galaxy will have a random orientation, and most ships will align their orientation to the last solar system they came from. In fact, there is no reason what so ever for them to stay that way in flight (for example, to navigate), yet somehow, they always meet right side “up”.

Now there is a simple explaination for this: the other ship choses to match orientation with the other, but have you ever seen Captain Kirk or Picard give the order, “Match orientation, ensign.” No, I didn’t think so.

I wonder if there’s a galactic treaty everyone signed declaring which way is “up” for all races. I’m sure the Organians were behind it.

Andreas Hartl sent me this one:

My favorite (from ST:VOY, some episode in season 1 or 2):

The crew of the Voyager has to get some samples of a rare and highly needed plant from the surface of a planet. The whole episode no restrictions of where to find this plant were made. Yet as they decide to go down on the planet, Paris makes one proposition: “I recommend to wait until noon; the weather on the planet can be very unpleasant during night”.

Think about this. You are orbiting a planet. The planet is rotating on its axis. Half the planet is in night, and the other half of the planet is in daylight. If you don’t want to land on the planet during the night, you can just land on the side that’s in daylight. Although one could argue that the plant was from a specific area that was in night, but this episode sounds like the infamous “Tuvix” episode. There were no geographical restrictions given for the location of this rare plant.

This is one of the more common source of blunders: writing as though you are trapped on the ground. If you are on the ground, you do typically have to wait for daylight, but in space, daylight is just 180 degrees away.