Let's Scientifically Nitpick the Movies

[Myasishchev]

Well, you see, I was kind of interested in the premise of "nitpicking the science of the movies" here, as opposed to playing the Trek Logic Excuse-making Game that's carried on in almost every other topic on the board. The latter is something that everyone can do in their sleep by this time, at least to their own satisfaction. So I was wondering if anyone knew of any way that we might possibly actually get such specific data from a Voyager probe that such a conclusion could be reached or whether the statement in the movie is doomed to be only the customary and arbitrary Trek handwavium that it was clearly on the writer's part.

A lot of the "scientific nitpicking" thus far doesn't actually have much to do with either science or technology, though - debating whether the Genesis Device (which is based in neither science nor technology) could create a star and planet based on the parameters established for the thing has nothing to do with either, for example, but is entirely a conversation about the internal story logic of the script and nothing more.

Now, in fairness, Chris and I were talking about how a normal nebula doesn't look like Mutara on the inside. Nobody can defend Genesis.

But, if you prefer wanton scientific bullshit, try Insurrection. Not only does it have another nebula-type dust cloud of the silly type, it has a star and a habitable planet with billions of years worth of evolution on it inside it. So it's not even a planetary nebula. It's a bunch of random crap that somehow covers a G-class sun. (And unlike M-class, G-class means something.)

Plus, you have a radiation field causing a reversal of cellular damage? That's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

 

[Myasishchev]

Since there was no huge shower of comets wiping out all life on Earth, dueling scientific papers would follow debating whether V6 was destroyed or sent through a wormhole with the findings in TMP settling the debates and requiring the losing estates to pay off any challenges made on Long Bets.

I think such a bet would violate the rule against perpetuities. Choose the state you bet in wisely.

 

[Cryogenic]

Still, Dennis *is* right about that dialogue. On the face of it, it's stupid. Moreover: Voyager 1 wasn't launched until 1977, and here's Voyager 6, which Decker asserts was "launched more than three hundred years ago," in spite of the fact that TMP is set circa 2272!!! Someone fucked up. And more than a few someones were too dumb to notice.

I disagree. The concept of a Voyager 6 fits perfectly well with the fact the American space program in the Star Trek universe was far better funded in the 1970's and 80's than in our own otherwise there's no way to explain the DY class existing in the mid-1990's. We see a picture of a space shuttle landing on the Rec Deck display in TMP, but there's no date. We know that's from one of the glide tests, but the Trek universe's Enterprise might be returning from an orbital flight launched off a modified or even a flyback F1 booster. (I'm excluding any info from any production after TMP for purposes of this point.)

I think you must have missed my appended paragraphs, made well in advance of your post. Nonetheless, in light of your response, I felt I needed to use more considered language in even my first paragraph (the one you quoted, and which the subsequent paragraphs were playing Devil's Advocate to), and I have gone back and revised some of my wording accordingly.

I agree with your thoughts here. It's quite beguiling to see that TMP used then-current NASA projects and extrapolated forward, making them futuristic for the time of TMP's release, yet centuries-old history in the annals of ST itself. History that, in the case of Voyager 6, never came to pass for us, but must have been something to see and think about in 1979, and in its own way, remains stirring now. Seems to be a feature of the film that its detractors miss. More's the pity.

 

[Flake]

Nitpick that space jump in Trek XI... I think such a jump would take something like an hour to complete and it comes across as being done in 5 minutes? Also wouldn't they end up many miles 'down range' rather than parallel with the giant space drill?

'twas very entertaining though

 

[Christopher]

Nitpick that space jump in Trek XI... I think such a jump would take something like an hour to complete and it comes across as being done in 5 minutes?

Since Vulcan's atmosphere is thinner and its gravity higher than Earth's, its terminal velocity would be higher; Earth's is around 200 km/h, so let's say 240 km/h, which would be 4 kilometers per minute. But if you start out in vacuum, you'd accelerate to a much higher speed and then get slowed toward terminal velocity as you fell into increasingly denser atmosphere.

Just to keep it simple, let's calculate for a 50-km fall in pure vacuum at, say, 12 m/s^2 (1.22 g). The time t equals the square root of (2d/a) = sqrt (2(50,000)/12) = 91 seconds -- yikes! So without an atmosphere, it'd take a minute and a half to fall 50 km. So we're talking something between 1.5 minutes at constant 1.22 g acceleration and 12.5 minutes at constant terminal velocity of 4 km/min. So diving from vacuum into a gradually thickening atmosphere, I'd say we're talking something fairly close to 5 minutes, yes.

Of course, 50 km is just a wild guess, but the movie did show the Narada hovering not too far above the planet surface. It might've even been less than that.

Also wouldn't they end up many miles 'down range' rather than parallel with the giant space drill?

They didn't jump from directly above it. They jumped from the shuttle on approach while it was still some distance away. Presumably the jump was timed (and the shuttle's velocity calculated) to put them on a trajectory that would line them up with the drill.

 

[Myasishchev]

I thought thinner atmosphere referred purely to oxygen content, which is consistent with the dearth of vegetation--not to absolute pressure.

My understanding is that gravity is a key determinant of pressure, so Vulcan should actually have somewhat higher surface pressure than Earth. I'm willing to be contradicted on that.

 

[Christopher]

My understanding is that gravity is a key determinant of pressure, so Vulcan should actually have somewhat higher surface pressure than Earth. I'm willing to be contradicted on that.

No, not really. Venus has only about 90% of Earth's gravity but its surface pressure is 92 times greater than Earth's. Yes, all else being equal, higher gravity would mean higher surface pressure, but all else isn't equal. Atmospheric density and composition are affected by many factors, including the rate of cometary bombardment from space, the amount of vulcanism releasing gases from the planet's interior, the intensity of sunlight and stellar wind erosion, the amount and type of biological activity, etc.

Vulcan is a dry planet, so we know it can't have many volatiles; most of the water must've outgassed/photodissociated into space. And a thick atmosphere would've slowed that process. Not to mention that air and water are both volatiles, and what removes one removes the other.

 

[Timo]

So I was wondering if anyone knew of any way that we might possibly actually get such specific data from a Voyager probe that such a conclusion could be reached or whether the statement in the movie is doomed to be only the customary and arbitrary Trek handwavium that it was clearly on the writer's part.

Why didn't you ask this question originally, then? Your question was on how the fictional character of Will Decker could know things with certainty. It would be pretty absurd to insist that he only rely on data from some primitive 1970s probe, when obviously a more scientific means of verifying the nature of the past event would be available to him. We don't know what happened to the Titanic from examining the 1910s onboard instrumentation or even from the eyewitness statements - we know it through study by 1990s and 2000s instrumentation.

It would be scientifically quite dubious if 23rd century science officers still went by 1970s telemetry tracks in establishing the true nature of the universe...

As for how 1970s instruments might perhaps give us that sort of data, I'd argue that the disappearance of Voyager VI at known coordinates in an anomalious fashion would allow the focusing of a great deal of instrumentation at that location. And sooner or later, somebody would realize that the location itself was crucial to the disappearance, and even more attention would be paid, eventually leading to the discovery of the telltale characteristics of this black hole -like thing.

Earth in the decades between the 1970s and today would have had so much spare instrumentation and observation time that some sort of a latter-day Herschel would have stumbled upon the blackholiness of that particular spot eventually, even if no "serious" researcher or organization paid attention or dared speculate. No need to involve the instrumentation of Voyager VI itself, then.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Brutal Strudel]

I am somewhat scientifically illiterate but let me float a possibility: what if this was a rather small black-hole-like-phenomena (BHLP) and it was just passing through? If Voyager 6 had its cameras pointed at one of the gas giants and a BHLP was interposed between the probe and the planet, wouldn't a simple visual inspection of the photographs show something? If the probe was then pulled off course before NASA lost contact with it, the scientists could have arrived at the (as Decker points out) ultimately inaccurate conclusion that it disappeared into black hole. Most likely, they figured it was crushed. Since Decker et al. had the damned thing right in front of them, they probably saw no need to discuss that part of it.

 

[Kegg]

So I was wondering if anyone knew of any way that we might possibly actually get such specific data from a Voyager probe that such a conclusion could be reached or whether the statement in the movie is doomed to be only the customary and arbitrary Trek handwavium that it was clearly on the writer's part.

Why didn't you ask this question originally, then? Your question was on how the fictional character of Will Decker could know things with certainty. It would be pretty absurd to insist that he only rely on data from some primitive 1970s probe, when obviously a more scientific means of verifying the nature of the past event would be available to him.

He doesn't seem to be consulting any of these sources, though, just going by what the probe told him. At any rate, the probe has been improved by machines and to begin with was presumably more advanced than the real Voyager probes - even including a basic understanding of its own mission, to learn all that was learnable, however transformed that may have been in time.

 

[Timo]

He doesn't seem to be consulting any of these sources, though, just going by what the probe told him.

Hmh? Wouldn't Decker be quoting these things from memory, without any input from V'Ger or its Ilia-shaped ambassador? I couldn't find the final script online anywhere, but my slowly failing memory suggests that Decker launched into the explanation simply after Kirk had rubbed the soot off the probe's plaque and established its true identity for good. The probe apparently wouldn't have told anybody anything in the 2270s, any more than it did in the 1970s... The information would come from the years in between.

At any rate, the probe has been improved by machines and to begin with was presumably more advanced than the real Voyager probes - even including a basic understanding of its own mission, to learn all that was learnable, however transformed that may have been in time.

Yup - that is probably the bigger scientific mystery here. How does one divine Voyager VI's exact function merely by studying its structure or programming? How does one derive a philosophy or a doctrine out of it?

I mean, the machine planet that eventually captured the probe could have held these explorationist views to begin with, and then imposed them on a bit of sensory hardware. But the point of the story seemed to be that the machine planet couldn't think like humans do, or at least that they didn't rebuild V'Ger so that it would have possessed the sort of "human spirit" necessary for understanding its own mission.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kegg]

Hmh? Wouldn't Decker be quoting these things from memory, without any input from V'Ger or its Ilia-shaped ambassador?

Hm. Then why does anyone assume he's judging things based on 1970 telemetry or any telemetry beyond whatever it is he learned about the Voyager 6 in school/high school/Starfleet Academy? He could just be paraphrasing some stodgy old lecturer for all we honestly know.

Yup - that is probably the bigger scientific mystery here. How does one divine Voyager VI's exact function merely by studying its structure or programming? How does one derive a philosophy or a doctrine out of it?

I'm going to assume it's a tad Asimovan. Just as his robots are given three immutable laws, this Voyager probe has been given an actual directive. So... it's got an AI developed enough to comprehend a basic concept. Heh.

 

[Christopher]

From my novel Ex Machina:

[Spock] spoke of the Voyager 6 probe, and how its encounter with the ergosphere of a black hole passing through Sol System’s outskirts had projected it on a Tipler curve across spacetime to a distant part of the universe. He told of how the probe, badly damaged by tidal stresses, had eventually drifted into a star system inhabited by a race of sapient Von Neumann machines, self-replicating automatons which presumably had evolved intelligence only after their organic creators had died out, so that they retained no knowledge of non-machine sentience. Spock considered it likely that the machines themselves had replicated out of control and overrun their creators, not out of malice but out of following their programming too well. Ironically, only afterwards did they adapt themselves to limit their procreation so they would not exhaust their system’s resources. They had little interest in starflight; their world was in an ancient globular cluster dominated by dim, metal-poor stars devoid of planets. Their probes had turned up nothing of interest to them, and they had long since abandoned interest in space by the time Voyager 6 arrived, though their knowledge of physics was unparallelled.

The machines had studied the battered probe, repaired it and equipped it to carry out its programming: gather all possible information and transmit that information to its planet of origin. (Of course the probe’s primitive software had contained no such abstract generalizations, only instructions for pointing and operating its instruments and antenna; but the machines had divined the purpose of those instructions and acted accordingly.) They had designed and built a technology to enable the probe to search the universe for its homeworld, and given it a form capable of evolving both physically and mentally in order to cope with the information and dangers it would encounter on its journey. Spock’s meld with V’ger had not revealed why the Von Neumanns had done this; V’ger had seen no need to wonder. Perhaps it was simply in their nature as social AIs to assist other AIs in carrying out their programs.

 

[Flake]

Nitpick that space jump in Trek XI... I think such a jump would take something like an hour to complete and it comes across as being done in 5 minutes?

Since Vulcan's atmosphere is thinner and its gravity higher than Earth's, its terminal velocity would be higher; Earth's is around 200 km/h, so let's say 240 km/h, which would be 4 kilometers per minute. But if you start out in vacuum, you'd accelerate to a much higher speed and then get slowed toward terminal velocity as you fell into increasingly denser atmosphere.

Just to keep it simple, let's calculate for a 50-km fall in pure vacuum at, say, 12 m/s^2 (1.22 g). The time t equals the square root of (2d/a) = sqrt (2(50,000)/12) = 91 seconds -- yikes! So without an atmosphere, it'd take a minute and a half to fall 50 km. So we're talking something between 1.5 minutes at constant 1.22 g acceleration and 12.5 minutes at constant terminal velocity of 4 km/min. So diving from vacuum into a gradually thickening atmosphere, I'd say we're talking something fairly close to 5 minutes, yes.

Of course, 50 km is just a wild guess, but the movie did show the Narada hovering not too far above the planet surface. It might've even been less than that.

Also wouldn't they end up many miles 'down range' rather than parallel with the giant space drill?

They didn't jump from directly above it. They jumped from the shuttle on approach while it was still some distance away. Presumably the jump was timed (and the shuttle's velocity calculated) to put them on a trajectory that would line them up with the drill.

Ahh, ok I appreciate your efforts here

I decided to take a look at a page from Wikipedia that detailed the highest free fall jump on record (from a helium balloon) here where Joseph Kittinger jumped from 103,000 feet and reached 614mph and got no faster than this, however you correctly point out that they started off in a vacuum and appeared to get a 'push' from a device on the shuttle.

Perhaps this is scientifcly accurate afterall then? I am surprised! FYI there is a moment in the movie where the viewscreen says 101000 metres to the platform (right before Chekov says 20000 metres, oops)

 

[Brutal Strudel]

From my novel Ex Machina:

[Spock] spoke of the Voyager 6 probe, and how its encounter with the ergosphere of a black hole passing through Sol System’s outskirts had projected it on a Tipler curve across spacetime to a distant part of the universe. He told of how the probe, badly damaged by tidal stresses, had eventually drifted into a star system inhabited by a race of sapient Von Neumann machines, self-replicating automatons which presumably had evolved intelligence only after their organic creators had died out, so that they retained no knowledge of non-machine sentience. Spock considered it likely that the machines themselves had replicated out of control and overrun their creators, not out of malice but out of following their programming too well. Ironically, only afterwards did they adapt themselves to limit their procreation so they would not exhaust their system’s resources. They had little interest in starflight; their world was in an ancient globular cluster dominated by dim, metal-poor stars devoid of planets. Their probes had turned up nothing of interest to them, and they had long since abandoned interest in space by the time Voyager 6 arrived, though their knowledge of physics was unparallelled.

The machines had studied the battered probe, repaired it and equipped it to carry out its programming: gather all possible information and transmit that information to its planet of origin. (Of course the probe’s primitive software had contained no such abstract generalizations, only instructions for pointing and operating its instruments and antenna; but the machines had divined the purpose of those instructions and acted accordingly.) They had designed and built a technology to enable the probe to search the universe for its homeworld, and given it a form capable of evolving both physically and mentally in order to cope with the information and dangers it would encounter on its journey. Spock’s meld with V’ger had not revealed why the Von Neumanns had done this; V’ger had seen no need to wonder. Perhaps it was simply in their nature as social AIs to assist other AIs in carrying out their programs.

Hey, neat! Below, I've posted how I answered Dennis in the Trek XI thread where he brought his issue up originally. (And Timo, I think you'll find the answer to your question: this nitpick isn't searching for a plausible extrapolation so much as seeking to score points for Trek XI at TMP's expense.)

V'Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager space probe gets sucked into a black hole and survives (GAAAAH), and is discovered by denizens of a machine planet who think the logical thing to do is to take a bus-size machine with the processing power of a couple of Speak and Spells and upgrade it to a spaceship the size of small moon, wrap that in an energy field the size of a solar system, and then send it merrily on its way. This is like you assisting a brain-damaged raccoon trapped on a suburban traffic island by giving him Ecuador.

He's being kind (okay, actually, he's going for the laugh) - giving the raccoon Ecuador at least makes a kind of simplistic linear sense (it gets the raccoon off that traffic island, right); what the denizens of the machine planet are asserted to have done does not.

And, again, all of this pooh-bah and foolishness is in service of "dramatizing" (ahem) the profoundly important "message" that Emotions Are Good.

Why wonder that no one but Trekkies were impressed by this thing? Reflect instead upon how desperate we were for Trek to continue that Trekkies lept so eagerly to get at the Kool-Aid. Compared to that, minimizing the logical failins of the Abrams movie doesn't even constitute a short hop - and in exchange, this time we get some competent entertainment.

Why wouldn't they? One of the interesting things about TMP is that is that it actually seems intent on imagining an alien way of seeing the universe, a way that doesn't make much sense to us but, when stripped of human arrogance and judgmentalism, does. Given a planet of machinery that has outlived its creators and is not in any way bound by humanoid concepts of cost/benefit (which are outgrowths of a pleasure/pain paradigm that long predate mammals, let alone primates), why not outfit a data-gathering wayfarer with better equipment to do just that and send it on its way? A machine intelligence could easily evolve along an idea of optimization-of-purpose just as an animal intelligence evolves along an idea of optimization-of-comfort. If that's too much hand waving for you, try this: the machines had nothing better to do. The racoon analogy is one of those analogies that reveal only the intellectual shortcomings of the person making the argument.

(I haven't read Scazi's fiction but I've read a few of his columns--having nothing to do with Trek--and I was not impressed. Nor am I impressed by your reductive dismissal of the themes in TMP. Look, I can do it too: Citizen Kane--"Ambition is Bad!", Hamlet--"Sucks to Lose Your Dad" or "Revenge is Hard.")

If you want your Star Trek to be little more than Tom Corbett or Rocky Jones, that's all well and good, but I'll thank you to stop sneering at us (Kool-Aid indeed) who do not. Really, it's unbecoming.

 

[Hober Mallow]

Other cultures may well have a spectrum of languages, but the UT would render the issue completely moot. Picard probably speaks French all the time, Bashir speaks Farsi, Keiko speaks Japanese, and so forth. It just gets translated to the lingua franca of Starfleet, just like it should.

Which is, according to Spock in "Metamorphosis," English.

What this doesn't explain is how, say, a Klingon is able to offer a mild insult to Picard in Klingonese and prevent it from being translated. If he's speaking his own language the entire time, how is he preventing certain words from being translated by the UT in order for the crew to only hear the Klingon words -- and how is Picard able to retort in Klingonese without that being translated?

 

[Timo]

Perhaps it's literally a "pardon my French" thing: the UT may have a modesty filter built in that refuses to translate cusswords and simple insults, so Picard gets the opportunity to say "Merde!" every now and then, and Klingons get to speak their own language even in the presence of Fed UTs. Instead of inserting a "Beep!" sound, the device merely ceases to function at such moments.

Most of the Klingon language probably consists of insults to begin with...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JarodRussell]

I somehow don't like the idea that they are speaking English.

 

[Myasishchev]

Perhaps it's literally a "pardon my French" thing: the UT may have a modesty filter built in that refuses to translate cusswords and simple insults, so Picard gets the opportunity to say "Merde!" every now and then, and Klingons get to speak their own language even in the presence of Fed UTs. Instead of inserting a "Beep!" sound, the device merely ceases to function at such moments.

Most of the Klingon language probably consists of insults to begin with...

Timo Saloniemi

Boy, that's a somewhat distrubing technology, then... of course, I suppose the translator has always had potential for abuse.

 

[Hober Mallow]

Boy, that's a somewhat distrubing technology, then... of course, I suppose the translator has always had potential for abuse.

Smells like a story!