NASA scientists slam 'absurd' 2012
- Thread starter Captain Shaw
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An enjoyable romp? Really?Well OF COURSE NASA is poo-poo'ing it.. It's all a big government conspiracy to conceal the truth..
The movie itself is an enjoyable romp, if a bit bleak at times with all the death and distruction. Pure popcorn pleasure.
I thought it was an abomination. It sucked like a $10,000 Hoover.
The only thing I liked was seeing Danny Glover and John Billingsley in it.
They DON'T?!
Not unless they're carrying actual explosives. Or are Ford Pintos.
Seriously, one of the most enlightening things about Mythbusters is discovering just how hard it is to get gasoline to combust. Although that really should be common sense, since if it were easy, cars wouldn't need complex carburetors or fuel-injection systems to get exactly the right mixture.
Anyway, I've learned that the same NASA panel also named the films with the best science, but of course fewer people are paying attention to that. It's an interesting list with some odd inclusions, but unfortunately none of the articles I can find provide a link to the primary source material, so I don't know why these films were chosen as the best.
Gattaca tops the list for good science. That makes sense. It was a pretty grounded portrayal of genetic engineering. I think there were some slightly problematical things about its portrayal of spaceflight toward the end, but they were minor.
Jurassic Park: Again, makes sense. It was based on the most solid paleontology available at the time, and while its genetic science was stretched for poetic license, it was fairly well-grounded. We now know that theropod dinosaurs were probably feathered rather than scaly, but that can be rationalized by the movie's statement that the JP dinosaurs had gaps in their genetic sequences filled in with DNA from amphibians and such. (Though I understand it's got some gaping holes where the computer science is concerned, like one teenage hacker being able to understand and regulate the entire island's security systems.)
Contact: Very solid science, since it stuck pretty close to Sagan's novel. The wormholes were hypothetical, of course, but based on solid theoretical work by Kip Thorne, work which he started at Sagan's request for the book but that's led to decades of active theoretical work on wormholes, warp drive, etc.
Blade Runner: This one I don't get at all. It's a fantastic movie, but the science isn't very solid. Flying cars and advanced organic AIs in 2019? And the descriptions of outer space are very fanciful; the script seems to assume that humans have colonized not just the Solar System, but interstellar space as well -- "fires off the shoulder of Orion" and so forth. The screenwriters don't seem to have had much grasp of interstellar distances or geography.
Metropolis: Huh? Again, a classic movie, but where's the good science? Its portrayal of robotics is completely fanciful, and its industrial technology is essentially allegorical.
The last one on the list is the original The Day the Earth Stood Still -- another film that I love but would never put on a list of movies with good science. Its grasp of astronomical distances is worse than Blade Runner's, or at least more overtly bad -- Klaatu says his planet is 250 million miles away, which would put it somewhere in the Main Asteroid Belt. And Klaatu's technology is highly fanciful.
So it seems to me these people were just listing sci-fi movies they loved, rather than ones with really good science.
NASA should be happy that they are still a trusted agency for these people to turn to.
Nowhere Man
Commodore
Heaven Can Wait
I already knew 2012 was an absurd film. I don't need NASA to tell me that.
I don't know, space travel isn't exactly booming these days. The questionable state of the shuttles limiting how often they can be used, cutbacks in funding and so on. They might as well use those big screens in Mission Control to watch movies.
Ignorance and irrational fear are enough to guard against and prepare for.
I don't know, space travel isn't exactly booming these days. The questionable state of the shuttles limiting how often they can be used, cutbacks in funding and so on. They might as well use those big screens in Mission Control to watch movies.
Ignorance and irrational fear are enough to guard against and prepare for.
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Captain
Yeah, what after that fake moon landing business where they couldn't even get the flag physics right.
^ Well, you know it seems these days nobody trusts the government, especially the "end of days" people, so to turn to NASA over 2012 is poignant. 
Please tell us you're joking...
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Captain
^ Well, you know it seems these days nobody trusts the government, especially the "end of days" people, so to turn to NASA over 2012 is poignant.
Yeah I gotcha, I was just amusing myself.
Sooo...where's the story that details why they thought 2012 is absurd (and why they think Jurassic Park is a lot better sci fi)? I wanna see the other movies on the good and bad lists, good particularly. Gattaca and Contact on the good list, okay, and probably 2001 as well, but after that, pickins get slim...
This would be fun: for scientists to rate just how plausible or not various sci fi movies are. Is Planet of the Apes more or less plausible than Star Wars? That kind of thing.
This would be fun: for scientists to rate just how plausible or not various sci fi movies are. Is Planet of the Apes more or less plausible than Star Wars? That kind of thing.
Flames, yes. Explosion, no. As I said, it's common sense if you think about it: car engines need elaborate fuel-injection systems to get just the right combination of gasoline vapor, oxygen, heat, and pressure in order to get the explosions that drive the pistons. So it follows that it isn't easy to get that combination. Even if a car is leaking gasoline and there's some kind of ignition source to ignite the vapor, there will just be a fire. The kind of big dramatic kaboom you see in TV and movies is the result of carefully orchestrated pyrotechnic charges and usually a few extra gallons of jet fuel hidden in the back of the car. Gasoline doesn't really burn all that intensely compared to many other flammable liquids. And if a gas tank is leaking, then the fuel isn't fully contained, and any overpressure could be easily dispersed through the holes, reducing the potency of any explosion that could happen.
After all, cars are designed with safety in mind, right? It is possible to make a gas tank explode if it's hit directly in a crash, but that's exactly why modern cars are designed to keep the gas tank well shielded from direct impacts.
If the auto industry were really so inept as to design cars that blew up as easily as they do in movies and TV (and if it were even physically possible for them to do so with gasoline-fueled cars), then the death toll in traffic accidents would be even more monumental than it already is and the auto industry would've been shut down by either an act of Congress or a torrent of lawsuits. (Especially since real explosions are far deadlier to people nearby than fictional explosions are, because real explosions can kill at a distance with shrapnel and shock waves, while in fiction you're perfectly safe so long as you aren't directly caught in the fireball, especially if you're coolly walking away in slow motion.)
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/02/more-than-1-000-dead-birds-fall-from-sky-in-arkansas/
they say this is a gaseous disaster or is it the 2012 thingy?
they say this is a gaseous disaster or is it the 2012 thingy?
Errr... even if there were a "2012 thingy," which there isn't, why would something that happened on the last day of 2010 be part of it?
And the article doesn't say one word about a "gaseous disaster." It suggests they were either killed in a storm or, basically, scared to death by New Years' fireworks.
I couldn't sit through the whole thing. At least I was able to finish The Core. Of course, I'll watch anything with Delroy Lindo & Stanley Tucci.