Netflix greenlights new "Lost in Space"

Clarke's axiom regarding "sufficiently advanced technology" being "indistinguishable from magic" is often quoted, but it tends to sound as if what's being discussed is necessarily a gap of centuries, millennia or even eons. Fifty years will do it, easy.

 

Discussion about good and bad moral behaviour is likely irrelevant to aliens, who don't have knowledge of human social, ethical and religious systems (or don't care) and who might feel naturally superior given that they are much more technologically advanced and appear not to be biologically limited. Anyway, Jesus didn't die for their sins...

 

OK what if a deal was made with the aliens to get the engine but we backstabbed them once we got the engine and how to use it?

 

Also, keep in mind that it was the alien crash the caused the disaster that necessitated starting an off-world colony in the first place. Is there anything morally wrong with using the technology that caused the disaster to try and recover from it, even if they didn't originally own it?

 

I guess not "shrug"

 

And yet, it's still one of the more hopeful sci-fi shows currently being produced. I think it's pretty balanced in showing danger and hope in the face of adversity.

 

I'm wondering if the new Jupiter 2 has any windows besides the front where the flight deck is.

 

That would depend on whether it crashed on it's own accord or was intentionally shot down without provocation. The impression I got was that it was the latter case.

Also, these things appear to be entirely synthetic, so for all we know the drive core may be more than just a piece of tech and stealing one is tantamount to kidnapping--perhaps quite literally if it has anything to do with how they reproduce.

 

That seems highly unlikely. If it hit hard enough to cause the equivalent of an extinction-level asteroid impact event, then (since it was presumably much less massive than an asteroid) it must have been traveling at very high speed, and Earth missiles would've had no chance of shooting it down. (If the explosion had been the result of the ship's reactor exploding rather than the impact, then I doubt any tech would've survived to be salvaged. Even in the impact scenario, that's iffy, but if it had very robust shielding, interior components would have a better chance of surviving an impact from without than an explosion from within.)

 

I could think of at least a half dozen different scenarios that could account for all of those objections, but since the show is keeping it's cards close to the chest on exactly what happened, there's really not much point in speculating.
Maybe it was found inert out beyond Neptune, shipped back to Earth for study only for it to suddenly come to life, freak out and try to open a wormhole while on the ground. Maybe the detonation of a defence mechanism, or the first step in an aborted terraforming process. Maybe the actual impact wasn't even the ship, but a round from some kind of railgun that holed whatever earth ship that was engaging it before blowing a hole clean though the planet before it could be subdued. Who knows? Doesn't really matter at this point.

Though the bottom line is that it seems much more likely that by whatever means, the ship was forced down than just happened to randomly crash of it's own accord.

 

Why?

 

Because the alternative is that the robots are *really* bad drivers, obviously.
I mean it's difficult enough to hit a tiny planet in the vast emptiness of the cosmos on purpose, but to do it by accident is just a special kind of incompetent.

 

I perceive.

But so many things have crashed in other stories (Roswell!) I didn't give it a second thought.

 

I didn't notice before, but now that you mention it, I haven't noticed any.

 

We are talking about Lost in Space, a show that was originally about crashing on a planet by accident (or rather, through sabotage). So the premise that such a thing is possible is inherent to the franchise.

 

I thought they did a scene with Maureen doing some maths and it looked like she was sitting by a window, and I think was on the ship. But I can't be arsed to watch the episode to find an exact frame haha

 

I'm sure that never crossed the writer's minds. (Sorry, I made the mistake of watching Into Darkness after a The Expanse binge. I'm grumpy about the Enterprise crashing into Earth in MINUTES when it was at the orbit of THE MOON.)

 

Assuming that the information we have been given so far is correct and that the data had not been manipulated beforehand.

 

What data? I'm talking elementary physics here. The crash was an extinction-level impact event. That is an undeniable fact, a reality affecting everyone on Earth for years on end, so it can't possibly be untrue. Everything else is just math -- to get an impact of that magnitude, the ship must have been traveling very fast, so it's profoundly unlikely that near-future Earth defenses could've shot it down. Not to mention that the idea that you could shoot a spaceship down and have it crash on Earth when it wasn't going to anyway is untenable, because orbital mechanics don't work that way. If it were passing through the Solar System and not heading for Earth already, then crippling it with weapons fired from Earth wouldn't change its course toward Earth; any acceleration the weapons fire imparted would probably be away from Earth. If it had been heading for Earth, then presumably it would've been decelerating for orbital insertion or landing, so knocking out its engines before it completed the maneuver would cause it to miss Earth, not crash here; and if it had completed the maneuver, then it wouldn't be going fast enough to cause an ELE on impact. If it had already been in orbit at the time, then knocking out its engines would just cause it to stay in orbit, because orbit is a stable trajectory. If, alternatively, it had been in a powered hover over a particular point on the Earth's surface, then disabling it would've caused it to fall to Earth, but again far too slowly to cause an ELE.

 

Maybe I need to go back and watch some of those episodes again, but what evidence is there that the ship or meteor's crash was what caused the extinction level event other than people were told it was?