Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Bill Pragnell wrote:
> > Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >>> we can control gravity without using a
> >>> centrifuge. I think this is more unlikely than FTL travel
> >> Given these are both based on relativity, why would one be more likely than
> >> the other?
> >
> > I wasn't aware we had any theories at all that might give us arbitrary gravity
> > control. I'm a bit behind on my cutting-edge physics though so perhaps I missed
> > it.
>
> Well, we're looking for the Higgs right now. We have zero theories that
> would give us FTL.  The closest we have, "Warp drive," assumes you're going
> to frob gravity around to make it happen.

Ok, I see what you mean. (I don't like warp drive personally, it's a retrofitted
contortion that, as you say, requires quite fine gravity control. I rate it
alongside star wars' hyperdrive to be honest. I was thinking of wormholes etc.)

> Actually, there's also the wormhole bit with "exotic matter", but it turns
> out "exotic matter" means matter with negative mass, so again it's
> intertwined.

Yeah, I guess that does push it into hyperdrive realms doesn't it. It just feels
a bit better developed because you can hide the detail in the exotic matter,
whereas I've not heard of any engineering applications of the Higgs Boson yet!

> > I've certainly not read any SF that offered any explanation for gravity other
> > than sheer mass, whereas there's lots of genuine relativity-driven FTL travel
> > ideas knocking around.
>
> I haven't seen any well-founded FTL mechanisms that don't assume it's done
> through manipulation of gravity. Wormholes, black hole travel, exotic
> matter, space warps... all gravity effects.

Hmm, the 'manipulation of gravity' that I was thinking about wasn't any cleverer
than piling big fat masses up in interesting ways - ever read any Stephen
Baxter? He's a big fan of going to the end of the universe to watch the last
protons of humanity decay... :)

Post a reply to this message

Chambers wrote:
> Oh, no, I just saw an asteroid that's going to hit the earth 2 1/2 years 
> from now, I have to rush down the mountain in the middle of the night 
> instead of making a phone call, so I can get killed running off the road 
> just so we have some reason to add tension to the first half of the movie!

You gotta start somewhere.  Not exactly genius, but not particularly 
buggy that one.

In any case, he did get killed because was on a rush to get the digital 
data delivered ASAP (mail server was down) and was trying to phone while 
driving.  yeah, just watched again to be sure... :)

tension is good.

Post a reply to this message

Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Ok, I see what you mean. (I don't like warp drive personally, it's a retrofitted
> contortion that, as you say, requires quite fine gravity control. 

Well, it's the one that actual scientists are actually talking about. :-)

> I rate it
> alongside star wars' hyperdrive to be honest. I was thinking of wormholes etc.)

Generally speaking, "hyperdrive" and "warp drive" tend to mean the same 
thing - going somewhere that the speed of light is faster. (Assuming it's 
explained at all.)

> whereas I've not heard of any engineering applications of the Higgs Boson yet!

Well, it depends what you can do with it! Higgs provides inertial mass, as I 
understand it, so it's really likely the basis of any "generated" gravity.

> Hmm, the 'manipulation of gravity' that I was thinking about wasn't any cleverer
> than piling big fat masses up in interesting ways - ever read any Stephen
> Baxter? 

The few I've read have been awful. :-)

And piling up big fat masses isn't gravity manipulation to achieve FTL 
travel? :-)

As an aside, I just got back from the bookstore and it seems they have no 
actual science fiction in their science fiction section. There was some 
heinlein and asimov and other dead authors, a whole shelf of star wars and 
star trek, another shelf of manga, and everything else was vampires and 
dragons.  Oh, except for the John Ringo type stories. (Many of which I'm not 
even sure why they're listed under Science Fiction, except the author also 
writes some science fiction.)  WTF guys? Haven't you written any actual 
science fiction in ten years? Is America so hopelessly stupid and luddite 
that nobody reads something with actual science in it?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

Post a reply to this message

"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:4adb6cf3@news.povray.org...
> somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:

> > Except that, even in these movies, the only purpose those on board serve
is
> > to screw things up. How hard would it be for NASA to crash an unmanned
craft
> > into the sun? All you need is 1960's dumb technology for that, scaled up
> > accordingly for the payload.

>   I find it rather amusing how you are bashing a movie you haven't even
seen.

<g>

>   You *think* that it was just a question of "let's send a rocket to the
> Sun... oh, it failed, well, we'll just send another... oh, it also failed,
> well, we'll just keep sending them until one succeeds; heck, let's send
ten
> ships at the same time, at least one is going to succeed".
>
>   Except that's not the case in the actual movie, which you would know if
> you had actually seen it. The second ship was the absolutely last chance
> humanity had. That's it. No more. If it fails, humanity is dead.

The *first* ship would have been unmanned in reality.

And *if* the second unmanned ship failed, *then* they'd send a manned rescue
and repair mission, which would make for a more beliavable premise.

>   The idea was that they packed *all* the fissive material they could find
> into the two ships. There was no more after the second one. Finito. If the
> two ships failed, humanity is dead.
>
>   Thus it makes a lot of sense to send a manned ship. Even the smallest of
> failures, something which could be trivially fixed by a crew, could mean
the
> mission would fail.

I'm afraid manned crafts still don't make sense. Trying to accomodate humans
badly compromises such missions. Not just due to life support issues, but
mainly due to the need to return them back to earth. Maybe one reasonable
scenario (stealing even more heavily from 2001) would be to have one or two
sacrificial humans in suspended animation, to be awakened for a limited time
only in case of emergency. Alternatively, you send a trailing rescue/steward
mission. But really, there's next to nil that can go wrong on an impact
mission to the sun if you do your homework, and there's next to nil that on
board humans can do should something go wrong, as Columbia and Challenger
showed us. Yes, astronauts fixed the Hubble, but that took months of intense
ground preparation.

Post a reply to this message

On 10/18/09 16:36, Darren New wrote:
> Neeum Zawan wrote:
>>> Also: Mission to Mars (altho the movie itself was not that great)
>> Fun movie. Not at all hard SF, though, or even close.
>
> Really? They even got the orbital mechanics right and such. I thought it
> was very good physics, other than the very ending of course.

	Well, perhaps you're right. It's been a while. I suppose Mars doesn't 
have a significant enough atmosphere to worry about burning up the way 
they entered?

-- 
When you die, you lose a very important part of your life.
                 -- Brooke Shields

Post a reply to this message

Darren New schrieb:

>> Event Horizon has some great SF in it, 
> 
> I have no idea why everyone liked that movie. I thought it was awful.

Not /everyone/ did. I think it was one of the worst "SF" movies ever: 
You go to the theater expecting some nice decent science fiction (in 
broadest sense) action movie, and all you get is some horror thriller.

"Contact" was equally "disappointing", but it was easily able to make up 
for it by being ingenious in its own right.

I think "Alien" was just as bad as "EH", but as I never went to the 
theater to watch it, I'm more willing to forgive.


In this respect - i.e. regarding expectations being met, "Independence 
Day" was probably the best Sci-Fi-Action movie I've ever seen, both at 
the theater and at home.

It promised straightforward action and special effects in a Sci-Fi-esque 
setting, and hit that mark 100%. The plot was just an adaptation of "War 
of the Worlds", but it never claimed to have an original plot in the 
first place.

Ah, thinking about it, I must say that there's another movie that fully 
met my expectations, /and/ had an intelligent plot: "I, Robot". It 
actually /exceeded/ my expectations, in that it managed to amalgamate 
multiple of Asimov's short stories and their plot devices into a 
consistent single storyline.


Another movie set in the future and happening to feature Will Smith, "I 
am Legend", definitely falls into the same category as "Event Horizon". 
A pseudo-science-backed classic vampire movie - WTF?!

Post a reply to this message

Stephen schrieb:


> attack craft behave as if they were aeroplanes. Accelerating forward to 
> go faster when they are in orbit and banking when they turn.

Yeah, they obviously didn't play those "attractor" leves of "Osmos" :-)

As for banking however, there /is/ some sense to it (though probably 
unknown to most movie makers) for manned craft: While "upward" 
acceleration of 9g can be survived with proper equipment and training, 
"downward" acceleration of that order of magnitude probably kills 
instantly though brain hemorrhaging, and I could imagine that "sideways" 
acceleration of 9g could break a pilot's neck.

(I couldn't find any definite infos on this on the 'net, but it seems 
that for instance roller coasters in Germany may have an "upward" 
acceleration of up to 6g, but a "sideways" acceleration of no more than 2g.)

So while it is most likely true that attack craft in movies typically 
bank because the director didn't think /at all/, non-banking (manned) 
attack craft would only prove that the director didn't think /enough/.

Post a reply to this message

Chambers schrieb:

> One based on biology rather than physics: 28 Days Later.
> 
> It's not a movie about zombies.  It's a movie about rabies on crack - 
> and it's one of the best movies of the decade :)

Given that you think it worth mentioning, I reckon it /is/ a movie about 
zombies, backed with a pseudo-scientific background story explaining 
that this type of zombies happens to be people infected by rabies on crack.

Just like "I am Legend", I guess.

I actually detest such movies. If I'd want a zombie movie, I'd watch a 
/real/ zombie movie.

Post a reply to this message

somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:
> The *first* ship would have been unmanned in reality.

  Why? The first ship failing for a trivial reason was as possible as with
the second ship.

> And *if* the second unmanned ship failed, *then* they'd send a manned rescue
> and repair mission, which would make for a more beliavable premise.

  You don't "rescue and repair" a ship which eg. plummets into the Sun
without exploding because something critical failed a bit before.

  I honestly think you are now really stretching to try to find something
to complain (about a movie you haven't even seen). I'm failing to see your
ultimate motive. Is it to disagree just for the sake of disagreeing? What
is your ultimate goal?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Darren New schrieb:

> >> Event Horizon has some great SF in it, 
> > 
> > I have no idea why everyone liked that movie. I thought it was awful.

> Not /everyone/ did. I think it was one of the worst "SF" movies ever: 
> You go to the theater expecting some nice decent science fiction (in 
> broadest sense) action movie, and all you get is some horror thriller.

> "Contact" was equally "disappointing", but it was easily able to make up 
> for it by being ingenious in its own right.

> I think "Alien" was just as bad as "EH", but as I never went to the 
> theater to watch it, I'm more willing to forgive.


> In this respect - i.e. regarding expectations being met, "Independence 
> Day" was probably the best Sci-Fi-Action movie I've ever seen, both at 
> the theater and at home.

> It promised straightforward action and special effects in a Sci-Fi-esque 
> setting, and hit that mark 100%. The plot was just an adaptation of "War 
> of the Worlds", but it never claimed to have an original plot in the 
> first place.

> Ah, thinking about it, I must say that there's another movie that fully 
> met my expectations, /and/ had an intelligent plot: "I, Robot". It 
> actually /exceeded/ my expectations, in that it managed to amalgamate 
> multiple of Asimov's short stories and their plot devices into a 
> consistent single storyline.

  Wait a moment. You base your opinion about movies solely on whether they
meet the *expectations* you had about the movies before seeing them (rather
than judging them in their own right, without any prejudices)?

  I'm sorry to say this, but that sounds just crazy.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message