This can also happen to any writer who sells his/her story to Hollywood In the second part air was breathable but it was because they have terraformed the planet. The terraforming facility was not only mentioned as a sidenote to give a plausible explanation to why they can breathe but it played a role in the story. A role so important that the fact they can breathe air became the sidenote to support the existence of the facility itself. Brilliant. Not to mention the limited amount of ammo (often neglected), limitations of technology (and clever ways they get around these limitations) and the human weaknesses (fear, greed) You haven't read the book. In the book they meet the "big" form of the alien in the food storeroom as he is opening the boxes and eat the food in them. Of course it is still stinky as 1) how did the alien find the food stockroom on a big ship, 2) how did he know what's in the boxes when these were closed air-tight and 3) how can an alien life-form digest food made for humans (maybe this one is plausible saying that likely the same kind of compounds are present everywhere in the universe). Still it has a sort-of explanation to how it could grow that big. From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo ) :
Nope, matter of fact I have not read the book. I know there is a series/franchise of books based off Alien & Predator, but I didn't know the original had a book form. Is the book older than the film, or is it a novelization of the film, published afterwards?
They are novelizations written by Alan Dean Foster : - Alien : - Aliens: Hope the links are not considered as being adverts
They wouldn't be, but you used the media button instead of the link button so they didn't show up. No worries. I now know who wrote them so I can track them down myself. I read the novelized version of AVP in 2004. It was the year that Florida got hit 4 times by hurricanes and we had rented a house on the far coast to escape the worst of hurricane Jeanne when it looked to make landfall (and did) just a few miles south of where I lived. Someone had left the copy in the rented house and it kept me company as we weathered the storm.
I used the link button but it was converted to media. Let's try without linking it : Alien : www.amazon.com/Aliens-Alan-Dean-Foster/dp/178329017X Aliens: www.amazon.com/Aliens-Alan-Dean-Foster/dp/178329017X
This time they show up. Strange, that. Anywho... I asked to know whether the film had omitted the pantry raid by the xenomorph or if the novelization attempted to address the conservation of mass issue. It would seem then that the latter is the case. I agree with you, a bit of a poor fix, but at least plausible. I'm still not convinced at the idea of something the size of a ferret growing to the size of a very large man within a day, though, as regards thermodynamic conversion. Yes, bamboo grows quite fast, but it's mostly air chambers, there is very little mass when compared to the growth of such a solid and large creature. The xenomorph would be a furnace of heat.
I didn't hate AVP too much. AVP: Requiem was a felony crime. All it was missing was: "Ahh! Ahh! Scary monsters are chasing us! Oh, look, the J.V. locker room. I think now is a good time for a shower and some gratuitous and utterly random nudity!"
Yepp, they could have spent a few more days with the search for the creature making it's growth a bit more plausible
It depends on how serious the work is. Riddick is fun action, while other works may need an explanation for that level of silliness.
While '"fluffy" inside' sounds surprisingly silly for a science fiction novel (?), a world bigger than Earth could be less dense, having less mass and therefore, despite being bigger, have less of a gravitational force?
Yes, such a smaller density planet could exists but do not imagine a rocky planet with the size of Jupiter and the mass of Mars. No rigid material is that lightweight (except some artificial ones but those are very unlikely to form planets). During the Big Bang only hydrogen, helium and small amounts of lithium and beryllium were formed and thus the distribution of these is homogeneous everywhere. Heavier elements are formed in the cores of the stars and released out to deep space during supernova explosions. The amount of these heavy elements (carbon, iron, etc..) slowly increases over time and influences the composition of new planets. When a new star and it's planets form the matter of former supernovas is used in the process and therefore the planets will contain heavy elements (like Earth). A planet which is older than Earth may contain less heavier elements and therefore has less density, while a newer planet is likely to contain more of the heavy elements and is more dense. "Cosmic history" (eg how many supernovas occurred nearby) also affects density.
Good points; thus, I concede that rocky planets larger than Earth, but with less mass and less gravity, could exist, but... we run into other problems. The main of which is the "Mars is a Microwave Oven" issue. As you may well know, Mars was not large enough, and its core was not sufficiently dense and the outer core not sufficiently radioactive to maintain a molten state and an electromagnetic field. Even if Mars had been closer to the sun and had better surface conditions, life as we know it would be subject to solar radiation the likes of which we were no designed to withstand. Earth was large enough to keep a hot, spinning core running our electromagnetic shield, but the size of the planet is only part of the story. It's pretty radioactive down there and this comes from the kind of heavier elements you mention in an area of space that has had a storied "Cosmic History". Our planet is loaded with heavy metals and heavier elements, so this neck of the woods has seen some action. The kind of planet you propose, by definition, would not have the interior composition of heavier elements needed to protect life from the local power plant, the sun. It would be like our moon that is nearly all rock and no metal (relatively speaking when compared to the Earth) because it appears to have formed from only mantle ejecta after Earth's impact with the hypothetical Theia, the core of which (Theia) seems to have combined with Earth's core subsequent to the impact when everything was still soft and squishy.
This planet would be lethal for humans but species evolved there may live happily in that radiation (or deep in the ocean). Without metals easily available, they may not be able to build a highly developed technical civilization, though. Sometimes when people talk about a very-very developed race that built it's first spaceship billion years ago, they might talk about something which is simply not possible. The Universe itself needed time to produce enough heavy elements to create planets that can support a technically developed race. This is not necessarily true as it depends on the rate of supernova explosions and as I know these were more frequent in the "early days". New idea : what, if the planet is bigger and heavier than Earth but rotates much faster? At the equator this produces a significant upward acceleration (force)
The Dark Knight Rises. Every scene where Selina fights is impossible, not to mention cringe-inducing.
In principle the creature could have absorbed elements from the atmosphere and used them to increase its mass. It's not as crazy as it sounds: where does all the mass in a large tree come from? Not all of that is drawn out of the soil; a lot of it is from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (which is then inconveniently released when oil is burned). I understand it's not very plausible for that to happen in day or whatever!
A tree is able to get all of that mass because very very little of a tree is living tissue. Trees are a very thin layer, just beneath the bark, that stretches from the roots to the leaves. Most of a tree is actually dead.
How did I miss this thread? It's been a real pleasure reading through it. It's also made it very clear to me that I will NEVER write Sci-Fi! I do not have the brain/knowledge for it. I don't think I'd ever sink to the level of 'unobtainium' but I sure as hell would founder when it comes to planet density, etc. But god, I LOVE reading and watching sci-fi. Loved Pitch Black (watched it because of Claudia Black, who is one of my very favorite actresses) - although I did wonder what the critters ate when they couldn't get her. I also loved Alien. Never gave a thought as to how the critter got so big, so fast. I just assumed it did, and that aspect was scary as hell. See what I mean? Don't have the brain for this. Favourite show of all time? Definitely Farscape. But lord, the wacky science ... translator microbes ...living ships ...wormholes ... What I loved was that this strange and totally unbelievable fantasy science was just the framework to tell a very human story—and the script itself often poked fun at the science. The fake science existed to embellish and focus the story, which was, oddly enough, a story about 'real' space and the future. How do we deal with the vastness of space? What might it contain? What are our fears and hopes for space exploration and colonisation? What would our personal and political motivations be? And how will we react when scientific theory becomes fact—or gets turned on its head? And how WOULD we interact with an alien species? Will it be Close Encounters–or Independence Day?
Hi @jannert , be my guest here in the realm of "mocking authors who are more successful than we are" Don't worry about brain/knowledge. This thread is for hard sci-fi fans and the most popular sci-fi-s are soft ones -> full of unobtanium and Hollywood science.
I recently discovered Farscape and have been working through the entire series on DVD from Netflix. I really like it. Yes, the science is rather iffy in many (most?) places but the world has a workable self-consistency. It's that self-consistency with at least a nodding acknowledgment of real science that makes it work. I love the living ship concept. I think that's great. The translator microbes... well on a TV show they can't deal with alien languages in every episode. That would take too much time from the story. So they have to find some way to wave their hands around the issue. I find translator microbes at least as good a hack as the "universal translator" on Star Trek. I especially like it when the hack doesn't quite work, such as when we learn Pilot's native language is so complex the translator microbes can't keep up. Anyway what makes Farscape so good, I think, isn't the science or technology presented but rather the characters.
I agree with you about the microbes. I thought it was at least a more complete and compelling addressing of the language thing. Characters in Star Trek are constantly having their communicator badges taken from them as part of plot-lines when they are away from Federation environs and they don't suddenly hear everything in its native unintelligibility. That inconsistency always bugged me about the Star Trek hack. The Farscape route used issues with the translator microbes to story-line advantage where Star Trek just ignored holes in the fix.
Answering the original question: it depends. It depends on the style. I wouldn't say I consume sci-fi for it's credebility, but there are a lot of blurry invisible lines to be crossed. Every real world rule you break the less serious you need to be about your world. So a sci-fi can never be as serious as a present. A sci-fi with FTL has to be less than one without. Time-travel even less. So, yeah, you can engage the infinite improbability drive and tell me that the answer is 42 and I'll be fine with it, as long as you do it with a smile.
The one place Farscape REALLY goofed was the second episode of Season 1, the episode entitled "I, E.T." The crew lands on a planet that (like Earth) still doesn't believe there is anything 'out there' but themselves—so it stands to reason these inhabitants would not have had 'translator microbes injected at birth.' And yet they can understand and speak to John Crichton as well as the inhabitants of any other planet. It was a plot hole that never got covered, and it's always bugged me. Mind you, it WAS the first episode beyond the pilot for the series, so I forgave them.
I am a bit of a stickler for accuracy on these things. My planets must be earth-like in most respects- be stable in terms of rotation and orbit, sit in the goldilocks zone, have a strong magnetic field, orbit a sun-like star (to prevent tidal-locking or excessively strong solar winds) etc etc. When I read anything involving the reintroduction of an atmosphere to Mars all I think is- whats the point? It will only get blown away again. So yes, I am with the OP on this one.
For my gn, most of the races breathe air and some are humanoid, but not all. I intend to put in a race or two that can't live in a human environment and don't like anything like humans. One of the none humanoids will have a hive like society.
