No science. There's no actual sense of discovery or problem-solving, just some tropes imposed in a high-tech setting. Example: event symmetry was a near-perfect explanation for the persistence of the alternate timeline in Source Code, but that has real-world implications - we wouldn't want to strain the poor brains of the movie-ticket buyers!
Spoilers for the movie Life, although the peeves in question are present in a number of movies. Excessively human astronauts/cosmonauts/taikonauts (or whatever). To be clear, I'm not talking about anyone traveling in or exploring space, just near-term, government sponsored space explorers*. I'm sick to death of seeing childish behavior, petty backstabbing, and a general lack of professionalism among people who are portrayed as astronauts. To date, there have been only 550 people to orbit the Earth, out of a current population of seven and a half billion. Our current space explorers are the most thoroughly screened, trained, and then re-screened humans ever to live. They make Olympic athletes look like random bums off the street in comparison, so when I see something like the beginning of Life (minor spoiler) where everyone in the crew is shouting suggestions and arguing about an EVA when the astronaut is preparing to go out, it tells me exactly what kind of crap the rest of the film is going to be. Then when Spoiler: Big spoiler for Life the creature gets loose inside the quarantine room and attacks the biologist and Ryan Reynolds says "screw the quarantine," right at the moment when it's clear that it was necessary... yeah, no. *to be clear, I have no problem with lunatics and assholes in space in further-term SF, where there are mining colonies, prison worlds, all that. I'd expect them there, just not on the ISS.
Second peeve, and this is another big one for Life, is hyperpowered aliens. I'll wrap the details. Spoiler: Huge spoilers for Life The damn alien is immune to fire. It's immune to vacuum. It's immune to the radiation from direct sunlight in vacuum in Earth orbit. It's immune to the cold, in the shade, in vacuum, in Earth orbit. It's so smart that its first official act as an escaped baddy is to find and disable the comms system on the ISS despite the fact that twenty-five days prior, it was a freeze-dried single-celled organism. Oh, and about that, it has all these superpowers because it's made up of undifferentiated cells. Why didn't Terran evolution come up with muscle cells that were also brain cells that were also skin cells that were also rods and cones and auditory nerves all at the same time. This little bastard makes the Alien look like ET without the healing powers. Come to think of it, that was one of my favorite parts about the Predator. He got injured, had a first aid kit, had to use it, and it hurt. Like in Battle Los Angeles, a movie that wasn't without flaws, when the aliens a) show concern for their wounded comrades, and b) have a crew-served weapon that requires reloading. My inner jarhead was all squee at those scenes.
So in less that a month an alien bacteria grew a body, and just so happened to evolve into godhood/demigodhood status? I have got to see this nonsense and probably lose my shit, on just how absurd this all sounds.
Humanoid aliens. I feel that they're lazy at this point. There are lots of ways to make a compelling non-humanoid character. Odo from DS9 is a great example. He is not human at all but he tries to be and takes their form (roughly) so he's a compelling character.
Agree with Pericles. There is so much to choose from when it comes to alien life forms. (Real)Witness accounts of people seeing all kinds of strange things/beings is a great source of inspiration, I think. And maybe make it less ... dark? How about having aliens going about their daily life(if they have one) here on earth but being disturbed by humans. Something like that.
The science part of science fiction has largely died out I think. I dont many people are really looking at the possibilities of future technologies, even those in their infancy, and using them in films. The last I can remember was the nano-wall in Doom. Something that would actually be possible in the future. Instead you get more of the 'Star Wars' 'Space Opera' type films, and thats fine, I generally really like them. I don't get hung up on 'realism' because i'm not looking for that. What I do find tiresome, and I found this with star trek and even more so with stargate, is humans superior morality over everyone else and how alien races are one dimensional and based upon a specific group of people from human history. You dont see a 'multicultural' group of aliens, unless you are having a alien civil war, then you just get two one dimensional opposing sides. Its tedious. That said, it is hard to think alien. What does an alien think? I remember black library tried some years ago to put together an anthology of alien race stories and, as far as i know, it didnt work because authors were putting too many human traits on to alien races. I'm also bored of franchises. The Alien franchise is awful. 2 films were enough, the rest have been garbage with no new ideas at all. Predator was an amazing film, what has followed since has not been as good. Even Star wars, prequels awful, sequel - well, not an original idea in sight but at least they got the feel right. (Wont mention Darth Tantrum or General Rantsalot.) I think a 'science fiction' film would look some what out of place now. Future science vs fantastical CGI environments. and trying to explain science would be incredibly dull. However, I would like to see some more sensible things in the way of space ship design. (The spaceships from space 1999 were, imo, the most sensible predictions for space craft design ever) or space travel ( I believe the theory of a perputal motion engine has been agreed upon now - so constant acceleartion without the need for a huge fuel supply). Even FTL is on the verge of being theoretically possible. And then there are books that have the potential for films, that do use science. The space battles in Jack Campbells Lost Fleet series are heavily based in maths and realism for example with travelling at speed effecting all sorts of things, including the time it takes to see things happen. Gets quite complicated at times.
I really like the Lost Fleet. I enjoyed the way he described the physical and time scale of the battles, and how they used the time delay to their advantage to try to outwit the enemies. But I'm not sure how well it would translate to a film. A reeeeeeaaaaally long build-up and then a battle that's over in a heartbeat would probably not be very satisfying to watch. Though, they could do some cool slow-mo stuff to expand the timescale of the battle so you could actually see it.
I understood Snowpiercer as a commentary on how stratified society victimizes those at the bottom of the pecking order.
I think people beat up the big franchises for lack of creativity too much. Most of them started a while back, so they were just originals that other people copied, therefore making the whole theme seem unoriginal. Also, for anyone who says the Jurassic Park/World movies aren't good, you're wrong. If you don't like Avatar, you need a reason other than their logo just being the Papyrus font. If you don't like Star Wars (other than episodes I-III) you're wrong. Interstellar is good, but I never want to watch it again, I don't know why. Arrival is good, it reminded me of Interstellar, but I could watch it more than once. Star Trek has too long a history for me to understand or catch up on. Really bad movie though, HBOs new Fahrenheit 451. They did exactly the thing that the book said not to do.
The Arrival movie with Charlie Sheen (Carlos Estevas) was pretty good. Also Star Trek is kinda like Star Wars Having a huge Universe and history to it.
My biggest peeves are FTL scanners, engagements at ranges and speed where the human eye can follow, and WINDOWS/EXPOSED BRIDGES ON SPACESHIPS. Space is about the most inhospitable place for life. So WTF do ships designed for combat have windows and exposed bridges? You’re in space. You see with scanners at ranges of billions of kilometers and interact with things moving hundreds or thousands of kilometers per second. No windows.
I think you’d enjoy The Lost Fleet. All the combat at FTL takes place at a fraction of a second, following hours or even days of laborious preparation for a battle you don’t really know anything about because of the time delay. It’s much more enjoyable to read than that description makes it sound
I assume you mean it's been agreed that it's impossible? Perpetual motion would require an increase of entropy of exactly zero, which is not possible as we understand the laws of physics. Even a perfectly tuned physical machine has quantum uncertainty, so entropy always increases. There have been several theoretical ways to decrease entropy (most famously called Maxwell's Devil,) but those have always been resolved. The biggest problem doing such a thing is that we're not entirely sure what entropy is. It's somehow both an emergent property of space in time, but at the same time appears to be fundamental.
If you are going at 60 percent light speed how far ahead can you scan before you are on top of whatever is heading your way? LIL!
I’ve gone through just about every Jack Campbell book there is haha. Excellent suggestion for others here though.
Depends on distance and method of scanning. If you're going 60% the speed of light, it'll still take you 12 minutes to get from Earth to Jupiter. Space is really really big. I would think some type of LIDAR would work for navigation even at those speeds. Remember that if you're moving at 60% the speed of light, from your reference frame, you're still sending pulses out at exactly the speed of light.
I got really far into TLF and then lost steam. I want to pick it up again, but feel like I’d have to start again. And I’m not sure I really want to do that
So the velocity of the signal cannot be increased nor decreased based on the movement of its source through space? Does that mean that a photon's rate of departure from our position can never be diminished by any acceleration on our part? If a photon is moving away from me at the speed of light and I try to catch up to it by trying to close the the distance at 90% the speed of light, would not its rate of movement away from me be reduced to 10 percent the speed of light? If you are running away from me at 50 mph and I tray to over take you at 40 mph, then your increase if distance from me would be reduced to a ten mph rate. If indeed light violates this, just exactly how does it do it? ndias420@comcast.net
No, even if you were going 90% the speed of light, and then turned on the headlights of whatever vehicle you were traveling in, the light would move away from you at c, the same relative speed that you'd observe it moving if you were stationary.
What bothered me about the film Life is that they did not blame the fellow who had the creature attached to his leg for not having told them that it was attached to his leg. In fact, he seemed to have protected it by explaining to them that the creature needed to kill top survive as it secretly slithered up his leg. They didn't find his silence strange after they discovered it? Come on! That's similar to how in the film Alien the crew members didn't blame the android Ash for not knowing that the fellow who had had a face-hugger attached to his face harbored a parasite in his gut. After all, Ash had all the technological medical means at his disposal to know such a basic fact. So suspicion should have been immediate that something was awry.
