Science of Sci-fi

GuanYin

Just wondering how important people think science is, in science fiction.

A recent thread on boards.ie regarding what alien life might look like got me thinking about how aliens are represented in science fiction novels and TV and films. From there I started thinking about habitats, space flight and physics are represented in sci-fi.


There are some obviously bad howlers out there, from the cat sized alien that manages to gestate in your oesophagus without you noticing to the fact that Hollow Man (or the invisible man) could see to the classics such as War of the Worlds where aliens were infected by bacteria that hadn't evolved in thier eco-system.

Of course there the fact that nearly everything in Star Wars and star trek is humanoid.

As a scientist I tend to pick up on alot of the mistakes and they do spoil my enjoyment a little (but not that much), I'm just wondering if anyone else finds well written and accurate science important in Sci-Fi.

User45701

Some of the science makes sence.
Alien life is a very high probality...

How would it look?
It depends on the type of life form and what sort of planet it evolvs on. If they evolved on a terran planet then they may be bi-peds

Sarky

Yup. The more accurate and plausible it seems, the more readily you'll accept it, and the show will feel more real and immersive as a result. They tried hard on Stargate, and I loved it. Star Trek's science never really cut it for me. Faster than light travel without folding space or tearing through it, and phasers don't work for me (although maybe my understanding of physics isn't recent enough to see it as possible).

I also love the GURPS RPG Transhuman space, because while it's very imaginative, it's still firmly rooted in hard science. No faster than light travel, no alien races, no lightsabres, but lots of railguns, solar wind sails, powered armour suits and genetically engineered subspecies of human that have nothing in common with their parent race...

On the subject of aliens, I really dislike the fact that most of them appear as humans with extra bits on in most shows. I know it's hard to have a convincing dialoge with an amorphous blob of pshychically levitating neural matter, but Star Trek in particular went too far. Bajorans are humans with funny noses. Klingons are humans with funny heads. Romulans, Vulcans and Ferengi are humans with funny ears. It seems it's impossible for a sentient being with multiple limbs or no lungs to appear in the universe...

bizmark

warp drive makes a bubble in which the ship doesnt travel faster than light but space around it does...i think

Stargate does well enough with real world Science but tbh it wouldnt work that well for Star trek / star wars / Bab 5 set so far in the future .........Plus lets be honest how many people watching would really be able to tell the difference between perfect Science and writer bull**** that sounds right ?

Sarky

It depends on the type of life form and what sort of planet it evolvs on. If they evolved on a terran planet then they may be bi-peds [/B]

I disagree. There's no reason why some other creature couldn't evolve larger brains and a culture to give itself our level of intelligence. Why not a race of superintelligent crabs? Or snakes?

bizmark

Because there’s no point having intelligence if you don’t have the body to use it

Id say all intelligence races will have a common "head" on top of their bodys where they have most of the sensory organs some type of grasping arms with some type of hands and 2-4 legs (because i heard any large animal with more than 2-4 is wasting energy) as for the rest who knows!!

* Bizmark waits for syke to tear him apart for lack of science/biology knowledge

GuanYin

Originally posted by bizmark
Because there’s no point having intelligence if you don’t have the body to use it

Id say all intelligence races will have a common "head" on top of their bodys where they have most of the sensory organs some type of grasping arms with some type of hands and 2-4 legs (because i heard any large animal with more than 2-4 is wasting energy) as for the rest who knows!!

* Bizmark waits for syke to tear him apart for lack of science/biology knowledge

Hehe, all I'll say is, you're looking at things from a very biased perspective. All the "rules" you state there work well on earth, but who is to say that alien life is anything like ours.

Could life evolve as a "swarm" of co-dependant organisms that are linked through sensory feedback to one another. Something like this would be able to manipulate anything as it could physically alter the swarm configuration. We can't say its impossible for something like this to evolve in an alien planet, we can't be sure that our neurological pathways are the only way to make intelligence, it could be a very crude way for all we know. Star Trek never stepped outside the box to think.

Woden

the next generation explained the reason why so there are so many bi-ped humanoid type alien species knocking around in an episode called the chase in which an ancient civilisation thingy seeded a load of planets in the galaxy, which i thought was good effort.

star trek also hired a science guy called andre bormanis to try and give the science some plausibility on star trek, he wrote a book a star trek based book called science logs (and he is currently a writer on enterprise).

half decent science is important to me in sci-fi, you don't have to swallow it hook line and sinker, just enough for you to say yeah ok maybe its possible in the future and let them do there hand waving.

i appreciate the effort they put in when they talk of particles like gravitons and tachyons. i also laughed at something in enterprise once where i think there is a planet (and possibley an episode) called Keto-Enol. which refers presumably to keto-enol tautomerisation in carbonyl chemistry, well i laughed anyway

data

GuanYin

I never forgave TNG for having a chief engineer say "Degrees Kelvin"

Woden

ah i'll forgive him i'm sure i say degrees kelvin and i'm sure i used to put the little o symbol with K back in nam. like when i got reefed at the end of my seminar with

Random Dr. (joky manner) "David, is there such thing as mass spectoscopy"
David "eh eh that would be mass spectrometry would it"

after i spent the whole seminar saying the first one

GuanYin

Originally posted by Dataisgod
Random Dr. (joky manner) "David, is there such thing as mass spectoscopy"

The story would be funnier if the answer to that question wasn't "yes!"

Sarky

How about a planet composed mostly of impure silicon, where a series of random earthquakes and impacts led to the formation of a vast semiconductor network complex enough to think for itself?

Now I think about it, Star Trek TNG actually did something like that, didn't they? Some mining planet where the topsoil had become sentient or something...

bizmark

Could life evolve as a "swarm" of co-dependant organisms that are linked through sensory feedback to one another

Its a big big universe with billions and billions of stars so anything is possible and i sure as hell wouldn’t rule anything out...........Its just nice to think that maybe one day some where we will find a race that looks somewhat like us who we can have a peaceful relationship with .....Noting wrong with hoping

Then again maybe we are alone....maybe life is very common but life capable of space travel (like we will be at some point)is very uncommon maybe we are in a type of galaxy zoo where other races are protecting us from out side interference because we are at the ass end of technology.......just no way to know

what do you think skye your one of only a few peolpe on boards with the education to take a guess (i think)

Woden

the original series had a silicon based lifeform called the horta i think that may be the episode you are referring too.

Sarky

Sort of Prime Directive thing going on, yes?

It's entirely possible.

On the other hand, there's no reason to assume that any alien life would be well disposed to others. Remember Independance Day? Preseumably if such a migratory and conquoring race existed, they wouldn't be running their technology off unprotected, insecure Apple Macs, and we'd never have a chance...

GuanYin

Originally posted by bizmark
what do you think skye your one of only a few peolpe on boards with the education to take a guess (i think)

I think its extremely unlikely that natural selection run on an earth-like will produce an intelligent humanoid creature anything like us. Now, take a non-earth like planet with life and your guess is as good as mine.

Its not just aboutthe aliens though even the language barriers are overcome easily, the physics the methods of reproduction. I saw an astrobiologist say that Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy was probably one of the best science researched sci-fi books ever written.... On the flip side apparently a hugely popular scif fi series is based on a Ringworld (NOT Discworld) that some grad students with too much time worked out to be unsustainable. Surely writers owe it to their readers to avoid this sort of thing happening.

Pepe LeFrits

Worth considering to is the time aspect too. Considering how long it would take for a species to evolve to the point where they would be capable of developing space travel (millions of years?) compared to how long they'd actually be enjoying space travel before self-imploding as a species (maybe a few thousand?), it seems extremely unlikely for species to ever meet each other on an equal(ish) ground like in star trek or stargate.

GuanYin

Originally posted by Sarky
Sort of Prime Directive thing going on, yes?

It's entirely possible.

On the other hand, there's no reason to assume that any alien life would be well disposed to others. Remember Independance Day? Preseumably if such a migratory and conquoring race existed, they wouldn't be running their technology off unprotected, insecure Apple Macs, and we'd never have a chance...

Hehe apparently there is a website for potential alien invaders showing them how to protect themselves against possible computer virus attacks.

A quote from one of the NASA guys regarding the search for life on Mars referred to some images taken on mars was "when we were looking at the rock (in the image) how do we know it wasn't looking back at us?"

bizmark

Originally posted by Sarky
Sort of Prime Directive thing going on, yes?

It's entirely possible.

On the other hand, there's no reason to assume that any alien life would be well disposed to others. Remember Independance Day? Preseumably if such a migratory and conquoring race existed, they wouldn't be running their technology off unprotected, insecure Apple Macs, and we'd never have a chance...

Ya prime directive....You would imagen a alien race able to travel the vast vast space between stars (and maybe galaxys) would have developed planet busting weapon’s and to survives they would of had to become somewhat more peaceful......if that makes any sence

And ya humans aren’t very nice to less developed humans.....so whats to say a very advanced alien wouldn’t come along and kick our ass history on earth shows it’s pretty common to pick on the weak guy

[edit]
Contradiction city
Both are possible.......but if there are any other alien races its likely their very much more advanced than us....we just better hope they are nice aliens

Sarky

Originally posted by kaids
Worth considering to is the time aspect too. Considering how long it would take for a species to evolve to the point where they would be capable of developing space travel (millions of years?) compared to how long they'd actually be enjoying space travel before self-imploding as a species (maybe a few thousand?), it seems extremely unlikely for species to ever meet each other on an equal(ish) ground like in star trek or stargate.

There's a thing. There are surely a few planets in the universe that DON'T get smacked by city-sized lumps of rock on a regular basis, wiping most of the life away forever. Just think, the dinosaurs might have been mucking about between the stars for 60 million odd years or more if they weren't wiped out in that extinction. ( I know the impact alone didn't do it, the Deccan traps probably played a large part too, and there were probably loads of other factors. There always are...)

And that's just a recent big extinction. What if something managed to evolve enough to get off the planet before the biggest one of them all (forget how long ago exactly, but certainly a couple of hundred million years...Cambrian, perhaps?)

seamus

Originally posted by Sarky
On the other hand, there's no reason to assume that any alien life would be well disposed to others. Remember Independance Day? Preseumably if such a migratory and conquoring race existed, they wouldn't be running their technology off unprotected, insecure Apple Macs, and we'd never have a chance...

Aside from the poor script, cheesy jokes, and gung-ho American patriotism, that was the one thing that just completely destroyed that movie.

Hacking into an alien species's mainframe, and uploading a virus from a laptop - an apple at that. They're incompatible enough on earth
Where do you begin to point out the flaws in it?

Woden

it did have data (brent spiner) in it as a general mad scientist which made it ok in my book

Sarky

Maybe, but it did also have Will Smith and America Saving The Day...

And who's to say that aliens would even notice us? Why would your average being of pure thought want to enslave a material race? Would they even notice us?

Back to the science in scifi bit though, while accuracy is all well and good, it can sometimes be a bit restrictive. The background to, say, Warhammer 40,000, is scifi, but they allow all sorts of fantasy type things in because they invented an alternate dimension composed of pure energy that certain people ( Psychics, or Psykers) could tap into and perform magic-like feats with.

They do try for "possible in the future" stuff most of the time, but Warp space provides a handy way to pop in demons and fireballs, and I find the stories no less fun to read because of it...

bizmark

And who's to say that aliens would even notice us? Why would your average being of pure thought want to enslave a material race? Would they even notice us?

You can never have to many slaves
+If there was a lot of intelligent life and if it was easy to take over the galaxy wouldn’t you think SOMEONE would have done it by now? why leave the sol system alone because of one backward race ? (by a galaxy spanning race stander)

Sarky

Maybe they aren't leaving it alone. Just think of all the potential fuel for fusion engines in Jupiter and Saturn... Rocks in space are ten a penny, and this particular one also has this slimy scummy residue over it.

bizmark

i happen to be quite attached to that slimy scummy residue covering this rock .

Ah well it might be many hundereds of years before we have the technology able to reach other stars quickly and hundereds more to visit any great number of planets pitty really such along time to wait for a answer

Woden

i have been giving this some further thought and while nice and accurate science is nice in sci-fi to a certain extent it is not extactly necessary for a good show as i reckon a large amount of viewers wouldn't be that familiar with what is accruate and what is not and they just put it down to techno-babble. it is good though that shows put in the effort

GuanYin

Originally posted by Dataisgod
i have been giving this some further thought and while nice and accurate science is nice in sci-fi to a certain extent it is not extactly necessary for a good show

I agree with techno babble covering up a good show, while it can be irritating if its obvious, it doesn't ruin it. Films I tend to be less forgiving, especially if the flw is an important plot point.

What I really mean regarding this thread though is Sci-fi books!

ixoy

Originally posted by kaids
Worth considering to is the time aspect too. Considering how long it would take for a species to evolve to the point where they would be capable of developing space travel (millions of years?) compared to how long they'd actually be enjoying space travel before self-imploding as a species (maybe a few thousand?), it seems extremely unlikely for species to ever meet each other on an equal(ish) ground like in star trek or stargate.

Umm Stargate is generally meeting civilizations that were raised from human stock so the difference in civilization is only a couple of thousand years. And thus they have some several hundred years behind us and others where their civilization never had a dark age (e.g. the Tollan) and are hundreds of years ahead of us. There are very few civilizations not from human stock and those that are are very far advanced!

Woden

book eh, i read most of the star trek books so for what i said above i think is still applicable to those, there was one thing in of those books recently that irritated me as somewhat important to the plot was the slight difference between humans and another race was put down to the fact that the other race has different stereoisomers in there proteins and presumably there substituent amino acids where different to humans. this was used to explain certain allergic reactions. how feasible does this sound?

i thought it all a bit hand wavey but only as i know a bit about it.

other sci-fi books i've read for example iain m. banks the stuff is just so different and advanced and things are on such a massive scale that i don't think there is much science put into it. humans have a load of drug glands in them, they live on huge O's called orbitals and the ships are huge and run by sentient A.I's called minds. i recommend the player of games and excession from that series of books

data

Stark

Star Trek science is okay for me but for a few moments in Voyager. That warp 10 episode grrr, and they were too inconsistent with transwarp - kind of ruined what was a very interesting aspect to the science of faster than light travel. I mean transwarp seemed to come in every flavour, a coil you could stick in your warp drive, the various slipstream implementations (seven said it was the same underlying technology as transwarp), transwarp corridors, transwarp hubs etc. etc.

Watch Farscape a lot and sometimes the science bugs me there. Most of the time there is no science and you just accept that, the plot/characters are more important. But there was a few "woah there cowboy" moments. Like when Crichton (the lead character) does a Data-style jump through space from one ship to the other without a spacesuit and survives (Apart from having to have his face and stuff regenerated. I don't know maybe that is possible, would love if someone explained it to me.) And another time when they dropped a nuclear bomb down an elevator shaft and "it's okay the elevator walls will protect us".

Stargate science is good, like how they create an alternate universe with alternate evolution of mankind, really interesting.