Blueshift - July 17, 2009

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Maggie Masetti: Welcome to the July 17th, 2009 episode Blueshift, the 
podcast brought to you from the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA's 
Goddard Space Flight Center.  I'm Maggie Masetti.

So, here it is, mid-July and you know what that means!  Well, for me, it 
means packing about where my summer has gone. But what it really means is 
that the movies are full of summer blockbusters. When you work somewhere 
like NASA, everyone's got a bone to pick when a new sci-fi movie comes 
out.  Sometimes Hollywood gets the science right... but more often than 
not, it's terribly, painfully wrong.


Sara Mitchell and I walked around and asked our friends and co-workers 
what really annoyed them about how astronomy (and science in general) is 
portrayed in Hollywood.  We really expected the major complaint to be 
about things like sound in space, and though that did bother a few people?

Meredith: Sound in space...

Bryan: Sound in space?

Derek: There's no medium for sound to travel through.

Maggie: ...in the end, we got a much wider variety of answers than we 
thought we would. We had people sound off about old movies as well as 
newer ones, but either way, there might be plot spoilers, so keep that in 
mind! First up, Independence Day.

Brendan: There's the part of the movie where the main spaceship is 
supposed to be like a quarter of the mass of the moon and it sits between 
the Earth and the Moon and doesn't, you know, peel off our atmosphere or 
cause tides to go, you know, 900 feet tall, or whatever. And then they 
blow the thing up in the end, and it falls down to Earth, and it's a 
quarter of the mass of the moon and nobody gets hurt really, and it looks 
like the 4th of July... because it's Independence Day. Yeah, that's one of 
the ones that really bothers me.

Tommy: Well, in the recent Star Trek movie, I found the scene where Spock 
somehow manages to watch the destruction of his home planet from like, 
across the galaxy really frustrating.  You know, this kind of like lack of 
representation of distance in astronomy is often frustrating in movies. 
And also, anything where anyone gets sucked into a black hole. From far 
away. That is also very frustrating to me. Mainly because it took me such 
a long to develop an understanding, as a scientist, of how black holes 
actually do accrete material.

Brendan: Not to mention the fact if that they're really that advanced, 
then, you know, why wouldn't they just genetically engineer a virus to 
kill all humans and dump it in the atmosphere?

Laura: There was the scene in Tombraider where they were talking about the 
supposed planetary alignment of all the planets... aligned perfectly. 
Yeah, that doesn't happen. There was also the fact that she could walk up 
to her in-house observatory, look through a telescope, and see all the 
planets simultaneously aligning. That also doesn't happen.

Brendan: Or grab an asteroid on their way in, and slam it into the ocean, 
and kill everybody, and just wait a few days, and then take over the 
Earth.

Eric: Probably the worst offender that I can think of lately is the movie 
Mission to Mars. That movie I had great hopes for, because at the time, at 
the time I was working on the Mars Global Surveyor mission.  But as my 
kids and I were watching the movie, and we saw them getting ready to 
explore Mars, and then I noticed that their landing site was Cydonia. 
Cydonia is the location of The Face. And unfortunately the movie went 
downhill from there. On the whole, giving credence to the Face on Mars 
movement was extremely disappointing.  Another movie that came out at 
about the same time called Red Planet with Val Kilmer and Carrie Ann Moss, 
wasn't a whole heck of a lot better because suddenly Mars had a breathable 
atmosphere, which surprised the heck out of me.

Brendan: Or why that advanced a civilization would really need to, like, 
kill all the humans and take over the Earth when there are all kinds of 
planets out there to grab resources from.

Maggie: Ok, ok, Independence Day aside, when does bad science matter, and 
when can we just suspend our disbelief?

Peter: The number one thing is they portray that it's that easy. You just 
look at a bit of data, and oh, that's the right answer. It just falls into 
your lap. That is not true. Finding the right answers takes a lot of 
effort and legwork and generally investigation. It's not as if you can 
just run an observation of some object and know everything about it five 
minutes later.

Tommy: I think movies set in space tend to not ever really be about 
science at some level. So in that kind of situation, I can forgive 
explosions in space, or people leaping across from starship to starship 
with no breathing apparatus or anything, right? But in movies where 
science is like a central theme? I'm thinking specifically of The Day 
After Tomorrow here...that sometimes gets so bad, that watching the movie 
becomes incredibly difficult. Yeah, I'm willing to be forgiving most of 
the time, but if science is central to the plot, then no way! Get it 
right, you know! Call someone at Goddard!

Maggie: Well, I'm sure we'd all like to see them get it right more often.  
You know, like, in that movie Signs, when the aliens who are allergic to 
water try to take over a planet that is mostly water? I mean, it even 
falls from the sky here. What's up with that? And don't even get me 
started on Armageddon!  Of course, all the opinions in this episode are of 
individuals and not of NASA. So now we want to know, have you seen any 
good movies lately?  Or were you driven crazy by impossible physics in 
Transformers 2?  You can sound off about astronomy in the movies at our 
website (universe.nasa.gov/Blueshift) or you can find us on Twitter... 
We're @NASAblueshift (all one word). We?ll see you in a couple of weeks 
with another episode. This is Maggie Masetti, bringing the universe closer 
to you, with Blueshift.

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