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.

Pepe LeFrits

Originally posted by ixoy
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!

Human. Asgard. Goa'uld. Nox. Foothold Aliens. Serrakin. Re'tu. Reole.

Most of these are at a level quite similar (technologically or intelligence wise) to eachother. Which is amazing considering it'd take millions of years for each of them to develop.

Pepe LeFrits

Originally posted by k.oriordan
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.)

haha, I believe in that case what would happen in that case is that all his veins and arteries would push out to the surface of his body and explode (along with his eyes), while his body at the same time instantly freezes. That'd be some regeneration job.

Oh, and apparently the linings of the nose, throat and rectum also probably get pulled out through their relative orifices, while the entire torso will swell up (but probably not burst). Sweet.

ixoy

Originally posted by kaids
Human. Asgard. Goa'uld. Nox. Foothold Aliens. Serrakin. Re'tu. Reole.

Most of these are at a level quite similar (technologically or intelligence wise) to eachother. Which is amazing considering it'd take millions of years for each of them to develop.

Okay I'll take this as a challenge on a couple since you do know your SG-1:

* The Nox are far ahead of us. That was made abundantly clear in the episode of the same name. That's why they're up there hanging out with the Ancients. If I recall they made a point about their technology being so advanced that it would seem like magic to us.

* The Goa'uld don't count either because they are scavengers. Naturally they'd be at the same level (roughly) of other civilisations because they've plundered those civilisations to acquire technology (again a point stressed in the series).

* The Asgard are pretty far ahead of us - warp capabilities, for example, and cloning techniques. Since they were on the council with the Nox they are assumedly on a par and thus more advanced than might be readily apparent (energy sources, for example).

* 'Foothold' aliens and the Re'tu - we know too little about them to make a judgement.

All our own ships are scaveneged from the Goa'uld scanvegers themselves and shouldn't be seen as a merit of our own cultural or technological advancement. Unlike Trek, SG-1 has a much more believable sense of cultural and technological development - one of the many reasons I like it so much.

Pepe LeFrits

Originally posted by ixoy
Okay I'll take this as a challenge on a couple since you do know your SG-1:

* The Nox are far ahead of us. That was made abundantly clear in the episode of the same name. That's why they're up there hanging out with the Ancients. If I recall they made a point about their technology being so advanced that it would seem like magic to us.

* The Goa'uld don't count either because they are scavengers. Naturally they'd be at the same level (roughly) of other civilisations because they've plundered those civilisations to acquire technology (again a point stressed in the series).

* The Asgard are pretty far ahead of us - warp capabilities, for example, and cloning techniques. Since they were on the council with the Nox they are assumedly on a par and thus more advanced than might be readily apparent (energy sources, for example).

* 'Foothold' aliens and the Re'tu - we know too little about them to make a judgement.

All our own ships are scaveneged from the Goa'uld scanvegers themselves and shouldn't be seen as a merit of our own cultural or technological advancement. Unlike Trek, SG-1 has a much more believable sense of cultural and technological development - one of the many reasons I like it so much.

You're missing my point. Even if the Nox or Asgard are a few thousand years ahead of us technologically, that's still only a drop in the ocean time-wise. A load of races evolve over a period of a few million years and all end up travelling among the stars at the same time, within a few hundred/thousand years of each other technologically.

More 'realistically' would be for SG1 to find mostly species with an ape-like level of intelligence (unas and so on) and lower, and the remains of extinct civilisations (like the Ancients). Not very entertaining though

dictatorcat

You're missing my point. Even if the Nox or Asgard are a few thousand years ahead of us technologically, that's still only a drop in the ocean time-wise. A load of races evolve over a period of a few million years and all end up travelling among the stars at the same time, within a few hundred/thousand years of each other technologically.

There are factors you're not considering. Civilizations may be classed into type 1, 2, and 3. A class 1 civilization uses all the resources of it's planet to harness energy to meet it's needs (we barely justify being in this category), class 2 ones use all the energy supplied by it's stars to fuel it's needs, and finally a class 3 one uses so many stars it practically consumes a whole galaxy. The problem with this model is that presumably most civilizations would become extinct before the end of being a class 1 due to the time scales involved, and the differences between the classes of civilization would also be huge, as in SG1 where some control galaxies while some have even ascended beyond our comprehension. Conversly a primitive intelligence would not remain so for long, look at us, we've gotten as far as we have in just 100,000 years or less - nothing in geological time. The Asguard are a type 3 civilization, pretty much as far as it can go, they control a whole seperate galaxy as did the Ancients who are not extinct. The whole point of the class system is that it's steps a civilization need to reach so as not to become extinct due to exploding stars etc. Bit disjointed but hopefully i've made my point.

simu

Good sci-fi should explain the science it uses whether that be in terms of technology or the biology of aliens or whatever. It should also apply the rules it creates for itself in a consistent manner. If it's set in this universe, the rules of our universe should apply along with whatever new scientific discoveries are made in the fictional future. For example, if the laws of thermodynamics don't work anymore, there should be some explanation why not! If it's set in another universe, this universe should also be consistent internally.

Some sci-fi writer prefer to deal with more philosophical themes in their works - in such a case, I don't mind a lack of detail about scientific principles involved as long as there aren't errors that show the writer hasn't bothered thinking something through. In brief, I'm prepared to accept a certain level of technobabble given that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear as magic to us poor humans of the 21st century!

Some sci-fi, I still like despite obvious flaws in the science as it has more good than bad qualities overall. Star Trek TNG would be a good example - I share the attitude of Laurence M. Krauss (who wrote "The Physics of Star Trek" - a book on the flaws in ST physics of all things) - He pokes fun at the mistakes but is still fond of the show.

I'm also lenient with older sci-fi that is outdated due to scientific developments in our own reality - there's a lot more to the sci-fi genre than simply trying to predict the future exactly.

OmeGar

To me it comes down to how well it is written. I don't mind if the story ignores science, or self consistancy, As long as it has good characters.

However if a story ignores it own science in order to get around a problem in the story, then it's just bad writing.

If they remain self consistant that is brilliant. This can often add to it, as for awhile you wonder is there a solution.

anyway. the story is important.

Stark

I think His Dark Materials trilogy(I consider it a fantasy/sci-fi hybrid as most of the ideas are possible if highly unlikely) and the Hyperion books are great examples of storyline benefiting from consistent science within the books, even if the science is a very theoretical long-shot.

It's one of the reasons I prefer sci-fi to fantasy. Fantasy writers just have too much freedom.

echomadman

I'm just wondering if anyone else finds well written and accurate science important in Sci-Fi.

Not being a qualified scientist, but being a bit of a dilettante I finf that glaring inaccuracies bug me, but on teh whole if the narrative is good enough then i'm not too pushed.

Stephen Donaldsons Gap Series was quite well written without screwing around with the laws of space-time too much, and it had non-humanoid aliens.

Cant think of any really bad ones right now though. As for the science of star trek... well, "gibberish, all gibberish" sums it up for me.

Sarky

And another thing: Didn't the last episode of Atar Trek TNG make a lot of use of "Warp 13"?

did they ever bother explaining that one away, especially after Voyager's Warp 10 shenanigan's?

ecksor

Yeah they did. See some posts on the star trek forum about it for all the boring details. I think STaN posted about it.

bizmark

Originally posted by Sarky
And another thing: Didn't the last episode of Atar Trek TNG make a lot of use of "Warp 13"?

did they ever bother explaining that one away, especially after Voyager's Warp 10 shenanigan's?

Easy to explane either they made a new Warp speed rateing system like they did from Tos to Tng or warp 13 is really a transwarp speed

Tree

Robert Reed writes lovely sci-fi with fair chunks of nice physics in it, for instance, as a planet gained mass it started to slow its rotation to conserve angular momentum, not blantantly explained for the world but physicsy ppl like me and my friends picked up on it and loved it. Nice solid science is quite nice to come across, too much made up jargon or over explainedness can be irritating. though i can live with out explanations too.

accept that it seems like magic! (still dont like fantasy novels though..:S)

As the great A.C.Clarke said something about sufficeintly advanced technology seeming like magic (dont ask me to quote anything other than king lear)

he's another great sciencey sci-fi writer!

Capt'n Midnight

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

Devil in the Deep. Janus IV was the planet. Organism used fluorine based blood - bout the only thing that will dissolve silicone. (not silicon)


If the science is not plausible or following common rules then it's fantasy. eg: most of Voyager

Jules Verne - most of the stuff he wrote was based on real science. Anyone see the program where they discovered ancient french SCUBA - brass and all which was contemperary with 20,000 leagues under the sea ?

Helloconia series was ruined by the gradual increase in the amount of pure fantasy into the series.

WRT: Warp - I prefer the original system where each warp speed was light speed cubed
eg: warp 1=C, warp 2 = 8C, warp 3= 27C
so warp 10 would be 1000C and warp 30 =billionC would take you to the edge of the observable universe in 10 years.


RE: being in space without suit, was done in 2001 - the main trick being to exhale all air so you don't swell up - you can survive for maybe 30 seconds - the guys on the Diving forum might know more details on the effects of decompressions.