Movies and plausibility...

Am I the only person who has seen the new movie "The Fourth Kind?" Don't know quite what to make of it other than it scared me half to death.

I guess it falls under Science Fiction, but as far as I could make out it's true. They're telling us that what those people experienced, in the movie, is actually true. It really happened, or is that part of the movie? There's even a list of the doctors (phychologists, psychiatrists) who tried to help the victims of whateveritwas that happened. The doctors wanted nothing to do with the movie. Sorry I saw it.

It's a mockumentary. None of it is true.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1220198/

From Roger Ebert's review:

Mila Jovovich seems to get mostly horror movie roles for some reason. She deserves better.

Nobody is going to travel cosmic distances in order to kidnap rednecks, and the ancient astronaut themes which Jeremiah Sitchin and others like to talk about can be explained in terms of antediluvian solar system realities without the involvement of anybody from other star systems.

There are two kinds of space travel, i.e. travel within your own star system, and actually travelling cosmic distances to other star systems. The one is doable with present or near term technology; the other may never be doable in any practical terms.

If you scale our solar system to the diameter of a yardstick, then the sun is the diameter of a human hair, and Alpha Centauri is four miles away and that's the nearest. Everything else is further. The thimble full of antimatter which it would take to get to Alpha Centauri in less than one human lifespan would cost on the order of thirty or fifty times the GNP of the United States to produce.

You gonna go to that much trouble to kidnap rednecks??

Of course these alien abduction stories are sheer nonsense, be they stories fabricated out of utter lies, mental illness, or a combination of both.

Our understanding of antimatter is what approximately 100 years old.
http://livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/history/am-history00.html
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6683.html

For all we know, civilizations may have been studying this branch of science for millenia and might presently park themselves in industrial colonies around say ... black holes or astrophysics based structures that we are completely unaware of to mine fields of antimatter jettisoned....

My biggest complaint with those vocal naysayers here is because of their absolutist nature of their beliefs. In one of many interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson's had with either Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, he (like every other intelligent and rational scientists) admits how much we don't know about the universe outweighs how much we know: 99% unknown to 1% known. I guarantee he's being modest with his assumption. It's intriguing and frustrating when the so called self proclaimed greatest minds (via outright implications) sited here in this debate can blatantly state their dogmatic beliefs outweigh even the reasonably skeptical greatest minds human history has ever known.

Now that was really hilarious.

Whiner.

Unless you propose that the cosmic speed limit of 186,212 +a fraction of a mile per second can be ignored, the propulsion systems don't alter the necessities of dealing with microgravity and cosmic radiation over very long periods of time, and vast distances. Ten thousand light years is still ten thousand light years, and if you want to go to Antares, even if you can make a significant fraction of the speed of light, say 80%, it's still going to take you twelve and half thousand years to get there. That will require enormous expenditures of materials and energy. The greatest minds living cannot overcome this, which is a mathematical certainty.

Let me know when you get your faster than light rocket ship built, 'K, whiner?

One simple question: How many of Issac Newton's theories have been debunked since he formulated them?

You're shamefully blindsided by your dogmatic belief that our present day theories are 100% accurate. Not 95% accurate or 97% accurate or possibly 99% accurate. I can absolutely guarantee you if you asked Stephen Hawkings, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and many others or if you could talk to Albert Einstein or Carl Sagan they all would say they are in some degree skeptical of our present day understanding of physics. The very nature of being a great scientist is to keep a healthy skepticism and continue challenging our present day beliefs and not give up when we constantly find out what we believe is dead wrong and we still shooting down laws of physics which were believed to be irrefutable at one point or another.

I've not been "blindsided" by anything. Absolutely nothing to which i have referred is Newtonian. Unless and until someone can who how the limitation of light speed, beyond which matter converts to energy, can be circumvented, the impositions of time and space are unavoidable. I don't assume that 100% of any theories, nor any percentage of any theory, are accurate. The speed of light is a demonstrable fact, not a theory. That is not a belief, it is a demonstrable fact. For example, it was repeatedly demonstrated by the radio communications between Houston and the various space craft which were involved in the Apollo project.

Get over it.

You're obviously missing the big picture point. Literally for centuries, the laws seemingly discovered by Issac Newton were seen as irrefutable/untouchable in their accuracy. Centuries later, many of his greatest ideas have been proven false.



For centuries, Newton's laws were deemed FACT. Demonstrable fact like the so called laws involving the speed of light as you continue to OCDesque insist.

There's nothing obsessive or compulsive about what i'm saying, shitmouth. I saw your feeble attempt at making a point about Newton, but it is not relevant to the point i'm making. That point is that the speed of light, for as much as it frosts your tiny human balls, is a demonstrable fact which severely limits the probability of you or anyone else achieving you cherished fantasies.

Of course, if you can't get over it, it's no skin off my nose.

By the way, pouty little boy, that someone "deemed" Newtonian physics to be fact is not at all the same as having demonstrated the case. I don't use words like demonstrable because i think it's cool, i use them because they have a specific meaning which is germane to what i'm saying.

You and I seem to agree on this one. I believe human feet will be on Mars within five years from now, and the technology to go anywhere in our own system is at least forseeable within a decade or two.
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Alpha Centauri may be possible with technologies which are more than a few decades out, no real way to say, but anything much further than that is hard to even picture.

Avatar at least gives some notion of the scale of the effort involved, most sci-fi flicks simply finesse the problem and claim that faster-than-light travel will simply cease being a problem at some future point for reasons unknown. Even the five or six year trip in suspended animation described in Avatar assumes travel at some major fraction of light speed while most people who talk about actually doing anything like that in the forseeable future talk about ten or twenty percent of light speed, tops.

By which i take it to mean that you refer to people who entertain realistic expectations . . .

When i write of 80% of light speed, it is for illustrative purposes only--to demonstrate that even at such speeds as that, the cosmos is still so damned huge, that the time required to cover such vast distances beggars the silly assumptions of most science fiction. I have no expectation that the human race will be traveling at such a large fraction of light speed any time soon.

For centuries, Newton's laws were deemed FACT. Demonstrable fact like the so called laws involving the speed of light as you continue to OCDesque insist.

Newton laws turned out to be a special case for Einstein laws that fit for speeds under 10 percents or so of light speeds nearly 100 percent and very closely even for 80 percent or so of light speeds.

Newton’s laws were not disproved in the sense you are trying for in any case.

Aside from the question of getting people to other stars, there's a question of getting information to them. Avatar glossed over that one. Using present technologies, it would take just over four years to get a message from here to Alpha Centauri, assuming we had a transmitter powerful enough to do it at all.

There is in fact a possible solution to that one but whatever it would take to do that is nowhere in sight as of yet. That of course would involve harnessing Ralph Sansbury's sub-electron particles to the task somehow or other.

You'd still have the problem of getting human bodies to ACA, which could not be done faster than C with any known or imaginable technology as of today.

I mean, that's part of what's charming about Avatar; the film gives you some idea of how hard doing some of these kinds of things would be.

I've not seen the film, nor know anything about it. (I'll wait for the DVD.) However, if it actually introduces some reality into motion picture science fiction, that would be a good thing.

One of the sci fi novelist jokers had a book about human immortals, a handful of people in the population even after all these thousands of years, and his premise was that they would go off to a distant star system, and since they were immortal, it didn't matter how long the journey took. The book was lame in many respects, but entertaining if one suspended disbelief for the basic premise. It was entitled The Boat of a Million Years, i believe.

But when reality strikes, we are left in a situation much like that faced by European colonists centuries ago. When the First Fleet, as it is known in Australian history, left England in 1787, they might as well have been going to the other side of the galaxy. In the more than 50 years of the convict system, nobody escaped permanently and made it back to England. The convicts dropped on "the fatal shore" in 1788 had simply been uprooted with no prospect of return, and little to no prospect of ever communicating with home. Even when, in later years, people came out as willing colonists, they did so with the knowledge that they likely would never see home or their loved ones again, and might get a message from home, or send one, every few years at best.

This is what, in a realistic scenario, human interstellar colonists would face. If some sort of suspended animation were developed which were reliable, and the problems of microgravity and cosmic radiation were effectively dealt with, they would still be faced with the prospect of never seeing home again, and very likely not being able to ever again communicate with the friends and loved ones they'd left behind. If, for the sake of argument (and only on that basis), one assumes a speed of 80% of C, to got to a planetary system 40 light years from the Earth would still take 50 years. Your friends and loved ones would be dead by the time you got there, and you're not going to be picking up the phone to call anyone on Sunday afternoon after church.

You just about need to see Avatar on the big screen. This one is really different from anything you've seen before. As much of a jump forward as Alien and Star Wars represented in 1977 - 1979, this one represents from anything you'd seen up to this time.

Even the 3D thing. The 3D glasses they hand are are a world apart from what you used to see and the effect is absolutely realistic.

If I had to pick any one thing about Avatar which bothered me...

To the best of my understanding in the history of the world, nobody has ever drawn a bow with two fingers; you either use three fingers, a thumb ring, or a modern release device.