SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

Without going into too much detail (to avoid spoilers) let me just say that if you had a mini-blackhole and you wanted to use it to destroy a planet, you do NOT need to drill a hole to the center of the planet first. All you’d have to do is release it in the general direction of the planet and let nature take its course.

The tiny singularity (which, depending on how tiny, wouldn’t exist for long thanks to Hawking radiation) would pass right through the unlucky planet and absorb it in seconds.

And by "absorb", I mean blow up.

If a mini-blackhole passed through a planet, matter would fall into the blackhole faster than the blackhole could absorb it and this would result in much of the matter getting compressed so intensely that a sizable portion would get converted to energy. This is why actual blackholes are significant x-ray emitters. So the planet/blackhole encounter would result in a nova-level energy release, not the simple implosion shown in the movie.

Speaking of "shown", I'd like to suggest that Mr. Abrams take a look at the sky and answer the question, "If Mars or Venus were destroyed by a blackhole, how much of the event would you see with the naked eye?"

The answer (in his implosion scenario) is not much, because planets are pretty far apart. If they appeared as big or bigger in the sky as our moon does to us, that implies they’re as close as our moon is to us. Get it? Good.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

The movie never goes into detail about how the AI technology works so I can't analyze that. Instead, I'll just point out a common mistake in most (but not all) computers-taking-over-the-world movies.

There is no theoretical upper limit to how smart an AI can be, which means that once it's capable of improving itself it would quickly (as in later that afternoon) be so vastly smarter than us that the idea that we could do anything to stop it is ridiculous. Can the ants in your yard stop you from eradicating them at your whim?

SCIENCE MOMENT BY E.C.MCMULLEN JR.

Science and technology aren't always the same thing. Science can be about theories and ideas that have no real world applications. Technology on the other hand, deals with solving scientific engineering problems that produces actual material results. I'd like to focus on a major plot device in PANDORUM which employs the ever present use of Chem-lights.

Chem-lights or Chemiluminescence (chemically created light), patented by Omniglow and manufactured in 1986 under such names as Cyalume and Snaplight (to name a few), is an old technology based upon chemical reaction. You break a chemical containing capsule, which is floating in another chemical, and when the two touch they produce light for a short period of time (the atoms get excited upon meeting each other, but soon lose interest). Eventually when the chemical reaction stabilizes and becomes inert, the light goes permanently "off".

Want to know more?

Damn Right, you do!

Continued at /Pandorum Science Moment.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY E.C.MCMULLEN JR.

The word Unobtanium (please tell me you get it) is an old joke scifi staple used in SF satire and comedy. To find it actually being used in what is supposed to be a serious SF movie fraught with social commentary only serves to further demean any attempt at intellectual or moral depth. But that's not the only problem AVATAR has.

For those who don't know, James Cameron has made his mark in making hard-core science fiction movies. In The Terminator movies, time travel is a theory, possibly unlikely, but it isn't fantasy masquerading as science. Everything else was scientifically possible. In ALIENS, Cameron expanded on the hard core science fiction of ALIEN and ran with it. This gave a logic and sense of realism to a futuristic movie. That feeling of place and unforgiving reality allowed audiences to seamlessly plug in to what was happening on another planet, because there remained an order to everything despite the unknown.

TL;DR is for ignorant bumpkins!

Dive deep into the /Avatar Science Moment.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY E.C.MCMULLEN JR.

As writers and directors, the Spierig Brothers made DAYBREAKERS as a science fiction film.

So let's consider the modern source.

Bram Stoker never had his vampire getting killed by the sun. Dracula walked in the sunlight as a normal man. But it was as a creature of the night, that Dracula regained his supernatural powers and strength. Vampires and their issues with sunlight were created by Director F. W. Murnau, who came up with that in his vampire flick, NOSFERATU.

No one at the studio could figure out how to end the picture, so Murnau just had the creature fade away in the sunlight. Since then we've had vampires in sunlight decaying to dust (Hammer), boiling away (SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM), turning into a demon, catching fire and burning to death (VAMP), exploding (NEAR DARK), and burning to death (BLADE). The Spierig Brothers went for burning to death in the sun and exploding if staked.

Okay, sure, why not? I don't know what could cause that, but I know it has a cousin among the viruses. May I introduce, the Baculovirus.

However, since the movie never makes clear how the vampire epidemic came about in the first place - it just happened - I'll leave it alone.

This is what I can't leave alone in a science fiction movie: Vampires and mirrors.

In DAYBREAKERS, vampires can't see themselves in mirrors, so they have to use video cameras and look at themselves in a monitor.

No way.

A mirror, regardless of what it is made of (glass, plastic, polished metal) reflects light. As to its use and function, that's all it does and can do.

Count Dracula didn't reflect in a mirror because, as Bram Stoker wrote him, what we saw of him was not his true form. There are also many moments in DRACULA where he becomes a wolf, a bat, and mist. It's never certain that he really was any of these things, these appearances may have been spells cast upon the human mind to make the characters think so. Bram alludes to this many times.

Some try to explain that a vampire can't be seen in a mirror because it doesn't reflect light. But if that were the case, the vampire wouldn't be invisible, but pitch black. The absence of light is no light, which is dark. If light passes through the vampire because it is invisible - and only visible to humans because it is playing tricks on our minds - then a video camera can't see a vampire either. It doesn't matter what kind of future camera technology they may have. The cameras in DAYBREAKERS pick up all the background light, dark, and shadowed. What's more, as we see from the vampires on the news, the studio uses lights to brighten the on air TV reporters. So their camera's electronic optics work the same as ours today: electronically excited by light photons and transmitting same. And that's all a mirror does - only without any excitement.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY E.C.MCMULLEN JR.

The varmint in THE RIG is supposed to be a creature that lives at the bottom of the ocean its entire life. We did something to piss it off, and so it comes out of the water to kill all humans.

Howzat again?

There is a reason why fish can't live in the sands of the dry desert. It's the same reason why polar bears aren't native to the Amazon river. Watching the deep sea varmints leap about with their acrobatics, having full knowledge of how doors work, and having no problem at all with breathing air, even someone with just an elementary school education would be saying, "What the heck?" (yes, "heck". It's elementary school! You know a lot of foul-mouthed first graders? Sucks to be you, then!).

With the exception of certain mammals and giant squid, deep ocean fish varmints, like the kind that live on the bottom of the ocean and look like these critters, cannot withstand even the pressure change of being brought up to the surface, let alone Above it.

They die. And NO ocean life form can spend long hours out of water breathing air and running about, swinging from place to place like a monkey, all lightening quick. There is nothing in it's natural environment to enable it to develop such muscles.

Anyone who has broken a bone can attest to how quick muscles atrophy when not used for even brief periods of time. So you can easily imagine how difficult it would be for a creature, who has little understanding of its weight in the water (water provides bouyancy), to use or even have the awesomely powerful muscles of a land creature that spends its entire life supporting itself without the aid of water.

You know what happens to the most powerful sea creature when it washes up on the beach and can't make it back to the water?

It lays there dying!

But what if its a killer whale? Even great white sharks fear killer whales! Perhaps-

It Lays There Dying!

Not because its sick, but because it evolved to adapt to its environment.

We have all evolved for our environment. Some of us are more adaptable than others, but no multicellular life forms can be as fast as cheetahs on land swing through the air like chimpanzees through trees, and live at the great tons of pressures found at the bottom of the ocean. This head-bangingly stupid plot device greatly derailed the suspension of disbelief in this movie.