SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

Alien invasion stories invariably imagine the invasion to use methods that are just extensions of our own. The spaceships carrying the off world hordes are just futuristic versions of Naval troop ships, etc. But this movie is unique in that it imagines a method that doesn't involve any physical vehicle or object.

Instead some kind of force is projected that allows someone somewhere to manipulate humans on the genetic level and create a humanoid variant loyal to that someone. An invasion by proxy, if you will. And I can no more imagine how it's done than a jungle tribesman of New Guinea could imagine how television works. Not only wouldn't he know - there is nothing in his world view that would even serve as a basis for guessing or extrapolating how the magic picture box might be made to work.

Which means I have no science objections to this example of Clarke's Law: "A sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic."

SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

Could the Van Allen belt catch on fire?

Absolutely not.

The Van Allen belt is a region in the Earth's magnetic field that traps sub-atomic particles from the solar wind (electrons in the inner belt, protons in the outer belt). Radiation is higher than normal inside the belts but it's still the hard vacuum of empty space. There's nothing there to burn.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

I understand the real purpose here is to express the fear people felt about nuclear testing.

These bombs were huge and scary and still a relatively new thing. Who knew what the consequences would be? Before the first nuclear weapon was detonated in 1945 there was some real fear that the heat of the explosion would ignite the atmosphere, incinerating all life on Earth (Now THAT would be The Day the Earth Caught Fire!). But could very large nukes actually change the tilt of Earth's axis or even change Earth's orbit and send our home world spiraling into the sun?

No. Not even close. Not even a little tiny bit.

On a human scale a nuclear explosion looks like a huge event of immense power, but from the Earth's point of view it's the tiniest of unnoticeable pinpricks.

The Earth is a huge body and the amount of energy it would take to alter its axial tilt in a single shove is more than humanity has ever produced in all of its history put together. If we tried to do it on purpose and detonated all of the 10,000 or so nukes the Russians and the U.S. own all at once, it still wouldn't be enough to nudge a body as massive as Earth. And actually changing Earth's orbit so it was heading for the sun would take many orders of magnitude more energy.

That being said I will point out that the movie does a good job of showing the kinds of climate shifts you'd get if an event like this did occur. The writers were much better climatologists than physicists. But if the Earth's axis shifted by 11 degrees as they describe it would be immediately obvious to even amateur astronomers, because constellations from the southern hemisphere would suddenly be visible. There would be no denying it.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY E.C.MCMULLEN JR.

Could this really be? Could you remove a human head and transplant it onto another body?

Back in the mid 20th century, Dr. Robert White successfully proved the efficacy of the first head transplant of a mammal. He was able to repeat his method, making it fact. Others were able to repeat his methods, most notably Russian scientist, Dr. Vladamir Negovskii, a pioneer in reanimation in his own right.

Since the 1960s, humanity has had the capability of keeping a decapitated human head alive for days. Which means that any damage to the person's body could be repaired without worry of the damaged body killing the brain.

Which means that millions of people have died needlessly in the past 50 years. So why was this operation stopped? Why didn't the technology advance (repairing the necessary spinal cord between head and body)? The very idea made people squeemish.

Continued at SCIENCE MOMENT: The Brain That Wouldn't Die (Trigger Warning, there are videos of actual head transplants and living decapitated heads).

SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

John of Ephesus chronicled the bubonic plague that hit Constantinople in the late 6th century A.D.

He wrote:
"In some cases, as people were looking on each other and talking, they began to totter and fell on the streets and at home. It might happen that a person was sitting at work on his craft, holding his tools in his hands and working and would totter to the side and his soul would escape."

He goes on to describe how everywhere one looked were:

"corpses which split open and rotted on the streets with nobody to bury them."

This plague killed more than a third of the population of Europe and Asia

My point is that pandemic diseases are not unknown in human history. They've happened before and will happen again. But a disease that turns you into a vampire? Unlikely, I'll admit, but I have no problem with it here. You don't become a superhuman immortal demigod like Dracula. Instead you become a deranged shambling pitiful creature that feeds on blood.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PARALLEL EVOLUTION!*
(Read anything by Stephen Jay Gould, but especially Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History).

Of all the reasons why they should have known where they were, the most obvious is life.

Every person, every oak tree, every blade of grass should have been a clue.^ And let's not even get into the fact that the apes spoke perfect, 20th century English! At the very least they could have made mention of the idea that perhaps after they left Earth some one invented faster than light space travel and colonized this world a thousand years before they got there.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

When you want to make a movie about a weird place where interesting weird stuff happens to topless natives, they're gonna have to be topless alien natives, because even in 1968 when this movie was made, the entire surface of the Earth was extremely well mapped.

There are no uncharted islands or hidden valleys or, especially, lost continents. ("Now where did I put that continent? It was here a minute ago . . . ?")

SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

Let's set aside the fact that if there's a planet opposite Earth, why isn't there an opposite Mars or opposite Venus? I'll do that because the whole premise, though interesting, is impossible.

A planet that shares Earth's orbit 180 degrees away is in an unstable position. Perturbations from the other planets would draw it more and more out of alignment and there's a good chance it would ultimately collide with Earth. This would happen quickly on the geologic time scale, which means if it were there we'd know it by now (there are more science problems than this, but to tell you more would spoil the movie -feo)