Favorite ridiculous SF/fantasy cliches

[Prince of Kitties]

Not offensive ones, just ones that are absurd and silly.

 

I think my favorite so far is "bad space weather."

 

In bad SF films: ion storms look like huge purple storm clouds, and damage your starship's armor or whatever.

 

In real life: "ion storms" don't look like anything, but will give you radiation poisoning.

 

The realistic version seems like a better plot device to me, so I have to wonder why it barely ever gets used on film and television.

[Randomizer]

Transmission of sound through the vacuum of space. Alien had the tag line that in space no one can hear you scream, but Star Wars and others had the noise of space ships moving.

 

American Physical Society once published in its monthly newsletter the top 10 physics mistakes from Star Trek: The Next Generation and I wish I knew where I put it.

 

Edit - Found it

[Lilith]

creatures from other planets having biology even remotely compatible with humans. we shouldn't even be able to eat their food let alone reproduce with them.

[Harehunter]

Silicon based lifeforms. Even though silicon resembles carbon in many ways, it just doesn't combine into molecules as complex as carbon does.

[keira]

Suns turning into black holes and somehow magically gaining the ability to suck in planets even though they have gained no mass.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

creatures from other planets having biology even remotely compatible with humans. we shouldn't even be able to eat their food let alone reproduce with them.

Star Trek at least acknowledged and explained this one.

[Student of Trinity]

I seem to recall an ST: Voyager episode in which the starship escaped a black hole by flying through a crack in the event horizon. Of course, a ship that can go faster than light would have nothing to fear from an event horizon as we understand it, so presumably our primitive 21st century science is simply all wrong about black holes. But if whatever they call an event horizon in the 24th century is a thing that can possibly have a crack, terminology must have really gotten sloppy in the intervening centuries.

 

I've never much liked hard science fiction. If it's entirely consistent it's boring, but if it screws even one thing up, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

[Enraged Slith]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

creatures from other planets having biology even remotely compatible with humans. we shouldn't even be able to eat their food let alone reproduce with them.

Just because we shouldn't, doesn't mean we can't.

I'm actually curious what the general scientific community thinks about extraterrestrial life. If earth-like conditions are a prerequisite to life, shouldn't it follow similar patterns like everything else in the universe, or am I just completely off-base?

[Student of Trinity]

Nobody knows whether Earth-like conditions are necessary for life. All we know is that they are sufficient. We have no idea how similar life evolving under Earth-like conditions tends to be, or even how common life is under those conditions. Maybe the universe is full of beautiful, Earth-like planets that are almost all sterile, because life is a tremendous fluke. Or maybe life is ubiquitous.

 

Maybe the watery core of Titan is the egg-like home of a single enormous squid, watching us.

[Alorael at Large]

Consider that to get anything out of eating something we need to have the enzymes to break it down and the transporters to pick up the pieces and do something with them. Even life on Earth has many incompatibilities. We can't digest cellulose, for example, although other organisms can.

 

Now consider putting an entirely novel set of molecular architectures into play. Even if it's relatively similar carbon-based life, the chances that the molecules would have the right structures for us to do more than pass them through our digest tract like rocks.

 

—Alorael, who is a fan single biome, single city, single character planets. Or even systems. Yes, if there's just a single colony on an otherwise wild world it probably is fairly homogenous, but the idea that other worlds could be described the way a town is now seems laughable. Even densely populated planets not Balkanizing into many separate countries (maybe in a confederation, but still separate) seems at least worth considering.

[Callie]

Asteroid fields in Sci-Fi are far more dense than in reality.

 

It's also pretty annoying how aerodynamic spaceships are. Or spaceships doing barrel rolls like a jet plane in earth's atmosphere. Or spaceship interiors that look like luxury hotels. If it has to accelerate to absurd speeds and travel extreme distances, a spacecraft shouldn't have any unnecessary mass.

[Prince of Kitties]

To be fair, Star Trek etc. have methods of nullifying G-forces, presumably by reducing the inertia of a spacecraft and its contents.

 

How this is done is left to the viewer's imagination... Likewise, how the bizarre physiological consequences for the crew are avoided.

[Upon Mars.]

Aliens dying from the flu while being bombarded by bacterial elements from earth for centuries or how goblins apart perhaps from those Potter stories, are always evil.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

creatures from other planets having biology even remotely compatible with humans. we shouldn't even be able to eat their food let alone reproduce with them.

Captain Kirk* accepts your challenge!

[Alorael at Large]

At least Mass Effect has no cross-species reproduction that actually involves the transfer of material from one species to another. It's more like some kind of psychic imprinting combined with parthenogenesis. And Mass Effect is built on tributes to ridiculous sci-fi in a fairly hard setting anyway.

 

—Alorael, who in the vein of his previous complaint also has some problems with races in fantasy. First of all, they're usually species. Secondly, they often lack races, or subtypes, which is odd. Thirdly, they tend towards cultural homogeneity even among far-flung subpopulations. Fourthly, they seem to be unwilling or incapable of assimilation. There are no Elvish-Gondorians for some reason. All of these things are possible, of course, but they, too, deserve some kind of commentary.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Crack Team of Cracksmen

Secondly, they often lack races, or subtypes, which is odd.

the proliferation of different kinds of elf in D&D is both a good counterexample and a good reason why few counterexamples exist

[Alorael at Large]

D&D elves are different enough to qualify as different subspecies, or maybe even different species. Alfus viridis, Alfus obscurus, Alfus vulgaris? The profusion is hilarious, but it's part of the same problem: various writers had some inability conceive of elves living in different biomes, or even in different ways, without being entirely different elves. It smacks of racism and it makes no sense.

 

—Alorael, who supposes that if our dwarves are all the same they're probably Pumilionis pumilionis

[Cairo Jim]

I just realised this today while watching Star Trek, and realised it happens elsewhere to. I find it quite strange when a ship enters hyperspace that it always has, sort of like a "tunnel" through stars and such. You'd think that there'd be something in those ships way.

[Prince of Kitties]

Stars are really, really far apart. Even if you're moving FTL.

 

On that note, every SF television series ever gets wormholes completely wrong. A proper wormhole would let you see through it to what's on the other side, and would look more like a huge lens than a tunnel.

 

Edit: also if you're in hyperspace, you're physically displaced from where the stars all are - just in a direction that can't normally be perceived. Assuming at least that there aren't any stars in hyperspace...

[Alorael at Large]

Hyperspace can work however it wants, but I'm always entertained by confusion between somehow traveling faster than light and traveling instantly. When nearby stars are lightyears away, traveling at several times the speed of light still means travel times that make early transatlantic crossing look quick and easy.

 

—Alorael, who thinks that the idea of space as a great ocean usually tries not to include isolation, hardtack, and scurvy. Passage at Arms is something of an exception.

[Cairo Jim]

Originally Posted By: Miramor

Stars are really, really far apart. Even if you're moving FTL.

I know they're far apart, but I also know they are all over the place.

Originally Posted By: Miramor

Edit: also if you're in hyperspace, you're physically displaced from where the stars all are - just in a direction that can't normally be perceived. Assuming at least that there aren't any stars in hyperspace...

Unless this is some very strange physics thing, this doesn't sound right. Almost like sailing in a straight line around the Earth and not hitting any land masses just because you're traveling ridiculously fast.

[Prince of Kitties]

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim

Originally Posted By: Miramor

Stars are really, really far apart. Even if you're moving FTL.

I know they're far apart, but I also know they are all over the place.

The reason the night sky isn't as bright as day, is that the stars are so far apart that the light of most of them hasn't reached us yet. A hypothetical starship would probably have to be moving at huge FTL speeds (billions of light years per second, assuming "normal" time onbaord) to be in danger of hitting anything.

(High relativistic speeds, with billions of years per second worth of time dilation, would also do the trick.)

Quote:

Unless this is some very strange physics thing, this doesn't sound right. Almost like sailing in a straight line around the Earth and not hitting any land masses just because you're traveling ridiculously fast.

It's because "hyperspace" usually refers to higher-dimensional space - at least one dimension other than the usual three. If you took away one dimension, and turned 3D space into a 2D plane, a starship in hyperspace would be moving somewhere above or below the plane. Stars would (probably) be confined to the plane, so the starship wouldn't be in danger of crashing into one.

[Prince of Kitties]

BTW, I think time dilation must be the most underappreciated plot device ever. Joe Haldeman used it, Orson Scott Card used it, Ursula Le Guin used it all the time. It's fantastic, it's weird, it's awe-inspiring... And I have never, ever seen it on TV or in movies. Very strange.

[Student of Trinity]

A good point. But maybe that's because of the specific limitations of TV and movies as genres. For one thing, time dilation is not widely known, and it's hard to explain without pages of exposition. Also, in dramatic terms, the main effect of time dilation is that characters that have already been introduced get old and die, and new characters get born and have to be introduced. When you don't have time to keep introducing new characters, it's hard to make time dilation a major part of the plot.

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

Queen.

 

EDIT: Aww man, I didn't realize that video cut off the end of the song. Oh well. It's more strummed guitar like in the beginning.

[Alorael at Large]

The reason the night sky isn't as bright as day is because there just aren't that many stars. We may be seeing light that's been coming for years, or centuries, and maybe the star it's coming from has disappeared in the interim, but most of that dark space is just dark and will remain so forever. Most of space is empty. It's nothing like comparing ocean to land on Earth; it's more like comparing dark space to bright points in the night sky.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think the sheer size of space quite sinks in. The sun is 0.01 AU in diameter. Neptune's orbit describes a 60 AU circle. Even if a ship hits the solar system and ploughs through, it has a less than 0.02% chance of hitting the sun, and the chance of hitting planets is even smaller. (There is some funny math here since ships could well not pass through the plane of the solar system and miss everything entirely, but it gives a ballpark estimate of chances of hitting a star even if you run into the neighborhood of a star. It's very small. Stars are big compared to other objects in space, but compared to space itself they're as tiny as little dots in the night sky.

[Cairo Jim]

There's also a lot of dust clouds and such blocking the view too, which is why we can't easily see them all.

[Erebus the Black]

I shudder at the thought of Larry Nivenn's supposed Galactic shockwave being actually true and not just an imaginary plot device

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Immunity to Normal Scorn

—Alorael, who doesn't think the sheer size of space quite sinks in. The sun is 0.01 AU in diameter. Neptune's orbit describes a 60 AU circle.

they're called astronomical units for a reason

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim

There's also a lot of dust clouds and such blocking the view too, which is why we can't easily see them all.

Yes. If you live in a city, going out somewhere rural, with less smog and less light pollution, can be astonishing. The sky doesn't just have a few points of light, it's full of a sprinkling of lights that are lost in urban glare. It's awe-inspiring to see how many other stars are out there and consider how many have planets, how many might have inhabitants who might be looking up at us. And there are more that we can't see, too faint, too distant, buried behind the light of closer, brighter stars.

The vast majority of space is still the darkness in between. And we're in a galaxy, a comparatively dense cluster of stuff.

—Alorael, who will just throw out that one very basic estimate of the average density of stars in the universe is one per billion cubic light-years. That's something like one part star to 10^15 parts nothing. One quadrillionth of the universe is stars. Forget needles in haystacks; try finding a single square foot patch of area on the entire Earth's surface.

[Cairo Jim]

Originally Posted By: Immunity to Normal Scorn

The vast majority of space is still the darkness in between. And we're in a galaxy, a comparatively dense cluster of stuff.

And it seems to get more densely packed as you head towards a galaxy's centre. Of course you get massive star clusters, nebula, dust clouds, so on and so forth in between too.