And, you know, there just aren’t that many times in a man’s life when he’s going to be getting both a gun pointed at his head and fellatio. The two are usually applied under wildly different circumstances.
Count D., if that’s the biggest physics blunder that caught your attention in Galaxy Quest, you weren’t paying attention. 
Allow me to nitpick your retort: unrelated species converging in morphology as a result of occupying similar ecological niches is convergent evolution. Parallel evolution occurs when two species evolve along similar lines, at the same general time, in the same general ecospace (a classic example being the contemporaneous evolution of early browsing horses and paleotheres). Thus, alien species evolving along similar lines would be an example of convergent, rather than parallel, evolution. Unless those species evolved on Earth, at the same time humans were evolving…
You know, you’d think that was true…
I know, I know. But it still bothered me just the same. (The fact that “berrilium spheres” - a fictional invention of the writer of the cheesy show - actually existed and actually did what they were supposed to do, I had no problem with. ;))
There’s no reason you couldn’t have spheres of Beryllium. It’s a perfectly respectable metal. People have even used it (at least theoretically) in space propulsion systems.
But wouldn’t want to be around a rolling sphere of it. The dust is mucho poisonous.
What about in Starship Troopers, where Buenos Aires was hit by a meteor apparently thrown by the aliens at Earth from their planet clear on the other side of the galaxy? (Or am I foolhardy for even bringing up a Paul Verhoeven movie; wasn’t there someone here who was convinced of his greatness and who went on at length about it?)
Boy, have you opened a can of worms. This is one of those topics listed in the SDMB “Hot Button” thread.
But I think no one disputes that lots of stuff in the Veerhoeven film is ludicrous. Don’t get me started. In the Heinlein book, of course, the Bugs are highly advanced. But Neumeier and Veerhoeven liked the idea of humans fighting “instinctual” Bugs with built-in technology. Of course, if Bugs on the other side of the Galaxy tosed rocks at us, our great-great-great to the nth grandkids wouldn’t have to worry about them.
Heinlein must be doing 500 RPM in his grave o account of that movie. With his name on it.
Somehow, I doubt Buzz’s forte is mathematics or astronomy, especially considering he’s a frikkin’ toy. 
I believe the word you are looking for is “Space Ranger”
(Of course that’s a grammatical error too)
Huh. I stand corrected. Good thing I wasn’t the fictional writer!
“Two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning Heinlein … all alone in the night.”
Well, we can all breathe a little easier in this post-lissener epoch.
But on one episode, they thought they had to go through a workaround so that their (apparently smokeless powder) guns would work in a vaccum. A normal modern day round would ignite and propel it’s bullet quite well in a vaccum. Now, the lack of air to act on the spinning might cause an odd trajectory sure, I am not sure about that, I admit. But the writers seemed to think they needed air for the round to fire. :eek:
Actually, AIUI, the spinning of rifled munitions is a way to even out uneven thrusts from frictional contact with the atmosphere. As such, as long as the bullet was going straight upon exit from the barrel, there wouldn’t be anything else (but gravity) to work upon it in a vacuum, so it would go straight on towards some final orbit…
A comment about parrallel and convergent evolution: There are a great number of species from vastly different evolutionary families that show a great deal of similarity. I find the link between shark form and dolphin forms less intriguing than the fact that while the Saber-Toothed tiger was prowling in Eurasia, there were similarly constructed predadors in Austrailia, too.
Not in any way to defend Starship Troopers, but having watched it again recently (by way of excuse, alcohol was involved), IIRC the meteor was a local rock shot out of orbit and into BA by “bug plasma”. So, since both bugs and humans used wormholes to get across large distances, the bugs just aimed their super-duper plasma cannon through a wormhole there, the beam came out here, knocking a smallish asteroid into our intrepid heros’ home town. Still plenty stupid, but not as bad as a lonely meteor wandering along through interstellar space for millennia before cratering into Argentina.
In that TNG episode, it turned out that the “panspermia” was created deliberately by an ancient humanoid species (the first such) who wanted to leave some legacy that would outlast even their own extinction. They seeded the galaxy with probes that would plant life – and the DNA was subtly programmed so that each ecosystem so created would, after a long, long time, produce a humanoid species, regardless of differences in environmental conditions. Which explains not only why Spock has ten fingers, but why it’s possible for him to be the product of a human-Vulcan marriage.
OK, it’s lame, but it is an explanation.
The real explanation – aside from the necessity of using human actors (unless you want to spend extra money on puppets or CGI) – is the necessity of having characters with whom the audience can form an emotional bond. How can you do that if the character doesn’t have a recognizable head with two eyes above and a mouth below? It might work in a novel, where the reader invests more effort into imagining the fictive universe, but not on a TV show. Babylon 5 had a minor character in, I believe, the first season that was a giant insect, resembling a praying mantis. It didn’t last. (Kosh the Vorlon lasted five seasons but we could always imagine a human inside that humanoid-shaped encounter suit).
Funny enough, that was a direct result of them trying to get the science on the show right. The firearms guy they hired to consult said that guns wouldn’t fire without an atmosphere, and they wanted the physics of the show to be as accurate as possible, so…
They talk about this in the commentary on the DVDs. Sometimes, you can’t win for losing.
Check out this link: http://sir.real.50megs.com/comix/catalog/screen/BizarreSex10.htm
The caption is too small to read – but it says, “Earthling, give me your SEED!”
I never cared about the whole “:sound in space” thing. I mean, you might be able to get away with one or two mvie with it, but it will simply get annoying.