Especially considering that given the amount of DNA recoverable from the guts of amber-trapped insects, the analogy is comparable to saying “We have the words ‘the,’ ‘and,’ and a half dozen random consonants, but we filled in the gaps with the text of ‘War and Peace’ to recreate the Bible.”
You’re not taking centrifugal force into account, which is exactly what I’m talking about.
There were a lot of things wrong with “Armageddon,” but this is one hundred percent accurate. It is, in fact, entirely possible that such an asteroid would go unnoticed until it was too late.
Left Hand has already pointed out Bill Bryson’s observation (actually, it’s the observation of the astronomers Bryson interviewed for his book) that a killer asteroid probably would not be noticed until it actually struck the Earth, at which point you’d have just enough time to shit your pants, assuming you weren’t underneath it, in which case you’d be vaporized before it even hit the ground. The asteroid in Armageddon, of course, was much larger than the sort of killer asteroids Bryson speaks of - it was, of course, “the size of Texas,” whereas Bryson’s theoretical doomsdat rocks are the more customary three-to-five kilometres across. But even a Texas-sized asteroid would probably sneak up on us. In the film they saw it WEEKS in advance, in fact; they had very early warning. The likelihood that we would have more notice than that is approximately one in a squillion.
Truth is, they’re hard to see because they reflect very little light, and one coming straight at us would have no apparent lateral motion, and there’s no systematic program to look for them. There could be one heading for the Earth right this moment, getting ready to slam into the Pacific Ocean at 5:28 PM tomorrow, and you wouldn’t know a damn thing about it. The annihilation of you and everything you know could be 24 hours away.
Sweet dreams!
Umm…yeah, I am…the further the drop, the larger the arc needed to lessen the G force. Large arcs := large G forces…quite the opposite. SHORT arcs, with small, abrupt changes = large G forces. Spidey would be just fine.
However, if we did have that 24 hours advance warning, Jack Bauer would be able to stop it.
I’m not so sure this is completely wrong. SD Staff Report
What I hated most in Jurassic Park was Jeff Goldblum’s totally obnoxious womanizing chaos theory moron character. Oh, yes… Chaos theory TOTALLY proves that any time man does anything as complex as an amusement park, it’s guaranteed to destroy itself in a frenzy of our of control chaos. Basically, Goldblum’s ‘chaos theory’ is ludditism masquerading as science. We can’t control anything! Don’t even try! If a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, who do you think YOU are trying to engineer anything? Huh?
Tell it to the people at Disney World.
No. It couldn’t.
Texas has a length of 790 miles and a widtih of 660 miles. The largest asteroid in the Solar System is Ceres, which has a diameter of 580 miles. Ceres was discovered in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi.
There are no undiscovered asteroids “the size of Texas” wandering around the Solar System.
On June 17, 2002 it was discovered that an asteriod had just missed earth,
passing by ar 120 kilmeters, 1/3 the distance between the Earth an the Moon. It just missed Earth in June 14, 2002. It wasn’t noticed till threed days later!
A few others that really bug me:
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People outrunning fireballs and explosions.
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For that matter, people who escape explosions by just jumping out of the hallway, while the explosion flies down the hall and past them. Apparently, not a single writer in hollywood is familiar with the concept of ‘overpressure’.
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People that fall, but are ‘saved’ when they grab a pipe on the way down, or even land across a flagpole or something. As if having all that force being concentrated on a 6" pipe across your waste or under your arm is somehow better than distributing it across your entire body on the ground. Besides, try dropping even a foot or two and then stopping yourself by grabbing onto anything. Good luck.
On June 17, 2002 it was discovered that an asteriod had just missed earth,
passing by ar 120 kilmeters, 1/3 the distance between the Earth an the Moon. It just missed Earth in June 14, 2002. It wasn’t noticed till threed days later!
That’s alright. That was a good miss, what about the largish meteor that bounced off the atmosphere in the late 1970’s? (Sorry, can’t Google it now, have to get offline before the lightning fries me and my 'puter.)
This is something that bugged me. The damn thing is 700+ miles in diameter, but you need to drill 800 feet down for the bomb to work? And if you’re just a few feet too shallow, it will fail utterly?
And that leaves aside the whole issue that one nuke doesn’t have nearly enough energy to blow apart an asteroid that was even 10 km in size. The energy required to move the two halves aprat is just orders of magnitude too large.
In general, the writers seemed to have no freakin’ grasp of what a big hunk of rock hurtling through space actually means. Which is understandable; it’s something quite outside our terrestrial experience. But they didn’t bother to listen to anyone who does know, so the made a movie basically 100% devioid of factual scientific content.
In the opening narration, Charlton Heston says that the K-T impactor (a 10-km sized object) hit Earth with the energy of a ten thousand nuclear bombs. Uh, try a million nuclear bombs, Charlton.
And it would be extremely difficult to change the orbit of such an asteroid to set it on a course toward Earth.
And an asteorid “the size of Texas” would be pulled into a spherical shape by its gravity.
And, as an aside, the asteroid looked all wrong. It’s called “regolith”, people.
God, that movie sucked.
Whoops, rearranged some lines and didn’t read carefully.
“And it would be extremely difficult to change the orbit of such an asteroid to set it on a course toward Earth.” refers to the Armageddon asteroid, not a 10-km-sized body.
Something else bothered me too. Doc Ock exerts phenomenal force on things with those mech arms, and they are anchored to his human body. Wouldn’t that much force tear him apart?
These threads always need a link to the Bad Astronomy movie pages.
How about the one in Die Hard 2 where he sets light to the leaking fuel which then catches up with the taking off plane. A 747 takes off at about 150 mph. Fuel burns nowhere near that fast.
They were also attached to one another, so that woudn’t be a problem. Think of it this way - technically speaking, Doc Cok wasn’t a man with four metal arms… he was a four-armed robot with a human bolted to its chest.
37 posts and no one has yet mentioned Intuitor’s #1 Insultingly Stupid Movie Pick: The Core? What is wrong with you people?
On the bright side of things, I just bought Real Genius (just released on DVD) and it is every bit as good as I remember it. And while it sports a number of exaggerations and effects to support the story and the gags, it is clear that the director and producer went to some amount of effort to get actual technical experiese; the language describing the development and operation of lasers is (mostly) right, and the idea of using chemical iodide as a lasing medium was current at the time. The biggest obvious science gaff in the film is when Mitch is describing a rod of water ice as “liquid nitrogen”, but is actually a result of editing rather than bad scripting (the container the ice is in is filled with frozen nitrogen). There are also a number of references to actual pranks committed by various former Caltech students, and of course “DEI” appears in numerous places thoughout the film. (One of the tech advisors on the film was a Caltech alum and inserted “DEI” with the recognizance of the filmmakers.)
In Blade Runner some of the biochemistry terminalogy used in the conversation between Tyrell and Roy Batty isn’t just nonsensical technobabble, though the procedures they describe don’t make a lot of sense. Still, it’s a heck of a lot better than listening to the cast of the latest Star Trek-spinoff escape their latest plot development by creating a new particle. The laws of particle physics in the Star Trek universe must be fiendishly complex, what with the thousands of ____ions that are discovered on every five year mission. :rolleyes:
Stranger