Recently I saw the middle portion of Waterworld. I can more or less guess the beginning, but, since I’m not likely to want to sit through the whole thing in the future, how does it end? Does anyone ever find Dryland?
And while we’re here, does anyone know of a good movie site with spoilers?
Enola gets captured by the Smokers, and the Mariner goes off to rescue her, not because of the map, but because he’s her friend. He sneaks on board the smoker ship, kills a couple guys, then sees a speech that the Deacon gives. The Deacon couldn’t figure out the map, but motivated his people to just row to where they think was dry land. The Mariner tells the Deacon to give the girl up otherwise he’ll blow up the ship. The Deacon doesn’t believe him and the Mariner drops a flare down this hole which leads to the oil storage tank, igniting all the oil and causing a huge explosion. In all the chaos the Mariner rescues Enlola and the other survivors pick him up in the balloon. The old guy finally figures out what the symbols mean and they head towards the coordinates (latitude and longitude). Low on supplies, they finally encounter dry land, along with all the stuff Enola doodled (horses, trees, rocks, etc). They find a hut with Enola’s dead parents inside; apparently they were dying or something and sent their daughter off in the hopes other people would find dry land. Everybody is happy except the Mariner, he says the ground doesn’t move right and doesn’t seem to like all the noise on the island. He builds himself a new boat and Enola tearfully tells him good bye. As Enola and the other woman are waving him off, you see a plaque that reads “MOUNT EVEREST ELEVATION XXXXX” (can’t remember the numbers). The end.
Waterworld wasn’t that bad, really. I was able to enjoy it, despite it’s completely ridiculous premise - melting all the ice in the world would raise water levels app. 300 feet, where did over 20,000 feet of water come from? If I could remember how to figure out the volume of a sphere I could figure out how big of an ice cube would have to land on the Earth…
I suppose all the people who normally lived atop Mount Everest died of the plague or something? It would have been cooler if they found a huge boat with two skeletons of every animal inside.
By the way, I don’t get what was so awful about this movie. I watched it on cable just to see how BAD it was, and it turned out to be pretty good, actually. Certainly no Mad Max by any stretch of the imagination, but much better than many, many other movies I can think of. (I still want to know where all the bad guys got their cigarettes from, though.)
I’ve come up with 3583264842.75 cubic kilometers of water needed to raise the water levels 7 kilometers, but I can’t figure out how to get my calculator to do square roots.
According to my calculator, the cube root of your number would be about 1530 km. I assume you want cube root to figure out the length along an edge of the ice cube.
I never saw the Mt. Everest plaque when I watched this mess on late night TV, but that would just have irritated me even more. Because I can buy the Mariner diving on his own to a few hundred feet to pick up artifacts, but if the water level rose to 20,000 feet, then even to dive to Denver (famously 1 mile high above previous sea level), then he’d have to dive 3 miles. Even with gills, that’s not remotely within the realms of possibility (think cold, think pressure, think about the amount of time it takes to get there, think about the much less than 3 miles worth of cable on his winch).
Come to think of it, if there was any city within diving distance, then the planet should be studded with the tops of mountains.
I guess it’s just more scientific illiteracy on the part of Hollywood.
I thought that windmill sailing boat was pretty interesting, and wondered why no one actually seems to have built such a boat. Then I realized that such a boat would have the opposite problem of a regular sailboat, namely that going downwind would be the least advantageous. The closer you get to windspeed, the less power you’d get from the wind turbine.
By the same token, the best direction would be directly upwind. Would the increasing speed of the boat, and relative wind speed, make the turbine turn faster and faster until some limit of friction was reached?