What do you think of the physics and other sciences in the world of The Expanse? How realistic is it?
What do you think of all that?
Quoting an interview:
Q: Did Daniel know all the science that you guys needed for this book or did you have to consult any other scientists or experts?
A: We do, but Daniel’s joke is that we try to aim for Wikipedia-level plausibility. We want it to seem plausible, but we never want scientific rigor to get in the way of awesome. We try to at least not be insultingly implausible for most things. We probably fail sometimes, but we try not to be insultingly implausible. Most of the research we need to do can be done with just reading, finding biology texts — and there are a lot of people out there who have done work on other possible bases for life. There was a guy who was, for a while, proposing the idea that life could have started out with a crystalline structure and then shifted to DNA. What would that look like? Just reading that stuff gives you great ideas. One of the main things you do is take out all the math, so that nobody can double-check your work and see all the things you screwed up.
Q: There’s a lot of science in this book in terms of the orbital mechanics and things like that. How did you guys figure all that stuff out?
A: Well, we take out all the math, so you can’t double-check our work. [laughs] We’re both nerds, and we both read a lot about the early space program. The idea of changing orbits and how you change orbits is something that’s just part of the science-fiction-ers lexicon. If we’re having somebody fire a rail gun to add more energy to go to a higher orbit, as long as we don’t tell you how fast any of that stuff goes or what orbital change they’re getting out of it, as long as we leave that kind of vague, it sounds plausible. It doesn’t throw you out of the story, but we make sure not to put any of the math in so the people who do understand all that don’t check our math and find out all these places we get it wrong.
The Expanse does a good job of making a plausible-seeming future of space travel and habitation. As someone who works in aerospace and propulsion, and with a background of doing studies on space science and transportation, I can punch a bunch of holes in the science pretty quickly, such as how they have propulsion systems with both very high specific impulse and high thrust, or how they can have ‘stealth ships’ in space when the exhaust plume and waste heat from even a small powerplant should make every ship immediately visible in the infrared spectrum, but it looks and feels a lot more like living in space than Star Trek or Star Wars, and more importantly, the milieu in which it is set is not just bunch of monocultures but individual societies with divisions and internal politics of their own.
A realistic show about living and working in space would be like watching paint dry, with the occasional random explosion or someone choking on their food. People complain about how ‘boring’ 2001: A Space Odyssey is, but that is nothing in comparison to actual space missions which are a lot of boredom and bitching about how bad the food is, and occasionally about how the plumbing doesn’t work.
Stranger
They should do a show about how space colonists really can’t afford to throw ayay anything and have to constantly repurpose and recycle. They could call it The Ex-Pants.
Yeah, I’ve always said, they do make mistakes, but they’re the sort of mistakes you usually have to think about to catch.
And every once in a while, they pull something that you never thought of. Like, a scene that you know from the context of the show is in “zero g”, but of course because they have to film it on Earth, the actors are wearing “magnetic boots”, so they look like they’re walking normally. But then someone gets shot and dies, and the body just kind of hangs there in an upright posture, held to the deck by their magnetic boots.
Yeah - fairly sure that people walking in magnetic boots wouldn’t look like they are walking in gravity, but you have to sort of forgive that on two levels: 1. The characters have lived all their lives in this environment and so can be argued to have more than a little practice with it and 2. It would just have been impossible to shoot everything with absolutely faithful realism.
Don’t they make a thing out of Avasarala having trouble with the mag boots during her first extended trip into space?
The slight problem I have is not so much with the science, but with the way that the writing, ever so slightly, and only occasionally, treats the solar system as if it’s one of those wall posters with all the planets in a neat line from the sun. Just because the ‘outer planets’ are what they are, doesn’t put them all in the same place - Ganymede, in its orbit of Jupiter, is sometimes further away from Tycho Station than Tycho is from Earth or Mars.
Most of the time, they don’t get this wrong at all - it’s just tiny bits of writing that sometimes seem to treat the Outer Planets as ‘those guys over there, all in the same general direction and vicinity’
Yeah, I don’t think they ever forget it, as much as they just don’t have the means to simulate it in every scene - for example, a drink poured on Luna always sloshes around in weird slow motion, but all the people walking are just walking normally, because as a production unit, what else can you do?
A couple of things I like: people don’t just ‘beam’ from the ships to wherever. Their bodies are intact and if they need to go somewhere they have to propel themselves either by a craft or intensely risky float.
Their use of missiles and projectiles/mini guns for defense. No laser beam nonsense and it just looks cool.
Then there was the belter that they tortured on earth in part by simply subjecting him to earth’s gravity.
I never get tired of that effect. It surprises me every time.
Yep, and it lead to one of the greatest bits of casual backstory for Amos.
Yeah, that was something that annoys me about the Belter Patois. They’re isolated enough from Earth and Mars to have developed their own ways of speaking, but all the Belters seem to speak the same way. Nope, if they’re isolated enough from Earth and Mars that their language has drifted that much, then they should be isolated enough from each other to have multiple branches of language. Ceres would be different from Ganymede, and Eros would be different still. And all the little ships and small fleets out there would be all over the place.
Of course, with fairly convenient video and audio communications throughout the system, such drift likely wouldn’t happen, except as deliberate affectations, like the on-again, off-again “Martian Drawl” that some Martians use just to annoy Earthers.
Well, I don’t have to think much about how a series of swingby maneuvers around Jupiter’s moons would take months instead of minutes, or that a farm on Ganymede would require massive mirrors to illuminate even a hectare of arable land with sunlight, but I’m willing to accept these as fictional conceits to facilitate an interesting story.
The use of “magnetic boots” to allow characters to be able to function normally (e.g. walk) while not under thrust is a practical necessity for shooting because of the complexity of wire work and the sheer amount of effort that would be involved in trying to simulate freefall conditions. They make the occasional special effect that shows liquids bouncing in low gravity or unsecured tools become a severe hazard under maneuvers, and even make it a plot point that without gravity bleeding from serious wounds won’t coagulate, so I’m quite forgiving when it comes to accepting that mag boots allow them to walk normally. This show is technically complex enough to shoot without requiring actors to try to float their upper bodies and arms as they would in free fall conditions.
In the books I believe it is stated each or the major stations has their own particular dialects. But while the belt and outer planets are widely distributed in space and divided politically, they are also unified by trade and a shared culture, so maintaining a common language makes sense. From the viewer’s standpoint, learning the vernacular of one patois is complex enough to provide a feeling that the Belt is an independent culture but expecting viewers to learn multiple vocabularies of marginal intelligibility is taking the world-building aspect too far.
Stranger
Yeah, I mean, it could even be argued that we, the viewers, just aren’t noticing the differences - like that thing we already know happens where people in one country tend to think the accents in another country are all the same, because they aren’t close enough to get familiar enough to discern the differences.
Well, my point is, I don’t think a really divergent language would arise at all.
In Earth history, during the years of European expansion around the world, such local languages arose in several places, because many different people from different places ended up in one location, and had to come up with some sort of common language to just survive everyday life. Each locale developed their own version because they didn’t all have the same mix of original languages to start with. And, because travel times between locales was measured in weeks or months, with no way to send voice messages at all, there was very little pressure for these various languages to conform to one common, or at least similar, usage. Sailors would probably find it easier to talk several languages than to try to get everyone else to speak one language.
But when was the last time we saw such a language evolve? Now that everyone has easy access to TV, radio and the internet, we’re all starting to sound alike. I’ve seen this in my own family from Newfoundland, where people of my generation and younger have lost a lot of the Newfie accent that used to be so prominent, it was considered its own dialect, with lots of borrowings from French.
So I don’t see the Belters developing a language so different that people from Earth would actually need lessons to even just understand what was being said.
That being said, the one Belter thing I do like is the development of hand signs that can be used when in a suit in vacuum to communicate essential information, as we saw Naomi doing this week. That’s the sort of language development that would occur, as it would be essential for Belters, but virtually useless for Earthers. And while Mars would probably have something similar for surface work in suits, it makes sense that it would be different - some problems are the same, but others are not. Belters probably don’t have to worry about dust storms, for instance. Also, Belters would mostly be in zero G, any so could use a whole-body language, where leg or foot placement could hold meaning.
It wasn’t the isolation so much as the different environment that caused the drift of dialect. It makes it easier to understand someone in a pressure suit, over a staticky radio, or in low pressure environments.
Lots more emphasis on hard consonants, less on soft sounds and vowels.
Yeah, that one I definitely caught in real time. Saw him entering in the course, and wondered how long that would take.
I certainly couldn’t tell you in my head if it would have taken months or just weeks, and if it had been days, then maybe I would’ve given it a pass, but hours, no, that’s just not doable.
They did have massive mirrors, didn’t they? But yes, you are only getting about 1/25th the light at Jupiter as you do on Earth. You get a little bit better without an atmosphere, but not much compared to the loss from the distance.
Actually, Space Island One was a great show.