By my calculations, the volume of a shell 5 miles deep over the entire surface of the earth is 986,050,685 cubic miles of water.
The current volume of water on the earth right now is 332,500,000 cubic miles.
That’s a lot of water to add!
Oh I criticized it a lot, even while I was watching it the first time, and I had no idea how much it cost.
The core premise of the movie is flawed.
First off, of course, there isn’t enough water to submerge the world enough that only Everest is visible. And it wouldn’t be possible that only Everest was above water - unless it was above water by a foot or so. If as much of Everest was above water as seen in the movie, then you could see many more of the Himalayas visible as a whole island range.
Also, if Everest was barely above water, Denver would be four miles underwater. Even the Titanic is only about two miles down. No way Mariner can dive that far.
The movie is supposed to be set 500 years in the future. Mariner is supposed to have evolved (or mutated) gills. Five hundred years is not anywhere enough time to see such mutations.
Given that, even the events of the movie make no sense. As mentioned, if dirt is so valuable, why are there dirty people? Even more, HOW are they getting dirty? Where is the dirt coming from? These people should be the cleanest people ever in the history of the world!
And the smokers! The movie is presented as if the situation is static - people living in some sort of stable system, with the smokers raiding them periodically. But such a situation is not stable. The smokers have weapons and mobility. The atoll people couldn’t survive. The smokers would wipe them out in short order, to the last person.
The movie hinges on a map showing the mythical “dry land”. How does a map work when the whole world is flat water? How does anyone even know where they are? To use a map, first you have to know that much.
This movie pissed me off so much. Such an intriguing idea wasted by stupidity.
They showed a plaque marking where Sir Edmund Hillary summited Everest
As for where the extra water came from, that’s easy - it’s the water that was missing from the Earth in the “Mad Max: Fury Road” universe…
They actually stole most of it from the Mad Max universe.
Wasn’t there something about the map being wrong unless you took into account that the poles had reversed or something?
The one thing I remember was that the girl, Kevin Costner, and the love interest were escaping in a balloon. Apropos of nothing, the girl falls out, and KC does a bungee jump to rescue her and three jetskis blow up or something.
From three MM universes, actually!
In case some haven’t seen this, this site illustrates how much water there is on earth, put in a “drop” on the surface of the earth.
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html
It is a surprisingly small amount!
I don’t watch sci-fi thrillers looking for scientific plausibility. But now that we’re on the subject, I’m wondering how the air pressure would work.
You obviously can’t live on the summit of Mt Everest now because there’s not enough air that high up. But let’s say, for the sake of argument (and using Just Asking Question’s figures), that around 650,000,000 cubic miles of water appeared on Earth from somewhere and raised the sea level five miles higher. Would the air pressure at the new higher sea level be the same as the air pressure at our current sea level? Or would the air pressure at the new higher sea level be as thin as the air pressure is now at that height?
I think you’d have to find about 65,000,000,000 cubic miles of atmosphere to go with all that water if you want to breathe on that island.
It would be close to our present air pressure at sea level. The volume of air wouldn’t have changed, and neither would surface gravity by very much. There would be pretty much the same weight of air over any given location of Earth, which is what creates air pressure.
Assuming that whatever method you used to add the water didn’t blow away the atmosphere in the process, then air pressure at the new sea level would be slightly less than but basically the same as air pressure at current sea level. The surface area would be increased only slightly, so you’d have only slightly less sectional density of air above any given point. And the surface gravity would decrease only slightly, so you’d have only slightly less weight corresponding to that sectional density.
And I’ve never understood the concept behind criticizing a movie for the size of its budget (John Carter suffered from this same problem). When I go to a movie, I care about how entertaining it is, and I care about how much I paid for a ticket. The movie’s budget doesn’t change either of those. I’m sure that the production company cares very much about the movie’s budget (or more precisely, between the budget relative to how much they earned from it), but I’m not the production company. I don’t even own stock in it. Why should it matter at all to me?
Well, the Earth would have more mass due to all the magical water. The higher mass would tend to increase air pressure at the surface due to the earth’s greater gravity. An extra 8 km of water would add something like 4.1*10^18 kg of mass to the earth (actually a bit more because it’s salt water - I assumed pure water). This is less than 0.001% of the earth’s mass so the extra gravity’s effect would be pretty small. Assuming the atmosphere contained the same amount of gases it contains now, it would be spread across only a modestly greater surface area (about 0.25% more surface area, if we have 8 km of water piled on the surface), which would tend to decrease surface pressure a touch. So, on balance, I would guess that air pressure at the surface would be pretty close to sea level’s today, I think only very marginally lower but not even enough to make your ears pop if you were teleported there from today’s sea level right now.
ETA: I disagree with Chronos’s assertion that gravity would drop. It would be higher due to the extra mass of the water, but not by much.
I agree.
The only way the budget matters to me is two ways: 1) how you spend it, and 2) is it enough to do what you want?
If I see an announcement that Ringworld is in production with a $50M budget, I’m not even sure I’d bother. That’s going to give you Logan’s Run quality sets and special effects. If it has a $300M budget, that won’t guarantee that the film will be any good, but at least it has a chance of looking good.
That’s another good question. Would it be salt water? Could it be? How much weather would you get on a pelagic planet? Would there be enough rainfall to support humans? Would there be any rain at all? Did the atoll folk have desalinization?
Would the poles still be warm on waterworld? They still are receiving less solar radiation, no matter how hot the mean temperature gets, the poles should still be cooler. Or would the water act as a huge heat sink, making everything the same temperature?
I also seem to recall a young Jeanne Tripplehorn in a skin-tight… something.
The mass would be higher, but so would the radius, and water is significantly less dense than the Earth as a whole.
You calculate the extra mass of the water as 0.00001 of the Earth. The extra distance from the centre (about 5 miles on a 4000 mile radius) is on the order of 0.001 Earth radii.
So it seems like the gravity would be different by about a factor of (1.00001)/(1.001)^2 which is about 0.998. The extra distance effect dominates the extra mass effect.
I stand corrected by Chronos and leahcim. Thanks for not letting me spread ignorance.
If only Hollywood thought as you do!
So if the planet was almost entirely covered by water, how would that affect tides? Would they be greater, without landmasses to slam into and lose energy? How would storms be created and dissipated?
Of course there would still be rain, where do you think rain comes from? It comes from evaporation of the oceans. We wouldn’t have continental effects, where rain is dumped at the margins of continents and mountains, and the continental interiors are dry. So we’d have the same amount of rain, just spread out differently.
In the movie itself, the ocean water was salt–they called fresh water “hydro”. So whatever magic added the water to Earth added salt water. If the added water had been fresh it would have decreased the salinity of the oceans by 2 or 3 times, since it seems the amount of water added would have to be 2 or 3 times the mass of the current hydrosphere. Water that brackish would be drinkable.
As for tides, they’d be mostly not noticeable unless you had something anchored to the bottom, like Mt Everest.