If you must approach a landed alien spacecraft, never, ever do it while next to a priest or a man waving a white flag.
Death ray for sure.
From sf I learned that in the future:
We will have a manned orbiting space station
That we will watch TV broadcast directly to our homes via satellite. (Many Arthur C. Clarke books)
That we will communicate by using devices hung on our belts, which activate when you flip the cover open. You can often call someone by saying their name.
We’ll have robot pets.
We’ll have computerized libraries, available from any home.
Oh wait - that’s the present.
Most guards are stupid and gullible. Most guards.
Titan A.E.:
PREED: Hmm! An intelligent guard! Didn’t see that one coming!
From Species : An alien race can take a stick figure and the structure of DNA and make a beautiful blonde female human.
From Alien and Aliens: Eggs don’t go bad, especially bug eggs.
From Independence Day : A red neck in a jet can destory a craft designed to travel thru space and a planet’s atmosphere.
From Scifi in general:
- Doctors/pHd’s know everything (Quantum Leap, X-Files, etc. )
- Coorporations or governments can effectively hide things from the public (X-Files, Serenity )
MST3K on the Metalunan mutant, as he’s whacked on the head with a pipe: “There go the piano lessons.”
Hey in “Weird Science” two High School Kids made an even Sexier Brunette with a primitive computer.
Jim
Yeah, but no matter how many times I try, it never works! :mad:
But they needed to have it hooked up to a Barbie Doll. 
If you are serving anywhere on the Enterprise, and you don’t have top billing on the movie posters, under no circumstances should you try to stand out. You especially don’t want to be a young, good-looking, cheerful, can-do kind of guy whom everyone on the bridge loves like his or her own son. When Scotty looks at you and says “Aye, he’ll do” while nodding his head approvingly, he might as well be giving you the kiss of death. With tongue.
Instead strive to be the sloppy underachieving jerk that no one wants to hang out with. You’ll make Commander and live to be a hundred.
-
Any human Earth male from the present who ends up in the future, the past, or on a spaceship full of strange aliens, will be cooler, funnier, kick more ass and be a better pilot, driver, lover and fighter than everyone he meets, regardless if they are a race of alien warriors, Earth Galactic Special Forces Commandos, cops or Trilithium miners.
-
The prefered form of government in the future will be an imperial monarchy.
-
The primary weapon will be some kind of sword.
-
No matter how advanced other races are, there’s something special about us hu-mons.
Spectacular! That’s who I was thinking about in post #63 
Someday, the entire planet will be ruled by a benevolent military dictatorship whose leaders dress in tinfoil.
When exploring new worlds or time-travelling, don’t forget your chocolate. For some weird reason, if you’re surrounded by murderous humanoid aliens or distrustful natives, giving up your Hershey’s chocolate bar creates a bond of friendship. No, it doesn’t make sense to me, either. I knew it worked on pregnant girlfriends, but humanoid aliens was a pleasant surprise.
There are no keys in the future, not for doors, ground cars, transatmospheric attack crafts, whatever…
In any Utopian society, no one drives cars. In fact, most people walk everywhere. (C’mon, you’ve conquered war, poverty, disease, and pollution, and no one’s figured out how to make a '57 Chevy run on batteries?)
When visiting Robot worlds, bring lots o tasty Energon Treats. Or a sidekick.
And, ON THAT TOPIC…
Two hundred years from now, there will have been no changes in people’s tastes in music: cultured starship captains will listen to Bach; grimy salt-of-the earth mechanics will listen to mid to late 20th century rock. The only exception will be in the 25th century, when Buck Rogers will attend discos which play music eerily reminiscent of the late 70’s.
To be fair, the redneck in question was a decorated veteran combat pilot, though several decades out of practice. Though there were probably quite a few rednecks involved, since they did recruit heavily from a convoy of RVs. That said, all those fighter jets got to Area 51 SOMEHOW, which means either they were flown there at some point after the attack, or they were already on the base, which suggests that there were active duty pilots (secretly) stationed there to begin with.
Also, the fact that the alien ships were designed to fly BOTH in space and atmosphere would suggest a fighter jet designed soley to operate in an atmosphere could have a marked advantage, especially if the alien pilots tended to rely on their sheilds to protect them (thus, when they find themselves without aforementioned shields, they are ill equiped to defend themselves).
Oddly enough, an exception to this rule can be found in Star Trek. In an early episode, the Enterprise accidentally goes back in time and also accidentally knocks down a Tactical Air Command fighter jet in the 1960’s. The pilot turns out to not only be several hundred years behind on his history lessons, but is also quite useless for any real purpose other than being a subject for historical research in the 23rd century (they consider retraining him, but decide he is too old for it to be effective). The solution, involving time travel physics that are hokey even by Trek standards, involves dropping him back in his fighter before the Enterprise knocked it down, somehow both erasing his memory of the whole thing and managing to prevent his crashing to begin with.
Oh, they did. They even managed to make a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle run on a crystaline-based fuel source with no polluting byproducts (and highly increased engine efficiency). The problem was, they couldn’t deal with Road Rage without mandatory populace-wide doses of Prozium.
And we ALL know how THAT went.
Somehow, books and literacy completely disappear.
In the long run, it makes more sense for a brilliant scientist to drag his reluctant civilian family (including two pre-adolescents) along on a long term dangerous mission instead of personally training a crew of motivated, unattached pilots and scientists to do the dirty work while he monitors and advises them from the safety of earth.
Also, because computer glitches are a thing of the past, no one feels the need to rotate the pilots so that one can be at the controls at all times to at least make sure that the autopilot doesn’t freak out and crash land the ship on Pluto.
Pre-adolescent kids from the future will look at humongous man-eating bug-monsters standing three feet away from them and go “Wow” or “Far out!” instead of screaming, crying and being traumatized for the rest of their lives. even if they do somehow manage to get away.
If you’re a somewhat well-built man in your 70’s, and you’re wearing a tuxedo, all you have to do is smile devilishly at a 25-year-old former Miss Universe, and she will want to have your children. (Whoops, sorry, that’s something I learned from James Bond.)
Nah, that fits right in with the thread. Heinlein sure seemed convinced of it, at least.