At a constant acceleration of 1g (flipping over at the middle) for 4.3 light years, the time passed on Earth would be almost six years, the time on the ship a little more than three and a half one way. To have only one year ship time one way would require a constant acceleration of 6g.
I already acknowledged that that part of the ending was a weak point. But it’s a very tiny part of the overall narrative of events – of which there are so many important science-driven events that Kip Thorne wrote an entire book about it, as I said. To then call the movie “not hard science fiction” because there are one or two things in it that you don’t like is absurd. The science of Interstellar is predominantly the science of physics: Newtonian, relativistic, quantum, and quantum gravity.
Yes, and if you read “The Science of Interstellar”, or watch the movie carefully, that was just one out of a very large number of such events that permeate the whole movie and make it the fascinating spectacle that it is.
Why? That may not be a likely outcome, but there are many reasons that it could happen. We already have real-life underground vaults safeguarding crop seeds to guard against food crop extinction due to natural or man-made catastrophes and global warming, and indeed some crop seeds have already been withdrawn. You not only have to be able to grow or make the stuff, but you have to do it economically and on a very very large scale. Thorne addresses this briefly in the book:
Throughout recorded history, the crops that humans grow have been plagued by occasional blights (rapidly spreading diseases caused by microbes). The biology that underlies these blights is based on chemistry, which in turn is based on the quantum laws. Scientists do not yet know how to deduce, from the quantum laws, all of the relevant chemistry (but they can deduce much of it); and they do not yet know how to deduce from chemistry all of the relevant biology. Nevertheless, from observations and experiments, biologists have learned much about blights. The blights encountered by humans thus far have not jumped from infecting one type of plant to another with such speed as to endanger human life. But nothing we know guarantees this can’t happen. That such a blight is possible is an educated guess. That it might someday occur is a speculation that most biologists regard as very unlikely.
Wow! No, I can explain it just fine! I can explain it in terms of the growing tsunami of anti-science ignorance that was one of many contributing factors to the results of the last presidential election. This dichotomy that you claim is so improbable can be found right within the executive branch of government right now: NASA is still spending billions on advanced projects, the National Science Foundation, the NIH, and many other government bodies are still funding billions worth of scientific research, yet simultaneously there are important government departments run by ignorant doofuses with nothing but contempt for science. If this can happen right within the executive branch of government in real life, it seems more than a bit silly to criticize a movie because it portrays a freaking schoolteacher as not being in lock-step with technological thinking! That’s not even a criticism of the movie’s science, it’s a social commentary, and it’s a rather astute one, IMO.
tl;dr: Interstellar is an excellent and entertaining science fiction film that features a much greater attention to scientific detail than most such films, due in large part to expert guidance from Kip Thorne.
It’s not just “a schoolteacher”. There is a strong implication that this is the “official line” throughout the entire country (world?) in terms of educational policy, and general social disapprobation toward science and technology. If we ever get to the point, Khmer Rouge style, where this antiscience philosophy has extended that far, there will be no more funding for NIH, NSF, etc., you can be sure of that.
I stand corrected!
The OP’s standards for “hard SF” differ from mine, and, I think, a lot of SF fans. we’ll allow perhaps one or two beyond-present-day tech items like FTL travel in order to let you get into the situation, but insist on scrupulous attention to known science beyond that.
But, taking the OP’s restrictions and looking at SF films, here are some not yet listed (I think):
Metropolis
The Lost World
It! The Terror from Beyond Space
Destination Moon
When Worlds Collide
War of the Worlds
The Lost Missile
The Quatermass Xperiment/he Creeping Unknown
Quatermass 2/Enemy from Space
Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth
Conquest of Space
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Panic in Year Zero
The Man in the White Suit
Crack in the World (despite its scientific howlers of errors)
2001: A Space Odyssey (if you except the “trip” sequence)
2010: The Year we Make Contact
The Monolith Monsters
Creator
Marooned
Fail Safe
Firefox John Campbell argued that Fail Safe is science fiction. If so, Firefox is, too – a point I asserted last weekend at Arisia
There are lots of other, lesser films that are arguable SF but aren’t really very good, but which don’t violate the OP’s rules – Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Earth II (not the Gene Roddenberry TV pilot, but a pilot for life aboard a spinning space station),
Not just primitive savages. I recall reading an article in the mid-sixties that supposed a target drone fell into a time-displacing worm hole and wound up in 1945. Bereft of any control signals, it goes into safe mode and orbits for a while until it runs out of fuel then comes in for a hard landing that leaves it intact, if somewhat bent up. The article then went on to ask what conclusions researchers and engineers analyzing of the remains would come to.
Several aspects were covered but the one I remember is how their vacuum tube technology would be utterly at a loss to explain how the solid-state circuit boards could work. Resistors would be familiar to them as would capacitors but the transistors would leave them baffled. If they sacrificed one they would conclude that the speck within was pure silicon – the doping would be less than they could detect – and pure silicon doesn’t do anything interesting no matter what voltages you apply to it.
The article concluded that the researchers could only surmise that the strange object came to them from hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the future, not just twenty. Imagine what they would conclude if they got their hands on a smart phone with millions of transistors they can’t even see without an electron microscope – which they don’t have – in an area the size of your fingernail.
Per the Alien Wiki, regarding the Sulaco:
So FTL travel is part of the Alien milieu even if it doesn’t really feature or get mentioned in the early films (no idea about the later ones).
CalMeacham, I would say in 2001 the opening sequence is also “softer” than all the stuff with HAL-9000. As cool looking as the monolith is, and as neat as the idea of its proportions being the square of the first three integers, there is an awesome hard sci-fi movie in the middle of the film about an AI and some astronauts, that has nothing to do with the monolith (HAL’s motivation could be anything mission-critical).
I’m not familiar with most of the movies you listed, but as for 2010: turning Jupiter into a star might be a little too far for me to find plausible enough to qualify as “hard”.
Jophiel, interesting. But I wonder about these wikis: how do we know their information is canonical? Do the screenplay writers sign off on this stuff?
Desert Dog, amazing that electronic technology changed that much in those twenty years. What if the drone had gone back 10 years? It’s interesting for me to ponder the exact number of years that would put them right on the 50-50 edge of maybe being able to reverse-engineer it, or maybe not. Or for that matter the 99–1 position where they might figure it out if they talk to the right people and do everything right.
But I guess, for all our advances since then, that was quite a time for technology. I remember a few years back marveling that there were still passenger jets from the 1960s in service; I don’t know if that’s still the case.
Jurassic Park.
One entry I see missing from the hard SF movies is The Europa Report, a low budget first contact movie that nonetheless tries to adhere to hard science.
Count me in as another vote for Interstellar, 2001, 2010, and I don’t think I saw mentioned, Contact.
The problem with the OP’s constraints is that it feels like the confines are to what we know now science and derived science based on what we know-now science. I had this argument with a friend recently. He was willing to accept fusion, but who hand-wave away anything approaching a Dyson sphere because any civilization with that kind of knowledge wouldn’t have any other problems that it couldn’t solve, i.e., if they could build a Dyson sphere, then surely they can beat some issue, solve some problem.
As for TV shows, but I fear may strain credulity here, but I would also vote for Fringe.
How is traveling to a location that is 4.3 light years away, in less than 4.3 years, not FTL travel?
I figure that if it’s the aliens doing it, you can’t fault the humans for being non-“hard”. Which is why I included movies where aliens have star travel, but humans don’t.
Among TV series, you have to include Men into Space, a 1959-1960 TV series that showed a future with folks, well, going into space. All inside the nearby solar system, with no artificial gravity or FTL ships or aliens.
I actually saw this as a kid. I’ve never seen it in syndication or available as home video, or broadcast on cable. It was so invisible that, for many years, even books specializing in TV science fiction didn’t mention it or list episodes. It wasn’t until the internet came along that the series finally won a belated recognition.
Interstellar and Contact are probably about as hard as it’s possible for science fiction to get, while still featuring FTL travel. But they do still feature FTL travel, which is a huge deal. I think it was Asimov who once pointed out that time travel is traditionally considered science fiction and werewolves are traditionally considered fantasy, even though, given everything we know, werewolves are actually a lot more scientifically plausible and less fantastic than time travel.
As for Blade Runner, another hint to FTL travel is that there’s known to be something of interest called the “Tanhauser Gate”. We’re given almost no detail about it, of course, but it’s widely supposed that the Tanhauser Gate is somehow involved in travel to the offworld colonies.
They’re not doing that. In the reference frame of the Earth, the trip takes about six years. In the reference frame of the traveler, the trip would take about three and a half years, but the distance is shorter due to relativistic length contraction. In either case, though, if a radio message were sent out at the same time that the ship was launched, it would beat the ship there by a couple of years.
Another case of hard SF showing Men going into space (prior to themn actually doing so) was the series of episodes of Man in Space broadcast on the Disneyland TV show (the one on ABC, prior to their move to NBC and the name change to Disney’s Wonderful World of Color). Although broadcast in black and white, he episodes were made in color, and are (or at least were) available on DVD in color.
Here are some YouTube clips:
There were three shows, derived from the work of Werner von Braun’s group, and showcasing a proposed series of steps to get men into space, on the moon, and out to Mars, all using plausible existin and extrapolated technology, and featuring space stations and the like.
That sort of begs the question of what is “hard science”, doesn’t it? Is it ok to allow wormholes and “ice clouds” and gravity drives and tesseract structures that allow communication back to the past because they are based on some actual theory? Is it “hard science” to pick one or two fantastic elements like warp drives and time travel while the rest of the movie uses realistic effects of relativistic time dilation and ships that look like something NASA will build in 50 years?
Of course Interstellar ignores the very obvious problem of it presumably being much easier to “colonize” a dying Earth with habitats than it would be to move a significant number of humans off world.
And what was Plan B anyway, assuming they found a suitable planet? The crew of the Endurance was going to raise thousands of embryos to adulthood by themselves?
The Martian Chronicles?
The science is actually abysmal in these, but they don’t require Time Travel, FTL, teleportation, Aliens, or other no-nos forbidden by the OP:
The Magnetic Monster
GOG
Riders to the Stars
Battle Beneath the Earth
A few others:
F.P. 1 Does not Answer and its simultaneously-made other-language “clones”, with different casts
** Things to Come** – written by H.G. Wells ! Not at his best, though.
We mentioned the Robert Altman/James Caan film Countdown on another thread. It qualifies here.
So does Outland, Peter Hyams’ inept re-setting of High Noon in outer space. Harlan Ellison wrote a cute little piece eviscerating this film. There are science issues with it, too (people don’t explode in vacuum), but it overall qualifies. No FTL, no artificial gravity.