To the moon Alice............

[Xaiveir]

HONG KONG - The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

The British astrophysicist told a news conference in Hong Kong that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out.

He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The 64-year-old scientist — author of the global best seller "A Brief History of Time" — is wheelchair-bound and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Hawking said he's teaming up with his daughter to write a children's book about the universe, aimed at the same age range as the
Harry Potter books.

"It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe," his daughter, Lucy, added.

They didn't provide other details.

[Narrock]

They should figure out a way to create atmospheric conditions on the moon that would produce weather patterns similar, but not identical, to what we have here on earth. Maybe they can filter out hurricanes and tornadoes. Then start experimenting with planting various flora.

[Ginzburgh]

Then start experimenting with planting various flora.

Which can only come after the cover the entire surface with soil. Shouldn't be too difficult.

[Arlos]

Moon is entirely too small to hold on to a reasonable atmosphere. Remember, the moon has significantly lower gravity than even Mars, and is basically pure rock, except for some really small deposits on its surface left by comets smacking into it. As of right now, the Moon has no atmosphere whatsoever.

The thickness of a planet or moon's atmosphere is basically directly controlled by 2 factors: 1) How much gas is being added constantly into the atmosphere, and 2) The amount of gravity on the planet.

Look at Mars, for example: It hasn't had active volcanoes for a VERY long time, so the amount for #1 is rather low. Combine that factor with it's rather low gravity, and you get the current status of the planet, where the atmospheric pressure at the surface is about like that of the Earth at 100,000 feet in altitude.

Now, I am sure someone will bring up Saturn's moon, Titan, where we just sent the lander as part of the Galileo mission. Well, we're not entirely certain how that atmosphere works, because the gravity of Titan is lower even than Mars', yet its atmosphere is twice as dense as the Earth's. As best we can figure, is that there is significant volcanic activity that is caused by tidal heating from Saturn's gravity.

Now, without getting technical in what the tidal forces are, let me give an analogy: You know that if you take a piece of metal and keep bending it back and forth, the spot where you're bending it gets pretty warm, right? Well, Titan is close enough to Saturn that Titan is effectively continually getting bent back and forth by that gravity, which heats the inside of the planet, which causes volcanism, etc.

So, ultimately, there is no way to terraform the moon; it simply lacks the raw materials, or conditions necessary. It MIGHT be possible to terraform Mars, if we can figure out a way to jump-start its vulcanism. We'd also need to bio-engineer some kind of plant capable of surviving in negligible atmospheric pressure, that could start converting some of the CO2 to Oxygen. We'd still need a really high CO2 content compared to the Earth though, as you'd NEED a greenhouse effect there for it to be anywhere near as warm as the Earth, because it's a fair bit further away, and thus gets a lot less solar energy.

Now, one issue that is rarely if ever mentioned, is that there are some pretty significant long-term effects to living in lower gravity. Someone born on the Moon or Mars will never be able to come back to the Earth and live there, because their muscles and bones won't be anywhere near as developed as those of someone born here, and the gravity would quite literally crush them to death, slowly.

The long-term effects of microgravity are actually one of the biggest obstacles to even sending people to Mars to begin with. The current record for longest time in space is 438 days. That's about 1/3 of the time necessary for a manned Mars trip, and the guy that did it was effectively in intensive care for weeks recovering ocn ehe came back. Basically what happens, is that in the absence of gravity, the calcium in your bones starts to leech out of the bones and back into the bloodstream, and there's actually evidence that it never goes back, permanently leaving your bones significantly more brittle. Also an issue is muscle atrophy, because even with extensive exercise, your muscles just aren't working against 1G of force 24x7.

Now, there are some methods we can use to simulate 1G, but they require a really large ship and a lot of engieneering. But, they're also something that requires basically a giant centrifuge, and would be completely impractical for a colony environment on the surface of a planet. (A huge space station, it might be possible). Now, all of these risks I've talked about are seperate from the other risks, such as hugely increased risks of radiation exposure from solar flares, etc. as there's no magnetosphere on the moon, and only a small one on Mars.

So, while I indeed support the idea of creating permanent Moon/Mars/Space colonies, there are numerous and HIGHLY significant engineering challenges that would need to be dealt with before we even contemplate it. We need to successfully overcome the challenges to just to GET to Mars to begin with first, before we start working out means to live there permanently and independently.

-Arlos

[Ginzburgh]

FIRST!

[Arlos]

Ugh, don't remind me of that movie. It had potential to be pretty damn good, but some of the science was so bad that it just ruined the movie for me. The ending sequence was the absolute worst. It was so bad I almost got up and walked out of the theatre.

Now, I know it might not seem that bad to someone who wasn't an Astrophysics major in the past, but to me, ugh.

-Arlos

[Ginzburgh]

That's ironic because everything I know about astrophysics I learned from that movie.

...guess it's back to the drawing board.

[Arlos]

Yuck. That's like learnign all your Geology from "The Core" or all of your environmental science from "The Day After Tomorrow", both of which were spectacularly bad, science-wise.

You want to watch a Science Fiction movie that gets its science right, go watch 2001.

-Arlos

[Agrajag]

Yuck. That's like learnign all your Geology from "The Core" or all of your environmental science from "The Day After Tomorrow", both of which were spectacularly bad, science-wise.

You want to watch a Science Fiction movie that gets its science right, go watch 2001.

-Arlos

And to think, I believed that "The Day After Tomorrow" was based off of scientific fact with the exception of the dramatically fast timeline.

[Ginzburgh]

What part of 2001 are you referring too Arlos?

[Phlegm]

What part of 2001 are you referring too Arlos?

The boring part... oh wait ... the whole movie is fucking boring.

[Drem]

What part of 2001 are you referring too Arlos?

Probably everything, from having no sound in space to how realistic all the planets look. I still don't get why people add sound to stuff in space. Everytime I watch Star Wars and hear all that noise in space I get to wondering. I also wonder how something could explode into a big fiery mess in space. 2001 is the best space movie ever made, imo. It might be long and drawn out but it's not supposed to be a guns blazing action packed adventure. It's a thoughtful take on intelligent design.

[Ginzburgh]

but...

The height of lunar mountains was overestimated, as the film was made before the lunar expeditions of the Apollo program, and because meteoric erosion was underestimated.

The gravity in Clavius base simulates that of Earth's rather than lunar gravity, although it is conceivable that the briefing takes place in a centrifuge, simulating normal gravity.

The thermal radiators on Discovery One, originally intended to be included, were eventually removed from the design because Kubrick felt they looked too much like wings.

In the EVA shots of "Discovery One," the background stars are seen to be slowly moving in relation to the ship. This is inaccurate -- the stars are too far away and the ship's speed too slow in relation to them for them to appear to move. Kubrick was aware of the inaccuracy of these shots but ignored the issue for artistic license, because if presented accurately the shots lacked visual movement, looking like still images. However, another interpretation is that the entire Discovery stack rotates end-over-end and the "camera" is rotating synchronously with Discovery against the fixed stars.

The dust blown up by the exhaust of the lunar shuttle is seen to billow up from the landing pad, rather than radiate out in straight lines, as would happen in the near-vacuum of the lunar surface.

A further inaccuracy seemingly ignored by many commentators is the varying phases of the Earth as seen from the Moon during the landing maneuvers of the Aries 1B moon ship (an error of continuity as well as science).
There are various places in the film where planets "magically" align, for artistic purposes, in defiance of reality.

In the sequence in which David Bowman blows the hatch on his space pod to make an unprotected entry to Discovery's airlock, there is a shot with Dave rebounding in the airlock chamber, while his space pod is still sitting just outside the airlock door. Since the pod is not fixed to Discovery, the blowing of the pod's hatch should have caused the pod to move away on the thrust of its escaping atmosphere—though rather slowly, given a rough estimation of the mass and speed of ejected air (and Bowman) in relation to the mass of the pod. This being said, it is not impossible that the ejection procedure involves automatic compensation by the thrusters of the pod, as in stationkeeping.

There is a somewhat famous, though small, technical error when Heywood Floyd is flying to the moon. Supposedly in a weightless state, he sips through a straw, and when he lets go of it, the fluid slides back into the container. This is not necessarily an error, however. Although there would be no gravitational force to pull the fluid in space, Floyd might have created a slight vacuum in the container when his lips were on the straw. This could have been sufficient to pull the liquid back into the container. Another explanation for this might be that the tips of the straws seem to be fitted with some types of small valves which, ideally, would prevent the liquid from escaping once the sipping was over.

The Centrifuge in Discovery One – seen here, astronaut Frank Poole is jogging around its circumference like a hamster in a cage.Though the crew quarters in the spaceship Discovery are arranged in a rotating wheel to simulate gravity, which is often overlooked in science fiction, the wheel's small radius would require a fairly rapid RPM (five to ten RPM depending on the actual radius) to produce earth-like gravity. It is suggested that the human body becomes dizzy, nauseated and disoriented when exposed to high Coriolis forces, and few if any humans could become accustomed to high levels of rotation. In addition, the amount of gravity exerted on the human body would vary between the feet, waist and head. A better design to reduce the gradient of centripetal force would have been to rotate the entire ship, and have the crew section and the drive section swinging from the central AE-35/Antenna structure tethered by strong cables. However, this is assuming the crew quarters rotate to simulate Earth gravity. Were the purpose to simulate, say, lunar gravity, the section could rotate much more slowly.

In one scene, a flight attendant grabs the pen of a sleeping Heywood Floyd as it floats in zero gravity inside a spaceship cabin. The pen is rotating, but it is not rotating about its own center of mass; instead, it is rotating about a center that is significantly external to the pen. This happens because, in reality, the pen was mounted on a large, transparent, rotating disk from which the actress playing the flight attendant plucked it, and it was not mounted at the center of the disk. In an actual zero-gravity environment, some force would have to be acting upon the pen in order to compel it to rotate around anything other than its own center of mass.

...not that I could do any better or anything.

[Captain Insano]

My question is if we terraform mars will the hookers have 3 tits? That would be awesome.

[Ginzburgh]

Of course they will.

[Captain Insano]

TO MARS! Someone ready my spaceship!

[Arlos]

Yeah, there were some relatively minor erros in 2001, but it was much much better as far as science goes than really any other sci-fi movie that I can think of.

The whole ending sequence of Total Recall was so ludicrously bad that it went beyond "so bad it's funny" to "so bad it's painful".

1) You don't explode in a vacuum, your body is too tough for that. Now, without going into the physics, the lower the atmospheric pressure, the lower the temperature at which things boil. (That's why there's "high altitude" directions on a lot of packaged foods). If we're suddenly plunged into vacuum, the heat at which our body keeps our blood is sufficient to cause it to start boiling. So, what happens is all of the capillaries near our skin, especially in the eyes, nose, ears, etc. burst open and your blood boils out from such various orifices, eventually leaving us a withered mummified husk.

2) It is completely impossible to sublimate ice into gas in anything even remotely resembling the time frame shown at the end of the movie.

3) It is likewise impossible for gas to spread across the planet that fast, to where literally in seconds the planet has a comfy atmosphere. Air is too dense to move that quickly.

4) Even if a gas DID move that quickly, it would pick up mass quantities of dust, rocks, etc. as it blew out across the ground, just like a hurricane does, and it would've literally flayed them alive as it blew across them as they're writhing around on the ground. Sandstorms on Earth can do that, 5000mph winds on Mars could do it in seconds.

5) Not to mention, even if they somehow didn't get shredded, the winds (even if they were moving at a more reasonable 500mph) would've picked up their semi-shredded parts and flung them into any handy vertical object, converting them into a pulp. 250 mph winds on earth can fling train engines several hundred yards. 500mph in gravity 1/3 that of earth would fling humans for miles, or until they smacked into one of those cliffs they were right next to.

6) The average surface temperature on Mars is about -80 degrees Farenheit. Even if there's suddenly atmosphere everywhere, that doesn't mean things suddenly got warmer. In their shredded indoor clothes they were wearing, they'd have frozen to death in minutes, just like we would on earth if we wore T-shirts in Antarctica in winter.

I could probably find a good half dozen other major issues with that ending sequence, not to mention earlier sections. At least earlier in the movie, the errors weren't SO egregious as to completely destroy the movie, but that ending scene... /barf

-Arlos

[Ginzburgh]

What about Event Horizon!?

[Arlos]

I only saw Event Horizon once, and that was in the theatres. I remember it being bad, but not as hideously awful as something like, say, Armageddon or this movie. I mostly remember it as having the soundtrack cranked up louder than about any other movie I've ever seen. To really judge, I'd have to see it again, and I didn't like it the first time I saw it, so my motivation to see it again is nil.

-Arlos

[Thon]

Event Horizon wasn't too bad. "You won't need eyes where we're going"

as for the whole living in space/another planet thing goes. if we master genetic engineering we might be able to one day create people capable of not only living on other worlds, or in zero gravity, but they would thrive there. or at the very least, give future generations a jumpstart to being able to function out there. depending on the environment, we could tailor make species. mars would have different needs than say, titan.

the moon is another story though, it's close enough not to need terraforming. just massive base construction. it's only a few days away at our technology, more than close enough to ship needed supplies. although it's nowhere near economical to deliver said supplies currently