Fractured Fantasy Imagines Blowing Up Moon

June 19, 2009

We’re a nation of science dummies. No more than 25 percent of Americans are “scientifically savvy and alert,” says public opinion researcher Jon Miller. Most of the rest of us “don’t have a clue.”

Prime time TV dramas like the upcoming miniseries, Impact, which will air on ABC-TV the next two Sunday evenings  (June 21st and 28th) underscores this sad state of science cluelessness. The scriptwriter Michael Vickerman (author of several B-grade sci-fi flicks) is a total ASTRO-101 flunky.

Why am I ranting? Because the premise of the show is light-years beyond absurd. It is an insult even to the three-quarters of the country that is science illiterate.

Simply let me walk you through the storyline.

From the ABC-TV web blurb:

“The world watches as a large meteor shower streaks across the skies. Hidden in the meteor field is a brown dwarf, a dead star. It smashes into the moon in a tremendous explosion of rock and debris.”

A brief visit to Wikipedia would have enlightened the scriptwriter that a brown dwarf is larger than Jupiter and so would swallow the Earth and moon like King Kong snacking on gumdrops. It’s also made of mostly hydrogen --- not rocks -- so it can’t break into pieces. Statistically, the nearest brown dwarf would be 2 light-years away. You certainly would have plenty of time to know it was coming. “Hiding” a brown dwarf in a meteor shower is as nonsensical as hiding an elephant under the bed.

“Then strange anomalies begin to manifest themselves on Earth. It starts small -- cell phone disruptions, unusual static charges and odd tidal behavior. The evidence suggests that the moon and its orbit may have been permanently altered.”

Go out on a clear night and simply look at the moon. The great dark mare that form the face of the “man in the moon” are lava-flooded basins carved out by asteroid impacts billions of years ago. The moon is still in a nice tidy orbit today. Objects massive enough to modify the moon’s orbit would only come flying by if the solar system became dynamically unstable, and the small chance of that happening is billions of years in the future.

“ The anomalies increase to the point where the effect of gravity is being manipulated by increased electromagnetic surges coming from the moon. People, cars and other objects are rendered momentarily weightless in random, isolated areas around the globe.”

Electromagnetism has nothing to do with gravity. The electromagnetic force is carried by photons, gravity by gravitons. What’s more, the moon does not even have an electromagnetic field like Earth’s. But electromagnetic is an important sounding word. So it get’s thrown around in pop culture all the time to make people sound, well, science literate. What’s more, gravity cannot be “shut off” in select neighborhoods on Earth (what, didn’t they pay their “gravity bill?”)

“The world now has 39 days to stop the moon, or all of mankind will perish. After a failed attempt by the United States to destroy the moon, the scientific team works together to mount an international mission to the moon.”

This sounds suspiciously Biblical, didn’t the Great Flood last for 40 days? The moon is 1/80^th the mass of the Earth, or 10 billion billion tons. An ant would have more luck dismantling Mt. Everest that we would have knocking out the moon with the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal thrown at it.

I suspect the show’s producers were cheap or lazy or both because they didn’t have the wherewithal to at least hire an astronomy consultant for the production. (If they did in fact, the expert should be stripped of his or her university tenure.)

I appreciate that a good sci-fi flick needs to suspend some science to allow for time travel, warp speed, and seductive green alien women.

But a far more plausible “death from the skies” tale could have been built around simply detecting a previously undiscovered comet that’s barreling straight toward Earth. In reality, by the time the comet-Kazi was seen and orbit plotted, it would be too late to do much of anything but go underground and start building Dr. Strangelove shelters.

The great sky survey telescopes of the next decade, like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will essentially make a movie of the heavens and capture just about anything that moves. So ten years from now we’ll have a hefty catalog of wayward comets and asteroids that could possibly do us harm. We could make long-range plans to deflect anything that looked like a potential threat to Earth.

Rather that watching this DVD dollar-bin class sci fi flick, go find a good book about cosmic catastrophes and get really scared.

 

Comments

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[charles kafka]

its a shame with a little bit of research, one could have a piece of neutron star , or a mini black hole hit the moon. then they could have theorised that strange matter (from The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)) new research (with protesters saying outside warning about the collider accidentally could create a black hole, ) might be an anti-dote for black matter (make it unravel ,or some such, and mix with the moon's center. or throw automatically throw it into a parallel universe. ) one could have their edge of the set thriller, and at least still be digestible.
a piece of brown dwarf would just be made up of hydrogen and farts... stinky but not the end of the world.
a full brown dwarf as above stated that close to the earth would just have the moon and earth for a snack..(see article about a small spot appearing on jupiter :-)

im starting to worry about this bit about 75% of the people being science un-savy, that puts great responsibility on the 25% that are. to be straight forward, honest, and be able to simplify the concepts. and let everybody else do whatever they do best. Everybody does have their skills, and gifts. Nobody should be "left out" and all opinions should be welcome.

[Charles Kafka]

P.S.
love your writing style, simple, straight to the point, and readable. keep the articles coming!.
charles kafka