ANd for another bad science thing (although in a comedy, I must admit, but it's so appallingly bad, that I have to include it).
Evolution: WE're carbon-based, and arsenic is our poison. They're nitrogen-based, so we go one across and three down on the periodic table... look! Selenium must be their poison.
It was shocking.
It was funny! Come on I laughed my ass off in that movie, like when Stifler started singing....<wipes tear from his eye> that was a classic!
Η ζωή, η ζωή εδω τελειώνει!
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One also has to wonder how a nitrogen-based life form can even exist. It would not appear to be reactive enough to form the essential bonds to form complex life-forms. Now we don't even think that Silicon-based life can exist because the atoms would be too large and they would not bond as easily as carbon, but a NITROGEN based life-form is just terrible.
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Master of Ossus wrote:One also has to wonder how a nitrogen-based life form can even exist. It would not appear to be reactive enough to form the essential bonds to form complex life-forms. Now we don't even think that Silicon-based life can exist because the atoms would be too large and they would not bond as easily as carbon, but a NITROGEN based life-form is just terrible.
Nitrogen is more reactive than carbon - the most reactive non-metals are (in order) Fluorine, Oxygen, Chlorine and Nitrogen. But Nitrogen does not form complex molecules in the way carbon does, so you are correct in saying that a nitrogen-based lifeform cannot exist.
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I'm trying to say that Nitrogen cannot form as many bonds as carbon. Sorry if that was unclear. I don't think that that is worse than Species "New form of methane," but I think that it is pretty bad. Nitrogen-based life forms would not exist.
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Latinum Star Recipient; Hacker's Cross Award Winner
"one soler flar can vapririze the planit or malt the nickl in lass than millasacit" -Bagara1000
Raxmei wrote:By definition impossible if the offspring can have children of its own. If not, then it is onely as impossible as a human-mushroom crossbreed.
Actually, mushrooms are more plant-like than animals (like humans), so I would rather equal human-extraterrestrial crossbreeds to crossbreeds between sheep and dolphins.
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Simon H.Johansen wrote:
Actually, mushrooms are more plant-like than animals (like humans), so I would rather equal human-extraterrestrial crossbreeds to crossbreeds between sheep and dolphins.
Extraterrestrials would belong to entirely alien taxonomic groups that only superficially resemble animals. The genes wouldn't look at all like anything on Earth, having diverged billions of years ago. Mushrooms are optimistic.
I was watching the episode with Armus killing Tasha Yar and covering the shuttle with Troi trapped inside--what's the ep title, anyone? Anyway, this is a very mild gaffe but I'm hella bored. So they plot the level of energy field that Armus is putting out, and find that it's highest when he does things like kill Yar and kidnap Ryker, and at a minimum when he is covering the shuttle. If you look at the graph though, and we get to see it 2 or 3 times, the mins should be flat lines since Armus covers the shuttle for meaningful time intervals; but they show up as instantaneous events, just as the maxes, which occur over relatively short time intervals, do. They were counting on the mins to give them a "human" response time to get the transporter to penetrate the field, so it doesn't make sense that his energy raises steadily, which would prevent transport, after dropping to the minimums. I submit that FrankenB&B need a calculus with graphing utilitiies course.
What a world, what a world! Who would have thought that a little girl could destroy my wickedness?
"Armageddon" has an asteroid the size of Texas (orders of magnitude bigger than the dino-killer) that gets blown cleanly in half by a tiny nuke (which accelerates each piece to hundreds of km/s!)
"ID4" has aliens who travel across the galaxy to strip-mine the Earth for minerals found on thousands of barren planets they passed during their trip here. And if that isn't enough, their starships have open listening ports, they use modern wireless LAN cards, and they run on MacOS.
Star Trek has too many problems to count, but here's my favourite: in one of the DS9 episodes a device is made which changes the laws of probability. Unfortunately, the laws of probability are mathematical. They are a simple matter of counting permutations and/or combinations. A device that changes the laws of probability is akin to a device that changes the laws of multiplication or addition.
And perhaps more importantly, who green-lights this stuff?
At the end of the day, it's green-lighted because most people don't take it seriously- it's eye-candy, or it's entertaining, or perhaps even funny, depending on one's view point. You get a minority of people who take it literally, and unfortunately the minority is often the most vocal group (take Star Trek for example- it has millions of fans, who watch the show not for scientific accuracy, which isn't important to them, but for entertainment. Unfortunately a small number take the show too seriously- and this number also happen to be the most vocal).
Originally posted by Master of Ossus
On the other hand, it MIGHT be possible because those aliens seeded the galaxy with their own genetic codes in an effort to get all of the races to grow up the same way, but still, it would be ENORMOUSLY unlikely.
What? When? Where? This is the first time I have heard this! Is this from an episode of ST or something? Not flamming you, just wanted to know from whence this came. [/quote]
That would be in the TNG episode called The Chase.
It was purposely written to attempt to explain why all the ST aliens look like
humans with stuff glued to their heads, and why they all seem to be able to
interbreed.
The seeder aliens kind of look like the founders from DS9 (the same actress played the one seen in the episode and the head Founder on DS9. The makeup is similar too. Sort of the unfinished human look.)
ANd for another bad science thing (although in a comedy, I must admit, but it's so appallingly bad, that I have to include it).
Evolution: WE're carbon-based, and arsenic is our poison. They're nitrogen-based, so we go one across and three down on the periodic table... look! Selenium must be their poison.
It was shocking.
Next time your out shopping, pick up a bottle of Head and Shoulders and get a look at what is in it. You aren't going to find Selenium in there...
I have noticed an even worse science gaffe than the ones I first noted.... the movie version of Wing Commander , where the commander of a spaceship urged the crew to be silent, lest the Kilrathi heard them.... in the vacuum of space .
I thought that was because the aliens could sense vibrations through the ship's hull if they were scanning while people were being loud.
At the time they were in an asteroid crater, which clearly had some sort of gas at the bottom, concealing the ship. So sound could have been transmitted.
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The seeder aliens kind of look like the founders from DS9 (the same actress played the one seen in the episode and the head Founder on DS9. The makeup is similar too. Sort of the unfinished human look.)
Hmm... maybe these "progenitors" were in fact the first humanoids encountered by the Founders??
"Hi there, would you like to have a cookie?"
"No, actually I would HATE to have a cookie, you vapid waste of inedible flesh!"
I will present to you all the worst, I mean the WORST movie of all time. Behold: Congo
Congo? Yes, Congo. That movie insulted everyone who had an IQ over 50. Let me explain. When I went to the theater to see this piece of s**t, it was me (CS major with some physics), a chemistry major, a geology major, and a biology major. By the time that movie was over, we were all insulted. Here's why:
1. The eruption of that volcano should have killed everyone in the area pretty much instantly.
2. The stupid scientist held a freakin laser IN HER HAND! She used it to kill a bunch of gorillas. Needless to say, I doubt one could hold a laser that powerful in your hand, let alone see the beam.
3. Amy the Gorilla. Nuff said.
4. The diamonds in the mine were just sitting out in the open, ripe for the picking like apples. Very nice.
I'm sure there are others, but just thinking about that movie is making me go blind.
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Stewie: "How do you know about the machine?"
--
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Datana wrote:Of course, the writers probably have read the Hitchhiker's Guide, as one of the engineering displays in TNG was labelled "Infinite Improbability Drive." It would explain how the ship runs into so many temporal whatsits, at the least.
They also did another ripoff; in Voyager, there is a race of "Vogons."
I wish they had tortured Janeway by reading her their poetry
You could probably put together a great comedy book from the gaffes in SF.
Some (a very few) of the ones I've noticed over the years...
Star Trek: as Darth Wong's said, way too many to list probably for this entire website. But here are some of the goofier ones which have caught my attention.
"Hodgkins' Law of Parallel Planet Development" —the one which explained away the Roman Empire Planet in "Bread And Circuses". They did a lot better with the Preserver Theory from the third season episode "The Paradise Syndrome".
Powered orbit —how many episodes where the Enterprise must constantly run her engines to maintain a planetary orbit, otherwise she'll end up spiraling down to the surface? I mean, a warp driven starship can't do what Skylab or Mir was able to manage with no engines whatsoever?
"Tomorrow Is Yesterday" —bad enough the entire idea of the Slingshot Manoeuver as a mechanism for time travel; I can't even begin to figure out the entire goofy notion of beaming a person into his own time-duplicated self to undo the events that person experienced in the first place.
The Incredible Shrinking Freezing Planet —come to Psi 2000 where you can see laws of physics being broken wholesale from the comfort of your own starship. If the planet is actually shrinking, then that means that there should be a tremendous amount of molecular friction taking place, which translates into heat generated by gravitational collapse. The surface of Psi 2000 should have been too hot for the Federation to plant a monitoring station on; evidently, the writer John D.F. Black likened the planet to a giant ice cube. But that's only one of the mysteries of Psi 2000; Uhura at one point reported strange shifts in mass and gravity, but even if the planet is improbably shrinking, its mass and gravity should remain constant. A planet doesn't have the mass necessary even to overcome electromagnetic repulsion of its own constitutent atoms, and the only way gravity can increase is if mass increases, and the EVA at the dead science station indicated that Psi 2000 had terrestrial gravity. Even the Psi 2000 disease doesn't pass muster; water can't spontaneously multiply itself, like a virus, which the disease wasn't. And the small amount each crewman could pass onto another one by personal contact couldn't possibly have the chemical density of the alcohol-like substance to produce the sort of symptoms in evidence and the duration of effect. One of the most scientifically illiterate episodes of TOS, by any measure.
"The Naked Now" —the stellar chunk; words simply don't exist to describe how idiotic this entire episode was but this was the one which had me screaming at the TV when I first saw it. Only Voyager was able to come up with stuff even more idiotic than this one.
Star Wars —no, not the old saw about parsecs expressed as a unit of time (particularly as it is used as a colloquialism in the context of the scene and clearly carries a meaning other than a strict matter of astronomical accuracy). Instead, a far more subtle error involving one of the most evocative scenes of the entire movie series. Who can forget that poetic moment when Luke Skywalker is looking out over the horizon to see the two suns setting and dreaming of a future he's beginning to think will never come his way? Beautifully composited. But one problem is that two suns would cast double shadows on everything. This mistake slips by in the recent movies of the Opening Trilogy and the Special Edition of ANH.
Larry Niven's Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers —the Teela Brown Luck Gene? PLEEEZE!
Come on I laughed my ass off in that movie, like when Stifler started singing....<wipes tear from his eye> that was a classic! 
