Top 5 Most Scientifically Plausible Sci Fi Movies

[Kurgan]

According to this:

I can't dress my links!

[Samuel]

Right

Would the Galactic Empire really have enough manpower to build (and then rebuild) the Death Star in the Star Wars films?

They don't get the concept of "galactic civilization" for starters.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The science is hard. Except for the FTL portal, the aliens who manipulate human evolution and the computer that goes rogue. Who didn't see that coming?

3. Gattaca (1997)

Not really. Someone else can explain the flaws- I am not so big on business management or theinsurance industry.

4. Iron Man (2008)

Though Iron Man's nifty gadgets, including his handy laser repulsors and jet boots, remain science fiction, in many cases the underlying scientific principles are sound. Practical problems, such as the suit's cost and weight, would make a real Iron Man unlikely.

It is realistic except for the fact it is impossible.

5. Jurassic Park (1993)

The whole plot isn't plausible.

The article seems to conflate plausibility is if some of the concepts are physically possible, rather than if the plot or other parts are valid. The only one I agree with is the Truman Show. The rest are no more plausible than the Jetsons.

[NecronLord]

It's not clear what the portal in 2001 is, the book claims it's a wormhole, but the later books claim otherwise. The aliens don't seem to manipulate evolution so much as survey it, either. And yes, a computer kills people - if you have a sapient computer, it killing people if circumstances dictate is hardly silly. There's nothing terribly implausible about the film.

Sure, it may not be a great film, but it is scientifically plausible.

Iron Man is nowhere near plausible, though. And there's tons of other scientifically plausible films that're left off here.

[Mobiboros]

Is the Truman Show really Sci-Fi? Nothing about it struck me as anything that couldn't be done now, save for the moral/ethical implications... which was the entire point of the movie. The article even notes we already DO this today just not as all encompassing. In fact it exists post the technology incorporated in the movie.

2001? Wasn't teh basic premise of just the movie "God did it!". Kinda shoots science in the foot actually.

Gattaca. I guess. I mean the human motivations and ethics are a stretch but it's basically just genetic screening and engineering.

Iron man... the guy even notes that aside from everything specific to the concept of Iron Man, it's all scientifically sound. What does that leave?

Jurassic Park? Meh, if you leave out the horrid explanation of how they did it one could make the case that we could clone dinosaurs and if we did we'd probably open a theme park. We open theme parks for everything else.

[NecronLord]

2001? Wasn't teh basic premise of just the movie "God did it!". Kinda shoots science in the foot actually.

Absolutely completely emphatically categorically not.

The 'monoliths' are very clearly some objects created by superior-science aliens. No gods required. They are in fact a complete refutation of divine creation, postulating that mankind's development was perhaps nudged by aliens... and that's about it. No big man with a rod of iron and a beard required.

Even then, they're not shown tampering with human evolution in any way, so much as accellerating human adoption of tool use.

[Mobiboros]

Absolutely completely emphatically categorically not.

The 'monoliths' are very clearly some objects created by superior-science aliens. No gods required.

Right, so the Aliens are of unknown provinence. Have "science" we can't comprehend. Have been tampering with human evolution to the point one dude becomes, basically, one of their servants as an energy being.

Yeah, that's much more rational than the summation "God did it". I'll, however, ammend my statement to "God-like Extraterrestrials did it".

This still doesn't speak to scientific plausibility.

[Deathstalker]

I, Robot is more plausible than most of those. Hell, Judge Dredd is fairly plausible in comparison.

[NecronLord]

Right, so the Aliens are of unknown provinence. Have "science" we can't comprehend.

None of which breaks the laws of physics. Hell, they still rely on radio signals godlike my balls.

Have been tampering with human evolution to the point one dude becomes, basically, one of their servants as an energy being.

Explicitly not. He goes near it, gets absorbed into it, and has an acid trip. Everything after that is audience interpretation.

[Uraniun235]

Right, so the Aliens are of unknown provinence. Have "science" we can't comprehend. Have been tampering with human evolution to the point one dude becomes, basically, one of their servants as an energy being.

Yeah, that's much more rational than the summation "God did it". I'll, however, ammend my statement to "God-like Extraterrestrials did it".

This still doesn't speak to scientific plausibility.

What's the limit to which you're willing to accept as "plausible"? What depiction of "very advanced alien technology" would you accept?

The movie doesn't even say "this shit is totally beyond our ability to figure out"; it's just that we can't figure it out on the face of it, and will take a long time to decipher. Hell, let's just look at modern computer technology. Imagine if we could take a slate tablet like this back a hundred years:



Run a movie on it. Play a game. Write on it. Those people would be totally baffled by it. They would have no idea how it worked, and if they tried to take it apart they would only be even more confused. They wouldn't even have the ability to take apart and learn from the CPU, because the transistors would be smaller than they could see; they wouldn't even know about transistors.

It's not at all implausible that there could exist technology which our present level of technological sophistication would be unable to understand within a few years, if not a few decades. Hell, we think we've got a bead on fusion power, and that's still projected to be decades away.


That aside... You're seriously butthurt that we don't know where the aliens came from or what exactly their intentions were?


(Your third point is invalidated as Bowman, even if he was transformed - as pointed out before, not even necessarily true - was almost certainly not transformed by some pseudo-evolution, and is therefore not necessarily unscientific.)

[RedImperator]

The idea that the moral of 2001, a movie written by an avowed and outspoken atheist (who basically inserted some line about how religion died out and the world became a better place for it in every one of his books), was "God did it" is easily the most ludicrous thing I've read this week that wasn't spoken by Sarah Palin.

[Duckie]

The idea that the moral of 2001, a movie written by an avowed and outspoken atheist (who basically inserted some line about how religion died out and the world became a better place for it in every one of his books), was "God did it" is easily the most ludicrous thing I've read this week that wasn't spoken by Sarah Palin.

Indeed, although he might be confusing it with Contact, by Sagan. Although the lesson I took away from Sagan wasn't that 'some things can't be proven and rely on faith' (the lesson in the movie, at minimum, despite its depiction of religion with the fundamentalists), but rather that the aliens were just as illogical and prone to finding false positives for patterns (such as 'hey I'm god lol hi' encoded in pi) as mankind. But maybe I was looking too far into it.

[Junghalli]

Gattaca. I guess. I mean the human motivations and ethics are a stretch but it's basically just genetic screening and engineering.

There's a bit of a plot/logic hole in how two presumably genetically "perfected" parents have a child who isn't similarly "perfected", but it can be explained away.

There was a thread on it on SB.com (link).

[Batman]

I don't recall the parents being genetically perfected. From what I remember, their kids where among the first generation to get the treatment. And I also have no recall of their gengineering technique being infallible. They apparently COULD fix most if not all genetic defects in the CHILD. I'm no biologist but I don't think that's necessarily the same as being able to eliminate every potential problem that might LEAD to genetic defects in eventual offspring, in the PARENTS.
It's been a while since I saw that movie, mind you.

[DPDarkPrimus]

That list fails for not having Alien on the list.

[Gil Hamilton]

I don't recall the parents being genetically perfected. From what I remember, their kids where among the first generation to get the treatment. And I also have no recall of their gengineering technique being infallible. They apparently COULD fix most if not all genetic defects in the CHILD. I'm no biologist but I don't think that's necessarily the same as being able to eliminate every potential problem that might LEAD to genetic defects in eventual offspring, in the PARENTS.
It's been a while since I saw that movie, mind you.

The genetic engineering in Gattaca was all pre-implantation. The geneticist actually explains the process that it doesn't even involve modifying a person that much, but selecting genes that already exist specifically to produce the ubermensch 1 in a 1000 resultant child, rather than leave it to chance and presumably includes the inclusion of a genetic marker that says "Hey, I was genetically engineered!" on a blood or urine test (probably as a legal proof of engineering, even if we disregard it being an obvious plot device).

[Deathstalker]

IN Gattaca, Ethan Hawkes character was a "free-birth" to steal a phrase, conceived in the back of a car. His brother was planned with a geneticist to be perfect.

[Samuel]

2001 is pretty good considering the list. The aliens are explained as "valuing intelligence" although their actions don't make alot of sense. Maybe they are just bored or this is a pet project of a few.

HAL going rogue isn't very plausible, but I think the book was written before "crazy AIs" became popular.

Of course, the timeline was understandibly horribly, horribly off. We still don't have a moon base!

Also, we know there isn't a monolith on the moon Iapetus. At least, that isn't what causes the color patterns.

[Ford Prefect]

HAL going rogue isn't very plausible

HAL doesn't go 'rogue'; all his actions were designed to protect the mission from his fallible human crewmates. HAL's logic is correct: if Bowman and Poole are dead, then there is no chance that they will accidentally let slip anything about the mission, and HAL is capable of running the ship independantly. Bowman even begrudingly recognises that HAL could do it on his own better than both the human astronauts, if I recall the novel correctly.

HAL is probably not a particularly accurate model of what a real-life artificial intelligence would look or act like, but in the context of 2OOI, everything that HAL does is plausible. The HAL 9000 is a very clever but very literal machine. His 'craziness' comes from a serious conflict of interest: it is his primary duty to protect the mission, but it is implied and comes across in both the movie and novel that HAL likes both Bowman and Poole, as much as he is able. Additionally, he is moved to his final actions (murder) when he witnesses both astronauts discussing switching him off, which he believes would put the entire mission in jeopardy.

[Ohma]

Also, we know there isn't a monolith on the moon Iapetus. At least, that isn't what causes the color patterns.

Well...yeah...I'm not sure how that really counts against the movie any more than like, any other piece of fiction in general (I don't think that there was a salesman named Willy Loman living in New York City in 1949 who killed himself so that his family could get the money on his life insurance policy for example).

[CaptainChewbacca]

Clearly, this guy isn't lucky enough to have seen THE CORE.

[Samuel]

Clearly, this guy isn't lucky enough to have seen THE CORE.

I remember mentioning that to my geology teacher at Cosmos. He hated it. It is number 1 for implausible movie physics.

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/mpmain.html

[NecronLord]

HAL going rogue isn't very plausible, but I think the book was written before "crazy AIs" became popular.

Eh. Remember, Hal is not one of a kind. There are lots of AIs in the 2001 setting. He's the only one of his class ever to even make a mistake. I would be very surprised, if, out of thousands of AIs, not one of them fouled up when given irrationally conflicting goals.

Also, we know there isn't a monolith on the moon Iapetus. At least, that isn't what causes the color patterns.

Fortunately, the movie version has it floating in space.

And curiously, the black dot he describes on Iapetus wasn't known about when the book was written. It was coincidence that one was later found. Clarke described it as rather spooky when someone sent him a picture of that thing.

[Starglider]

There are lots of AIs in the 2001 setting. He's the only one of his class ever to even make a mistake.

Where do you get this from? In the novelisation, there is only one other AI of that class (SAL-9000).

As I recall, SAL is featured in the 2010 film as well. In the 2010 novel, the Russians criticise the Americans for using too advanced and risky computing technology.

The total absence of sapient AIs from the following 2061 (and 3001 excepting the Hal-Bowman remenant) seems like an enormous retcon.

HAL is probably not a particularly accurate model of what a real-life artificial intelligence would look or act like,

I think HAL is reasonably accurate, if you make certain (reasonable) assumptions about the implementation details. HAL appears to be a hybrid of formal logic and neural network techniques, with an overall potential constrained by relatively unsophisticated hardware. There are many, many papers on proposed logic-topped, NN-backed general AI designs, though of course none of these have ever worked very well in real life. There are also many, many papers on direct hardware implementations of neural nets, though again very little actual implementation work has been done. In an alternate universe where AI got more funding (i.e. no 'AI winter') and different research approaches were taken (i.e. the symbolic logic and connectionist people didn't split off into warring camps with very little cross-fertilisation) HAL-9000 by 2001 is quite plausible. HAL's behaviour as described in the novel is completely plausible based on these implementation assumptions. Of course I'd also expect transhuman AGIs to follow in very short order and a technological singularity by 2010, certainly by 2061 even if the results of the Discovery mission had a massively chilling effect on AI research.

The idea that the moral of 2001, a movie written by an avowed and outspoken atheist (who basically inserted some line about how religion died out and the world became a better place for it in every one of his books), was "God did it" is easily the most ludicrous thing I've read this week that wasn't spoken by Sarah Palin.

Unfortunately Clarke seems to have gotten somewhat religious in his (very) old age, which ruined the last two books of the Rama series.

I, Robot is more plausible than most of those. Hell, Judge Dredd is fairly plausible in comparison.

Ironically, yes. Films don't have to be good to be scientifically plausible. Also, 'Logan's Run' was fairly plausible except for the teleporters (which played a very minor role anyway).

That list fails for not having Alien on the list.

Alien fails hard on the mass issue. There is just no way that creature could have grown that fast, before it starts eating crewmembers. Hell, even with unlimited food available I very much doubt it's biologically possible to go from a rat sized creature to a human-sized creature in a couple of hours, no matter how crazy your biochemistry. Also, Alien has FTL, of the standard sci-fi type (which makes no particular effort to be plausible). Much as I like the sets, the equipment design looks horribly dated now, much more so than SW, and it's hard to imagine 1970s computer technology still being in use a century later when hyperdrives and fusion reactors are common technology. Then there's the super-acidic blood, and the pretty much chemical impossibility of making a living organism based on it.

[NecronLord]

Where do you get this from? In the novelisation, there is only one other AI of that class (SAL-9000).

The film. HAL repeatedly says, and stresses the point that 'No nine thousand series computer has ever recorded a fault.' And things like 'this kind of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.'

It's quite clear from the context that they're not that rare. Certainly that wouldn't be an impressive or reassuring boast if there were only the two of them. There's various references to 'HAL nine thousand series computers' (note that HAL is part of the series name, even, there are supposedly other HALs) with a 'perfect operational record' and in any case it beggars belief that if HAL came online in 1992 (in what is called a HAL plant no less) and had a perfect operational record as a high end computer and analyst for nine years, no more than two would be commissioned. Every government agency would want one, and if it were legal, so would every large corparation.

There's very little continuity between the novel series and the films, or even the other novels (the 2001 novel stating that there was some kind of wormhole nexus, the 2010 novel stating that there was no such thing, and the 3001 novel explicitly stating that the monoliths are limited to C in their communications) and I really don't think that anything in the novel should really affect what we say about the film itself.

If, at the time, Clarke intended for there to be only two of them, I can only assume that Kubrick or someone else altered the script to imply something quite different.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Was watching Armageddon on the Beeb last night and it reminded me of Deep Impact and its far more realistic take on things (but less shit exploding). The Messiah, for instance, is a NERVA powered dedicated spacecraft, something easily in the same league as the Odyssey.