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Doctor do what now
Righto, I'm starting to see why all my friends were getting tweaked by season 2 of the new Who.
Look, if you want to imagine that the future of humanity 5 billion years from now looks like it's maybe only 500 years from now, fine. If you want to conjecture that aging and death is intrinsic to humans and literally incurable, okie dokie. I may grumble at your conclusions but I accept that you may wish to simplify and streamline things in order to write popcorn SF (and produce it within a reasonable TV budget).
But don't say that it's impossible to orbit a black hole, when in truth that notion is no more preposterous than orbiting an ordinary star. They're both just gravity wells, man. Just stay out of the Swartzchild radius and you're fine. A black hole is actually not some sort of capricious space monster that arbitrarily pulls in and gobbles up matter from an indefinite distance away. Seriously, you could have replaced it with an Classic Trek-style Giant Space Amoeba or whatever and the whole thing would have been far more reasonable.
I feel that this is a more legitmate complaint that WHAT that's not how computers work or whatever. It's one thing to make shit up about how physics works (time machines? warp drives? bring em on, I love em) but to present known things as matter-of-factly and utterly wrong is just beyond the pale.
Look, if you want to imagine that the future of humanity 5 billion years from now looks like it's maybe only 500 years from now, fine. If you want to conjecture that aging and death is intrinsic to humans and literally incurable, okie dokie. I may grumble at your conclusions but I accept that you may wish to simplify and streamline things in order to write popcorn SF (and produce it within a reasonable TV budget).
But don't say that it's impossible to orbit a black hole, when in truth that notion is no more preposterous than orbiting an ordinary star. They're both just gravity wells, man. Just stay out of the Swartzchild radius and you're fine. A black hole is actually not some sort of capricious space monster that arbitrarily pulls in and gobbles up matter from an indefinite distance away. Seriously, you could have replaced it with an Classic Trek-style Giant Space Amoeba or whatever and the whole thing would have been far more reasonable.
I feel that this is a more legitmate complaint that WHAT that's not how computers work or whatever. It's one thing to make shit up about how physics works (time machines? warp drives? bring em on, I love em) but to present known things as matter-of-factly and utterly wrong is just beyond the pale.
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re "that's not how computers work" I think The Matrix sidestepped this problem very effectively by having all the computers showing the green kanji screensaver effect. It looks sufficiently computer-y to non-experts while remaining abstract enough that geeks can't complain about it. It's like dylithium crystals and warp cores: they all use wonderfully self-consistent and completely fictional science.
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There is a region around a black hole called, I think, the mesosphere. This is outside the event horizon, but still close. (Between 1 and 1.5 event-horizon radii?) In this zone, there are no stable orbits. You can escape or fall in, but orbiting is impossible.
Farther out, orbits are possible. And of course if you get far enough away, relativistic effects become small and you can orbit as you would any other mass. But the point is, the Doctor Who scenario is an oversimplified description of a real phenomenon.
So, um, there.
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Maybe I can hope that the Doctor or one of the spacers hastily explained this to Rose, and this bit fell victim to the handfuls of seconds that gets cut for the show's US release. But even then there's no excuse for the "ohh, now it's eating an entire solar system that inexplicably wandered into frame" bit. Whatevah.