History Main / ColdEquation

* ''FrauImMond'' (1929). After a struggle punctures the oxygen tank, the two male crewmembers [[LotteryOfDoom draw straws]] to see who gets to return to Earth on the rocket. The DirtyCoward gets the short straw and breaks down sobbing, so the hero makes the HeroicSacrifice and stays behind on the Moon instead.

* Narrowly averted in the 1935 ''MutinyOnTheBounty''. The mutineers stranded Captain Bligh and (most of) his loyal crew on a lifeboat without enough provisions to survive 'til they reached landfall. Bligh ordered extreme rationing and used his seagoing prowess to get them to land before they starved to death or died of thirst. It was the only time in the movie where Bligh was made to look like a hero.
** And this was Truth in Television.
*** Not quite, the film Bounty also demonstrated this. Whatever you think of Captain Bligh, his seamanship was exemplary...

* ''DadsArmy''. Captain Mainwaring is presented with this scenario to test his decision-making skills: You are in a balloon over enemy territory that is slowly running out of air; who do you throw out? Mainwaring decides on Godfrey, who doesn't look very happy.

* The DragonsOfPern story ''Rescue Run'' had this problem turn up when the rescued colonists try to smuggle in several hundred kilos of precious metals (Which turned out to be less valuable than the homemade medicines they packed legitimately), throwing the mass calculations off. Instead of spacing people, the crew spaces the metal, along with some furniture.

* In the {{Tintin}} comic album "Explorers on the Moon", when Thompson and Thomson turn up as stowaways on the Moon-Rocket, Calculus worries that, since oxygen supplies were assessed for only four people, there might not be enough for six. It gets worse when [[spoiler:Colonel Jorgen]] is revealed to have smuggled himself on board, with the help of TheMole. He intends to maroon Tintin and his companions on the surface of the Moon, pointing out that they don't have enough oxygen to bring prisoners back to Earth. Later when the villains are overpowered, [[spoiler:Tintin [[HonorBeforeReason refuses to leave them behind]] despite having exactly the same problem. After Jorgen is killed in a GunStruggle, Wolff decides to atone for his actions [[RedemptionEqualsDeath by stepping out the airlock]]]]. Even so Tintin and his companions almost don't make it back to Earth.

* Twisted for a {{Xxxenophile}} story. The bomb shelter will only hold two, and the female character tells her two male companions that if she has to repopulate the Earth she wants to enjoy herself doing it, so "auditions" are now in order. [[spoiler:World War III did ''not'' just break out, she said it had as an excuse for threesome sex.]]

[[folder:Music]]
* Referenced in the song ''Nautical Disaster'' by TheTragicallyHip.
--> I was in a lifeboat designed for ten\\
Ten and only\\
And anything that systematic would get you hated\\
It's not a deal nor a test nor a love of something fated\\
The selection was quick, the crew was picked\\
In an order\\
And those left in the water were kicked off our pantlegs\\
And we headed for home
[[/folder]]

* Echoed and possibly referenced by Mark Verheiden and Mark A. Nelson's follow-on graphic novel set ten years after ''{{Aliens}}''. Hicks smuggles Newt aboard a weight-critical ("gravity-balanced") ship on its way to the alien homeworld. The situation is averted on this occasion, as he took pains to dump stores equivalent to her weight before takeoff.

* The Pern story ''Rescue Run'' had this problem turn up when the rescued colonists try to smuggle in several hundred kilos of precious metals (Which turned out to be less valuable than the homemade medicines they packed legitimately), throwing the mass calculations off. Instead of spacing people, the crew spaces the metal, along with some furniture.

* Invoked in Frederik Pohl's ''Gateway''. It's one of the many occupational hazards of space travel when all your ships are alien craft with preset trips of unknown length.

** Also when there's only one spacesuit to cross back to the Icarus -- the other crewman immediately start putting Capa (the only man who can fire the bomb) into the suit, ignoring the protests of their commander.

* In the {{Tintin}} comic album "Explorers on the Moon", when Thompson and Thomson turn up as stowaways on the Moon-Rocket, Calculus worries that, since oxygen supplies were assessed for only four people, there might not be enough for six. It gets worse when [[spoiler:Colonel Jorgen]] is revealed to have smuggled himself on board, with the help of TheMole. He intends to maroon Tintin and his companions on the surface of the Moon, pointing out that they don't have enough oxygen to bring prisoners back to Earth. Later when the villains are overpowered, [[spoiler:Tintin [[HonorBeforeReason refuses to leave them behind]] despite having exactly the same problem. After Jorgen is killed in a struggle, Wolff decides to atone for his actions [[RedemptionEqualsDeath by stepping out the airlock]]]]. Even so Tintin and his companions almost don't make it back to Earth.

* Twisted for a {{Xxxenophile}} story. The bomb shelter will only hold two, and the female character tells her two male companions that if she has to repopulate the Earth she wants to enjoy herself doing it, so [[IfYouKnowWhatIMean "auditions"]] are now in order. [[spoiler:World War III did ''not'' just break out, she said it had as an excuse for threesome sex.]]

* Two famous court cases involving survivors of shipwrecks who took to the lifeboats and were charged with murder for their subsequent actions are ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Brown_(ship) United States vs. Holmes]]'' in which sailors forced passengers (including women) off an overcrowded lifeboat, and ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens R vs. Dudley and Stephens]]'' in which sailors murdered the weakest member of their lifeboat crew, on the grounds that they were starving and he was likely to die anyway.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13 Apollo 13]] actually ran into this dilemma. After the oxygen tank in the command module explodes, the crew is forced to use the life-support systems of the LEM module. Normally, this wouldn't have been a problem, but the LEM was only designed to support two people, not the full crew. [[hottip:* :In an ordinary mission, two crew members would land on the moon in the LEM and explore the surface while the third stayed on the command module in lunar orbit.]] Luckily, they succeeded in MacGyvering a few ways to work around this that didn't involve murder, and NASA wanted their [=LEMs=] to have a big fat margin of error if something went awry. NASA didn't expect the LEM to have to last for 3 men for the entire mission, but it did.

* ''BlakesSeven'' episode "Orbit". AntiHero Avon and DirtyCoward Vila are on a shuttle desperately trying to achieve escape velocity. They throw out everything they can but are short seventy kilos. [[spoiler:It turns out that the shuttle is being weighed down by a piece of super-dense matter. Once Avon finds it all he has to do is push it out the airlock - if he can, because it's so damn heavy. Trouble is, he can't get Vila to help him because he's scared Vila into hiding.]]

* There's an urban myth where people found the dead body of a man in the desert holding a piece of straw. In a line from his body are clothes and equipment. It's impossible for him to have walked and there are no tracks leading away from a vehicle. The solution to the mystery is that he was on a balloon than was descending over the desert; the passengers threw out everything they could to gain height, before realising one person would have to go. The corpse drew the short straw.

* It is alleged that Godwin (author of ''The Cold Equations'') essentially took the story from a story published in EC Comics' ''Weird Science'' #13, May-June 1952, called "A Weighty Decision," scripted by Al Feldstein. In that story there are three astronauts who are intended to be on the flight, not one, and the additional passenger, a girl that one of the astronauts has fallen in love with, is trapped aboard by a mistake rather than stowing away. As in The Cold Equations, various measures are proposed but the only one which will not lead to worse disaster is for the unwitting passenger to be jettisoned. Other sources note that the theme of Feldstein's story is itself strikingly similarly to the story "Precedent", published by E.C. Tubb in 1949; in that story, as in the others, a stowaway must be ejected from a spaceship because the fuel aboard is only enough for the planned passengers. These sources argue that neither Feldstein nor Godwin intentionally "swiped" from the stories that came before, but merely produced similar variations on an ancient theme, that of an individual being sacrificed so that the rest may survive.

* In ''Down to a Sunless Sea'' by David Graham, at one point the narrator's Boeing and his new girlfriend's Antonov are fleeing to Antarctica to escape the nuclear devastation of the entire civilised world. Unfortunately, they run into heavy cloud which is lethally contaminated with fallout, and the Antonov doesn't have the fuel to make the trip at the higher altitude required to clear the fallout. So the Russian co-pilot calls for volunteers and opens the Anti's cargo doors, and leads a procession of about one-third of the passengers on the long drop into oblivion. [[spoiler: In some editions of the book, it turns out that they were the lucky ones when all was said and done.]]

* The TropeNamer is of course ''The Cold Equations'', the classic 1954 sci-fi short by Tom Godwin famous for averting the AlwaysSaveTheGirl trope. A young girl stows away on a shuttle carrying vital medicine to a planetary colony, not knowing that its fuel has been precisely calculated and her extra weight is enough to cause disaster.

Note: Please '''do not include''' discussions on the short story ''The Cold Equations'' on this page. [[Headscratchers/TheColdEquations Instead post them here]].

* ''{{Sunshine}}'' (2007). Icarus II is damaged on its mission to reignite the sun, but the crew realise they can still get there if one of them dies. A scientist who's lapsed into depression after indirectly causing the death of TheCaptain is an obvious candidate. All but one of the crew vote to kill him (their mission is, after all, to save the entire human race) only to find he's already killed himself. [[spoiler:Or he was killed by a stowaway whose presence makes the whole question moot.]]

* There's an urban myth this troper knows where people found the dead body of a man in the desert holding a piece of straw. In a line from his body are clothes and equipment. It's impossible for him to have walked and there are no tracks leading away from a vehicle. The solution to the mystery is that he was on a balloon than was descending over the desert; the passengers threw out everything they could to gain height, before realising one person would have to go. The corpse drew the short straw.

* In the {{Tintin}} comic album "Explorers on the Moon" [[spoiler:Colonel Jorgen smuggles himself on board with the aid of Wolff, a crewmember he is blackmailing. He intends to steal the rocket, leaving Tintin and his companions on the surface of the Moon. When Wolff objects Jorgen points out that they don't have enough oxygen to bring prisoners back to Earth. Later when the villains are overpowered, Tintin [[HonorBeforeReason refuses to leave them behind]] despite having exactly the same problem. After Jorgen is killed in a struggle, Wolff decides to atone for his actions [[RedemptionEqualsDeath by stepping out the airlock]]. Even so Tintin and his companions almost don't make it back to Earth.]]

* Narrowly averted in ''MutinyOnTheBounty''. The mutineers stranded Captain Bligh and (most of) his loyal crew on a lifeboat without enough provisions to survive 'til they reached landfall. Bligh ordered extreme rationing and used his seagoing prowess to get them to land before they starved to death or died of thirst. It was the only time in the movie where Bligh was made to look like a hero.

Note: Please '''do not include''' discussions on the short story ''The Cold Equations'' on this page. [[JustBugsMe/TheColdEquations Instead post them here]].

* Invoked in Frederik Pohl's ''Gateway'' as one of the many occupational hazards of travel in mysterious alien ships with preset unknown destinations.