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Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...

Dr. James Van Allen (the Van Allen Radiation Belt around the Earth is named after him) was once asked by a reporter to 'define space'. He replied, "Space is the hole that we are in."

Most people (if not, in fact, everyone) can't get their minds around just how big the universe is. So it should come as no surprise that most Speculative Fiction writers can't either. This is chiefly true of creators of TV, film, and video game SF. Creators of written science fiction can be positively obsessive about accuracy. On the other hand, sometimes not. If your qualitative yardstick is based around an author's ability to describe distances, this may be a useful way to distinguish good print science fiction from bad print science fiction. And it's why a lot of science fiction fans don't like the movie and TV adaptations of their favorite books and stories. The usual blend of Adaptation Decay and Did Not Do The Research is a surefire way to leave the adaptation with no sense of scale. On the other hand, "Space is so ridiculously huge that there is absolutely no realistic way that anyone could ever travel to anywhere even remotely interesting in in the lifespan of most major civilizations", while not a total deal-breaker, does rule out an awfully broad range of plots.

For example, consider that a light year is about ten quadrillion meters or nearly six trillion miles. That's ten-to-the-power-of-sixteen meters, or ten petameters. At the opposite end, an atomic nucleus is on the order of a quadrillionth of a meter. That's ten-to-the-power-of-negative-fifteen of a meter, or a femtometer. Such outrageous SI prefixes rarely appear in fiction, and that's before we get anywhere near the scales of galaxies and subatomic particles. If it sounds like a number made up by a child (yottametres, septillion seconds), the writer might have actually taken it seriously. Another example: the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri (the nearest star to Earth) is about 4.5 lightyears. Traveling at lightspeed, that takes 4.5 years. If you can travel at 10 times the speed of light, it still takes about 5.4 months. To get there in one month, you'd have to be traveling at 54 times the speed of light, roughly. To get there in a week? 234 times lightspeed.

A related trope is Medieval Stasis, where society stays the same for thousands of years.

See also: You Fail Engineering Forever

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