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Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale
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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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Distance Examples
Anime
- The Five Star Stories: The titular Five Stars are most commonly referred to as "The Joker Star Cluster," even though real clusters have several thousand stars, but it's also referred to as The Joker Galaxy, which is even worse, and The Joker Constellation, which doesn't make sense either, since constellations are only called as such by people who can see them from a distance. It could possibly be a star cluster if the Five Stars are just the only ones with habitable planets out of a cluster of thousands. It could also be a multiple star system of five stars orbiting a common center of mass.
- Star Blazers: In order to Save The World, the Star Force has just one year to retrieve the Phlebotinum from a planet that's one hundred million light years away. In other words, their round trip will be 12,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles long. No problem, though: they have a faster than light drive. When they use it for the first time, after a lot of drama, they're excited to discover that their FTL drive has taken them halfway to Mars, a few light minutes away. Then they celebrate their "success" with a snowball fight on Mars. They eventually leave the solar system a few days later. Yeah, Earth is doomed.
Comic Books
- The Marvel Universe, despite usually playing this trope like a fiddle, has an aversion in Captain Marvel. Even though Mar-Vell's Flight is capable of reaching and sustaining escape velocity (7 miles per second) he realizes that it would still take him ten hours to reach the moon roughly 250000 miles away.
- New Avengers #19-20. Iron Man has a space-ready suit that breaks Earth's atmosphere to reach a small asteroid where Earth is seen with enough stars to look like a shot from Hubble. Retreating from a cosmic being who can fly across North America easily, Iron Man flies in an arc that goes behind our view of Earth, which looks like he's traveled more than 1/4 the diameter of the planet. He goes back to Earth's surface on Genosha, an island the size of the country Malawi, that looks like it could be jogged across when Magneto is levitated over it. Iron Man again goes from Earth's surface to space, keeping up with the Sentry near the moon. The Sentry travels from here to the sun and stares a couple feet away from its surface, which looks like a distance shot or a small model. Iron Man goes from space to back on Genosha. This whole sequence takes less than a day.
- DC Comics' Infinite Crisis has multiple Earths being created and destroyed fairly close to Earth without causing massive debris or gravitational pulls, sound can travel across space to one of these Earths if you scream loud enough, Superboy Prime can push planets without digging into them, Kryptonians can fly to the nearest galaxy or the center of the universe in little time if they try hard enough, and a red sun, though it's supposed to reduce Kryptonians to the strength of a normal human, can be flown straight through the middle if you go in quickly and have the will to withstand the mass of several thousand miles of atoms in constant nuclear fusion.
- Note that the original Crisis on Infinite Earths specifically points out that the parallel Earths aren't causing gravitational effects on each other because they're slightly out of dimensional sync, and has preventing them from coming into dimensional sync as a plot driver. (As did the Silver Age story Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two.)
- Of course, in a recent Superman storyline, the bottle city of Kandor gets restored to normal size in the North Pole. When humans begin to get scared and several other heroes come to arrest some Kryptonians that have violated the law, Kandor launches itself into Earth's orbit around the sun (but on the opposite side of the sun, so that Earth cannot see it) and creates a new planet. The many laws of physics broken by two planets sharing the same orbit and neither having negative effects on the other are never mentioned.
- Orbiting exactly opposite each other is actually one of the few cases where two things can share the same orbit.
- In fact there is a group of asteroids that happens to orbit exactly opposite Jupiter.
- No, there's not. There's a group of asteroids that happens to resonate through three different points around Jupiter's orbit, one of which is opposite Jupiter ... but no asteroid *stays* there. They pass by that point and the leading and trailing Trojan asteroids in their orbits.
- Unfortunately for Kandor, the presence and proximity of other planets in the Solar System renders that point, called the L3 La Grange point, highly unstable-Venus especially, since it passes within 0.3 AU of L3 every 20 months. The asteroids in Jupiter's orbit stay put by virtue of Jupiter's stronger gravity and the greater distance of the other planets.
- Someone forgot just how far sending reaches in Elf Quest: The Searcher and the Sword. There are two bits worked out here: First, the troll tunnels that are so far underground that sending can't reach them, and secondly, Shuna and her friends being so far away from the holt that Dart must extend his sending "past the limits of his own range". Despite that, a half-dozen elves manage to clamor <!—clamber?—> up a nearly vertical tunnel from the troll tunnels to the surface — without getting exhausted doing so, or, for that matter, losing breathable air. And just after Dart pushes his thoughts "past the limits of his own range," he leads Shuna in a wild dash for maybe a few blocks' worth of forest.
- Another Marvel example, when Quasar (Wendell Vaughn) visits Uranus (stop snickering) to explore the supposed origin of his power bands, the trip takes over two years, requiring hibernation and artificial life-support.
- And then there's the Green Lantern Corps. The entire universe divided into 3600 sectors, each of which is patrolled by two (it used to be just one) Space Policemen. And most of them seem to spend most of their time on Oa, or their favourite planet, or pursuing obscure goals of their own.
- Sometimes it's just Milky Way which, while several orders of magnitude easier to do, it still a bit absurd.
- Well, to be fair, it's not the ENTIRE universe, since there is mention of a sector 3601. It's just the KNOWN universe.
- It used to be the whole universe but right now it seems to be just the Milky Way and there are more than just "Two per sector" so it's getting better.
- Even if we're talking about JUST the Milky Way galaxy, that's still a total volume of nearly 8 trillion cubic light-years (not including the galactic halo). Dividing this into 3600 sectors means that 1 sector would still contain, on average, over 2 billion cubic light-years — equal in volume to a cube 1300 light-years on a side. There would be millions of stars in each sector, each of which (in the DC Universe) presumably has inhabited planets. Having just two Green Lanterns responsible for policing the goings-on in that many star systems is simply absurd, even at the pre-Crisis levels of Green Lantern's powers.
- Lampshaded in Starman. When Jack Knight goes into space, he assumes getting to the Large Magellanic Cloud will be a cinch. He is told it will take in excess of 80,000 years.
Film
- No so much a problem of distance as of volume, but Starship Troopers the movie has starships flying so close together (while in orbit!) that one of them crashes into another when shot. Space is big, there's plenty of room. If you're flying within visual distance of another ship and you're not trying to dock with them, something is wrong.
- Maybe the one bit of the book the writer read? It is outright stated in the book that most of Johnnie Rico's unit never makes it to Klathandu in the failed invasion because they were still aboard the ship when another one collided with it in orbit. The implication seemed to be that for the sake of landing the MI units close enough for mutual support the troopships were in dangerously close orbits.
- Another example is when the ship Roger Young passes an asteroid. The characters figure out that the Bugs probably knocked it out of orbit with plasma fire, sending it toward Earth. Okay, fine, but then the Fridge Logic kicks in and you realize that it will take decades, if not centuries, for an asteroid to travel the distances separating solar systems...and then it gets worse when you realize that a graphic earlier in the film showed that the Bug homeworld and Earth are on opposite sides of the galaxy, separated by about 50,000 light years of space. The asteroid hits the Earth a few weeks later (at most), which means that sucker was moving.
- At least the Bugs in the book (and the ones in the cartoon) have ships.
- The film strongly implies that the bugs had nothing to do with the asteroids, and that humanity is simpling using them as an excuse to invade.
- Averted in the DVD director's cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In the original theatrical and VHS extended cuts of the film, the V'Ger cloud was described as "82 AUs" in diameter, but in the DVD director's cut, the "eighty-" part is removed. While at first glance, it seems like 2 AUs is a bit too far in the other direction, when you consider (a) the fact that an AU (astronomical unit) is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 150 million kilometers or a little over eight light-minutes, (b) that the Star Trek Encyclopedia pegs the Enterprise's top sublight speed around 0.25c, and (c) the amount of time spent just sitting there... the math actually (kinda) works!
- The 1997 movie Contact gets distance ridiculously wrong in its intro sequence. It's supposed to be a montage of Terran radio signals that get older the farther away from Earth the viewing audience gets, except that "Boogie Oogie Oogie" from 1978 can clearly be heard near Mars (which is actually only about four light-minutes from Earth).
- Not to mention that the planets themselves are waaaay too close together in that sequence. It's still fun to watch, though.
- Even The Bad Astronomer is willing to overlook the inaccuracies in that opening sequence, in acknowledgement of the Rule Of Cool.
- Star Wars : While the infamous "Kessel Run in 12 parsecs" line arguably doesn't belong in this category, a certain sequence in The Empire Strikes Back definitely does. Right after taking off from Hoth, Han discovers that the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive is broken. After deftly evading the imperial fleet, he searches his charts for (and finds) another star system where he can get his hyperdrive repaired. Unless we make the ridiculous assertion that Bespin is orbiting the same star as Hoth, travelling there at sublight speeds would have taken years. The authors of the Extended Universe books have retconned this by saying that all hyperdrive-carrying spacecraft also have a slower "emergency backup hyperdrive" which is never mentioned in the films.
- It may also be a case of Fridge Brilliance; due to time dilation, the crew of the Falcon would only experience the passing of a couple of weeks, whilst giving Luke months or years to hone his Jedi skills on Dagobah. That's like killing two major fan complaints in one!
- Also, when looking for Bespin, Leia asks what system they're in, and Han replies 'Anoat System'. So apparently, they travelled between three star systems without a hyperdrive.
- Sources suggest the MF was attached to the Star Destroyer at the time, and that it was the Star Destroyer that made the jump.
- Neill Blomkamp, the director of District9 claims that the Prawns come from Andromeda galaxy to mine ore from alien planets, and live on their ships for thousands of years at a time. Unless they've stripmined the entire galaxy, which sounds impossible considering their technological level, it makes little sense that they'd have anything to do in the Milky Way. It would be so much easier to say that they're just few dozen lightyears away from home.
- Spoofed in The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra, when Betty comments that the aliens came "over a thousand miles" to get to Earth.
- In Prince Of Space, the Phantom of Krankor mentions that his planet is "half a million miles" from the Earth.
- In Airplane 2: The Sequel, the first passenger shuttle to Earth's Moon suffers a computer malfunction and heads off course... towards the Sun. It passes through the asteroid belt along the way. If that's not bad enough, the entire trip takes just a few hours. The number of things wrong here is staggering; the movie is a parody but it's difficult to tell if the writers expected us to take this part seriously or not.
- You're asking if we were supposed to take something seriously in Airplane. The movie where the phrase "Don't fall apart on me," is followed by a man's arms literally falling off. A movie where there is Dramatic Thunder in space. It's a movie that runs on absurdist humor, and you're wondering if the writers were at all worried about the scale of the interplanetary travel. *headdesk*
- Star Trek 11 opens with the discovery of a Negative Space Wedgie. On radio chatter, we hear discussion of whether or not it's due to the Klingons. The response is "No, the Klingon border is 75000 kilometres away!". That's closer than the sun in the very same shot.
Literature
- While it's not science fiction, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire qualifies. Although it's set on a continent about the size of South America (to judge by the distances given), distances are treated as much smaller when the plot demands.
- In one case it's justified: Dorne has been overstating its military capacity for centuries, helped along by King Daeron overestimating their numbers massively in his memoirs of the time he invaded the country to bolster his own military reputation. This revelation in Book 4 explains why Dorne refuses to intervene in the War of the Five Kings and needs allies in order to survive.
- GRRM has also commented on some of these issues outside of the series. He explained at a con that Robb Stark only collected together between one-third and one-half of the North's military forces before going south. He simply didn't have time to wait for the full armies to assemble. He also indicated this untapped manpower would play a role later in the series. Similarly, timelines assembled by various fans have shown that many of the incidents of armies marching quickly can be explained by the chapters not taking place in consecutive chronological order. Tyrion's statement about the 'short' march is also true in context: compared to travelling from say Seattle to Miami (the distance from Dorne to the Wall), travelling from London to Edinburgh is indeed a short hop, especially as it is along well-maintained roads.
- One discussion late in the third book throws everyone who's used to Easy Logistics for a loop. Robb Stark talks about moving his armies back north to fortify the home front. The talk goes something to the effect of "They'll start marching now, I'll go to a wedding and meet up with them by boat, and we'll all get there... oh, sometime next year."
- David Eddings' Tamuli trilogy justifies something similar. The protagonists cover massive continental distances in short periods of time (as in, less than several months). An in-universe historian trying to explain it comes up with a Hand Wave about different calendars. The real answer is that the goddess traveling with them was cheating with space and time a bit.
- Anne Mc Caffrey's The Death of Sleep has the protagonist's ship gets damaged, and she has to put herself into cryo in a lifeboat to have any chance of being found. The book goes out of its way to point out that if some benevolent aliens hadn't basically led a guy in a ship to her, she probably would never have been found.
- Averted in Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat. When the hero realizes how impossible would be to find his enemy (a woman in a battleship) without any clue to her location in the vastness of space, he sets a trap for her instead.
- One of James White's Sector General stories features victims from a space collision — and spends nearly three pages, A6 paperback, detailing the series of coincidences and bad judgment calls that managed to make it happen.
- Averted in the Starfist novels. It is specifically stated that, even with FTL travel, it will take at least three months minimum to reach any intended destination outside our solar system. Even radio transmissions are subject to delay. For example, an Earth-Mars vid-phone call has quite a significant delay time compared to our phones on Earth.
- Another example showing how you can screw up sizes without going into space comes from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar. One scene has a lidi running in terror when pursued by two hyaenodons. The hyaenodons are described as being as large as ponies. The lidi is a sauropod dinosaur, 80-100 feet long. This is the equivalent of a pair of rats chasing a horse, or a pair of foxes chasing an elephant. (This is one of many instances where Burroughs shows his total lack of understanding of animals.)
- Hyper-averted in Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space novels, since there's no Faster Than Light Travel and the decades of travel time have an enormous impact on the plot.
- Averted in Ringworld by Larry Niven, as his intrepid explorers take nearly a year exploring less than 1% of the thing's surface. (The characters are continually surprised by the size of the thing.) In the sequels, a starship moving at close to 5 miles per second still takes weeks and months to get from one distant point to another. At one point, the hero spots a series of maps of nearby planets laid out in one of the Ring's great oceans, and it takes him a moment to realize these planetary maps are on a 1:1 scale.
- Writers in the Star Wars Expanded Universe generally are aware that space is big, and they try to avert this (although a depressingly large number keep revisiting the planets established by the movies for no good reason). In the first book of The Thrawn Trilogy, Luke flees from a Star Destroyer by going into hyperspace, and since his X-wing is damaged it falls back into realspace after he's gone about half a light year - and he's stranded impossibly far from anything, only likely to be found on accident since his communications systems have gone out. On two occasions TIE fighters, which have no hyperdrives, struck out on their own and couldn't really get that far before life support ran out: an alien fleeing genocide nearly died before reaching the nearest system, and a handful of deserters had to turn back to the ship they'd abandoned when they ran out of atmosphere scrubbers.
- Some authors apparently decided to balance these efforts by putting in some egregious errors. For example, Sernpidal, a planet that orbits its star at the same distance our moon orbits Earth. It is also the third planet of the Solar System. Also, it gets half destroyed and knocked out of its orbit by an impact with its own twenty-kilometer-long moon.
- Actually it's the 'fifth' planet in the system. The moon bit was an act of war by extragalactic invaders, rather than being a natural cause.
- Sneakily averted by Douglas Adams, who concocted the Infinite Improbability Drive to get around the mind-boggling odds against Ford and Arthur being saved by another ship in the vastness of space, by making mind-boggling odds the thing that powers their rescue ship. And then bumped those odds up to Infinite by having both Ford's semi-cousin and Trillian, the apparent only other survivor from Earth, be piloting it: something he couldn't plausibly have pulled off otherwise, again due to space's sheer size.
- Also both averted and brutally lampshaded in the form of the Total Perspective Vortex, a device which, when hooked up to a person's mind, will give them a perfectly clear conception of both the entire universe (as extrapolated from a small piece of fairy cake) and themselves in proportion to it. This has the effect of instantly and painfully annihilating their mind unless that person is Zaphod Beeblebrox and the Total Perspective Vortex is inside a simulated universe created entirely for his benefit, conclusively proving that the last thing anyone living in a universe this size needs is a good sense of proportion.
- Strongly averted by David Weber in the Honor Harrington novels; FTL-capable spaceships grow over a kilometer long, effective missile range is in the millions of kilometers and a single missile's blast radius can be measured in tens of thousands of kilometers.
- And he will never, ever let you forget it.
- Not to mention that there are several instances where characters wait for their deaths for up to 15 minutes while the thousand strong missile salvo traveling at half the speed of light, travels the 60.000.000 or so kilometers between the shooter and the target. And the author emphasizes that despite the impressive acceleration of the target ship and the ludicrous amount of time available said ship has to avert the disaster, their theoretically and practically doomed. Plot Armour intervenes at least once to cripple the ship instead of destroying it. Talk about a Mind Screw.
- The biggest weakness of the Grav Lance is that it doesn't work unless your target is already within 100,000 kilometers, by which time you're long dead.
Live Action TV
- In Star Trek The Original Series, the Enterprise was frequently "the only ship in the quadrant," which apparently meant something very different back then.
- They also travelled to the edge of the Galaxy, and in Star Trek V, to the core of the Galaxy.
- It's possible to go too far in the other direction, as well: All Our Yesterdays refers to Vulcan as being millions of light-years away. Most of the stars of the entire galaxy fit in a sphere with a diameter of about 100,000 light-years. That would put Vulcan in the Andromeda galaxy or make Vulcan's sky really empty.
- In the Next Generation episode Redemption the crew of the enterprise becomes aware of a cloaked romulan ship that attempts to secretly deliver weapons for a political plot. To prevent the weapons from being delivered, 20 federation ships are linked together by phlebotinum beams to form a net. If the cloaked ship attempts to pass through the federation ships, the beans will be broken and remulans be detected. This is dumb on so many levels, but completely ignores any sense of scale by the fact that the romulans could just fly around the net. Or through it, as the space between the beams would probably thousands of kilometers wide.
- This is a case of the writers intentionally keeping things ambiguous, so that viewers could fill in the blanks instead of having a bunch of nonsensical/contradictory details to nitpick. For example: the distance between ships is never explicitly mentioned, so we can assume that they're actually many lightyears apart and creating a sensor net so wide that it would take a prohibitively long time to go around. Also, the tachyon grid graphic was a simplified visual representation of what was really going on and the tachyons were actually broadcast in a diffuse field with no "beams" to slip between. Of course, to a fandom that's used to picking apart every little inconsistency, their choice of ambiguity simply allowed the viewers to come up with their own worst-case-scenario nitpicking explanations instead...
- In the Star Trek Voyager episode "The Fight," Voyager encounters a Negative Space Wedgie that is "2 light years across." They start "11,000 km" away from it and yet, the whole phenomenon is visible on the viewscreen. As the Agony Booth review of this episode points out, this is exactly like "putting your nose on the ground, and still being able to see the whole landscape from horizon to horizon". The thing also looks about as big as Voyager when it engulfs it, which might make slightly more sense (for a given value of "sense"), since Voyager is apparently the size of a planet◊.
- The viewscreen isn't a window. If you see a 2-LY diameter object from the viewscreen that close, it means you've "zoomed out", so to speak, using your sensor technology.
- This is true in almost all episodes in the Trek canon (with maybe a dozen exceptions), because a planet is the size of a sound stage, while even the smallish Voyager is several sound stages wide. All plot elements and characters, no matter how undetected or un-findable before beaming down to a planet, will occur within a hundred feet of the beam-in point. This is actually approximately the same distance distortion that occurs in space in many situations.
- The problem may come from the way the scripts are written. Star Trek scripts often start out with units and technology names left blank to be filled in later. The initial version of the script will actually be written like "We can traverse the [really big distance] to Xffto Seven using [insert technology here]." Since the people who fill in the blanks may not know or care whether the really big distance involved is interplanetary or intergalactic, they're likely to just make up a big number and attach a big unit of distance.
- Blake's 7 showed someone mining the Milky Way galaxy to keep out aliens. This is simply impossible. By the time you gathered enough matter to build this minefield, there'd be no Milky Way galaxy left.
- One way writers attempt to justify their 'space minefield' is to use mines with a very long engagement range, such as an X-ray laser that uses a nuclear explosion to create a big focused blast of energy headed towards the target. That way, the mines can still threaten your ship even though they're hundreds of kilometers apart and spread out all around a planet. In the case of the Milky Way minefield in Blake's Seven the minefield required control by the most powerful computer the Federation could build to serve its purpose as a barrier against invasion. This suggests that the "mines" were far more active and intricate than the traditional pressure-sensitive bomb we're familiar with.
- Traveller: The New Era does this with missiles, realising the practical difficulties of getting a missile to collide with a ship that can accurately fire high-powered laser beams hundreds of thousands of kilometres.
- Blakes Seven uses "galaxy" and "solar system" interchangeably.
- Travis on one occasion spots the Liberator and crows, "There he is! I knew he'd have to return to this galaxy!"
- Despite travelling from Earth to the edges of the galaxy and back, there was a part of the galaxy it would take them centuries to travel across.
- Similarly, a Deep Space 9 episode featured a mine field around a solar system. While this is much more plausible (in the way that swimming across the Atlantic is more plausible than swimming the Pacific), they did it in a 2D plane, so that anyone trying to avoid this minefield could simply fly over or under it. Even then, they were building it at a rate that would have taken them hundreds of years to complete (if anyone had done the math). DS 9 later averted this, with a space minefield around a very small area (the opening of a wormhole) with a realistically long time spent laying it. (Or rather, using matter replicators to let it lay itself - but that just gets into Energy usage, below.)
- The original Battlestar Galactica did this as well. Adama says that Earth is located in "a galaxy much like our own" ...not to mention that in the last episode, the basestar is apparently the only one in the galaxy in which the Galactica is located, and the rest of the Cylon fleet is spread throughout the universe looking for the Galactica's fleet! They'd have greater success looking for an electron-sized needle in an haystack the size of Jupiter.
- Also factor in that the show stated that Galactica's top speed was "light speed" and they spent the bulk of the series travelling at the pace of the slowest ships in the fleet.
- In the new version, the close-range space battles are justified by the fact that if the Cylons didn't jump in really close to the Colonial fleet, they really wouldn't have any chance to hit them before they were noticed and the humans jumped away.
- If you remember well, in the old Galactica serie, the fleet can "jump" between what is probably galaxies (and do it at least one time).
- Babylon 5 quotes distances of tens of light years between the major powers, but later shows a galactic map on which the major powers control most of the galaxy, requiring distances to be roughly a thousand times greater. In another example, at one point a ship that has been supposedly lost deep in Hyperspace is reached by a chain of less than twenty fighters with only one thousand kilometres between each of them, meaning that the supposedly distant ship is less than 20000 km from the jumpgate. This can be handwaved by saying "Well, it's Hyperspace," but...
- The map can be safely ignored, as it was only used to delineate the areas the Shadows and Centauri wanted to conquer, not what they ever really controlled.
- Mostly this was averted by not mentioning numbers at all. "How fast?" "Fast." The few times they did come up tended to be Wall Bangers, but easy to ignore.
- J. Michael Straczynski acknowledged the problem of space's true scale when talking about showing space battles on TV, pointing out that TV viewers want and need to see the ships in the same screenshot pounding away at one another, but that any actual kind of space battle would likely take place at distances far too extreme for this (thousands of kilometres at minimum). The battle between the Shadows and the Narns in "The Long Twilight Struggle" attempted to acknowledge this on the screen; most of the fight consists of the ships simply accelerating towards one another, and only the last (catastrophic) few seconds includes any visual proximity. Nonetheless, most of the series' remaining battles gave in to the Rule Of Cool anyway.
- There's one wonderful aversion when the Centauri mine the space around a planet and the mines turn out to be automated weapons platforms.
- The fact that space battles take place at ridiculously small ranges is partially justified by the nature of the FTL device used at the fact that most of the capital ships of the major powers carry said device. Attacking from several light minutes away with missiles would be useless as the target could jump into hyperspace then out of hyperspace near the shooter, completely avoiding the missiles. . Also beam weapons and plasma weapons are realistically presented as not having an effective range of more then a few thousand kilometers due to dispersal, and an actual kill range of barely a few hundred, because of targeting issues (The famed Minbari stealth device actually prevents the targeting of the ship, not its detection.). In "A Call to arms." one of the characters, orders the beam weapons of his ship (some of the most advanced in the setting) fired at a target 10000 kilometers away, to which the firing officer replies that it would be inefectual because of beam dispersal.
- The moon in Space 1999 was variably described as being billions of kilometres, miles, and light-years from Earth, resulting in roughly equal difficulty in returning despite the fact that the first case would put the moon closer to Earth than Saturn, while in the latter case the moon would be vastly more distant from the Milky Way galaxy than the Great Wall, currently the largest known feature of the universe. It (the moon) passed between star systems at speeds fast enough that the passengers went through a star system per week, yet remained close enough to each and slow enough to reach a planet via shuttle for days at a time.
- Remember it look like the Moon slow when she enter orbit, and go faster when she quit it (and the doctor say i need a season 3 !).
- Firefly was ambivalent as to whether action was taking place in a "system", presumed to be a solar system, or the galaxy. It was finally pinned down into a series of five star systems, four of which were orbiting around a single giant star, which was reached from Earth by Generation Ship. The show was admirably vague about distances and speeds, e.g. "How fast can it go?" "Standard shuttle."
- The followup movie Serenity has a barely noticed and 'lost' planet on the edge of the system. However, this planet appears to be known — it is in Serenity's navigation computer, but all reference to its name and population are wiped from the records, so no one knows what it is, nor do they want to approach it to check it out due to the presence of Reavers.
- As they go through The Asteroid Thicket of ships to reach Miranda, think of how many Reavers there must be for them to be that densely packed. But more likely than not, Serenity passed through a fleet of Reaver vessels en route, and couldn't turn away from them lest they look suspicious.
- The Official Map of the Verse confirmed that Miranda was indeed on the very outer edge of the Blue Sun system, orbiting its own protostar, Burnham, at about fifty AU from the main star. At the time of the series, it was the outermost world in the entire Verse.
- To be fair, Miranda (the "lost" planet) had been declared uninhabitable - a blackrock which the terraforming didn't work on. The characters (specifically, Kaylee) did vaguely remember that there was a call for settlers on it years ago. The system has dozens of planets and hundreds of moons - it'd be easy for some ordinary people (which the characters are) to forget one, especially one that's uninhabited. Think of it as being like a modern person forgetting about Eris or the name of a sparsely-settled region of our own little planet. The series, to be fair, did for the most part keep the idea of space as a vasty nothingness ("Out of Gas," for example) with running into other ships being treated as a fluke.
- Probably the most spectacular example is in the first segment of the Doctor Who story "The Trial of a Timelord," where Earth was apparently hidden by moving its entire solar system several million miles, which is the celestial equivalent of hiding from your date in an empty movie theater by leaning an inch to the left. For scale, Mercury never comes within 28 million miles of our Sun, despite being its closest planet.
- In "The Wheel in Space" the Cybermen divert a meteor storm in the direction of the titular space station by sending a star nova in the Hercules Globular Cluster, which is 25,100 light years away. The disparity in scale is at least 12 orders of magnitude.
- In the 1996 TV movie for Doctor Who, Gallifrey is stated to be some 250 million light years away from Earth, on the other side of the Milky Way. For reference, the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy is estimated 80-100 thousand light years. It is even sadder being said by the Doctor himself...
- To be fair, in the original series, Gallefrey is repeatedly stated as being in a different galaxy; our Milky Way referred to by Time Lords by the mundane and unflattering name "Mutter's Spiral". So it could actually be 250 million light-years away. And the direction toward Gallefrey might be along the line from earth's position on one edge of the Milky Way through the center of the galaxy (and well past the other edge). So it's possible to look at it such that it makes sense. Though admittedly it's a reach.
- It's possible he meant only that it was in the direction of the oppposite side.
- In fact, it look like the Milky Way size was underestimated and is probably bigger than Andromeda (remember we are IN Milky, and then her borders are faded for us. And add to that her probably enormous halo, and you have maybe a 250 MY large galaxy.
- ...sorry, no. Andromeda itself is only 2.5 million light years away. The entire Virgo Supercluster is only 110 million light years across. We may not know our galaxy's dimensions quite as precisely as we know Andromeda's, but we're not THAT far off.
- The difficulties in preventing movement in 3D space is spoofed in an episode of Futurama; environmental protesters are attempting to stop an tanker full of dark matter by forming a human circle around it. Unfortunately, they forgot that objects in space aren't limited to moving 'forwards' and 'backwards' — the tanker merely scoots upwards a few metres and merrily flies over their heads.
- In a Groundhog Day Loop episode of Stargate SG-1, Teal'c mentions that a planet called Alaris is "several billion miles" away from Earth. The fact that the next closest star to Earth after the sun, Proxima Centauri, is approximately 25 trillion miles from Earth is, apparently, not relevant.
- This might simply be a units misunderstanding. It never got to This Troper as wrong, since billion means 10^12 here. Since light year is approximately 1 * 10^13 km, this can easily mean anything in the 5-20ly range, depending on your definition of several :) And Teal'c wasn't really going for accuracy there - the sheer distance is all that matters. If you ask me, even one light year is quite a long range golf stroke :)
Radio
- Planet Man referred to the Astro Drive, which would enable the hero to travel the "millions of light-years to Alpha Centauri." Alpha Centauri is just 4.37 light-years away — in fact, it's the closest star system to our own. Actually traveling "millions of light-years" would be a lot more impressive.
Tabletop Games
- Battle Tech was originally hit pretty hard with this, as the game stated that a Hex is roughly thirty meters, meaning that no weapon short of artillery had a range equal to or greater than a single kilometer. Catalyst Games, the present owners of the license, have kept the Hex measurement, but have gone on record saying that Battletech Weapons are really not that short-ranged.
- The problem with this stance being something like 20 years worth of Novels saying that they most certain are and various plots and tactics that more or less hinge on this fact to work at all. At some point it really is just better to go "Yeah it's kinda silly, but this is a game about giant walking tanks a few dozen of which are considered an entirely reasonable force to invade a planet, just go with it."
- Very carefully averted with the Warhammer 40000 space battle Gaiden Game Battlefleet Gothic, for all its joyful use of Space Is An Ocean and the Rule Of Cool in general. The actual models are completely out of scale with the rest of the game, but the manual itself tells that, in scale, the ship the model represents would be somewhere in the stand holding it up. Thusly, distances measured being from the centre of the ships' bases so that you can have nice looking miniatures without also requiring a spare country to play the game in. Base-contact in the game is "close range," generally of the order of tens of thousands of kilometres. This is also the reason you need a command check to ram another ship - the captain not only has to order a potentially suicidal course of action and make it stick with the crew, he also has to hit a target equivalent to headbutting a pinhead from a mile away...
- Also Warhammer 40K Background fluff has reinforcements taking years sometimes decades to reach a planet.
- Of course, given that it's The Warp, there are also accounts of ships arriving at their destinations before they left. One story about an Ork warlord has him somehow arriving back at his starting point before he left, so he attacks and kills his past self so he could have two of his favorite gun.
- Half-averted in Mage: the Awakening. Though its unlikely players will ever actually experience space travel, it is possible to experience a version of it in the Astral Realms. In the Tenemos (the Dream World of humanity) it would be mostly played straight, because of human conceptions of scale and space travel. In the Dreamtime (the Dream World of the Earth) the conceptual representation of the universe is mostly to scale (since the Earth is devoid of any kind of romanticism). The sheer scale of the Solar System alone is presented as staggering, and since there is no FTL in the Dreamtime (though there is the rare shortcut), travel between conceptual planets has to be taken the slow (read, years long) way. And that's not even getting into travelling beyond the conceptual Solar System. The only reason any of this is practical is because of the Year Inside Hour Outside nature of Astral Space.
Video Games
- Freelancer messes with distance so much that it's not even funny. Planets are two kilometers wide. Moving at three hundred meters per second was considered fast. Moving between planets took barely more than fifteen seconds. Asteroids are barely larger than a car. Moons are barely larger than a battleship. The examples are countless.
- This, though, is a very clear example of Acceptable Breaks From Reality. The scale of the game is very definitely geared towards making it playable and to the developers' credit, they do it very well.
- Not to mention that planets in that universe never move relative to one another or the star, which is very convenient for the people who built the interplanetary freeways.
- 7 Days a Skeptic by Yahtzee revolves around an old locker discovered floating in another galaxy by an exploration ship. Ignoring the staggering improbability of finding anything that size in an entire galaxy, the locker was launched from Earth four hundred years before the game starts, in the modern day. The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, our galaxy's closest neighbor, is 25,000 light years away. This simple metal box would have had to travel at multiple times the speed of light to make it out of the Milky Way in such a short time.
- This can probably be explained as the work of Chzo. Indeed, the supernatural nature of such an astronomically unlikely event is implied (though not stated outright).
- EVE Online averts this one admirably. Distances in solar systems are realistic - from any particular planet, all other planets seem like points, and are several AUs away. FTL technology is required to get anywhere. There are even two types of FTL: short range warp drives which are used to travel within systems (fitted to ships), and long range star gates for travelling light years between star systems. Combat is frequently with ships that are only visible by their targeting icon.
- Interestingly, they also point out the sheer size inherent in a single system. The game's equivalent of dungeons and hideouts are not actually hidden, per se. It's just that there is no conceivable way to locate them without having the specific co-ordinates. Complexes are reached by short-range intra-stellar hoppers, which jump you into the location. Of course, why a society with casual FTL drive lacks halfway decent sensor ranges is a mystery.
- They actually do have scanners, you have sensors that can detect objects up to something like 70 AU away. The problem there is shown off with the (free and part of every ship) directional scanner - Sure, you can detect something that's 500,000km away, but at those ranges even a scanning cone of a few degrees means you're also picking up *everything* within that 500,000 area. Gets very confusing when you're detecting 2 deadspace complexes and a player owned station, you end up with up to hundreds of items coming up on scanner with no ability to find their exact range (As you'd expect, no depth perception). Even the scanners keep the logic working. Fortunately, most ships can be fitted with probes that determine the objects' precise location with triangulation.
- Yes, now that you mention it EVE is actually the most complex MMORPG ever made.
- Eve also falls victim to this trope, with the asteroid fields that tends to consist of a few dozen asteroids tightly packed into a crescent shape. In real life the average distance between asteroids is several thousand miles. However, since a realistically depicted asteroid field would be impossible to implement in a playable fashion, this counts as an Acceptable Break From Reality.
- Ratchet And Clank. Each game takes place in its own galaxy, which your ship's map shows as being around 6-10 planets. Hell, in the first game, the Big Bad, Chairman Drek attempts to build his race a new planet by using a machine to steal huge chunks of ground from lots of planets. Given the pieces he steals are roughly continent-sized, how is the patchwork planet not the size of Jupiter?
- Still, Drek was obviously not going to use every planet in the galaxy for the new planet (he states he uses the best parts available), given that when it was finished, you could still return to any planet you had visited. And there's nothing to say that you visit every planet in the galaxy you're exploring in the games... oh, and not every game takes place in a new galaxy, in fact, the only game that didn't take place in the Solana galaxy before the Future saga was the second one.
- The second game gave us a moon approximately 200m in diameter. It has its own atmosphere (probably; Ratchet has a helmet supplying him with air, so everybody else could have one too), and a fairly substantial city. Giant Clank can jump high enough to significantly reduce its size.
- Wing Commander was never all that clear on what units of distance to use, depending on the game, but pretty much all of them were ludicrously wrong. Less than 100km between planets in a system (Privateer)? Um, no. Just... no.
- And let's not get into the shenanigans it plays with measuring speed, by using a variable "klicks" (which, unlike in Real Life, isn't slang for kilometers) for the distance portion of stated speeds...
- Let's face it: Pretty much every space shooter gets the distances wrong, assuming you don't vaporize enemies far outside of visual range.
- Metroid games presumably take place within the Milky Way galaxy (it's never explicitly stated, but seem a reasonable assumption). However in Metroid Prime: Hunters Samus and the other bounty hunters go to investigate a signal that's stated to come from another galaxy.
- SPORE never claims to be serious at all, however most stuff tend to "make sense" generally, at least in a cartoon kind of way. But when you get to the space age? Flying between planets or even star systems takes ONE SECOND. Alright, one could say that's just so you won't be bored out of your mind, as it's not like the game has a set time and date system. However the problem is, while you're flying between planets, enemy spaceships can shoot at you...at generally the same speed they shoot at you on the planet level. If you zoom out, the galaxy looks scarily big, yes, but when you zoom in you just fly from star system to star system happily. The stars are sitting next to each other in a shockingly "full" galaxy, and you can just NORMALLY FLY to the center of the galaxy by star-hopping. No faster-than-light, no jumping, no wormholes(alright, they exist, but they're not necessary), you NORMALLY FLY to the center in a matter of minutes.
- Well, the closest stars can get in that game is 1 parsec, which is about '3 light years'. I would call 3 Light-Years PER SECOND faster-than-light travel. The scale in this game is pretty realistic. You zoom in far enough, and looking up, those "close stars" are small points.
- Free Space gets this wrong in the other direction for once. Earth gets cut off from the FTL network at the end of Freespace 1, and a major plot point of Freespace 2 is the chance of reestablishing contact with Earth, since nobody has heard from it in the intervening 30 years. However, we still have FTL access to Alpha Centauri, so in the 30 years between games, there would have been plenty of time for ordinary radio messages to and from home.
Western Animation
- In Justice League Unlimited, a particularly egregious (drink up!) case occurs in the second AMAZO episode, where the android, on an interstellar journey to Earth, destroys a planet —or rather, teleports it out of the way— rather than make what is, given the scale involved, a ridiculously minor course adjustment. This is meant to showcase just how ridiculously powerful AMAZO has become: given two choices (remove planet or go around planet), removing the planet is more convenient.
- Challenge of the Super Friends was never known for its rigorous scientific accuracy ... or even for being terribly coherent. In the episode "Conquerors of the Future," a distress call arrives from the planet Santar, and Superman announces: "Santar is trillions of light-years from Earth. We'll have to leave immediately!"
- Along with the usual problem of traveling to the end of the universe and back between breakfast and lunch time, occasionally planets in Futurama will be shown to be several SHIP LENGTHS away from each other.
Real Life
- Will journalists ever stop describing low Earth orbit as "intergalactic"?
- Not so long as Branson's space tourism company is named Virgin Galactic, they won't.
Time Examples
Anime
- The Excel Saga episode "Legend of the End of the Century Conqueror" (a parody of post-apocalyptic anime, mainly Fist Of The North Star) opens with the announcer shouting "The Future, 199X!" The studio audience shouts "It's already over!" and the flustered announcer replies "Oh Crap, you're right!"
- Neon Genesis Evangelion averts this with any civilian technology, such as Shinji listening to an SDAT player most of the time, or the phones, which were presumably outdated when the series was made. While there WAS an apocalypse, humanity had clearly reverted back to consumerism pretty quickly, so some features ought to have improved. The computers, on the other hand, are only SLIGHTLY subhuman AI, which probably won't be happening any time soon. It pretty much evens out.
- Averted in Voices Of A Distant Star. Due to the great planetary and later interstellar distances traversed by Mikako, the protagonist, any messages she sends to her boyfriend Noboru will take days, months and eventually years as she travels further from Earth. Part of one message she sends is "to the 24 year old Noboru, from the 15 year old Mikako"- although they are the same age, he will be 24 by the time the message reaches him.
- Averted in Soukou No Strain. Kind of. In actual time passed over the series, hundreds of years have passed due to relativistic effects. It takes ages to get anywhere despite having FTL travel. In fact, Ralph was sent to aid a ship under attack that had left around four hundred years earlier. Not sure if time dilation works like that but... anyway, it's only kind of due to the fact that destinations are changed as though they'll still be relevant orders when the crew arrives. And issues with communication speeds. Meh.
Film
- In Demolition Man, the entire mainstream society gets completely overhauled, eradicating violence, swearing, and anything deemed hazardous to one's health, within 30 years. There are people (or at least one police officer) who were working adults in the ultra-violent past society, who are still in the workforce.
- One of the biggest time examples comes in A New Hope with Obi-Wan's line that the Jedi Knights were the guardians of the Old Republic "for over a thousand generations". A generation is about 25 years (defined as the time from one generation's birth to their giving birth to the next generation), so 25 times a thousand equals... 25,000 years?!? Just for reference, that's the same amount of time that's passed between the end of the Neanderthals to the present day. The Expanded Universe has kept faithfully to that number, even though it means that the Republic has gone the whole length of human civilization with no major advances or changes. George Lucas may have eventually thought better of it: the prequel trilogy has Palpatine saying instead that the Republic's stood for "a thousand years", which seems like a more reasonable estimate (though the EU's worked hard since then to reconcile both statements via the "Ruusan Reformation", which just brings up the 25,000 year old Republic issue all over again).
Literature
- In Iain M. Banks Excession, an alien artifact on the order of several trillion years old turns up, which makes it older than the universe by several times. However, the Culture are well aware of this fact, freak out, and suffer an existential crisis at the existence of something that cannot possibly exist, and collectively heave a sigh of relief when the artifact spontaneously vanishes and stops offending them with its impossibility.
- The original Dune series by Frank Herbert was set 10,000 years (human history goes back 7,000 years at present) after the Robot War known as the Butlerian Jihad, featuring an old, decadent society that had presumably been going downhill for a long time. However, when Frank Herbert's son picked up the reins and wrote prequels set before and during said Butlerian Jihad, the prequels end with all the social orders and customs, and even the religion, of Dune already established as nearly identical to the ones in the original novel. And the reader is expected to believe that they stayed exactly the same for longer than the time between the invention of writing and the present.
- George R.R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire has the earliest dates in its fictional world's history set at 12,000 years earlier, with the oldest family in the land able to trace their history back 8,000 years with apparent accuracy and detail, and with that family name never once dying out due to infertility, war or famine caused by the planet's frequent mini-ice ages. However, in the third book when one character is about to be elected the 998th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, one of his friends is puzzled he can only find records of less than 600 previous ones, indicating the dates may not be reliable. Furthermore, Martin later confirmed that there are problems with date-keeping in the fictional history of Westeros, and dates much past 2,000 years ago are to treated as mythological, legendary and highly suspect. This may be due to the planet's highly unpredictable seasons (which last for years at a time), meaning that only a tiny minority of the population (those who keep track of astronomy) can accurately track the passage of time.
- Lord of the Rings: Arwen's engagement ring has been in Aragorn's family for six thousand years (except when it was pawned to the Lossoth).
- It's (allegedly?) the ring of Barahir. Putting together handy timelines one, two, and three nets you a total age of about 6200 years. Which is kind of sort of ridiculous in Real Life terms but really it's of a piece with a story which is far more reliant on A Wizard Did It than hard science so probably not really an example.
Comic Books
- The 1998 DC Comics crisis crossover DC One Million has members of the Justice League Of America travel to the 853rd century (specifically the year 85.271, because that's the year when DC expects to release issue #1,000,000 of their original Superman title Action Comics), where they encounter their distant descendants, who are members of the "Justice Legion A."
- A million months after 1938 would in fact fall in the year 85,271 and 852 71 would fall in the 853rd century just as 20 09 falls in the 21st century. The scale is huge, but the math is right.
- It's the scale that's the problem; seventeen times the whole of recorded history, and the DCU is basically the same only with cooler tech.
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who, particularly during the Patrick Troughton era, dated an awful lot of its high-tech future stories to the twenty-first century. Going in the opposite direction, the story "Doctor Who and the Silurians" named a species after the era a million years before they were around. Someone caught this too late, and in their next appearance, the Doctor pointed out that their name was a misnomer.
- The series's first story, about cavemen, had dates slapped on it in different draft scripts ranging from 1000 BC to 1,000,000 BC, with no apparent thought that these were different in any way. Similarly, "The Daleks' Masterplan" had dates from 5000 AD to 1,000,000 AD in different drafts.
- In Frontios and The New Earth the Doctor and companions travel to the extrordinarily distant future (millions, billions, and sometimes even trillions of years), only to discover humans have not changed in any way. It should be noted that it only took us a million or so years to evolve to our current state from Neanderthals. In the episode Utopia, which is stated to be set sometime beyond the year 100,000,000,000,000 A.D., the Doctor handwaves this by saying that humans have evolved into higher life-forms countless times, but keep reverting to homo sapiens sapiens out of nostalgia.
- Space 1999 had an advanced base on the moon in the year of its title. In fairness, that didn't seem so far-fetched in the heady days of the Apollo missions, which was when the programme was created. This is more a depressing case of the opposite of Science Marches On.
- Power Rangers has shown the year 2025 to be more advanced than the year 3000, and once traveled back to show Salem-esque witch hunts in 18th century English-colonized California.
- The "present" in Quantum Leap is 1999, and featured self-driving cars (and time-travelling scientists) amongst other things. However, the show all but declared that its native timeline and ours weren't the same (though they were apparently growing closer all the time).
- Parodied and subverted on Late Night with Conan O'Brien's Year 2000 sketches, where Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter would make ludicrous predictions about the year 2000 (the show began in 1993) while wearing "futuristic" robes and employing "dramatic" lighting (flashlights held under their faces). The sketches were set to dream-like music with "In the year two-thoooousaaaaaand..." repeated by band member Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg. Even as late as 2007, Conan and different guests continue to make predictions about what will happen in the year 2000.
- The absurdity was lampshaded by Andy Richter on the second episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, which began in 2009. The replacement sketch, In the Year 3000 takes the lack of scale in the opposite direction, making predictions for a thousand years in the future based on current politicians and celebrities still being around.
- The Star Trek episode "Space Seed" explained that Earth had been wracked by world wars and conquered by genetic supermen...in the 1990s. (If Khan were thirty when he ruled half the planet, the genetic engineering that produced him would have had to be possible at the time the show was first aired.)
- Of course, the episode aired in 1967, when the previous World War had only ended a little over twenty years ago. The idea that another world war might break out some time in the next twenty or thirty years was frighteningly plausible at the time. Producing supermen before 1970, on the other hand...
- There's a serieds of Eugenics Wars novels (basically Khan's back story), written in the 21st century, that explains that the Eugenics Wars really did take place, they were just done via covert ops, the results were covered up, etc)
- Also, Khan looks about 30, but that doesn't mean he was actually born/created 30 years prior to ruling a large portion of the earth. Remember, he's the product of GENETIC ENGINEERING and could have been created as a fully grown human with the appearance of age, or could have been augmented to age rapidly.
- Laugh-In had an occasional feature of news from twenty years in the future; one such segment got a big laugh by mentioning President Ronald Reagan — dated a year or two after his actual term ended.
- The terraforming in Firefly happens too damned fast. Assuming the system is Alpha Centauri—and it probably isn't—it would still take ships going .1c about fifty years to get there. Ships that can do that are quite some time away, probably several decades at least. Then they terraform a bunch of planets; leaving to one side that the vast majority of them would need more than terraforming to be habitable (like, say, being moved closer to the sun), the series happens in the 2500s. Assuming they arrived in-system in 2150 (and the earth will of course not be rendered uninhabitable by 2100, unless something changes drastically), that's only 350 years to do the terraforming! There could've been a Hand Wave for all this (a rare case where nanotech might realistically be up to the task), but the series' deliberate vagueness—about things like FTL, for instance—backfires for once, and hurts Suspension Of Disbelief rather than helping.
Video Games
- The original Mega Man series, set in 200X, includes 4-foot-tall robots equipped with fully developed artificial intelligence, superhuman speed, reflexes, and fighting ability, and weapons involving plasma cannons, lasers, time manipulation, and holograms. Comparatively, Honda Motor Company's ASIMO robot can't even make it up a set of stairs without falling over. They later changed it to 20XX.
- This might explain why most robot masters' boss rooms don't have stairs in them.
- ASIMO's only fallen down the stairs once, okay?
- Mass Effect seems to play this straight, with humans having expanded into the galactic political scene in less than thirty-five years, inserting themselves into pan-galactic society to the point where they are commonplace throughout the galaxy and have the military-industrial capability to rival established alien societies that have been around for thousands of years. However, that's the whole point, and human expansion is so amazing and unprecedented that the rest of the galaxy is quietly terrified of humans.
- Some of the supplemental material you can read (as well as the places you go in the game) seems to imply that the romanticism of space colonization is really just a an image in the mind of the public with the reality more subverted. The first world colonized by humans is implied to be little more than one major city as are other major colonized worlds. Most other worlds are little more than supply outposts or used for resources it seems, barring those that have had extensive histories like the Citadel.
- This is because the Earth is horribly overpopulated and polluted so the push for colonization is so great, also because humans armed forces are only 3% (compare to 10%-40% of the others races) of the population, they can't defend their colonies making them easy prey for raiders.
- Spoofed wonderfully in Fallout, combining fully fledged AIs and portable fusion power cells with magnetic reel memory racks that are "much better then conventional punch cards."
- Assiduously avoided in Frontier: Elite II, which featured proper Newtonian flight physics via a velocity-vector, view-vector, thrust-vector avionics system and a galaxy of realistic size and scale. For some reason (radiation? gravitational perturbation?), hyperspace jump exit points are on the outskirts of star systems, meaning about 3 days or so journey is needed to get to a planet, even after using hyperdrive to get to the star system in the first place. Luckily, like the military sims of its day, it implemented "accelerated time" in logarithmic increments, up to 10,000 times real time. As a side note, the game's poorest engines produced around about 3G, and the fast, light ships you start off on can rocket around with about 35G of acceleration. Inertial dampeners are mentioned nowhere.
- Similar to the Dune example above, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has planets, cities, societies, and even technology virtually identical to present times. Despite KOTOR being set 4000 years prior to the movies.
- Generally speaking, [1], but the lampshade on this one is that both the KOTOR Era and the Clone War eras represent golden ages which are at the pinnacle of galactic technological, economical and cultural achievement. The New Jedi-Sith wars were fought about 1,000 years before the Battle of Yavin, and it was set in a galactic dark age where soldiers went into battle wearing medieval armor, the Republic was non-existent to the point where the Jedi Order was the sole source of political unity, and the galaxy was plagued by roving clans of Sith warriors. After the final crushing defeat of the combined Sith clans at Ruusan, the Jedi and the last shreds of the Republic go on to institute the Ruusan Reforms, effectively forming a new Republic (which is how SW fans lampshade the lines in the new trilogy that the Republic is 1,000 years old and has never had a war in its history) and letting the galaxy slowly repair itself for 1,000 years, though it is hinted that the KOTOR era may have been even more technologically advanced, since personal shields are common gear for organic soldiers (during the Clone Wars, known shield technology is toxic to organics) and Lightsabers from the KOTOR time are considered priceless relics of incredible strength. How Rakatan technology is still in working condition despite being exposed to the elements for almost 20,000 years, however, is still a mystery.
- Of course, the bigger problem here is the Old Republic lasting 20,000 years, and still having little technology change.
Western Animation
- Spoofed in an episode of Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law. George Jetson, after arriving in our time, treats Birdman like an inferior creature, stating proudly, "We are from the future! The far off year of 2002!" Birdman glances at his calendar, which reads "March 2004."
- The backstory of the various Transformers continuities typically extends back millions of years from the present date, and that's just the most recent activities of the current generation of characters. Granted, they're immortal robots, but still.
- And in the original cartoon, it's implied that nothing of importance happened on Cybertron during the four million years the season 1 protagonists lay dormant on Earth until they reawakened in 1984. Shockwave promised Megatron that he would keep Cybertron as he (Megatron) leaves it, but... damn.
- Shockwave is good at two things, being a Magnificent Bastard (a very creepy one) and taking everything to the logical extreme.
- The Dreamwave comic series attempted to justify this by stating that due to ongoing rebellion and quashing of said rebellion, both Autobots and Decepticons formed a truce because they simply ran out of energon, and needed to go into a long period of stasis. In fact, by the time the Earthbound Autobots and Decepticons get home, they find that Cybertron actually is much better. The War Within series also had characters noting how, despite their level of technology, they had yet to go beyond their own moons.
- The Marvel comics actually delved into the history of the war during those four million years in some detail, chronicling the rise and fall of multiple Deception and Autobot commanders, the raging of the battles over vast distances of the planet, and the gradual pushing back of the Autobots on every front, until by the time contact is reestablished with Optimus Prime and co on Earth, the war on Cybertron has effectively been over for several thousand years and the Autobots are no more than scattered guerrilla bands fighting on against all hope. The comics also seemed to postulate at one point the existence of many other Transformer factions and neutral forces other than Autobots and Deceptions who rode out the war, but this idea was seemingly later abandoned with those factions not being mentioned much past the Target: 2006! story arc. The comic also suggested that many Transformer factions had abandoned Cybertron to live in peace on other worlds, such as the Cybertronian Empire under the Liege Maximo and the later-Headmasters under Fortress Maximus, spreading the war over a much vaster distance of space as well as time.
- In the "Breakout" episode of Megas XLR, highly-advanced sentient beings are shown to imprison a criminal. A title card then says "1,987,462,128,012 years later..." and cuts to present day, making the timeframe a little over 132 times the current length of existence.
Size and Mass Examples
Anime
- Ah, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. In a rare example from the show that can't be chalked up to Rule Of Cool, in the last episode, the titular mecha ejects it's smaller forms at the enemy when it is restrained. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is the size of a galaxy. Chouginga Gurren Lagann is the size of the moon. They appear in the same frame. The fact that this happens should make anybody with a passing knowledge of astronomy angry.
- Not to mention the Great Zamboa (the antagonist's galaxy-sized mech) having a clearly visible planet set into its forehead.
Literature
- Despite containing one of the vanishingly rare aversions of distance and speed issues in military sci-fi, David Weber's Honorverse did suffer "The Great Resizing" as a result of the author forgetting the square-cube law while assigning the lengths and masses of his setting's starships. When the people trying to create a gaming spinoff crunched the numbers, they realized his smallest ships were about right, but the mightiest warships were "not quite as dense as cigar smoke!"
- Since the text makes only rare references to length, and very commonly notes mass as a determinant of acceleration, the author retconned in a new and much shorter length that delivered reasonable density.
- Larry Niven's Ringworld takes the common misconception about the Dyson Sphere (see below) to a more 'practical' level. Why build an entire sphere around a star when a single continuous strip could house more life than could possibly fill it? But the example of this trope comes more into play with Return to Ringworld, which was written after Niven attended a convention where several college students were roaming the halls chanting "The Ringworld is unstable". Niven did the math and, nerds being nerds, discovered they were right. The Ringworld is indeed unstable, so he added some jets to allow it to maintain its position.
- Of course, Ringworld starts off with the Puppeteers fleeing the galaxy, dragging the five planets of their home system with them, which has its own host of Sense Of Scale problems (But come on, they're towing planets. How is that not awesome?)
- The whole of Known Space is a region of around 30-60 lightyears in diameter, depending on time. The Ringworld and the Fleet of Planets are both far outside this, and the Fleet is moving along at a steady clip of .8c. The Puppeteers are long-term planners who are perfectly willing to move thousands of years in order to be safe.
- Iain Banks has an even more practical variant in his "orbitals" - ring-shaped worlds that are only five million kilometres across and in a conventional orbit about their star. The size is chosen so that one revolution per standard day evokes one standard gravity of centrifugal force. In Consider Phlebas there is passing mention of Spheres and Rings, but by later novels they seem much less popular (although, how many do you need?)
- Matter is set on a "shellworld", effectively a planet-sized (and shaped) set of matryoshka dolls. They have about ten or so levels, so while they have quite a bit of room, they don't produce the ridiculously enormous living area of a ringworld.
- Also by Niven, in his Integral Trees setting: the so-called "integral trees" are plants in a free-fall environment typically between 50 and 100 kilometers long and 700 meters across. A small (few thousand people), fairly primitive (early Iron Age) society is harvesting these trees for lumber at an implied rate of one or two a year. Thing is, a single tree will yield about eight trillion board-feet of lumber, or about a century's output of the entire United States lumber industry.
- Stephen Baxter's Ring features an artificial ring the size of a galaxy spinning at something close to the speed of light, with the idea its sheer mass would rip open a hole to another universe. The enemies of the ring-creators are peeved at this and hurl entire galaxies at the ring (including ours, but it's okay as we won't get there for several tens of billion years) in an attempt to destroy it, to no avail. The plausibility of such an object's size and the ability to build it without either exhausting all matter in the universe or getting it finished before the end of time may depend on the reader's suspension of disbelief.
- To be fair, the ring-creators came into existence a couple seconds after the universe did, are born in black holes, have utterly ridiculous technology, and have a stable time-loop existence so that as soon as they came into existence, they were at their technological peak. They've had plenty of time.
Western Animation
- In the various continuities of Transformers, various transformers could change their size and mass. To give you an idea on how much of a change they could make, you could pick up and carry around Soundwave and his assorted Casseticons. (The fact that they turn into a cassette player of some kind and its associated cassettes is another quandary.) Soundwave in his robot form is something like a 30-foot-tall heavily armed and armoured war machine.
- Probably the worst example of this - worse even than Megatron and his gun transformation - was Reflector. Each one only slightly shorter than Soundwave, THREE robots (Spectro, Spyglass, and Viewfinder) managed to each form a different part of a camera that has been portrayed as small enough to fit into Thundercracker's hand.
- On the other end of the scale is Unicron. He is a Transformer the size of a planet. And picks up another, normal size Transformer between his fingers and drops him in his mouth. To say nothing of the rest of the fight scenes against him.
- The Transformers Wiki has an entire page dedicated to the wackiness of Transformer scale.
- The size of Cybertron itself varies a lot in Transformers lore. Considering it's inhabitants tend to be about 30 feet tall, it could be assumed that the planet is fairly big, but in fact when it gets knocked into Earth orbit (which happens twice in the series) it appears to be about the size of our Moon. Considering that Cybertron is apparently too big for Unicron to consume in planet mode, this means that the actual number of planets Unicron can consume without ripping them apart with his bare hands (which in the case of a planet like Earth would take a long time) is fairly limited.
- However, in the Marvel Comics series, Cybertron is said to be larger than Saturn, which given its mechanical, solid nature would immediately make it as dense as a black hole. This is usually handwaved with the explanation that it's riddled with many passages and tunnels, making the whole thing porous. Unicron in the comics is kept to the same scale relative to Cybertron as he is in the movie, meaning that Unicron could now swallow the Earth in a couple of munches. Naturally, he is still shown being lightly damaged by weapons fire from normal-sized Transformers, able to pick up other Transformers and eat them with his fingers, and at one point gets smacked in the face by the Ark, which by scale comparison is now revealed to be about the size of Neptune. Yeah, they didn't pay much attention to size in the comics either.
Live Action TV
- The Star Trek: TOS episode "The Galileo Seven" in which Spock and a small crew were lost in a shuttlecraft while the Enterprise studied quasar-like phenomena. The image on the main screen was clearly of an artist's rendition of a quasar. For frame of reference, a quasar is a galaxy thought to have a black hole at its center, spewing stuff from each pole of its galactic core. The implications are either of a galaxy-like phenomenon within a galaxy (?!), or that the Enterprise was at the far reaches of the universe studying a quasar with a very, very small number of worlds therein.
- No-one knew for sure that a quasar is a galaxy until the 1980s, and they don't look like one without additional information that wasn't available when the episode was made. This is more a case of Science Marches On.
- Hilariously, the remastered version added stumpy little relativistic jets and an accretion disc.
- Used intentionally and cranked up to 11 via the Rule Of Funny in Psych, where detective Shawn Spencer has to pretend to be the guide doing a laser light presentation at an observatory, but quickly makes it painfully obvious he knows nothing about space.
Shawn: There are almost 4... hundred stars, in our galaxy. Maybe more. No one knows for sure. Some say that the Milky Way may be larger than the Indian Ocean. Ah, and here are our constellations. Here's one of a fish...and here's one of a guy, holding........ some sort of a thing?
Janitor: (whispering) You're supposed to name them!
Shawn: And here is Monkey with Rash. The Egyptians used to set their clocks by it. And here is the Hammer of Jeff.
Video Games
- Super Mario Galaxy is very confused as to what constitutes a planet or a galaxy. For example: the smallest "planets" are maybe thirty feet in all directions, and the biggest are smaller than the Earth's moon. Meanwhile, "galaxies" are simply clusters of these "planets" or sometimes just one relatively big "planet," with no stars to speak of. Unless you count the abundant tiny black holes. It can be chalked up to Rule Of Fun, though, the setting running on cartoon physics.
- Though the actual reason is that in Japanese, the same word is used to refer to planets, asteroids, galaxies, etc., the real confusion being why that was kept in the translation.
- Wing Commander, yet again. Fitting 104 15-20 meter long fighters in a 700 meter long space carrier that not only has to carry the fighters, but jump drive, conventional space drives, and supplies (including oxygen for crews) for up to months at a time? And recall that the Bengal-class carriers following the Tiger's Claw were built 10 meters shorter.
- Actually, this one's completely plausible. For which, I reference the page from The Other Wiki on the USS Enterprise (CV-6). Complement: 90 planes between 25-40 feet (8-12 meters). Scale the dimensions up by three while only doubling (or less) the length of the fighters, no problem at all, especially with the whole square-cube law thing giving you a bunch of extra volume to work with.
- Averted in the Free Space series of games. Fighters and bombers are tens of meters long, and capital ships (particularly in Free Space 2) appear immense in-game.
- Homeworld is ridiculously bad about ship weight. Most ships' weights in "tons" correspond to them being lighter-than-air craft. I guess that would make getting 'em into space pretty easy, though.
Other
- Freeman Dyson's idea of the Dyson Sphere, a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to completely surround a star and capture most or all of its energy output, when typically misrepresented by journalists and sci-fi writers as a solid shell completely enclosing its star. Hear that sound? Yeah, that's the collective groan of pretty much every engineer on the planet doing a coordinated Face Palm at the sheer impossibility of a solid structure of that magnitude keeping itself intact. Not to mention the issue of where the hell one would get enough material to build something that would outmass the entire solar system it's supposed to hold several times over. Dyson himself had a sense of scale, was fully aware of the impossibility of a solid shell and had in mind "a loose collection or swarm of objects travelling on independent orbits around the star.".
- Cricket magazine had an even worse example in one of their stories. Not only was there a solid Dyson sphere, but "a small strip around the equator was far enough away to support life."
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics" featured a Dyson sphere with land, water and a sustained atmosphere (judging from all the green) on the entire inside surface. Despite the fact that the surface had open doors.
- Receives a lampshade in Schlock Mercenary, where aliens who habitually make Dyson spheres of a canvas-like material have a name that translates to "fucking expensive."
- In the Star Trek novel Inferno (book three of the Millennium trilogy) O'Brien is trapped in a Pah-wraith hell featuring a solid-shell Dyson sphere. The sheer impossibility of the thing slowly but surely drives him insane. Of course, being an illusion the whole time, it gets a pass on any sort of physical possibility.
- A more petinent question is if Dyson really appreciated how much power a Dyson sphere could generate is in Human terms and what we (or any aliens species) would actually need it for.
- For manufacturing the tons and tons of antimatter necessary to make interstellar voyages within human lifetimes, of course.
Close Size and Mass Examples
Energy Examples
Comic Books
- In V4 Legion Of Super Heroes, the moon is blown up. Earth hardly notices, even though just a few chunks of it should wreak disaster on the Earth equivalent to being hit by hundreds of asteroids at once. Later on, the Earth is blown up and said to damage the moons of Saturn, when the effect should be unnoticeable.
Film
- In the Back To The Future films, time travel needs 1.21
jigawatts gigawatts, the amount of power released by a lightning bolt. The same amount of power can be obtained by burning a tankful of gas per second - powerful, but not as unthinkably great as the films implied.
- Sounds (relatively) impractical though; How would you be able to strap enough fuel tanks onto the machine and still have room for the other components, even if you sacrifice driveability?
- It should be noted, gigawatts is a measure of energy per unit time; given that the time travel seems to happen almost instantaneously, this would suggest that you actually only require a very small amount of energy. Working through the requirements properly, lightning is typically 500 MJ - while standard petrol is 44.4 MJ/kg, meaning 11-12 kilos of a fairly standard fuel is more than required. That's less than four US gallons of uncompressed petrol. Hydrogen, now getting to be as commonplace and very easy to acquire if you're ordering beforehand rather than just pulling into a station, is around 120 MJ/kg, so compressed to the same density would require about a third of that. (1.3-1.5 US gallons. There's a reason hydrogen fuel cells are feasible.)
- Actually, Gigawatt in this case very likely refers to the electrical meaning of the term, which makes it implausibly large (on a scale of nuclear reactor output).
- Armageddon provides a shiny example in the categories of size, energy, and distance: An asteroid the size of Texas (roughly 700-1000 km across depending on the axis chosen) is not an asteroid - it's a planetoid. It is comparable in size to the larger moons of the outer gas giants. The movie states that our heroes drill 800 feet into it. Many modern rig operations close on to twice that, while diamond-head drilling goes to four times the stated depth before hitting its cost-effectiveness ceiling. And lastly, they they split the
asteroid planetoid in two by setting off a 20 megaton nuclear device in the hole. Now, setting aside the concept of getting a nuke into such a hole (which is fairly narrow in diameter), this is roughly equivalent to taking a bowling ball, pricking its surface gently with a push pin, and then farting into the hole.
- That large an object that close to the Earth would be 3000-4000 times brighter than Ceres, the largest asteroid in the Solar System, and thus easily spotted with the naked eye. It would have naked-eye visibility for a least a few weeks before the 18-day deadline given in the film.
- If the object is "the size of Texas," we have a problem — we know how wide Texas is from east to west, and we know how tall Texas is from north to south ... but how thick is Texas? Is it only the thickness of its own topsoil layer? Is it a single molecule thick? Does it extend in a Texas-shaped wedge all the way to the center of the Earth? If we assume that Texas is only paper-thin, this object "the size of Texas" hurtling toward the Earth suddenly seems a lot less threatening.
- In Star Trek The Motion Picture the staggaring, awe-inspiring power of Vger's ball-lightning attack (which is at one point shown disintegrating an entire Klingon fleet) is measured by the Enterprise's sensors and reported by Sulu as being "One to the Twelfth Power". We will leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate what 1^12 is.
Literature
- In the Riverworld series, food is provided by an energy-to-matter conversion. Three times a day, each Grailstone blasts out enough energy to create food for seven hundred people, and half that energy gets wasted into the air. There are some 20,000,000 Grailstones on the planet. Just for clarity, a one-kiloton thermonuclear explosion converts about .05 grams of mass to energy. The Grailstones should blow the atmosphere off the planet at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now that's a barbecue!
- The source of this energy is also a problem: it's stated that the Grail system is powered by thermoelectric generators under the planet's crust. The available energy (3.6 exajoules per day) sounds like a lot, but it's only enough to synthesize about 40kg of food.
- Perhaps the grailstones are also solar collectors?
- The heat energy of an entire world wouldn't be enough to make the grail stones work, so no, I don't think that having them be solar collectors would make one bit of a difference.
- The extra matter also ought to turn the River Valley into a miles-deep sewer of human waste in a few short years. There would have to be some means of converting the mass back into energy to avoid this.
- The many varieties of fish and worms act as waste disposal.
- So the valley is full of fish, vermin and icky bacterial mould instead. Doesn't sound good either. There's a reason why the First Law of Thermodynamics is the Law and the First. Ecosystems in particular depend on conservation to work normally, they will screw up very quickly if more biomass keeps appearing from thin air.
- In Forbidden Planet, the crew of the spaceship is attacked by a monster and blast it with an impressive looking nuclear powered laser. They then go on to mention that no living being should have survived the hit. The problem is, they give the output of the laser in as "three billion electron volts"... which comes out to under half a nanojoule. For comparison, shining a laser pointer of the kind you might use to point at things in a presentation on something for a tenth of a second would impart one million times that much energy.
- Now, if that 3 Ge V figure was a measure of the energy in the individual photons of light in the beam... that would be impressive.
- The same electron volts mistake is also seen towards the end of The fall of Hyperion.
Live Action TV
- In Doctor Who, the Slitheen scheme to use the world's stockpiled nuclear weapons to "reduce the planet to molten slag." In fact, the Earth gets more energy from the sun every hour than this. It'd not be enough to do more than lightly toast the surface.
- Even worse than this is the episode "Journey's End" (season 4 spoiler), where 25 strategically placed nuclear bombs are meant to be enough to destroy the entire planet.
- It would seem that nuclear technology in Doctor Who is meant to be that ridiculously powerful. May I direct you to the old series "Z-bomb", a UNIT bomb that destroyed the earth-like planet of Mondas.
- In any case, each nuclear bomb would have had to have a yield of approximately 2,365,667,200,000,000 megatons, or 47,313,344,000,000 times more power than the largest nuclear bomb ever built. Assuming a fusion-type warhead, each of those bombs would probably weigh about 1,277,460,288,000,000,000 kg, much more massive than the asteroid theorized to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Such a warhead, strategically placed, would be extremely difficult not to notice as it could be as much as three hundred miles across.
- In the charity mini-episode "Time Crash," the Fifth Doctor realizes a rupture in space and time is imminent, but when he calculates its extent, it turns out to be "roughly the size of Belgium... Well, that's rather anti-climactic, isn't it? Belgium?"
- In Space1999, an explosion at a nuclear waste dump accelerates Earth's moon to a speed that defies the laws of physics. In fact, the energy required to get the moon out of orbit is more than enough to completely pulverise it.
Video Games
- Kind of energy: the Pokedex entries for some Pokemon species. "Magcargo's body temperature is 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit" (Sun's surface: 5,800 Kelvin, or 9980 F), "Charizard's fire is hot enough to melt boulders" (1200 Celsius, 2192 F)...
- Magcargo Rule34, perpetual WMD of the future! Select your country, pick up a male and female, VERY VERY CAREFULLY, and drop.
- It should be noted however that numerous Pokedex entries are contradicted by both the games and the anime, contain a suspicious amount of rumours and conjecture, and considering the favoured tactic of Pokemon researchers is to recruit ten-year-olds and send them off without instruction, there's a strong implication that science in the Pokemon world is of a very poor quality.
- In Metroid Prime Hunters, the Volt Driver is said to fire multi-terawatt bursts of electricity. A terawatt, or one trillion (10^12) watts is the unit that measures the total amount of power used by humanity (about 15 terawatts). The Judicator fires supercooled plasma that reaches near Absolute Zero. Both of these are hand held weapons.
- The annihilator beam of Metroid Prime 2 combines matter and antimatter. This would produce a blast comparable to a nuclear bomb. The beam is semiautomatic (0.5 grams of matter and antimatter produce roughly 9 * 10^13 Joules of energy — which is, roughly, the energy output of a Fat Man type nuclear explosion. And even 0.0001g of matter and antimatter each would still produce enough energy to melt a metric ton of steel.
Western Animation
- In Ben10 the self destruct mechanism on the Omnitrix releases enough energy to destroy the entire universe. One of many problems with that idea is if you ever got that much energy into one point (assuming it existed in the first place), the total absence of energy from the rest of the universe would destroy it anyway.
- Considering that the Omnitrix is capable of both increasing and decreasing both Ben's size AND mass, it seems plausible that the energy comes from the same place that extra mass either comes from or goes to.
- Well, technically, it was "rip a huge hole in the universe", not "destroy the universe", but the Universe is destroyed either way, and we still run into the same problem.
- In the Supermarionation series Fireball XL5, it only took a few missiles to blow up an incoming planet.
Velocity Examples
Anime
- Space Cruiser Yamato has the Earth see the approach of the Comet Empire, even though it's light years away and the light from it wouldn't reach us yet. Also, the Comet Empire is the size of a small planet - big, but not big enough to be seen at that distance anyway.
- In the Americanization, Star Blazers, the newly launched Argo makes its first hyperspace jumps, traveling light years from Earth to Mars. Must have been a bit of a detour involved.
Film
- Starship Troopers (The Movie) once again shines through with a huge asteroid passing a battleship vastly distant from Earth, with the same asteroid striking the Earth mere hours later. To add insult to injury, the battleship was also moving towards the asteroid, yet the asteroid seems to slowly pass by happily ripping off a section of the ship as it does so - suggesting the ship is, in fact, flying backwards at a velocity very close to but slightly slower than the asteroid.
- Parodied in Spaceballs:
Colonel Sandurz: Prepare ship for light speed.
Dark Helmet: No, no, no. Light speed is too slow!
Colonel Sandurz: Light speed too slow?
Colonel Sandurz Ludicrous speed? Sir, we've never gone that fast before...I don't know if the ship can take it.
Literature
- Justified in Animorphs where travel through Zero Space is explicitly stated to be relatively random, where the same distance can take either hours or months, depending on how Zero Space shifted.
Live Action TV
- The length of subjective time it takes to get from anywhere to anywhere else via TARDIS in Doctor Who is entirely random. But then, the navigation is notoriously dodgy, and the TARDIS appears to travel via a dimension not unlike the Warp from Warhammer 40000 (see below).
- Star Trek is even worse: the USS Enterprise traveled to the edge of the galaxy (in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name") and to the center of the galaxy (in Star Trek V) in the space of a single episode. The trip from one galaxy to another would take about 300 years (though the trip would be made with the modifications of extra-galactic aliens who had engines that were better than the Federation's). Yet in Star Trek Voyager, when ships were about a thousand times faster, the estimated travel time to Earth from the opposite side of the galaxy was upwards of 70 years.
- By the time of Star Trek The Next Generation, a Warp Speed scale was firmly established by Paramount, where a speed of Warp X (below Warp 9) meant the ship was travelling at X^3.3333... times the speed of light. This makes Warp 1 equal to light speed, Warp 2 just a hair over 10 times the speed of light, and Warp 9 a little more than 1500 times light speed. Yet in the episode "Where Silence Has Lease", the Enterprise traverses the 1.3 parsec distance to the edge of a giant space cloud at Warp 2 in about 30 seconds.
- In Star Trek Enterprise, the Klingon homeworld is several days' travel from Earth, which would put the two empires right on top of each other, given the increases in cruising speed in the other incarnations of the franchise. (Though one interesting exception: in the first episode of Star Trek Enterprise, Trip describes the ship's top speed in terms of how long it would take to travel to Jupiter and back, and he's exactly right, based on conventional estimates of how warp factors work). In fact if you use those same calculations, the Klingon home planet would be two and a half lightyears from Earth; the nearest star to us in Real Life is four and a half. Missed it by that much. Which is, really, still a hell of a big distance in conventional terms, but isn't that much in terms of space.
- Space 1999 comes through again by having characters track the approach of faster-than-light craft optically, and by allowing floating space rubble, conventional rockets, alien spacecraft, and a moon hurtling interstellar distances in days to be in range of each other for exactly as long as the plot demands.
- In Babylon 5 hyperspace travel appears to be done at the speed of plot. For example, it takes 3 days to get from Babylon 5 to Earth, which is about 14 light-years away. It also takes 3 days to get from Babylon 5 to Z'ha'dum, which is about 20,000 light-years away. In fairness the creator readily falls back on the "It's hyperspace!" argument every time anyone even starts to talk about this.
- In fact, in the DVD commentaries he explicitly says that the White Star "moves at the speed of plot."
Tabletop Games
- Handwaved in Warhammer 40000 where the chaotic nature of the Warp means that the same trip can take vastly different amounts of time. We have at least one example of a ship arriving quite some time before it left, and another of a vessel arriving at it's destination millenia after it was supposed to arrive, though the crew seemed to believe it took only a couple of months. When your hyperspace is made of illogical thought, it's no wonder there's a bit of variation in travel times.
- To illustrate - a particularly powerful Ork Warboss, in the course of a WAAAAAAAAAGH!, managed to make his entire ship travel back in time to before the WAAAAAAAAAGH! even began. The Boss decided to find his past self and kill him so he could have two of his favourite gun. You heard me.
- Warhammer 40,000 also came up with a nice solution for the Necrons: the Inertialess Drive. It makes the ship unbound by inertia, allowing it to almost instantly (the time it takes for the drive to activate) accelerate to a practically infinite velocity, then immediately come to a stop. Necron phase technology would prevent them from crashing into anything, and the precision of their machinery (their weapons, for example, are crafted atom by atom, as an idea of how precise Necrons are) would ensure they don't go waaaay too far, out past the galaxy.
Video Games
- In System Shock 2, it's discovered that a piece of the space station which was jettisoned by the player in the first game has crashed on a planet in the Tau Ceti system - crossing a distance of 12 light-years in a mere 30 years. This would require the ejection charges to have kicked the module loose at about half the speed of light...
- Unless the occupant got clever and built a propulsion system for the module.
- According to some scans, Samus' ship can travel at 72 times the speed of light. Without using the hyperdrive.
Other
- Although this doesn't involve space ships, the roleplaying site Mega Man MUSH once had a memorable example of this in its news files for the various character stats, describing what the specific numbers for each stat would represent. In the news file for the Velocity stat, where 1 signified "less than 5 mph (8 km/h,)" 5 meant "60-150 mph (97-241 km/h,)" and 9 was specified as "767 mph (1235 km/h)" (the speed of sound,) 10 was defined as "escape velocity." Hilarity ensued when someone pointed out exactly how fast escape velocity is.
- here◊ is a graph to demonstrate. Maximum speed is the Y-axis, velocity stat is the x-axis. Note the rather...sharp change in the slope.
- Thinking that escape velocity is the speed at which you need to fly to leave the atmosphere is its own little common misconception right there.
Unitless Number Examples
Anime
- Neon Genesis Evangelion suffers from this. Pretty much all the technobabble related to the Evas is given without units ("Its decreased by 0.3"), although they do occasionally remember to use units for things like sizes.
- Power levels. That is all.
- Obligatory "Over 9000" comment.
Western Animation
- Parodied in one episode of Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command, where Evil Emperor Zurg decides to make a team of evil, cloned rangers. Towards the beginning, the following conversation takes place when trying to decide how "Evil" to make the rangers:
Zurg: Give them... a hundred evil! No, wait, a thousand evil! No, make it a MILLION evil! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Grub: Gee, that's awfuly daring, your evilness, seeing as you only have an Evilness rating of 13. Zurg: Oh. Well, um, on second thought, how about we just give them a twelve.
Film
- Star Wars - It is generally given that there are millions of habitable worlds in the Galaxy. There are roughly a trillion beings living on Coruscant alone... when the Kaminoan prime minister thinks it's wonderful that he's able to announce that a million "Units" are almost battle-ready, many people take it as individual troopers. One trooper per inhabited world? Yep, that's going to keep the local systems in line. A later Ret Con gives the production figures at 3 million, which isn't much better. The number of droid troops varies wildly depending on which source you read, from "1 million produced per year" to "several quintillion." There have been attempts to partly justify this as propaganda, bad intel and misinformation-sowing on both sides of the war. The real culprit, of course, is that nobody ever said what those "units" meant. Could be one clone trooper, could be a whole army of 'em.
- The one-trooper-per-world thing Lampshaded in Shatterpoint, when it occurs to Mace Windu. He also considers that the the clone troopers have been "kept busy" during the war. The canonical explanation is that the force needed to fight a war is much smaller than the one needed to police the galaxy, leading to the Empire being forced to conscript regular humans instead of trained-and-bred troopers.
- One possible explanation is that the wars, presented to us as pivotal conflicts, are actually somewhat low-intensity in terms of affecting the general populace of the Galaxy. This certainly seems to be the case for Tatooine, where both the Rebellion and the Jedi (and to some extent the Republic itself) are strictly "something that happens to other people."
- When you allow in information from Star Wars RPG Saga Edition books (which are considered canon by most fans since each book's content must be approved by Lucasfilm) it gets really silly. In the "Clone Wars Campaign Guide," not only is the 3 million clones figure repeated, but the Separatist Army is said to consist of a quadrillion droids. In other words, the clone force is 3 billionths of the Separatist force. It's also worth noting that during WWII, the United States had 16 million men in its armed forces.
- Dammit why can't they just change unit to battalion (about a 1000 solders) which would up the number to 3 billion clones, sure it isn't that large but it works.
- Well, at the very least, the Star Wars The Clone Wars series mentions in its that the clones are outnumbered a hundred to one (instead of billions), which may imply some numerical revisions may be forthcoming, or at least the dispensing of concrete numbers.
- It gets even worse in the NJO novels when the New Republic, losing planets to the invading Yuuzhan Vong left and right, is described as having problems finding shelter and food for millions of refugees. WTF?
One Hundred Billion is an unreasonable high figure - probably outrageously inflated - but even so -
Subtract these casualties from the preconquest population of Couruscant.
There are nine hundred billion people left over.
Nine
Hundred
Billion.
Survivors can be a weapon too.
- A similar problem: all droids have a four-character "designation," each apparently a combination of non-case-sensitive numbers, with a dash somewhere in it (i.e. C-3PO and R2-D2, or IG-88). Assuming each droid is giving a unique name with this setup, there are "only" 5,038,848 possibilities (0-9 is 10, plus 26 letters, so 36^4, times three for the number of places to put the dash) - which, considering droids have been around for at least the better part of 4000 years, and there are quite a smegload of them, would run out fairly quickly.
- Unique names were a Merchandise Driven change - originally, R2-D2 was a common model number, but when the toys started coming out, the "Red R2" became "R5-D4."
- It's made very clear that the alphanumeric designations are *not* all there is to a droid's designation nor unique to each droid. For droids that aren't main characters, we have numerous examples of a bunch of identical droids with the same model number (HK-50 assassin droids, B-1 battle droids, etc.) We also have examples of droids who have their own personal identification number that's different from their model number — OOM-9 from Phantom Menace is a B-1 battle droid.
- Little bit of math fun here: Han Solo owed Jabba the Hutt the price of a dumped shipment of spice. 17,000 credits, apparently (based on Solo and Jabba's discussion in Ep IV from Special Edition onward), works out to Solo's original debt plus an extra 15%. Now, Han was smuggling glitterstim spice, which is considered rare and exotic. According to certain sources, exotic spice is worth 20 credits a GRAM. This, however, means that the 14,782 credits Jabba lost (14,782.6, if you want to be exact) adds up to about three-quarters of a kilogram of spice. Unless this stuff is less dense than the average sparrow feather, 0.73 kilos should be small enough in size to fit into nearly any small compartment (or possibly up Chewbacca's butt... hey, these ARE professional smugglers).
- 20 credits a gram to whom? That may be street value, or street value in certain places, or value in prison, or any number of specific conditions that we can't know without specifying who the certain sources are. 20 credit street value could almost certainly translate to something close to the figure given (especially if it's more like sage than flour in density) if we're talking wholesale or bare manufacturing costs.
- Drug lords always deal in street prices (when not paying the producers). That is the entire point of being a drug lord. It is also the reason why the profit margins amount to garages full of cash money in Real Life.
- And speaking of Coruscant, a mere trillion people couldn't produce the sort of crowding we're shown. If we assume the a land surface area similar to earth, and that the oceans are not inhabited, this works out to roughly 1500 sq ft per person — a good-sized apartment. Everything shown, however, is with very tall buildings, multiplying the available space. Either most of the planet is purely industrial, everyone has way more living space than they could ever use, or the population is really a lot higher than a trillion.
- Coruscant is explicitly referred to as an ecumenopolis. That is to say, one continuous, planet-wide city. The second film reveals that there are large industrial areas of the planet; the Expanded Universe notes there are several engineered oceans; and of course, 1 trillion is just the official, census numbers. The troglodytes in the sections near bedrock level don't count.
- Irregular Webcomic did a series of strips regarding this. Probably the most compelling and interesting argument against Coruscant is the fact that a planet-wide city would dump so much waste heat into the system that the surface of the planet would be hot enough to melt lead.
- They have the technological capacity to completely destroy entire worlds through brute force energy beams. If they can handle dealing with waste heat on that scale, they shouldn't have a problem dealing with the waste heat from a ecumenopolis.
- Actually taken into account by the author of Irregular Webcomic (a physics Ph.D.) — due to the laws of thermodynamics, it is way easier to cook a planet than to freeze it. All the energy needed to create a planetary air conditioning would translate into at least as much heat energy as what you want to cool, meaning that the planet would get even hotter, which is the real problem. The Death Star is at least not firing all the time.
- Whenever Jacen and Jaina went to Coruscant's lower levels, they found less dense populations. And a lot of nasty monsters.
- Plenty of the 'residents' of Coruscant would be droids, which wouldn't count towards the census, yet could still take up considerable space.
- It's also certainly possible that Coruscant is smaller than Earth.
- That brings up the question of gravity and why it seems like Earth normal, but that's answered pretty easily with the "different galaxy" bit. We know people look like normal Earthbound humans, but we have no real proof that they're actually built the same, including questions like bone density and what blood and tissue is made out of (and whether it might be something heavier than water). Alternately, it could be terraformed.
- The wikia makes mention of transients, temporary works, and unregistered populace, so even without the various monsters of the undercity the population could be well over 1 trillion. Also, it's not just the seas that are uninhabited, the polar regions are also exempt.
- For a big universe, Star Wars is extremely small. In Knights Of The Old Republic, where did the Sith hide their maps? Tatooine, Korriban, and Kashyyk. Rancors turn up all over the place. We mostly bump into the same few races. Luke flies off to Dagobah, and happens to crash-land — out of an entire planet — next to Yoda. I'm sure you can explain a lot of it by saying "The Force makes it so", but the universe doesn't feel as big or diverse as it should to me.
- In the last case, its strongly implied that Yoda was deliberately guiding Luke's X-Wing to that exact location. Remember, his scanners went haywire...but they didn't the other times.
- You missed Manaan and the Rakata left the Starmaps on those planets, not the Sith. Rancors were only found on Rakata (been crashed there by ships), and the planets were seperated by tens of thousands of lightyears.
- Well I don't know where you get that '1 million planets' from, but Wookiepedia puts the numbers as high as 20 billion planets on which life developed, and 20 million on which intelligent life developed.
- Star Wars also tends to get pretty hilarious when Jedi are often limited to the thousands (if even that), and yet these guys are pretty much interstellar police. Not to mention force affinity is genetically linked, which raises rather glaring problems that This Troper would rather not think about.
- This is actually pointed out in one of the Dark Horse Clone Wars comic, where Obi-Wan says something to the effect that much of the galactic population has never seen a Jedi.
Live Action TV
- In Farscape a scientist's computer has the DNA information for over 11 million species, which is supposed to be an impressive number. On Earth there is somewhere between 2 million and 100 million depending on whether you're a lumper or a splitter. Of course there's also the question of why non-Earth species should even have DNA. Genetic material sure, but exactly the same molecule?
- It should also be noted that said scientist was interested in genetic superiority, so would likely have no interest in cataloging the "lower orders". It's heavily implied that most if not all of those 11 million species were sentient. Comparing that number to the number of sentient species on Earth makes it a little more awe-inspiring.
- Translator microbes. Thus random alien genetic material becomes DNA.
- That doesn't really solve the problem though. It tells us that DNA is the molecule, not why it should be the same.
- In Babylon 5, the Earth-Minbari War was the most significant war in human history. However, in terms of deaths it's a little lacking, as the human death count was only 250'000 and the Minbari significantly less. For comparison, World War 2 had a death toll in the tens of millions.
- In fact, most battles in B5 are like this, even planetary bombardements only have a few thousand deaths the only one with a more than a million had asteroids (and that took weeks of nonstop dropping), its rather narmy.
- However, one of the canonical novels says that 600 million Narns died in the bombardment. Given that one of the producers on the show ensured that a ship mentioned in this novel as being at the first encounter between the humans and Minbari was represented in a flashback to the event in the series itself, this was taken seriously at the time. However, in Season 3 Straczynski said that only '5 or 6 million' Narns had died, which seems preposterously unlikely.
- Justified for the Earth-Minbari war (and possibly others by extension), as the humans could barely dent most Minbari ships, and the Minbari pursued a highly clinical approach to fighting. The overarching strategy was to launch focused attacks on military targets only, bypassing civilian colonies and generally leaving civilians untouched because they could easily be picked off once all effective resistance had been neutralised.
- In addition, thanks to secondary sources (the RPG and later novels), the Earth Alliance is revealed as having expanded into space only fairly slowly and space travel is still insanely expensive at the time of B5. Even Mars, relatively easy to get to and colonise, only has a population of about 2 million after a century of continuous settlement. The other 'big' colonies only have a hundred thousand or so settlers, and most Earth Alliance colonies and outposts are much less than that. In addition, the Earth Alliance purposely shut down or destroyed their jump gates and their beacons, denying the location of the Solar system to the Minbari for over two years before they located it.
- Deep Space Nine tells us about one of the Klingon Empire's most epic battle. Ten thousand warriors attacked a city. Considering that Alesia involved 60,000 legionnaries fighting and defeating 330,000 Gauls, the Klingon Empire's battle history is very small scale.
- Well considering ancient and medieval historians ALWAYS fudged the numbers (usually giving their enemies more troops to explain losses or make victories that much more badass), maybe the Klingon historians suffered the opposite. But 10,000 does sound really small... unless it was a city with the population in the millions, all of which resisted. Or something.
- Given that they're Klingons, they probably did lie. The actual battle likely involved far more than 10,000 attackers, who were successful. Then (probably years or decades later) the historians claimed there were far fewer attackers, to make it sound more impressive. (Inflating the number of defenders is not out of the question, of course.)
- Cannae was big for the day (if the numbers given are correct), but it's nothing compared to the Somme or Stalingrad although these might be considered too modern (what sort of era would we be looking at here, classical, medieval, rennaisance, napoleonic?).
- In Doctor Who episode "Voyage of the Damned", one of the tourists confesses to her husband that to pay for this trip she incurred a debt that they, a couple of middle-class shopkeepers, will never be able to repay. At the very end of the episode we learn the exchange rate, which makes their hopeless debt equivalent to a few hundred pounds.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000 has this off and on, likely as a result of the huge number of different writers and developers who have worked on it. At times, distances, timescales and the number of soldiers needed to launch a sector-spanning crusade are handled "realistically," but just as often a few hundred Space Marines purge an entire world in a few weeks.
- Yeah, but have you seen the Space Marines?
- Doesn't matter how good they area, such numbers troops simply cannot cover the sufficient ground for such an operation.
- Only the Planetville nature of the BattleTech universe combined with its quasi-feudal nature can really explain how, given the bottleneck of interstellar travel, any major planet ever changes hands as the result of an invasion. The thought of using some non-microscopic fraction of the industrial capacity of an entire world to create a defensive force that would simply swamp a few dozen 'Mechs dropping out of the sky by weight of numbers is never seen to enter anybody's mind. (Of course, since that sort of thing could easily encourage disobedience towards one's liege lord and thus be considered potential treason, it's probably somewhat justified given the societies depicted. And, naturally enough, it would render the game itself kind of pointless.)
- Funnily enough, the game depicts this realistically - it's entirely possible to swamp an enemy mech with about a hundred infantry units which would likely be far less costly.
- Swamp a mech with infantry, yes. Less costly, no. A big mech has about the same nominal combat power as a brigade of foot infantry(~3000 guys), and the game's stats assume that infantry are professional soldiers, with the training costs that implies. If you use the official stats on unit costs, you can get maybe 4 stacks of infantry for the same price as a mech, not the 100 you'd need to fight on a level playing field. The game rules were written to make mechs the best units, and it shows. Because seriously, should it take 3000 guys to drop what basically amounts to a big walking tank? That's more in the realm of "three guys and some bushes".
- There is a crossover Fan Fic in the works on a Spacebattles Forum, where the authors took this and ran with it. There the Earth of our present day (actually, the one from the novels of Tom Clancy, but that's close enough) gets transported into a Battle Tech times, and some enterprising Sphere lord decide to stage an invasion. So far, the mechwarriors were getting trounced quite convincingly, even if the cost is significant.
Close Unitless Number Examples
Other
- Star Wars... just Star Wars. It simply doesn't take into account how mind bongingly vast a galactic empire would be. To put in perspective: a hundred million soldiers fought in WWII, a single planet could field a hundred million soldiers, an empire hundred thousands of planets strong should have an army which numbers in the trillions. Those grand battles we see? Skirmishes.
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