Captain, we've been attacked by some sort of force ray! Gah! Gyah! Space air is flooding in! Right. Goggles on!
—
The Simpsons (Bart and Lisa watching
The Planet from Outer Space)
Thanks largely to
Speculative Fiction, space is probably one of the most
inaccurately portrayed things in modern media, to the extent that complete falsehoods are
widely accepted as fact.
This is a very specific kind of
Did Not Do the Research, which may have been partially justified in earlier media as
the research back then wasn't up to much. Modern portrayals of space, however, still haven't changed much from the
rock-filled,
noisy place which will make an unprotected human instantly
explode into
clouds of ice.
Some of this is due to a
lack of research or just
lack of interest. But most of the modern misrepresentations can be put down to the
Rule Of Cool (the idea that
things with sound are cooler, or at least
not as scary, as
a famous tagline pointed out, as things without),
artistic license, or simply the belief
that audiences wouldn't accept it any other way.
Overlaps
Artistic License - Astronomy. Compare
Space Is Magic, which goes
above and beyond mere technical inaccuracy. See also:
Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness,
The Coconut Effect.
