Archived Discussion

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Sordid: Is it just me, or does the very beginning of the new Star Trek flick have the following off-screen conversation: "Repeat, could this be Klingons?" "Negative, lieutenant, you're seventy five thousand kilometers from Klingon space." Somebody verify, please?

Gus: This entry rocked so hard, I thought my teeth would fly out.

Kendra Kirai: The thing about Chaos Theory (Or the Butterfly Effect), is that while if you go far enough back, small changes can have big consequences...that doesn't mean it will. In many stories, the universe is remarkably robust. While the odds of J Random Shopkeeper having 248 jelly beans instead of 287 changing things in an appreciable manner are nonzero, that doesn't mean they're particularly high. Most changes like that would be so small as to be imperceptible, even over many thousands of years. Or especially over many years. Most people simply don't have enough of an impact upon history, one way or the other, to change it in a way that lasts for more than a generation or two. Now, that doesn't mean that a change in just the right place wouldn't alter things significantly...for example, if JFK hadn't been shot, the repurcussions of that change would probably be present for hundreds, if not thousands of years. That's the great thing about Chaos Theory. It's chaotic. Roll five dice. Flip a coin however many times as the dice say. If heads comes up more times, have a sandwich. If tails comes up more times, have some ice cream. Now if you did that a hundred times, you might end up with 20 ice creams and 80 sandwiches...or 1 ice cream and 99 sandwiches...or 80 ice creams and 20 sandwiches, or really any of those combinations. That's an example of chaos theory. One small change plus the laws of probability plus time.

Ununnilium: I agree. I'm not sure what to do about it in the entry, though.

Whogus The Whatsler: Here's the thing that I always get hung up on: the actual analogy inherent in the Butterfly Effect, that of the flapping of a butterfly's wings making the difference between rain and sunshine. I have been trying for years to get a reliable answer as to how exaggerated an illustration that is. Because if the weather is so volatile and complex that such a minor shift in air pressure can have noticeable repercussions — and I could easily believe that it is and just as easily believe that it is not — then all a time traveller would have to do is show up and the weather patterns would become affected, and as per the nature of the atmosphere these effects would eventually become tangible on a global scale, and considering how much human behaviour is shaped by the weather — thousands of activities are scheduled around it, copious amounts of money is spent on account of it, human lives are lost to it — I have to imagine that the changes would pretty much have to wind up being significant. But if the actual butterfly illustration was just chosen as an effective, simplified way of communicating a very sophistocated principle, and is not actually true, then most minor interactions will indeed prove meaningless in the long run.

This is a bit of a thing with me. I haven't been able to find a final answer, but I'm still looking. In the meantime, your point is valid and conceded, and I'll remove the second paragraph (as I think the first one still holds true).

Yamhack: Does any find it interesting that the average population for ANY given colony in written science fiction always seems to be given as in the tens of millions at most? This might make sense in the early days of colonization, but it somewhat hard to fathom why you'd still see pop levels like that 400-500 years after the colony was founded.

Working with an initial population of 10,000, a setup time of 5 years, a setup-time mortality of 50%, and from year 10 onwards a booster of 1,000 people every 5 years. You'll have ~12,100 people by year 25 (for an input of 14,000), you about equal population at 35 years and ~16,800 (for an input of 16,000), and by 50/75/100 years you have ~26,000(for 19,000 input)/~48,800(for 24,000 input)/86,200(for 29,000 input).

Robert: Drop a pebble in a stream and all the molecules will take very different paths, but the stream as a whole will be barely changed. So it is with the butterfly effect and history. The hurricane may be deflected by a 100 miles, but the broad sweep of history is unaffected. Even if Columbus had sunk in a storm, some other European would have found the Americas within a few years, and the familiar story would play out, barely changed from our history.

Kendra Kirai: I think it's more of a 'slow buildup' thing, actually...the beating of a butterfly's wings may change the weather..but only in the most minute amounts, over an extremely long length of time. If you suddenly changed a nice spring day into a rainstorm enough to call a baseball game, for instance, the world weather patterns as a whole would probably remain largely unchanged for thousands of years. And that would be a rather large change, all of a sudden.

Robert: Not so, and I've studied the maths that proves it. The world weather patterns are the climate, and would remain unaffected for eternity - not changeless, but changing only in the ways it would have anyway. The fine detail of the weather, would diverge exponentially on a timescale of days. Two weeks would be enough to change it by as much as the climate allows, even if you only moved a single grain of dust on Pluto.

Kendra Kirai: There's also the factor of probability in that as well..no two wingflaps of a butterfly are exactly the same. The molecules of the air go in slightly different directions, there's pockets of slightly denser air, thermal effects...it's all interconnected in such a way that it's effectively impossible to determine what causes something to happen unless we ourselves have a direct role in the cause, and have a way to directly monitor the proceedings we set in motion.

With the wonders of a truely infinite Multiverse however, things don't have to make such sense. You can have a world where everything is exactly the same, except the President is Wally Gator and the Speaker for the House is a garden gnome. In such a multiverse, if one thing is possible, then everything has to be possible. Including a universe which matches with your own almost exactly, except for one large change somewhere in it's past. Or you could have a universe that's exactly like your original one, except somewhere in the vast void between galaxies, a single subatomic particle is in a slightly different position. Maybe somewhere in the far distant past or future, that tiny change means the difference between the birth or death of a galaxy, or a small child...the potential is there...

That said, the vast majority of your parallel universes would be amazingly similar to our own, if we started cataloging from here...a few universes over, someone has their house painted blue instead of white. Small change, maybe it's important, but very probably not. Sci-Fi writers pay too much attention to the huge ones, and not enough to the tiny ones. (This is my own interpretation of an infinite multiverse, by the way. An infinitely large ring, or torus...with infinitely small 'slices' being each universe, the closer to your starting point, the smaller the changes are...the "farthest" you can go is "90 degrees" one way or the other..for if everything is possible, then nothing must also be possible. "180 degrees" from your position on the ring, everything is opposite. Not just black is white, up is down, things...what is the opposite of a bicycle? What is the opposite of life? It's not death, Death is the absence of life. Thus, if an infinite multiverse exists..it must also not exist. Result: A paradox. The existence of which guarantees the existence of everything else.

....but I digress. :)

Citizen: Wow, this entry sure grew up fast. o.o Cool. :3

Sikon: I disagree about octants. Space may be 3D, but the galaxy is flat, so dividing it into quadrants is justified.

Ununnilium: Yeah, I'm taking that out:

(And in three-dimensional space, you really should be talking "octants" anyway.)

Nobodymuch: Of course the whole thing about "quadrants" is that they entirely depend on what you want to divide in quarters. The Star Trek "quadrant" could be 1/4 of a "sector"

A quadrant is 1/4 of a circle by definition, so unless you have a very circular sector in mind it's 1/4 of the galaxy. As for octants, the Milky way is about 12,000 light-years thick at its thickest, quadrants are about 50,000 from centre to rim, do we really need to complicate it further than quadrants?

Tulling: It occured to me: are there no examples of Sci-Fi having a proper and consistent sense of scale?

Ununnilium: There are plenty; they're more common in books, though.

Westacular: This entry could probably benefit from some mentions of noteworthy counter-examples that try to teach people the proper scale of things. Robert Charles Wilson's novel Spin, for instance.

Uchuujinsan: Will do if it isn't already, I recently created articles for Robert Charles Wilson and Spin anyway. Help with entry pimping it would be appreciated :)

Seven Seals: This is the only "technology" example so I'm loathe to rip it out, but...

The year 2015, as shown in Back To The Future Part II, has flying cars, hoverboards, compact nuclear power generators using trash as fuel, voice-controlled house appliances... and plain old fax machines, printing messages on plain old paper.

I'm not sure what the point is, here. It's 2007 and we still have plain old fax machines. Is the observation here that they should have used something more high-tech, or that the people of the future would use e-mail and messaging even more than we do? I didn't think the fax machines were especially jarring.

Ununnilium: I was thinking about that. I think the point is that it's weird that the fax machine is so ascendant in the BttF future - one in every room! - when it's been mostly eclipsed in our time.

Here's a trope: instead of new technologies showing up in the future, current technologies will become more and more advanced.

Ununnilium: Took out "(assuming that he meant 1.21 Billion Watts and not an unknown 'Jigga' prefix denoting a larger value than that.", because "giga-" can be pronounced with either a hard G, or a soft one, as in the movie.

Red Shoe: I'm pretty sure that before the movie, the soft g was not a recognized pronunciation of 'giga-'.

Seven Seals: I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but everything I've read indicates that people are heavily divided on the matter — that is, on whether it was "jiga-" originally or not. Whether that is or is not the case, though, it's not particularly likely that BTTF "invented" the "jiga-" pronunciation. From IMDB's trivia: "n the film's script the word "gigawatt" is spelt "jigowatt". Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis had been to a science seminar and the speaker had pronounced it "jigowatt"." Since a "jigowatt" is obviously completely wrong, the story that they transcribed it phonetically from someone who already used the pronunciation is likely.

Ununnilium: 'Kipedia said I should use Vulcanized nails. I mean... Wikipedia says that both are correct, and that "jiga" actually used to be more common.

Seven Seals: Really? Where? Not at the "giga" entry. That only says "the latter hard G pronunciation has become more common, especially when referring to computer measurements such as gigabyte and gigahertz". One might think that implies that the other pronunciation was therefore once more common, but it doesn't actually say that, and Wikipedia editors certainly can be weird like that.

Also, WP gives zero sources for the statement and actually mentions BTTF as an example of "jiga-", so it should count for nothing in this particular discussion. I looked at Wikipedia first too, and in this case it's about as useful as asking a random person on the street.

But we're getting distracted... This discussion is not concerning itself with tropes, so we'd have to petition for permission to continue it. And you know how the bureaucrats on this wiki can be.

Ununnilium: Good point. But dictionary.com says that both the American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary and The Jargon File (which is an awesome site, BTW) list "jiga" as correct.

And the trope... uh... Spell My Name With An S? ``

Cambias: while all the examples are properly egregious, may I make a plea on behalf of writers of written science fiction? We aren't nearly as sloppy about our science as the creators of film and TV science fiction appear to be.

Lawyerdude: My comment discussed why units are the problem rather than scale. Doc Brown said that the Flux Capacitor needed "1.21 Jigowatts of Electricity". As my comment noted, Electricity can be measured using either the standard units of force, energy and power or by units specific to electricity. The dialogue never developed whether the Flux Capacitor needed an input of energy or charge or whatever to operate. The proper unit should be Gigajoules, since that is a measure of a one-time buildup and discharge of energy.

That would be all those books where the Soviet Union etc is still around?

Cambias: Geopolitics ain't a science. Those far-future Soviet spacecraft at least had proper mass ratios.

Agreed. A lot of the current examples are just examples of inaccurate (is there another kind?) predictions of the future that have nothing to do with scales and magnitudes. Maybe call it Writers Are Not Time Travelers ~~or History Marches On~~, with Accidental Prediction for the opposite? (Edit 2010/02/16: The quote here about a gigantic question mark seems applicable.) —Document N

Ununnilium: Took out the "why didn't more happen?" part of the Sound of Thunder example, since that's the whole point: You can't predict what will happen.

Also took out:

The first two seasons of the new series have quite a bit of travel to future epochs ranging from hundreds of thousands of years in the future to five billion years in the future. Oddly, most technology looks downright dated despite the mind-boggling distance in time.

...since... dated? Uh? O.o

Mister Six: I took out the following article quote:

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihiliated (his wife's) brain. But to his satisfaction, he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a universe this size, the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.

—The Guide, The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy

Because it didn't make sense out of context (the shock of what?), it didn't really say anything more than the others and we already have a HHGG quote.

Red Shoe: Is there some mount of context we can give to make it work again? I prefer it to the other HHGG quote because it's specifically about the difficulties of having a proper sense of scale.

Wam: The reference to Bab5's distorted sense of scale when they did the hyperspace rescue is actually not a good example to use. For one, that episode was dealing with distances in hyperspace, the physics (dimensions, scales and such) of which we have no way to relate to normal space (other than that small distances in hyperspace cover immense distances in regular space). Finally, the recollections of basic facts of the episode (which I believe was season 2 episode 'A Distant Star') with the star furries only 1km away seem to disagree with the episode summary at the Lurker's Guide to Bab5 (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/026.html), which estimates the distance of the chain of fighters at 4000km. Granted, even this larger distance is tiny to the scale of space, but again, this is in *hyperspace*, a featureless environment with odd aspects of physics (e.g. gravitational drift and non-linear distances (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspace_(science_fiction)#Babylon_5 )) that really shouldn't be compared to the physics of normal space.

Red Shoe: Given that JMS actually said that White Stars travel "at the speed of plot", I think it's still a relevant cite.

See also: Justifying Edit

Niali: I'm not comfortable hacking up the page myself, but I think it's worth pointing out that the odds constantly spouted in Neon Genesis Evangelion are the chances that a given event would take place under normal conditions without external guidance. The obvious conclusion that the viewer is led (by the nose) to is that there is at least one element here that the calculation of odds didn't take into account. That this element is bringing about events calculated at one-in-millions odds suggests very strongly that the element in question is an intelligent mind bringing about those events intentionally. The odds aren't there to show how incredibly (un)lucky the characters are; they're there to demonstrate that what's happening is not random chance.

Seconded. —Document N

mlah:Didn't want to change the main page but the one on back to the future in the energy section is false. The delorean uses 1.21 jigawatts not 1.21 gigawatts.

Kizor: The "jigawatt" used in the film is actually the correct pronounciation of "gigawatt." This is an admitted incogruity in the English language and there's often confusion about it.

Paul: The Babylon Five infor is incorrect. I am watching the relevant episode right now and those starfurys began at 1000 Km apart, not 1

Fast Eddie: Joke, right? In an entry about scale, you can't be suggesting that 1 or 1000 KM makes any difference in the scenario?

Seven Seals: Took out this:

Green Lantern has the galaxy (or universe - DC seems to consider the terms synonymous) divided in 3600 sectors, each patrolled by a single sentient creature. This means a single being has to upkeep law and order in a hundred million solar systems.

Yeah, that's extreme, but it's still not a convincing example: AFAIK there has never been a statement as to how many of these solar systems contain inhabited worlds (a number we ourselves can only guess at for our universe), Lanterns are shown to be capable of Faster-Than-Light Travel, and it's also not said that the 3600 sectors are equal in size. Lanterns aren't exactly called in for shoplifting, so it's just about conceivable that 3600 Lanterns could patrol the galaxy/universe well enough by the Guardians' standards. There are so many caveats and escape clauses here that it's hard to put this up as a good example.

Of course, I'll immediately agree that if they had, say, upped the number to 3600 million, they'd have a more convincing arrangement, but still.

I considered adding the quote "Space is quite vast" from that one episode of Stargate Atlantis, but really that scene kind of bugged me. Ellis, in complaining that it was going to take thirty-nine hyperjumps to search trillions of miles of space, was blatantly demonstrating that he has no idea how vast space is. —Document N

The Pegasus Galaxy (taken to be the Pegasus Dwarf Irregular Galaxy) is ~3 million light-years away, 3,000,000/39 = ~77,000 light-years per jump, high, but not impossible from what I understand.
- Unfortunately, I can't remember where my estimate of the distance from now. But I'm pretty sure they'd been separated from Atlantis a few days at most; for each jump they should only have been able to scan a radius of a few tens of billions of miles at most, and even then you're talking about detecting an object the size of a city from a distance greater than the width of the solar system. —Document N

Andyroid: Trimmed the Ben 10 entry down a bit, we don't need a freaking physics lesson on every little thing wrong with it, just the idea of a wrist-mounted device destroying the universe is ridiculous enough in my book. Keeping the original here for posterity...

In Ben10 the Omnitrix self destruct mechanism releases enough energy to destroy the entire universe. 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. Not to mention it would take millions of years minimum to actually destroy the universe (previous statement notwithstanding), since an explosion can't go faster then the speed of light and probably would go much slower. And of course, we're only talking about all the matter in the universe, since to destroy the actual universe, you would have to destroy spacetime, which is out of this editor's scope of knowledge.

Peteman: Can I make a few points about the inhabited planets? Aren't those only in the Republic/Empire? I recall something about the million systems of the Empire mentioned in ANH, and not everyone in the Galaxy belongs to the Empire at that point. There may be more inhabitable planets, just not belonging to/settled by/conquered (yet) by the Empire, so half the species mentioned might not be in the Empire (and there's the fact that a lot of worlds are plenty cosmopolitan, so there are more than one species on each planet, and probably thousands of different species on a planet like Coruscant).

Ninja Vitis: Added the Spacehounds of IPC entry under Technology.

In the Foundation entry, I wanted (but decided not) to change “computer” to “microelectronics”, because mechanical calculators, analog computers, and automated data processing systems were all extant at the time it was written, and it's highly unlikely that Asimov didn't know of them or hadn't considered how they would develop in the future. What hadn't been envisaged, apparently by anyone as far as I can tell, was the transistor, which opened the path to micro-miniaturization and the possibility of pocket computers, world-spanning data networks, and ubiquitous portable telecommunications. Even after the invention of the transistor, the impact — even the concept — of putting millions or billions of them on a tiny, mass-produced, reliable, low-power chip didn't make itself felt for decades.

arromdee: Deleting my own Yamato example, duuh. The Yamato uses space warps and doesn't go at intergalactic speed outside the space warps.

Andyroid: Deleted

The Millennium Falcon in Star Wars was described as being so fast it could "make the Kessel run in under nine parsecs," which is a completely bogus as parsecs are units of distance, not time.

That's Unit Confusion, not this trope.

Masami Phoenix: I think the entire "Technology" section should be removed. First of all, it's pretty much a repeat of Wheres My Jetpack, but more importantly, this has nothing to do with scale or research.

Tulling: Removed the following: "* Warhammer 40000 - one million marines in an Imperium of one million worlds, 100 or so regiments of 5,000 men seeming a massive force, especially when they are the total military presence of a world containing many billions of inhabitants.

Space Marines are special forces, and are supplemented by the Imperial Guard, which maintains many billions of men. I don't know what you mean by the second one. There's a PDF (something like that) force which polices a world, but they are supplemented by the planet's own garrisons of Imperial Guard."

This is not an example of the trope at all; Space Marines are ultra-elite shock forces that deliberately are few in numbers, Imperial Guard are raised in regiments that vary widely in size from a few thousand to several hundred thousand, collectively reaching into the billions if not trillions, and Planetary Defense Forces are the standing forces every world keeps for their own security.

Masami Phoenix: I removed Technology from the list as per the above reasons.

Blork: I'm tempted to get rid of Culture as well, it has nothing to do with scale.

joeyjojo: I second that. pull it.

INH:I removed this:

The Terminator had not just a true AI, but one capable of masterminding a plot to exterminate humanity, evolve all by itself out of normal computers by 1997.

Skynet was a military supercomputer with a chip design based on a computer chip from the future. It wasn't a normal computer by any stretch of the imagination.

The Nifty: Chopped this:

In the Ben10 episode, Ben has access to ten thousand alien forms; this would require him to unlock a mean of one new form every day for the entire twenty year period. This could be taken as simple poetics, except that Vilgax states he's studied all ten thousand of Ben's alien shapes.

Because it's so poorly written I can't understand the point it's trying to make. Anyone who can decipher it, please feel free to clean it up and stick it back in. :I believe it refers to the "Ben 10,000" episode/movie where he meets his future self, who now commands 10,000 alien forms.. which is a ridiculously large number to even find out about, let alone "study" in 20 years.

Red Shoe: Cut this:

2001 A Space Odyssey is past and 2010 is in the near future. There have been no manned missions to Mars, let alone the moons of Jupiter. At least books 3 & 4 are set in 2061 and 3001.

As it's clearly a example of Science Marches On rather than this.

Unkowntrooper

In the Unitless Numbers I think according to official sources they're are around 20 million sentient species and about one million full member worlds in the Republic or Empire and there twelve million inhabited systems in the galaxy according to the Comic Dark Empire.
- Wookiepedia pegs it at 20 million sentient races in the galaxy, and a further 19,980 million systems with only non-intelligent native life in them (although some have been colonised). The Old Republic had about 1.3 million member worlds by 21 BBY, and the Empire about 1 million, although it had another 50 million colonies, protectorates, governorships and puppet-states.

Fast Eddie: Pulled this bit of natter...

This troper assumed that stemmed from said ship having been less than one scene out from the jumpgate. It might matter. On the other hand, that doesn't really excuse the travel times, which are, well, plot based.

... also, not sure what "one scene out" might mean.

Honore DB: Having just rewatched A New Hope, I actually find it plausible that there's approximately one stormtrooper per planet. Obviously they fly around in large groups and land where needed, and even then it's not really enough to be an effective deterrent to rebellion. That's why they're talking about how the Empire needs either a veneer of democratic respectability or a mobile planetkiller in order to stay viable.

The Defenestrator: It's not 3 million stormtroopers in the Original Trilogy, it's 3 million clonetroopers in the Prequels. Clonetroopers are supposed to make up pretty much the entire ground forces for the Republic in a war that spans much of a galaxy, and they can't do that when their entire army is the size of China's military.

Metz77: Cut a bit of unnecessary natter from the "Jiggowatts" section.

Infinity Biscuit: As to the idea that Coruscant's listed population of one trillion shows a good sense of scale: Given that this would mean Coruscant would have a population density only twice that of Bangladesh or thrice that of Taiwan, or less than that of a suburban town, and that Coruscant is depicted as covered entirely in skyscrapers (skyscrapers taller than any on Earth by an order of magnitude, according to the literature), this figure is also far too low. This is also ignoring the fact that Coruscant is larger than Earth. A writer with a good sense of scale examines the issue here.

—- Mike: This article was good, except one thing: "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 about 100,000 light-years across at its widest point. I guess that Vulcan's sky is *really* empty. " Apparently, you can have a sphere with a "widest point"...which seems rather contrary to the definition of a sphere...

Spectrum: I have added in a note saying that the article uses short scale numbers throughout. If anyone finds any residual long scale numbers lying around, please fix them.

Blork: Removed this one, because the fact that the author thinks these numbers are "comically large" is practically an example of this trope in itself. 1 million Adipose is about one for every six people in Britain which sounds reasonable enough, the other large groups were planet conquering armies, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old so putting the end of the world at 5.5 billion years into the future is reasonable, and 100 trillion years is the high estimate for how long until star formation ends in galaxies - that episode took place at the time when the Universe was essentially dying off.

Doctor Who in its new incarnation seems rather fond of comically large numbers: five million Cybermen; the year 5.5 billion; the year 100 trillion; six million Racnoss; a million Adipose, 6 billion Toclafane.
- And FOUR Daleks.
- The "comically large" dates in this case deriving from current scientific understanding, so not quite an example of the trope.

Peteman: I thought the Omnitrix didn't release enough energy to destroy the universe, but rather caused some massive anomaly that would tear a universe-sized hole in the fabric of reality.

Nornagest: Edited —

** 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 7 and a half kilograms of spice. Unless this stuff is less dense than the average sparrow feather, 7 and a half 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). So, Solo it WHY???

17000 credits * 100 / 115 = 14782.6 credits

14782.6 credits / 20 credits per gram = 739.13 grams

739.13 grams = 0.74 kilograms

Your point is still valid — moreso, even — but you're off by an order of magnitude. Also raises the question of why a big-time drug lord would bother shipping such small volumes, but I'll leave the Fan Wank to the professionals.

How much would Solo be getting though, surely not a full 20 credits/gram, that would eliminate Jabba's whole profit margin, so he's probably not going to pay more than 10%, which brings us back to 7.4 kilograms. If it's the same density as calcium (hypothetical), that gives us 4.8 litres of the stuff, which ought to be easy enough to hide, unless the empire had some equivalent to sniffer-dogs, which would mean having to flush the drugs.

kascoldone: I've some concern with the example given about David Weber's Honor Harrington stories. The troper who posted it claims that Weber hand-waved interstellar distances while keeping the intra-system ones long. In fact, Weber explicitly utilizes a fairly well-detailed Hyperspace to explain his FtL travel. While he does utilize unexplained super-SCIENCE! to do so, it is within the larger, and scientifically consistent norms for the topic of Ft L, and not a good example of not having a sense of scale. Weber seems to have a fairly good grasp on the distances and physics involved, or at least one good enough that someone who doesn't have an advanced degree in roc ket sci ence likely wouldn't be able to tell. Further, the posting troper stated that there was a reference by Weber to the effect that god created star systems (at least, I conclude that that was the intent of the comment; I couldn't tell for certain due to poor phrasing). There is no such reference in the books (unless it is in one of the anthology stories), and such a statement would be inconsistent with the general tone of his work, unless the scene is from the viewpoint of one of the religious fanatics who are set as the—explicitly and implicitly irrational—antagonists of the series.

Nentuaby: Er... No, on that "god created" thing. It's not a wizard did it thing. It's just a speech formula, like "the sense that God gave little green apples."

Mike: I don't think this is doing it right:

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. The big issue really was getting it all at once, the difference between average and peak power. The tankful of gas would have had to have been burned up in under 10 microseconds, the same period of time as a lightning bolt lasts. (This is what capacitors are for, not that capacitors with that kind of capacity are cheap or small.)

Here's why: if burning a tankful of gas per second (real scientific, there) produces 1.21 gigawatts, burning that much in 10 microseconds (1 * 10^-5 seconds) would produce (1 / 10 ^-5) = 10^5 times the power (that's 100,000 times the power). Power is, after all, energy per unit of time. Burning that tankful of gas in one second would produce 1.21 gigawatts for a period of one second, while burning it in 10 microseconds would produce 121 terawatts for a period of 10 microseconds. In short, talking about getting X gigawatts "all at once" is...nonsensical. Its like talking about getting ten gallons per minute all at once. I'm tired, and on meds, so this is both a plea to the community and a reminder for me when I wake up: how can the example be rewritten so as to not fail physics?

Gigawatts in this case would seem to refer to the elecrical use of the term, which would explain the need for the lightning bolt (and the reason the uranium lasted only one trip), since this is some way up into nuclear-reactor territory.

Ununnilium:

In Robert A Heinlein's Moon Is A Harsh Mistress Mike the computer continuously updates the probability of success for revolution. The probability starts from 1 out of 7 and the number 7 goes up (making the probability go down) after a step in the plan succeeds; since the success of the whole plan is contingent on the success of the part that succeeded, the probability should be going up and the number going down. Later it is revealed that these numbers were faked to encourage the protagonists and the real probabilities were much lower.
- The reason the probability of success drops in this case is that the revolutionary conspiracy involves such a large operation that the chances of discovery and punishment - before the rebels can win in open conflict - rise faster than their odds of success. Of course there will be a tipping point eventually...
- Many of the bad numbers are also implied to be the odds of the entire gambit working, rather than a 'fair peace'. Because of a doomed ecosystem on the moon (ice is running out fast), anything that doesn't wreck commerce between Luna and Earth is considered failure because Luna will still starve inside 20 years. Prof and Mike just don't tell Manny this until it's too late for him do anything about it.

Yeah, this is all explained at length in the book.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is so big it can use galaxies as shuriken... So Yeah.
- Though, to be fair, the Gurren Lagann universe is literally powered by awesome. It's not so much the writers having no sense of scale, as them kicking reason to the curb in a deliberate attempt to keep upping the ante.

This is an intentional thing, yeah, so not an example.

WALL-E's extra short film about BURN-E says that the ship that takes WALL-E to Axiom is 821,190,000 miles away from Earth, and is show to be near a gas giant, and it's blue. Well, the thing is even Uranus' perihelion much farther than that, and they're probably supposed to be outside the solar system...
- Peripheral matierals indicate that the Axiom is in the Kuiper Belt on the fringes of the solar system. Still a ridiculously long distance to travel in a two-minute montage, though.

This seems like way too close an example. "Well, they're probably supposed to be outside the solar system and..." Cut for insufficient allottage of poetic license.

Wow... that is a very close set of systems then. If 50 AU is the very edge, then the entire 'Verse was about 1.5 thousanths of a light year across. This might help explain the Serenity's ability to take only a few weeks to get somewhere and still be sublight... but the astronomical effects... that is one close-knit set of systems.
Not exactly. The entire 'Verse is more than a thousand A Us across; its just the Burnham protostar orbits the Blue Sun system fifty AU out. Blue Sun itself is more than eight hundred AU out from White Sun, which is the main sun of the entire cluster.

Conversation In The Main Page. (I think. @@)

Ununnilium: Cutting out the Probability section and moving to Never Tell Me the Odds! and Million to One Chance.

Nentuaby: Good god, this page's sheer length is about ready to become one of its own examples. I added folders for example types, but they're still super-long. Should we perhaps think about breaking out subpages?

Peteman: Cut

In the Star Trek Voyager episode "Jetrel", the title character was portrayed as the person who designed a superweapon that, when dropped on Rinax in the war between Talaxians and his people, killed over three hundred thousand Talaxians. Sounds big to most people except for the fact that most modern day nuclear weapons have yields capable of killing in numbers well within that range and beyond. About 20 kilotons (roughly the yield of the Hiroshima bomb) killed up to 150,000. Modern thermonuclear weapons can reach yields ranging from hundreds of kilotons to a few megatons (one megaton = 1000 kilotons). This means that any single modern day thermonuclear weapon may kill into the millions, especially if dropped on major population centers. On the scale of space-faring civilizations in an interstellar war, 300K is a tiny number unless Talaxians had a population so small that it would make their being a star-faring civilization unlikely in the first place. However, the Talaxians may have simply been intimidated into surrendering, as the Metrion Cascade is capable of inducing a Class 4 to Class 5 Apocalypse on the Apocalypse How scale, and since their enemies could hit the moon of the homeworld, they could probably hit the homeworld as well.

As you can talk all you like about how a modern nuclear weapon can inflict incredible losses when hitting major population centers, but from what I gather, the deployment of the Metrion Cascade on Rinax was not so much to inflict incredible losses as to demonstrate their ability to inflict incredible losses. Neelix was taking the loss of Rinax so badly because his entire family got fried and as such it was personal.

BritBllt: And to back up this point, the Metrion Cascade is a kind of biosphere-destroying weapon, not just a conventional bomb. Rinax was a inhabitated, temperate moon, and the effect swept across it and destroyed everything on the surface. It killed every living thing on Rinax: the only reason the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands is simply because that's how many people were living there.

Archangel_One: What's this business about Firefly? "It was finally pinned down into a series of five star systems, four of which were orbiting around a single giant star". I'm pretty sure the opening narration for Serenity flat-out stated that it's all a single star system? There are still a heap of issues with that (how come every single planet and moon has Earthlike gravity? And a vaguely temperate climate?) which multiple star systems explain better, but where has the five-system thing come from?

Fast Eddie: Article predates Serenity by some years.

Uknown Troper: Actually, that was confirmed by the "Official Map of the 'Verse" that was released about six months ago, showing the official layout of the Firefly systems. I have a copy of it on my wall. It shows there are five star systems in the 'Verse.

Prime32: Removing this from Metroid Prime Hunters

Supercooled plasma is also an oxymoron as plasma is essentially superheated gas.

Heat is the normal way to create plasmsa, but plasma can also be created by removing electrons through other methods.

Anaheyla: The time section doesn't seem like it is in any way related to this trope. So scifi writers have an optimistic view of the future, or maybe for their time they wanted to list a number that seemed imposibly far off. How does that correlate to them having no sense of scale?

BritBllt: Removing this one for a few reasons...

Enterprise in describing the Expanse, the mysterious spacy-cloudy-thingie that the Xindi are hiding in. It's said, on screen, that it spans 2000 light years, and is 60 light years from Earth. Simple trigonometry shows this thing, seen from Earth, would therefore occupy 179.9 degrees of the night sky (out of 180) at least part of the year. Apparently, we just didn't — you know — notice that half the sky was missing a lot of stars.
- Also in Enterprise, when the Xindi superweapon is dropping out of warp on its way to Earth, the Big Bad acts shocked when he is informed that they will be entering real space 2 million miles from Earth, because apparently this is too far. In reality, this would put the weapon much closer to Earth than Mars or Venus is, and only about ten times as far as the Moon; right on top of it, at the rate Star Trek ships travel.

The Xindi Expanse isn't a massive cloud: they spend most of the season flying around inside it with the stars visible behind them, so there's no reason it couldn't occupy that much of the sky. And the superweapon arriving ten times further away than the Moon could plausibly be too far away for the purpose of a sneak attack. We saw the prototype emerge directly into low Earth orbit and instantly fire on the planet, so it's a safe bet the real thing was supposed to attack the same way.

BritBllt: And removing this one...

In the 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman movie, ol' Kal El of Krypton tells Lois that he's "from another galaxy, in fact." In the DC Canon before Crisis On Infinite Earths, the planet Krypton orbited the star Antares, which is 600 light-years from Earth. While one might be tempted to chalk this up to the movie taking liberties with Krypton's location, the more likely explanation is that the scriptwriters didn't know the difference between "another galaxy" and "another star system".
- Averted, it's pretty clear that the Superman movie takes place in a different continuity, and thus do not have to follow the comics; in the same way the movie Superman displays a few different power than those shown in the comics.

As the Justifying Edit says, it's a different continuity and Superman has a ton of different variations in his story anyway. The only evidence that the movie's writers changed it to another galaxy because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale is the example itself saying that's "more likely", without giving any reason why that's more likely. There's nothing in the movie to suggest that he's not from a different galaxy.

Unknown Troper: Pulled the Halo Wars example with the Spirit of Fire. The Spirit of Fire never deploys more than a few companies' worth of ground troops to any of the planets or locations at any point during the course of the game. Even if we're assuming evey single battle in the game involves a different force, that only totals out to a single brigade - two,a t most. That many men can easily be carried by the Spirit of Fire.

The Urban Prince: Despite only deploying a few companies. It still doesn't explain the inconsistent size of the ship. The military force might be debatable, but the size of the ship definitely isn't. So i think the example stays.

Unknown Troper: If it's an inconsistent size, then take it to Just Bugs Me, Gameplay and Story Segregation, etc. Just because the ship seems to be changing in size between cutscenes and gameplay does not warrant inclusion here. Inconsistent ship sizes are plot holes, not a case of the writers not scaling properly.

BritBllt: Removing all this Transformers natter...

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.
A black hole the diameter of Saturn would have to have a density at least 3.9 million times that of solid lead.

A black hole has (theoretically) infinite density. All the matter collapses into an infintismal singularity, so the phrase "as dense as a black hole" doesn't make sense. Anyway, a ball of metal the size of Saturn wouldn't be in danger of turning into one (which might be what the second edit's saying). A Chthonian planet could be that big and solid in real life: they'd be so friggin' hot that silicon forms clouds in their atmospheres, but if we're talking Transformers, that's easy to handwave with super-advanced, hyperdimensional Cybertronian air conditioners. :)

That Pellucidar example, I'm not exactly sure what a "pony-sized" dinosaur would be (a real hyaenodon is apparently one of those mammal-reptiles and is actually smaller than a hyena), but if it was 8 feet tall it seems to me it'd do some serious damage against a sauropod, especially in packs. 100 feet long doesn't mean the body was that terribly large, it's all neck and tail.

Someone should split this discussion page, but I'm up too late. —Document N

Anaheyla: In the Xbox 360 game Star Ocean: Last Hope, near the end in a massive space battle the enemy forces are shifting patterns too rapidly for the ship's computer to calculate, causing every one of their attacks to miss so Arumat switches to manual and proceeds to gun down dozens of enemy ships. Would that be an example of this trope?

Archived Discussion Main / SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale