History SciFiWritersHave / NoSenseOfMass

* One of the many, ''many'', reasons we know ''Loose Change'' is a DocumentaryOfLies is that it runs afoul of this trope. The {{Conspiracy Theorist}}s who wrote it claim that the Twin Towers were destroyed in order to cover up the theft by the government of several hundred billion dollars’ worth of gold that [[BlatantLies purportedly]] was stored in the World Trade Center’s basement. That much gold would be half again as much gold as has been mined in the planet’s whole history.

** The series makes it clear at multiple points that the UNSC doesn't have magical recoil mitigation technology, to the point that Cairo Station visibly tries to mitigate recoil with a small system of counterweights. The recoil from a 3,000 ton object launched at 12,000 km/s would cause the 2.9 million ODP to [[https://www.vcalc.com/wiki/AndrewBudd/Recoil+velocity+of+a+gun accelerate backwards]] at 12,414 meters per second, clearing several times its own length in a single second and instantly launching the station out of orbit. Not only does this not happen, the station doesn't visibly move at all when it fires beyond some minor rocking, indicating recoil velocity is in fact utterly negligible compared to the station's mass (so probably sub-100 m/s). In general you could shave several orders of magnitude off of the ODP's stated yield and it would probably still be too high going by what it's actually shown to do.

* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' can be terrible with Pokémon weights. Sometimes, this is obviously intentional, other times, not so clear. It also really sucks with Pokémon sizes in general, since with a few exceptions, most of them are literally a quarter of the size you'd expect such an animal or object to actually be. Like how three of the Pseudo-Legendary dragons (Dragonite, Salamence and Garchomp) are between 4 and 7 foot tall. Or Tyrantrum, which is apparently an 8-foot tall Tyrannosaurus Rex. If they aren't, it's likely they're much bigger than expected; Furret, the fluffy ferret, is 5 feet 11 inches long, Dunsparce, the Pokemon based off of a snake from Japanese folklore, the Tsuchinoko, which are said to be about 80 centimeters at most, is 4'11" long, and Glalie, a floating, demon-shaped ball of ice, is just as big.

* In VideoGame/CookieClicker, the message that pops up once you obtain 100 million cookies is "The universe has now turned into cookie dough, to the molecular level." 100 million cookies are barely enough to satisfy the United States' consumption of cookies for ''one day alone'', let alone account for the mass of the entire universe.

* Creator/EdgarRiceBurroughs' ''Literature/{{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 [[EverythingsBetterWithDinosaurs 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 [[ArtisticLicenseBiology total lack of understanding of animals]]).

* ''Film/{{Armageddon}}'': An asteroid [[EverythingIsBigInTexas the size of Texas (roughly 700 - 1,000 km across depending on the axis chosen)]] would make it bigger than Ceres, the largest dwarf planet in the inner Solar System, and comparable in size to the larger moons of the outer gas giants--and more than big enough that its own gravity would pull it spherical. Furthermore, 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 this, is of course, ''far'' too shallow to have any measurable effect on the asteroid, [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfEnergy but that's another subtrope]].

** ''Film/GuardiansOfTheGalaxy'': Ronan's ship, the three mile long Dark Aster, has all of the issue of Thanos's ship above and then some -- on top of being completely unarmed. It gets to the point that Ronan, in an attempt to simply kill as many civilians as possible, orders his Necrocraft to just start suicide-ramming residential areas -- when just devoting a tiny portion of the ship's mass to carry some missiles would have been both cheaper and massively more effective. Also, despite generating thrust sufficient to keep its hundreds of millions of tons of mass in the air, it notably has no environmental effects when accelerating within the atmosphere of Xandar (the floating can be explained by ArtificialGravity, the acceleration less so).

** ''ComicBook/PlanetHulk'' featured [[ComicBook/IncredibleHulk The Hulk]] shifting entire continental plates.

** Starkiller Base takes these issues UpToEleven, besides what has already been discussed in SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfDistance. The thing works sucking ''entire stars'', and even attempting to rationalize it assuming it uses the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf smallest type of star]], still remains how a body with a size at best comparable to Earth (its implied size due to its depicted gravity) and at worst to a mid-sized moon--[[https://sites.wustl.edu/fictionomics/2017/11/29/starkiller-base-cost/ its canon size of 660 km in diameter]]--can hold something that is hundreds of thousands of times more massive. Oh, and at the canon size it couldn't even hold an atmosphere without ArtificialGravity, much less have entire forests on it.

* ''TabletopGame/AnimaBeyondFantasy'' takes the issues with D&D dragons UpToEleven. According to the reference charts in the book of creatures and monsters, C'iel dragons and Gaira ones have a length of ''around 2 kilometers'', while the largest creature of the game, the dragon Rudraksha, has the size ''of a small city''. Granted, they're divine creatures but still... In the same book, there's too a kind of ''huge'' worm to have a size of up to ''ten kilometers'', that this time is described as a natural animal.

** On the other end, we have Cosmoem, who is only about four inches across, yet weights ''2204.4 lbs'', or just over a TON. And is easily carried by tween girl in her sports bag!

[[folder:Other]]
* Freeman Dyson's idea of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Sphere 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. To do this, one would require a solar system's mass' worth of building material that's stronger than anything we have so the thing doesn't collapse in on itself. 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."
[[/folder]]

** Averted in the episode ''[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS1E5WhereNoOneHasGoneBefore Where No One Has Gone Before]]'', in which the character of Kosinski said after 300 years of space flight only 11 percent of the galaxy had been explored, demonstrating just how huge the galaxy was.

** Cricket magazine had an even worse example in one of their stories. Not only was there a solid DysonSphere, but "a small strip around the equator was far enough away to support life."
** The ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' 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''.
*** Even if you could build a solid Dyson sphere, nothing would "stick" to the inside surface, because there is no gravity gradient inside a hollow sphere. Nor would the sun have any particular reason to stay at the center of the sphere.[[note]]Though, Star Trek does take place in a setting with cheap artificial gravity.[[/note]]
*** To compound their sins even worse, there is a ''visible curvature'' to the surface of the sphere as the Enterprise passes through the door -- on a sphere with about a 100 million km radius.[[note]]That's about 2/3 the Earth's orbital radius; apparently it surrounds a smaller and weaker star.[[/note]] To their credit, the episode does say the structure should be impossible.
** Receives a {{lampshade}} in ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'', where aliens who habitually make Dyson spheres of a canvas-like material kept inflated by light pressure from the enclosed star[[note]]still pretty significant work structurally, but not beyond that universe's tech base[[/note]] have a nickname for it that translates as "This was expensive to build." [[note]]Or more literally translated, "Expensive, expensive, expensive *BLEEP* we built."[[/note]]
** In the ''Franchise/StarTrek'' novel ''Inferno'' (book three of the Millennium trilogy) O'Brien is trapped in [[spoiler:a Pah-wraith hell featuring]] a solid-shell Dyson sphere. The sheer impossibility of the thing slowly but surely drives him insane. [[spoiler:Being an illusion the whole time, it gets a pass on any sort of physical possibility]].
** ''Fanfiction/DesperatelySeekingRanma'' has the team visit one in chapter 85. The setting involves high technology AND lots of magic, with the sphere’s inhabitants being effectively a precursor race. Minor aversion, though: even they don’t know where the thing came from, nor where all the mass could have come from either.
* For years, the assumption among paleontologists was that Quetzalcoatlus, a pterosaur with a thirty-foot wingspan, long limbs, and a long neck to match, weighed less than a hundred kilograms, or not a whole lot more than a human. [[http://www.flickr.com/photos/markwitton/1386125619/in/set-72057594082038974/ This is how big they were]]. It's not at all implausible that something much heavier than the original estimate can fly, and then we can have had animals tall enough to look giraffes in the eye without having their interiors be blimps.
** Part of the problem was that until Mark Witton started doing images such as the one linked to, most recreations of pterosaurs didn't have them in context with anything humans could instinctively relate to. Seeing that image and one suddenly realizes the 100kg (220lb) estimate is completely absurd.
* "Mining ore from alien planets" is arguably this trope, with dozens of examples across all media (for instance, it's what the prawns in Film/District9 did for a living, and it's what the [[AbusivePrecursors Anunnaki]] in Zecharia Sitchin's AncientAstronauts theory bred humanity for), because since metals are, well, heavy, they tend to sink into a planet and would require fancy machinery to dig them back up. Then there's the issue that taking into account how spread out precious metals would be on a planet (it's why gold is precious, after all - if they can be found by anyone digging in their backyard they wouldn't be) and the logisitics of transporting those metals (and your mining machines, if you want them back), and yeah - ''asteroids'' are way more practical to mine from. Or moons like Titan, which have lots of petrochemicals without all the inconvenient shaved apes or deep gravity well.
** Mining of the ''planets themselves'' is, though, far less ridiculous, if you have both the technology and the demand for operations of such scale. The asteroid belt combined peaks at about only 5% of the mass of the Moon. The Moon itself has a mass of only about 4% of the Earth's core. In short, the Earth's innards have much, much, '''MUCH''' more raw resources in them, than anything that can be mined out there, even if you assume that ''every'' asteroid is purely made out of metals and valuable minerals and nothing else, not even ice. So if you need A LOT of materials, then it is reasonable to not pick up crumbs, but go directly for that freight train fully loaded with bread. That said, this is only the case if the civilization in question is able to dig that deep, likely by cracking the planet itself open--many depictions of it [[WeWilUseManualLaborInTheFuture have them doing your typical surface mining operations]].
* A similar but even more ridiculous idea is harvesting water. At first, it might seem like Earth is the only place we know of with water, but that's just ''liquid'' water. Taking all the bodies within the solar system, all of their ice and water vapor has the combined volume of 1.3 billion cubic kilometers, which is ''20-50 times'' more water on and inside Earth. Jupiter's moon Europa alone contains twice as much water as Earth, and with only 13% of the gravity to make transport easy. And that's not even considering ocean planets, all the other planets out there that contain huge amounts of water, and even nebulae that contain enough water to fill the Earth's oceans '''octillions''' of times over.
* There is a real life cookbook called ''International Cuisine'' (1983) which has an (apparently serious) recipe for "stuffed camel", which involves cooking an entire camel and stuffing it with various other animals and foodstuffs (including 20 chickens!). One of the ingredients listed is "110 gallons of water", presumably to boil the camel in. The problem is, 110 gallons is only about as big as a mid-size aquarium, which is a "little" small to boil an entire camel (let alone one stuffed with a bunch of other things). The book also makes another underestimate in saying it serves a "crowd of 80-100". A dromedary camel weighs about 1000 lbs or so, assuming it only weighs half that after removing it's head, legs, and internal organs, that would still be at least 5 lbs of camel for each person!

* ''VideoGame/{{Rage}}'': The opening cutscene has some major scaling issues. First, Apophis passes through Saturn's rings, which should've resulted in it either being pulled toward the gas giant or caught in orbit, not continuing on to Earth. Second, and more egregious, is the scene when the asteroid passes close enough to the Moon to knock material off of it before continuing on to hit Earth. Not only are the Earth and Moon way too close here, but if the asteroid was really ''that'' huge (you can see the curvature of the moon in the shot), then it would've been large enough that A) it would be spherical, and B) Earth would probably have shattered, never mind any form of life surviving, arks or no. It should go without saying that the real 99942 Apophis is nowhere near this big.

* In at least one episode of ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' turning off life support for five minutes was enough to exhaust the entire oxygen supply of the ship. Considering the absurdly spacious rooms, they should have lasted quite a while longer.

** Mining of the ''planets themselves'' is, though, far less ridiculous, if you have both the technology and the demand for operations of such scale. The asteroid belt combined peaks at about only 5% of the mass of the Moon. The Moon itself has a mass of only about 4% of the Earth's core. In short, the Earth's innards have much, much, '''MUCH''' more raw resources in them, than anything that can be mined out there, even if you assume that ''every'' asteroid is purely made out of metals and valuable minerals and nothing else, not even ice. So if you need A LOT of materials, then it is reasonable to not pick up crumbs, but go directly for that freight train fully loaded with bread.

** The Morthanveld (a Culture equivalent Involved) Syaung-un nest is absurdly huge. A donut made of fractally-braided water tubes (Morthanveld are aquatic and don't like things they can't see through) of diameter 300 million kilometres and thickness of over a million kilometres for a population of a mere forty trillion? To see how absurd this is, reduce the volume by a factor of a million: Is a donut 300 kilometers in diameter and a kilometer thick appropriate for a population of 40 million? No? Then neither is the original size. Even a conservative estimate of its mass (assuming lots of empty space between these up-to-10km-thick tubes) would put its construction as requiring taking apart every planet, comet, an asteroid in a thousand solar systems. It doesn't fit at all with the normal size of Involved engineering projects (especially the absurdly tiny volume of the entire Culture warfighting forces).

** Various depictions of the Death Star make it unclear whether it is the size of the moon or simply a sizable space station, though

* ''Franchise/StarWars'': An out-of-universe example: A petition to the White House to build the Death Star was submitted. It reached 25,000 signatures, which means the government has to respond. So [[https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking/ they did]], outlining why they won't: namely, it'll increase the size of the budget defecit a thousandfold, the government doesn't support blowing up planets, and also [[DeadpanSnarker they're not going to build a weapon that can be destroyed by one guy in a spaceship]].
** Various depictions of the Death Star make it unclear whether it is the size of the moon or simply a sizable space station.

** Starkiller Base takes these issues UpToEleven, besides what has already been discussed in SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfDistance. The thing works sucking ''entire stars'', and even attempting to rationalize it assuming it uses the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf smallest type of star]], still remains how a body with a size at best comparable to Earth and at worst to a mid-sized moon can hold something that is hundreds of thousands of times more massive.

* Weber's story ''Mutineer's Moon'' and sequels in the ''Literature/EmpireFromTheAshes'' series, in which the starting premise is that the Moon (i.e. Luna, Earth's natural satellite, ''that'' Moon) is actually a starship. Yes, the whole thing. It has a layer of rock around the outer hull carefully sculpted to match the surface appearance of the ''original'' Moon that once orbited the Earth, tens of thousands of years ago, before the starship removed it and took its place. Incidentally, the entire human population of the Earth in these books descend from the human crew of that starship. Supposedly it's that big because a) Their reactors are at maximum efficiency at planetoid sizes, b) To defend against the next genocidal attack by the Achuultani, and c) Because it's intimidating, but at no point does Weber write the ship as if it was 2,000 miles in diameter, though. He writes the starship as if it were a few miles in diameter.

** Most notably, the Mobile Suits are mostly made of a variation of titanium, yet they have the same density as the human body. (The original RX-78-2 Gundam is 18 meters tall and has a mass of 60 tons. In accordance with the square-cube law, it's 10 times taller and 1000 times heavier than a 1.8-meter tall human weighing 60 kilograms, which means it has the same density.)

* Averted in ''Film/StarTrekGenerations''. Due to the enormous mass/inertia of the Enterprise saucer, when it crash lands, it takes quite a long time to stop sliding.

** The Morthanveld (a Culture equivalent Involved) Syaung-un nest is absurdly huge. A donut made of fractally-braided water tubes (Morthanveld are aquatic and don't like things they can't see through) of diameter 300 million kilometres and thickness of over a million kilometres for a population of a mere forty trillion? To see how absurd this is, reduce the volume by a factor of a trillion: Is a donut 30 thousand kilometres in diameter and 100 kilometres thick appropriate for a population of 40? No? Then neither is the original size. Even a conservative estimate of its mass (assuming lots of empty space between these up-to-10km-thick tubes) would put its construction as requiring taking apart every planet, comet, an asteroid in a thousand solar systems. It doesn't fit at all with the normal size of Involved engineering projects (especially the absurdly tiny volume of the entire Culture warfighting forces).

* Despite being an educational show, ''WesternAnimation/TheMagicSchoolBus'' fell victim to this big-time in the episode "Out of this World". In order to deflect an asteroid about to hit their school, the Bus grows to the size (and presumably the mass) of the moon, using its gravity to slingshot the asteroid [[HurlItIntoTheSun into the sun]]. The thing is, if an object the size of the moon suddenly appeared in Earth's orbit, the kids would have had a ''lot'' more to worry about than just their school being destroyed-- it would essentially wreak havoc on Earth's orbit just by being there. While a lot of the ArtisticLicenseAstronomy in the episode was {{lampshaded}} during the phone segment, this oddly went unmentioned.

** Creator/IainBanks addresses the DysonSphere problems with 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 (probably because having decided to give the Culture's total population at ~18 trillion, it's immediately clear that even one such structure is unimaginably more than they could ever possibly need).

** The Morthanveld (a Culture equivalent Involved) Syaung-un nest is absurdly huge. A donut made of water tubes (Morthanveld are aquatic and don't like things they can't see through) of diameter 300 million kilometres and thickness of over a million kilometres for a population of a mere forty trillion? To see how absurd this is, reduce the volume by a factor of a trillion: Is a donut 30 thousand kilometres in diameter and 100 kilometres thick appropriate for a population of 40? No? Then neither is the original size. Even a conservative estimate of its mass (assuming lots of empty space between these up-to-10km-thick tubes) would put its construction as requiring taking apart every planet, comet, an asteroid in a thousand solar systems. It doesn't fit at all with the normal size of Involved engineering projects (especially the absurdly tiny volume of the entire Culture warfighting forces).

* The ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'' Anime is just as bad as the games if not worse since it often misses continuity with the games themselves. This often leads to scenes where the preteen cast usually ends up handling Pokémon like their weight was a fraction their stated mass. This can be as little as Serena easily holding her arm out to let a fifty-one-pound Sylveon walk across it, to one of the most egregious examples: Ash, and worse, ''Pikachu'', easily carrying around Cosmoem, a tiny Pokémon that weighs just over ''a ton'', in their hands. For reference, this is the equivalent of a human child or small monkey lugging around a black rhinoceros.