Dr. James Van Allen
was once asked by a reporter to 'define space'. He replied, "Space is the hole that we are in."
Most people can't get their minds around just how vast the universe is in distance or time. Nevermind the fact that, according to Albert Einstein, they are two sides of the same coin. So it should come as little 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 (mostly). 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.
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 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 lightyear is on the order of 10 quadrillion metres or nearly six trillion miles. Let's assume your family car uses about 2 and a half gallons (11.37 litres) of fuel per 100km - about 25 mpg - and a gallon (2.55 litres) costs about $4 USD (i.e. 1.6 USD/1 Euro per litre) to traverse it. This means that one lightyear is roughly where you'd end up if you spent the entire national debt of the US on petroleum fuel, or nearly 4 times the cost of the entire Apollo program. At 60 miles per hour, it would take 11 million years to drive there. 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. This is because most writers aren't that good at or are too lazy to implement mathematics. If it sounds like a number made up by a child (Attention all yoctograms!, septillion seconds), the writer might have actually taken it seriously.
Writers fare no better with time, and this aspect of the trope spills over into fantasy writing as well. Many popular fantasy shared worlds are medieval in character and hundreds or even thousands of years old, yet the medieval period overall lasted at most around 800 years and the technology and armors in use in most fantasy settings were only around for a century or so. Many writers also completely ignore the effects of entropy - that is the speed at which objects decay if not actively maintained. Exposed skeletons rarely last a year before being torn apart and scattered by scavengers - and even if protected from that they will decay and turn to dust within a decade unless buried. Exposed metal will corrode, concrete will crumble, the speed at which cleared areas will reforest if humans leave can be dramatic as can be seen in the vicinity of Chernobyl.
A way of explaining the scale of the universe is to use Fermi style estimation
to the nearest powers of ten. The solar system is about a million times the width of the Earth while the Milky Way galaxy is 100 million times the width of the solar system, and the observable universe is a million times the width of the Milky Way. The size of the universe beyond that is speculation, though the observable universe may be but a speck in the larger universe, assuming it's not infinite.
Another example that often comes up is the idea of beings coming to our galaxy from another galaxy. While there's no reason why a writer can't introduce beings from the nearest galaxy intent on contacting/conquering the Milky Way, there would have to be a pretty dang good reason to travel the incredibly vast distances separating galaxies — distances which make traveling between stars seem like a little hop. Even in a billion years (assuming a sentient Earth species still exists by then - given that the sun will have grown bright and hot enough to make living on Earth a real pain, it's likely we'll have already jumped planets or found a way to move the Earth to a safer distance) when Andromeda begins its final approach to the Milky Way, it would still theoretically take an Andromedan civilisation a considerable amount of time to reach the arm of the Milky Way where the Solar System resides.
Some would consider this one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality. If the characters didn't travel through space at thousands of times the speed of light, it wouldn't be very interesting unless the focus was just the spaceship itself. Either you'd have to make the ship incredibly powerful to max out Time Dilation and shorten the time spent from the characters' perspective, put the characters into some kind of suspended animation (and just fast forward through their journeys), or even have entire generations of characters that would live and die on the ship before they even reached a known extrasolar planet (meaning the audience would say They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character or treat the new generations as a Replacement Scrappy), and so on... If Star Trek, for example, was realistically scaled, it'd be a lot less interesting.
When adding examples, it may be wise to consider the capabilities of the faction in question. What is "unrealistic" for a low-tech harder-SF group may not be so for a high-Kardashev Higher-Tech Species; after all, what we can do now would be outlandish to our medieval ancestors, so who's to say a society centuries if not millennia more advanced than us can't invent a "unrealistically" light yet superstrong material? On the other hand, some things are laws of physics, not limits of technology, and the difference is an important one (any ship that expels an exhaust to propel itself, for example, functions by the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, which is basically a special case of the Second Law of Motion—regardless of what the exhaust is or how it imparts the energy to expel it).
Related tropes include:
- Artistic License – Space: The Super-Trope in cases where writers fail to understand how far apart, how big, or how energetic stellar objects are.
- Conveniently Close Planet: A Contrived Coincidence wherein there always seems to be a safe planet available when space travelers get into trouble.
- Everything in Space Is a Galaxy: Calling things galaxies that are not.
- Evolutionary Stasis: The life forms in ecosystems do not further evolve or change from one time period to another.
- Hollywood Density: Writers neglecting the density of objects.
- Medieval Stasis: Society stays locked in a pre-industrial state for a very long time.
- Modern Stasis: Society stays looking like the modern-day Western world for a very long time.
- Planetville: Space Opera settings treating entire planets like the Adventure Towns trope, or otherwise failing to grasp how big they are.
- Space Age Stasis: Future societies stay the same for a very long time.
- Square-Cube Law: When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier and its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier. In other words, volume, and therefore usually mass, increases much faster than external size does. This is often neglected in fiction.
- Unit Confusion: Fiction writers misusing units of measurement.
- What Other Galaxies?: Treating the terms "galaxy" and "universe" as if they were interchangeable.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Math errors in fiction, which may overlap.
Examples:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Video Games
- Western Animation
- Antipodes: 10,000 years have passed since the cataclysm that ended Equestria. This is a span of time over twice as long as the entirety of written history. It would be long enough for languages to evolve beyond recognizability, for societies to develop into distinctly new cultures, for ponies to be well on the way to developing into a distinctly new species, for the old world's ruins to have all been eroded down to long-buried foundations, and for almost every piece of Lost Technology to become eroded into nothingness. Despite this, all old-world tech simply needs some tune-ups to work, and the ruins of ancient buildings are only about as worn down as they would be after a few decades to a few centuries of abandonment.
- Avatars II: When Qwaritch Takes Revenge has the titular Miles Qwaritch leaving Earth and returning to Pandora in the 4 minutes 35 seconds that the song Welcome to the Jungle lasts. Pandora is a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and the ships in the source material take six years to make the journey.
- In Boys und Sensha-dō!, Miho Nishizumi, a Japanese girl whos 5'2" and appears to be of average weight, is once described as weighing 80 kg, which is overly heavy for a girl like her.
- Child of the Storm generally tries to avert this when it comes up (which it usually doesn't, thanks to portal technology and hyperspace travel), with the author pointing out just how vast galaxies are, especially as compared to individual solar systems (this usually in respect to people who assume that the scale goes 'planet' to 'star' to 'solar system' to 'galaxy').
- In Christian Humber Reloaded, Season-Bringer is a dragon that is 22 miles long, yet somehow weighs as much as the United States (including the continent it's built on!), making him unrealistically heavy even for his absurd size.
- The Conversion Bureau: The Chatoverse: In ''Ten Minutes: Aftermath", the planet busting nuke was found to have a mass of 43.6 teragrams (36e+10 kilograms) or about 119 times the mass of the Empire State Building. It's specifically stated to be made of cesium and promethium. The picture drawn of the device shows it to be approximately the same size as the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which weighed a mere 4,400 kg. Even assuming the entire planet buster was filled with promethium at 7.26 grams/cubic cm, that still only comes out to a weight of 8639.4 kg. And for the bomb to weigh that much with the given dimensions, the filling of the bomb would have to have a density of 302,521 kg/cubic cm...which is about the same density as a white dwarf.
- Desperately Seeking Ranma 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.
- In Exitium Eternal
, the Council is horrified that ten million people dying of causes other than accidents and old age in a single day is nearly a record low for the Exalted Exitium. However, at the most conservative estimates, the Exitium contains a quadrillion sentient members. By the current standards of Earth's human population, that's less than one hundred deaths per day.
- Kyon: Big Damn Hero: Tsuruya will be the 108th family head when she eventually assumes that position. A single generation lasts approximately twenty-five years, so this implies that Tsuruya's family has been around for 2700 years — the ancestors of the Japanese did not even exist in Japan at that time. Even if we are charitable and assume that the position of family head has sometimes passed from sibling to sibling, or that some heads have resigned the position while still alive, and estimate the time between the 1st and 108th heads to be a quarter of that, then the family would have originated in the Muromachi period (c. 14th century). However, as a Yakuza family, it could not have existed before the Yakuza originated, at some time in the Edo period (c. 17th century).
- Pokémon Tabletop Utopus Region: In one episode, Lavi intercepts a Donphan and soccer kicks into the air to stop it stampeding Jade. The GM says that he gets it about ten metres into the air. Given that Donphan weigh 120kg, a kick with that kind of strength would be packing 25,400-29,500 Newtons of force, depending on the angle he kicked it at. Which is over ten times the amount required to crush a human skull. The more likely prospect is that the GM was exaggerating.
- In Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer Spectra is this really big diamond thing that emits light that makes it possible for life to exist. Unfortunately, The Dark Princess wants to claim it for herself, even though this will kill all life, including her. Spectra is implied to be the size of a real planet or star, yet the Princesse's Slave Mooks have managed to cover a significant percentage of its surface area in cable. Also, at the end The Dark Princess tries to ram Spectra and shatter it as a final act of defeated spite. assuming Spectra is only as big as Earth, you'd need about 100 zettatons worth of energy to destroy it, and her starship is only about as big as a schoolbus.
- Voices of a Distant Star: The talking computer (or whatever it is) does this a few times, saying that enemy units are "at twenty thousand" or similar things. It isn't even all that clear what type of a unit this is; it's probably a distance, but it could be the number of uneaten sandwiches they have in storage, for all we know.
- A scientist was lecturing about the eventual death of the Sun in about 5 billion years, however a man in the audience watching the lecture started worrying and got up. "What did you say?", said the man. "How long do we have left before the Sun finally dies?" "5 billion years", replied the scientist. The man in the audience scoffed, "5 billion years?! What a relief. I thought you said 5 million years!"
- The short narrations that precede the lyrics of Ayreon's album The Universal Migrator 2 - Flight of the Migrator have a goof putting the quasar 3C 273 in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. While 3C 273 is in the direction of the Virgo constellation, that quasar
it's at nearly 2.5 billion light-years and that galaxy cluster
at just around 50 million light-years, being unrelated to the latter.
- The music video for "The Ghost Inside" by Broken Bells features a toll booth in space.
- "Genie in a Bottle," recorded by Christina Aguilera, features the line "Hormones racing at the speed of light." In reality, hormones travel much slower in the bloodstream—about 0.3 to 0.4 meters per second—compared to the speed of light, which is 299,792,458 meters per second. While the song captures the intensity of emotions, hormones don't actually move at light speed but rather take seconds to minutes or hours to affect the body.
- Doctor Steel has a song called "12,000 Miles Through Space," which is about aliens crash-landing on Earth and jump-starting humanity. These aliens apparently didn't come from very far, as the Moon orbits just under 240,000 miles from Earth. The song samples a recording about satellite transmission, and that's far more reasonable, as some satellites cruise at about that altitude.
- Dune's 1997 song "Million Miles from Home" claims that the narrator is "floating through the galaxy" with the task "to find another happy place." Because the distance from Earth to the Sun already is approximately 90 million miles, he couldn't have gotten very far yet.
- "The Final Countdown" by Swedish band Europe. "We're heading for Venus, and still we stand tall [...] With so many light years to go and things to be found." Admittedly, light seconds don't sound nearly as good.
- Katie Melua's "Nine Million Bicycle In Beijing" featured the lines "We are 12 billion light-years from the edge. That's a guess — no one can ever say it's true," until a writer/scientist corrected her. She recorded an alternate version, changing the line to "We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars."
- The Mechanisms have a filk version of Tony Goodenough's "Pump Shanty," where the spaceship crew is pumping manually to keep the damaged life-support system functioning for three days until they can reach "the Periphery." The original lyric is "We're just a thousand miles from home" - about twenty-fifth of Earth's circumference and a long way to go on a sailing ship that predates engine-powered bilge pumps. The Mechanisms' lyric is "a million miles from home." Assuming they're heading for the periphery of their solar system (and not, say, their galaxy) and theirs is roughly the same size as ours - well, the minimum distance between Earth and Pluto is 2.66 billion miles. Either they've already been on this ship for at least twenty years, or they should be able to cover a million miles pretty quickly, which takes some of the bite out of the sarcasm of the original lyric. Or they're just being figurative when they say a million.
- In "Written In The Stars" by Tinie Tempah, he sings, "Written in the stars, a million miles away..." A million miles wouldn't even get to the closest planet, let alone stars. The nearest star from Earth that we know of (after the sun), Proxima Centauri, is about a quarter of a billion times farther than one million miles.
- Scientology:
- Founder L. Ron Hubbard said that a lot of things happened to the Thetans trillions of years ago — gorilla-themed mental-implant carnivals, bear-themed mental-implant explosions, "little orange-colored bombs that could talk", a brass dog that sucked people through it with electricity, etc. despite the Big Bang happening around 13.8 billion years ago. Of course, Hubbard's answer will be that the scientists are wrong and he's right, the Big Bang did not happen 13.8 billion years ago and whoever contradicts it is too blind or brainwashed to understand the truth. This is actually presented in a scene in The Master.
- One popular anti-Scientology website had an evolutionary biologist explain everything wrong with this account, and sums up the article as “Scientology: Just as wrong as creationism, but in the opposite direction.”
- Journey into Space: In Journey to the Moon/Operation Luna, while under the control of the Time Travellers, Mitch claims that their ship is from hundreds of lightyears away: the other side of the universe.
- Planet Man referred to the Astro Drive, enabling 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. Traveling "millions of light-years" would be a lot more impressive.
- In Orson Welles's Radio Drama adaptation of The War of the Worlds, rocket-launch explosions on the surface of Mars precede the Martian invaders' arrival by only a few minutes, as allowing any more time for their multimillion-mile journey would've run too long for the broadcast.
- Anima: Beyond Fantasy: 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.
- BattleTech:
- Only the Planetville nature of the 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 a 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 (or rather, always seems to escalate into massed orbital bombardment, at which point everyone loses).
- One of the ways that the game rules attempt to justify this is that it takes significantly more damage to disable a BattleMech than another vehicle of comparable tonnage. A "decent anti-tank rifle" will accomplish squat against a 'Mech under the rules, as a well-armored 'Mech can shrug off dozens of anti-vehicle missiles without suffering systems damage. Realistic? No, because gigantic explosive weapons exist in real life now and would be more accurate, fast and deadly with future tech, but it does serve the purpose of the game (giant robots pounding away at each other) better than more realistic rules would.
- Ironically, the rules (especially in but not limited to the Total Warfare edition) then do in fact allow infantry to do fairly significant damage to 'Mechs that happen to carelessly wander into range of their weapons. A stock twenty-odd man Inner Sphere ballistic rifle platoon can hit for upwards of ten points of damage per turn, all in annoying little 2-point critseeker damage packets. They're slow and not a major threat over open ground where 'Mech weapons can pick them off from a safe distance, but infantry are one of the legitimate reasons few MechWarriors look forward to urban combat among other things — and these are just a bunch of warm bodies with man-portable weapons who don't even have a single half-decent cheap combat vehicle to their name yet.
- The 'Mechs might be on the edge of believable, but a Dropship... well, the iconic Union is an eighty meter sphere weighing less than four thousand tons and protected by a few dozen tons of armor. That's less density than styrofoam and armor that's literally paper-thin.
- The game rules state that a Hex is roughly thirty meters, meaning that no weapon short of artillery has a range equal to or greater than a single kilometer. Catalyst Games, the present owners of the license, have gone on record saying that BattleTech weapons are not that short-ranged as form of Gameplay and Story Segregation so that players don't need to rent a tennis court to play a properly scaled round, though unfortunately there's also 20 years' worth of novels have various plots and tactics that more or less hinge on this fact to work.
- The setting manages to convey the notion of gravity well restrictions surprisingly competently; you can't just jump into the orbit of a planet, due to all the messy gravitational factors in play from suns, planets, and other gravitational minefields. Where it falls apart is in the fine details of distance; the Faster-Than-Light Travel used is an instantaneous travel time with a maximum range of 30 light years. Now factor in that the average distance between stars in real life is 5 light years. It's still somewhat plausible, until you take a look at the star maps of the setting and realize that there are far fewer stars than there should be. With a 5 LY average gap (so between 1 and 9 LY on a normal distribution) you should have an Inner Sphere choked with star systems rather than the map we have presently.
- d20 Future: The FTL rules fancifully claim that the first faster than light drives make humanity able to "reach distant stars in mere weeks"... and then proceeds to put up stats that make the first FTL drives 5 times the speed of light and the best 25. For reference, Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to earth) is a 9-month journey at 5 times the speed of light. A 'distant star', like for example ULAS J0074+25 which is one of the furthest stars away from us in our own galaxy, would be a 36,000 year trip at the fastest speeds available in the system.
- The Day After Ragnarok, which is set in an Alternate History where things got distinctly weird in 1945, lampshades the trope with in-setting discussions of the slain Midgard Serpent, whose size varies considerably in different accounts from the chaotic days of its appearance in 1945, and whose body disappears into the ocean depths at various points where the water should by no means be deep enough to cover it. The theory is that it was still emerging from some kind of mythic realm when it died, and that it hadn't achieved dimensional stability yet. This would also help explain why its fall didn't crack the entire planet.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Dragons can have truly big sizes. According to the Draconomicon, the largest of them — red, golden, and silver great wyrms — reach a length of 120 feet (40 meters), a wingspan of around 300 feet (100 meters) according to illustrations, and a weight of 1.280.000 lbs (580 tonnes) with them being as massive as an Airbus A380
, the largest airliner in service, and with a larger wingspan. And that's Third Edition data; back in the days of AD&D, largest ones were almost three times larger than that, and presumably thanks to the Square-Cube Law much more massive. A Wizard Did It in full effect.
- Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition: There is a small, easily missed mention that the 'weight' took into account encumbrance as well, how clumsy it was to carry the item. Carrying a 3lb hand weight would be easy; carrying a 3-foot-long sword, especially when you're a 3-foot-tall halfling, not as much. But as it's easily missable the weights were interpreted by many to be, well, weight, resulting in all manner of weapons and armour that are way heavier than anything in Real Life.
- In the 3.5 edition Monster Manual the Balor (A high level demon) is said to weigh about 4500 pounds, whereas the Pit Fiend (A high level devil) weighs about 800 pounds. This is even though they are the same height (12 feet tall), and have similar builds according to the artwork, so unless the Balor's bones are made out of plutonium or something, there's no reason it should weigh more than 4 times as much.
- Eberron:
- The setting timeline goes to the point of self-parody; the elves are stuck in Medieval Stasis despite living unchallenged on their own isolated island for forty thousand years; the goblinoid empire lasted uninterrupted for 5,000 years before succumbing to the aberrations and the Dwarfs created their kingdom around 12,000 years and banished the Mror Dwarfs for 7000 more or less until they were worthy. For comparison, human civilizations started in 3300 B.C, while agriculture and writing form would make it around 10,000 years old at most. And these are the most templed examples in the setting.
- Sharn, the biggest city in the setting, has a population density of under five thousand people per square mile with conservative estimates for how big the area of the towers is. For comparison, New York City has a population density of over 27,000 people per square mile; the above estimate puts the population density of Sharn more on a level with New York's significantly smaller state capital Albany. Even Keith Baker, the creator of the setting, freely admits
that the statistics from the 3.5 Eberron Campaign Setting don't make sense and should be at least five times higher, hence the reason that later versions of the setting just don't give them, and claims he mostly uses them to establish relative populations and ignores the absolute numbers.
Keith Baker: First of all, we need to address the tribex in the room, and that is that population numbers in Eberron have never been realistic.
- Forgotten Realms:
- Toril has been stuck in Medieval Stasis for at almost 32,000 years. The earliest dates given are for the War of the Seldarine when Lolth turned on Corellon Larethian, starting a series of wars between the elven kingdoms that lasted off and on for almost 8,000 years, each individual Crown War lasting for several hundred. Elves in FR are Long-Lived, but not that Long-Lived. 3rd Edition setting books justified gave a handwave that Gond, the god of craftsmen, is actively working to keep it that way, most notably by keeping gunpowder from working.
- Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden has the titular event being a spell placed on the Icewind Dale that has kept it in arctic conditions (~-45° C and much colder with windchill) and virtually no sunlight for two years. Realistically, almost all of the flora and fauna would be dead long before that point, and the intelligent races would all have long fled to more livable conditions. The adventure frequently seems to forget the lack of light in many of its descriptions and the catastrophe of harsh winter conditions that should change more behavior than it does. For example: one town has a plot that its miners are out of work because the local gem mine has been overrun with kobolds, all of this being announced by a young town crier (also, why is a child shouting in that kind of weather?). So, who exactly is funding all of this gem mining after two years of this nightmare? If exports can get out to buyers, then the townsfolk could get up and leave the area as well. A lot of the mind-boggling issues could have been resolved had the writers reduced the timeline to much less than 2 years. Then again, given that Faerûn is frequently beset with world-threatening catastrophe, there's no guarantee anywhere else would be safer, and they probably assume some adventurers will be along to sort it out. They're correct, of course.
- Dragons can have truly big sizes. According to the Draconomicon, the largest of them — red, golden, and silver great wyrms — reach a length of 120 feet (40 meters), a wingspan of around 300 feet (100 meters) according to illustrations, and a weight of 1.280.000 lbs (580 tonnes) with them being as massive as an Airbus A380
- Fading Suns has multiple noble houses counting over two thousand years, with the youngest of the big five being a mere thousand. It's just on the higher end of believability; the House of Savoy had ruled over the same piece of northern Italy for almost a thousand years and the family of Confucius has kept its records for about 2500 years. One viewpoint character is described invoking his noble ancestors 800 years after his line lost any right to a hereditary title, but which it kept the memory of nonetheless, and major guilds are implied to be still run by direct descendants of their founders from a thousand years in the past, despite them being trade associations supposedly open to newcomers rather than families one could only marry or be adopted into. But the icing on the cake is the Imperial Eye, a spy agency which existed in an unbroken form, under various names and serving all manner of republican regimes and feudal lords, for longer than any of these despite not even having a family line to fall back upon.
- Nova Praxis claims that rail guns and coil guns in the setting fire projectiles at 18000 feet per second. This is almost 5500 meters— per second. Even assuming that a bazooka-sized gun shooting a BB-sized projectile at such a speed would put the recoil at near 7500 Newtons; plenty enough to crush any bones in the way if not completely dismember your arm. Ironically, that's the least of your worries since friction from the air would heat your BB up to five times the surface temperature of the sun, forming a quickly mushrooming cloud of burning plasma in its wake. The person shooting such a gun would surely be killed in a very quick and horrible manner. The target has a much better chance of surviving as the shooter might have missed.
- Pathfinder:
- The 1st Edition Gamemastery Guide copies the D&D 3.X settlement size table verbatim, and the Golarion setting's biggest metropolis, the island city-state of Absalom, has only 303,900 people.
- According to the default Lost Omens setting, a number of nations—chiefly Taldor and the mostly offscreen Empire of Kelesh—have lasted 4,000 years or more virtually unchanged but for shifts in borders (the largest one being the Even-Tongued Conquest where the entire western half of the Taldan Empire seceded to become Cheliax, which then underwent Balkanization in the more recent past). This gets handwaved in some of the books that describe Kelesh, which mention that its padishahs fairly routinely make use of Immortality Inducers to extend their reigns.
- A Second Edition Lost Omens setting book describes the country of Quain as "lacking size" and being "neither particularly large nor particularly small"... at a stated size of 2,000 miles wide, a little less than the distance from New York City to Salt Lake City, Utah. This is wildly out of scale with other countries in the setting, most of which are closer to the size of mid-size European or African nations or US states: the continental United States is quite large at roughly 2,700 miles wide depending on where you put the posts.
- Starfinder: The larger ships have such low densities that air is literally three or more orders of magnitude more dense than the ship.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The story is around the year 40,000 (or 42,000 in more recent stories). Technology advanced a lot in the time between the present and the Horus Heresy in 30,000, which included a substantial dark age, but since then the Imperium of Man has stagnated completely. Somewhat justified in the Imperium's coreworlds, since all technological development is left to the Adeptus Mechanicus, who consider innovation heresy, but you'd think at least some of the Imperium's thousands of planets would have had some kind of technological development. It's also the small element of the Imperium having next to no cultural development in that time, despite the hundreds of generations that would've lived in that time and canonical claims of the extreme difficulty of governing an interstellar state when FTL travel and communication are very unreliable. Religiously motivated stagnation can be bad, but even the European dark ages had cultural developments going on.
- While Hyperspace Is a Scary Place is a trademark of the setting, various statements about how some of the more Warp-unfriendly factions travel between planets fall into this. The tyranids, famous for producing a "shadow in the Warp" that acts as an Anti-Magic field, were at one point said to drift through the interstellar void between systems completely at sublight speeds, which logically would give the Imperium years at a time to prepare for and intercept their incursions even if it was vastly more Fascist, but Inefficient than it is already. This was later retconned away as a mistake on the Imperium's part with the introduction of the Narvhal, a special tyranid bioship that allows them to travel faster-than-light by manipulating gravity.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation means that many weapons have laughably small ranges, such as the Deathstrike Missile, an ICBM with a maximum range of less than a mile (and indeed, less than the Earthshaker field howitzers fitted to Basilisk self-propelled guns). That did get fixed fairly quickly (the Deathstrike now has an unlimited maximum range), but we still have the problem of an ICBM most commonly used to kill someone less than 100 feet away.
- Population numbers and army sizes are a frequent source of consternation. Sometimes, 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. It's easy to interpret it as Imperial propaganda (and the Warhammer 40,000 Expanded Universe often indeed does). Examples:
- Eldar Craftworlds have wildly contradictory statements about their size and populations. Gav Thorpe, who wrote the Eldar-centric "Path of the..." books, said he envisioned largest Craftworlds having a habitable area the size of a continent with a population of low millions because apparently having tens of millions of Eldar on a Craftworld would seem too big for a dying race. Even if the population of every Craftworld would be in hundreds of millions, all Craftworld Eldar in the entire Galaxy (no exact number of Craftworlds have been given, but when the background gives a ballpark number it's usually "hundreds") would have the total population of a few dozen smaller Imperial hiveworlds (populations in the single digit billions) or a few bigger ones (which can have population of over a hundred billion each). Phil Kelly, who wrote the Eldar and Dark Eldar codices, on the other hand, seems to place the population of Craftworlds as much higher, since some of the background he's written would suggest even a small Craftworld would have a population of millions, with the largest ones having populations in the tens of billions (Biel-Tan and Iyanden are each mentioned to have lost billions of people in separate attacks).
- Lampshaded in the most recent Space Marine codex. The canonical estimate for ages now has been a thousand Space Marine chapters, each containing roughly a thousand men, meaning that in an empire of a million worlds there are fewer Space Marines than there are inhabited planets. The latest version of their 'dex thus states that yes, this seems an absurdly low number, but Space Marines are just that good that they can still keep most of it safe anyway (the number of Imperial Guard and PDF soldiers who die to ensure the Marines can make this boast is not stated).
- Matt Ward's Craftworld Iyanden supplement, which states the pre-tyranids attack population (always stated to have the largest) was in the billions. Yet that craftworld still engages in many wars and skirmishes every year. That seems a low population for a craftworld that fights so often, and is still somehow only slowly declining over the course of millennium. That should mean a high replacement rate - pretty un-Eldar-y! Apparently having a population any larger was considered too much for a 'dying race.' Thing is, "billions" only sounds big to those of us used to a single planet population like Earth. On a galactic scale, even hundreds of billions or trillions would be a very small drop in the bucket, well fitting for what used to be an Imperium-big Empire. "Billions" is also only sensible when considering how absurdly large Craftworlds are - they're as long as continents, but unlike continents, have their whole internal volumes available for habitation instead of just (part of) the surface. Each one effectively has the habitation area of a planet, and they're pretty consistently described as being almost entirely filled with urban areas - which if anything suggests that even tens of billions would be a major underestimation for the largest ones, but that's presuming that Games Workshop understands geometry any better than they do units.
- Often times, singular (or a handful, if the writer is in the mood for "realism") Imperial Guard regiments are mentioned as taking/holding entire planets, with large campaigns apparently containing a few dozen regiments at the most. This is usually justified as Imperial Guard units being in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of men: e.g. Eisenhorn: Xenos cites 750,000 men in the Gudrun 50th Regiment, while every Imperial Guard codex mentions the Valhallan 18th Light Infantry Regiment with 120,000. Still, while 750 thousand people in a regiment sounds like a lot, realize that in world war 2, Russia deployed 35 million troops. Germany deployed 13 million. And large planetary conflicts in 40K are supposed to be comparable or even larger in scale to World War 2 (from which the Imperial Guard draws a lot of inspiration from). A dozen regiments, even at a million soldiers strong seems like a pittance compared to this. Given that regiments lack battalion-scale units between them and companies, as well as higher-level military units like brigades, divisions and corps such hypothetical battalions could be grouped into, this only raises the question of how forces of such numbers could even be organized. At the other end of the scale, the Ciaphas Cain novels mostly revolve around the roughly thousand-strong Valhallan 597th (seemingly having taken the term "regiment" literally), which typically share their duties fighting brushfire wars over entire planets with at most two or three other regiments of similar size, and while some of the planets they visit are very sparsely populated, most aren't.
- The backstory of the planet Valhalla states that it used to be a garden world, but around the time of the Horus Heresy, it was hit by a Meteorite of Doom that shifted its orbit millions of miles further from its sun, leading to it icing over. An impact of that magnitude should rightly have shattered the planet altogether.
- Battlefleet Gothic put some thought into scale issues, 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 distances are measured based on the center 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 thousands of kilometers. 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, but he also has to hit a target equivalent to headbutting a pinhead from a mile away.
- Dark Heresy: Most solid-projectile weapons can be matched to a real-world counterpart with a similar weight, but shotguns are much heavier than they ought to be; modern combat shotguns generally don't weight more than four kilograms, while a Dark Heresy double-barrel shotgun (possibly the lightest and simplest possible design) weighs five.
- Rogue Trader: The game suffers from this with regards to the various space ships. Specifically, they scale the mass - and crew - linearly with the length of the ship. As a result, while the smaller ships are reasonable enough, the larger ships end up with the density of papier-mâché (less, actually) and a vanishingly small crew, especially since the fluff usually makes a deal about how little automation there is, with massive gun crews who have to push the guns into place by hand and then pull the shells into them on a rail.
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse has the Mokolé, were-reptiles who are survivors from dinosaur times. They're repeatedly stated as having ruled for millennia and falling millennia ago, which wildly understates the actual expanse of time - their empire fell 65 million years ago, while if their claims to having ruled for the entire age of the dinosaurs are true then their kingdom lasted nearly 200 million years. That said, this isn't the only way their memories don't quite match up with each other or reality, and some are starting to suspect that there's something not quite right about the story...
- Wild Talents:
- In 2nd Edition, one of the suggested campaign seeds is being part of an exploration team for a defunct alien "world-ship" that has moved into the solar system. The campaign text says, explicitly, "Every square inch of the 'ship', 6,123 miles in diameter, was to be searched under the express orders of Joint Space Command." This is a volume of over four billion trillion cubic meters they are talking about here. If the entire population of the planet Earth, all six billion people, were used for a search team, each person would still have to search over 660 billion cubic meters. Hope they packed a lunch!
- In the Progenitor setting, the first superhuman was infused with 1% of the universe's Dark Matter energy. While obscenely powerful by supers game standards, her powers aren't anywhere near, say, Gurren Lagann level crazy, much less Bronze Age Superman crazy.
- BIONICLE:
- An early map of the island of Mata Nui had it be about 36.8 kilometers from top to bottom, but later on in development
, someone apparently added an extra zero, leading to its canon size of ten times that—roughly the size of Denmark. Some stories match up with the larger size, but in most others, characters are able to walk across Mata Nui without too much time or effort, when such a journey would probably take days even if they were traveling on a well-paved road and not the untamed wilderness we see most of the time. Of particular note is that it's said the highest point on Mata Nui (the volcano in its center) is 23km tall: at that point, it would be a couple times taller than Everest, which certainly isn't how it's depicted.
- In the web serial Federation of Fear, the characters make a quick getaway from a villain by boat and shortly thereafter randomly happen upon Tren Krom's island. A map of their world shows this quick random escape route was actually over a thousand miles long and spanning almost half a dozen other islands that they somehow missed.
- The beginning scene of BIONICLE: The Legend Reborn when the Mask of Life flies through space, we are treated to a montage of the object traveling past planets and whole galaxies under seconds, after which it curves around a bunch of other planets, and then finally lands on the planet Bara Magna. The scene didn't make any sense, thus the writers retconned it for the official storyline, so that instead of traversing who knows how many light years, the mask only flies from Bara Magna's "planet moon" to the planet itself. This also prevented Makuta's eventual journey from said moon to the planet from having distance issues, though the scale was still off.
- The story of the film involves the heroes traveling across the desert under what appears to be a handful of days. Looking at the official map published in a tie-in guidebook, this journey seems more or less feasible. But other measurements and comments given by the story writer throw a wrench into the calculations since according to these, the distance would actually be thousands upon thousands of miles, and the planet's relatively small and crammed settlements should be the size of countries. The movie also ends with the characters (most of them below human-size) pulling these settlements together with mere ropes, manpower and a few motorized vehicles, dragging them across the vast desert again under no time.
- The average lifespan of the characters, both biomechanical and organic lasts for more than a hundred thousand years. After the Shattering happened, and the planet of Spherus Magna blew into three separate planets, all forms of advancement came to a halt on the largest chunk, the desert planet Bara Magna. The story picks up 100 thousand years later, and beyond the creation of the Glatorian fighting system, nearly nothing has changed. The death-rates are said to be high, yet no indication is given towards new people coming into being. Then, there's the fact that even 100 thousand-year-old fighters, such as Gresh, are considered youngsters, and others treat them as if they were kids. And he becomes a skilled veteran just in a few months' worth of story time.
- Occasionally Bionicle would describe things as ancient, stemming from prehistory or time no one remembers. In one book, the Artakha Bulls are said to be one of the oldest animal species known, at over 3000 years old. The film Web of Shadows references a feral, primal age that seemingly no one recalls. When an incident causes The Shadowed One to rapidly age over 3000 years, he becomes frail and old. However, none of these make much sense when most people in the story live for 100,000 years at the least, and thousands of years seem to pass without anything significant happening. Being old or ancient has little to no meaning in the story. In fact, one of the oldest characters, at over 100,000 years of age, is none other than the juvenile, youthful Takua.
- While the writer states Earth physics don't mean a thing, scale issues come up frequently. There's Mata Nui for instance, a circa 40 million feet high robot with a whole ecosystem inside him, who was build under a fairly short time, standing tall on the surface of his planet, in secret. His prototype, which was two thirds his size, blew up shortly before his construction, and none of the planet's inhabitants seemed to have grown suspicious of the mountain-sized robot parts that rained around them, all over the planet. Then, when these two bodies fought 100,000 years later, it was explicitly stated that the other, normal-sized characters simply ran around under their feet, crossing distances of thousands of miles within minutes. In the Mata Nui Saga, this scale issue had been taken into consideration, but they simply decided that the Saga's illustrations should depict both the giant robots and the human-sized characters within the same image. Otherwise, we would have only seen either the giant mechanoids duking it out alone or the armies of the "regulars" clashing in front of a gray backdrop.
- Another example: the Mata Nui robot's mission, according to his hastily written backstory, was to study other civilizations and learn how to prevent wars. He did so by approaching a populated planet, lying down into an ocean, and covering his face with an artificial island. After thousands of years, he would rise up and continue his journey through space. Disregarding the fact that his massive chest would probably still have protruded through the water, just how does a robot as tall as Earth is wide lie in a body of water without anyone noticing, without raising water levels, or without simply having any effect on the planet itself? The Mata Nui Saga took a more reasonable route and depicted Mata Nui gathering information from civilizations through his special powers, while staying clear of any planet.
- The most obvious problem is the various "maps" you can see of the various "Nui" islands within Mata Nui. They're arranged in such a way that it looks plausible as being contained inside a humanoid, but unless massive scaling is in order there's no possible way these would fit in the body we saw, especially with the scale. To say nothing of the character's journeys.
- Later on, concept art revealed that the Mata Nui robot was originally significantly smaller, about the size of Europe as opposed to Earth, and was scaled-up for unknown reasons in the published story. That said, the official measurements of the islands, as well as all media depicting the giant, are more in line with the concept art, so it's mostly the written story material that's truly problematic.
- Mata Nui, roughly the size of Denmark, originally had less than a hundred sentient inhabitants living in six small, disparate settlements. Each village had around 12 Matoran inhabitants (though their number increased as more characters were introduced), one Turaga elder and one Toa guardian. This was mainly for practical reasons: the villages were planned to appear in the cancelled 2001 video game The Legend of Mata Nui, where technical limitations couldn't allow for more villagers.
- The concurrently developed Mata Nui Online Game expanded the island's world with the Great Mine, a colossal mining area that would have needed hundreds, if not thousands of workers. The game also suggested that entire groups of Matoran have died in off-screen conflicts. The 2002 comics mentioned that additional settlements have also existed around the main villages, lending credence to the idea that there were more than 72 Matoran on the island.
- The 2003 film BIONICLE: Mask of Light increased the number of Matoran to hundreds to make the world feel more inhabited.
- 2004 revealed that the Matoran had originally lived in the island city Metru Nui before moving to Mata Nui. While this island was significantly smaller, it was a sprawling metropolis with expansive industrial infrastructure spread across six enormous districts and watched over by a total of 5000 Vahki police force robots. To make this city believable, the film BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui artificially bumped up the population to thousands, which was even explicitly mentioned in the dialogue. That was still an extremely meager number for a giant city, even accounting for the island's uninhabited areas.
- Fans eventually took note of the inconsistencies. To reconcile the plot hole of how a population of several thousands became mere hundreds when moving between the two islands, the writers retconned the number to be exactly 1000 Matoran, plus the Turaga and Toa. This made even less sense and was wildly inconsistent with both Mata and Metru Nui, and made the already established number of Vahki laughable. No further elaboration was ever given. The explanation offered by the Mata Nui Online Game of the Matoran's numbers dwindling was also retconned for no stated reason, expounding the inconsistency.
- An early map of the island of Mata Nui had it be about 36.8 kilometers from top to bottom, but later on in development
- The box for the original Rubik's Cube claimed it had "over 3 billion combinations". The actual number is approximately 43 quintillion. While not technically wrong (it does have more than 3 billion) it is akin to saying "more than 100 people live in New York".
- Transformers:
- Unicron is a Transformer the size of a planet. Yet he interacts with vehicle-sized robots that should not be visible. A number of scenes have him doing things like holding Transformers between his fingers, which shouldn't be possible unless those characters have abruptly ballooned to the size of, say, Rhode Island. A few stories have suggested that Unicron has consumed a significant fraction of universes. Considering that Unicron has consistently been shown to handle planets by simply flying over to them and munching them, it's rather hard to, er, swallow. It's especially strange to wonder how he handles, for instance, the larger stars—even the most judicious guess at his size (cartoon Unicron is a bit bigger than the moon, Marvel Unicron is about the size of Saturn) would have him be basically a grain of sand consuming an exercise ball.
- Unicron is a Planet Eater and is said to have eaten entire universes. Yet he eats them one planet or star at a time and just goes up and devours the thing. The observable universe has about 10^24 stars in it. Even if he ate a million planets a year, it would take about 10^18 years to eat all the stars (never mind the planets). Our universe is only about 10^10 years old, and you would think new universes would form before he finished eating even one.
- The size of Cybertron itself varies a lot in Transformers lore; it's been everywhere from the size of Earth's moon to the size of a large gas giant. Yet whenever we see it in a long shot, it has visible structures on its surface
◊, some of which even visibly poke well past its curvature. Its native population does have pretty advanced technology and tend to be 5-10 meters tall, but the larger buildings should be about the size of, say, Florida.
- Transformers: Generation 1: Double Punch has it claimed on his bio that, as a special adaptation, he's able to survive temperatures of 150 degrees Fahrenheit. As the wiki pointed out, "Yes, he's almost as powerful as the average teaspoon." Indeed, real-life humans can survive that temperature (or higher) as long as it's a dry heat (such as a sauna).
- Darths & Droids elaborately parodies the destruction of the Hosnian system in The Force Awakens, where the explosion could be seen right away from light-years away (fifty in the comic), by revealing that the Peace Moon's beam travelled backwards in time to explode the system fifty years ago so that the explosion could be seen now. Heck, they weren't even aiming at the Hosnian system in this version; they just assumed they could shoot right through that area because there hadn't been anything there for fifty years. (The odds of aiming at one system and happening to have another in the way, given how space is almost entirely empty, is probably a straight example of this trope.) This was all because the designer of the beam had known his ignorant superiors would want to see a big explosion right away.
- Girl Genius:
- The Heterodyne dynasty is either a really bad example or a really good aversion, depending on perspective. They have apparently been in power for upwards of a thousand years, ever since Ghengis Ht'rok-din claimed the sacred spring at the center of what would become the Heterodyne Valley. The problem is that it's basically unheard of for a single dynasty to last that long in real life. The quirk is that this is such a Crapsack World ruled by Mad Scientists that the vast majority of other empires average out at about ten years. Compared to that, it's no wonder the Heterodynes have been the boogeyman of the continent for as long as anyone can remember. Entire rings of fortresses have been built to contain them, only to themselves fall into dynastic infighting while the Heterodynes survive.
- Things start getting ridiculous with the god-queens and their eras. Albia is approximately eight thousand years old, and was one of the younger members of the sisterhood of god-queens. They communicated through the use of the "queen's mirrors," a Portal Network that was ancient to them. Later, the Polar Lords claim to be "older than the Queens, older than the gate-builders, older than the bronze men."
- Lampshaded in Grrl Power, where Math claims to be the 999th in a line of martial artists. Assuming 20 years per generation, said line should be twice as old as agriculture and have started in the Stone Age. The comic cast page calls Math's claim "ridiculous unless you assume both parents of every generation in his tree were martial artists", implying that the "999 generations" thing is a Tall Tale.
- In Homestuck, the Green Sun is stated to be nearly twice the mass of the universe, totaling 2*1053 kg (which gives a Schwarzschild radiusnote of 2.97*1023 kilometers, or 31.39 billion lightyears), yet it visibly has little to no gravitational pull. Until Act 7, that is, when Alternate!Calliope causes it to collapse into a black hole — which, having remembered the consequences of being an unimaginably massive object, proceeds to start sucking in the fabric of spacetime as opposed to just warping it. Then again, it's located in the Void Between the Worlds, where time and space are explicitly mentioned to flow differently from ours
- In Nip and Tuck, the Show Within a Show Rebel Cry features a Royal Brat who doesn't get it.
Even the writer obviously does.
- Receives a lampshade in Schlock Mercenary, where aliens who habitually make Dyson spheres of a canvas-like material kept inflated by light pressure from the enclosed star (still pretty significant work structurally, but not beyond that universe's tech base) have a nickname for it that translates as "This was expensive to build." Or more literally translated, "Expensive, expensive, expensive *BLEEP* we built."
- Sagan 4:
- In the Alpha timeline, plate tectonics didn't match the actual timescale and new kingdoms of animals would evolve from scratch in just a few million years. The latter is also seen in the Beta timeline, but was quickly snuffed out by the addition of a specific rule against doing so.
- In both Alpha and Beta, it can take tens of millions of years for a group of organisms to spread across an entire continent due to the timescale system being disconnected from the per-species habitat rules, when in real life a continent can be covered in less than one million years. However, this is somewhat mitigated in Beta with the addition of wildcard species, which can be in as many habitats as can be justified.
- The inverse also occurs with things happening too slowly. In Alpha, the rules about size increases were so restrictive that plants would take too long to grow large and only reach the size of large shrubs before the next extinction event, sometimes as much as 100 million years later, would kill them off—resulting in there never being any realistically large flora. In Beta, this is addressed and averted with new rules allowing flora to grow large much faster than fauna, and when Alpha was revived these rules were added there as well.
- An In-Universe example happens in the SCP Foundation entry SCP-1958
, a microbus that, through means unknown, was able to achieve spaceflight, with the occupants' goal of reaching Alpha Centauri. They thought they would get there in maybe four weeks at most, despite the van only being able to reach 130 km/h. For reference, Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away. After two months, they were not even past the moon; the journal detailing the tragic journey points out that one of the crew "fucked up the math", which they did big time; at their current pace, they would've taken another 37 million years to reach their destination. By the time the Foundation discovers the ghost vessel, it was near Mars at best.
- The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy: Discussed in regards to space history. The universe has been around for a staggeringly long time, but the Standard Sci-Fi History rarely delves into anything much older than human space exploration. This makes some sense, since actually tackling the whole lot is very difficult. Even if the very oldest aliens only appeared five percent of universal history ahead of us, that'd still leave 500 million years of history to write, which at a rate of a paragraph per million years would require something like a hundred pages or so of space, even before considering how advanced an even tens-of-millions-years-old civilization would be. Most writers deal with this problem by just avoiding it.
- During Barack Obama's presidency, a petition to build the Death Star was submitted to a form the administration added on WhiteHouse.gov. It reached 25,000 signatures, which means the government has to respond. So 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 they're not going to build a weapon that can be destroyed by one guy in a spaceship.

