Star Trek

[Unorthodox]

Imagine how good the series would have been if Stewart had showed the same emotion in the series...

[Unorthodox]

1.  Having watched him in other things, he's highly overrated as an actor to begin with, IMO.
2.  He clearly phoned in a fair number of episodes. 

[Buster's Uncle]

How many pages/months ago did I make the same two points?

He is a decent actor, just not the great one people make him out to be.  Royal Shakespeare Company experience is overrated, as those with it tend to forget that they don't have to be heard in the back row when acting in other mediums.  That's the same thing Shatner, a serious stage-trained actor, too, so often did wrong.  Stewart ay have been aware of that, given his usually low-key readings, but rarely found the right balance on TNG.


And I should say that I spent a lot of time watching YouTube vids of fake ST actors convention appearances back in January -most of the stuff out there with real ST actors is either really old or just too sad to enjoy- and it eventually struck me that they couldn't help that the scripts were mostly bad. [shrugs]

[Unorthodox]

How many pages/months ago did I make the same two points?

Don't know, I don't read everything.  I just was recalling how awful he was in his version Scrooge.

[Buster's Uncle]

He's no George C. Scott...

[Unorthodox]

Wow, terribad practical effects on data after his skin melts/whatever.  Someone should be embarrassed.  (granted most people probably won't notice.)

[Buster's Uncle]

Yeah, the Borg Queen was a bad idea, and the Data plot sucked, too.  That part of the movie just wasn't good.

[Unorthodox]

I personally like the queen.  Especially Alice Krige.  Her makeup is mostly well done, too.  The CGI floating spine thing is cringe-worthy though. 

The Borg had been neutered in the series, and giving them a charismatic evil presence was good adaptation....and that's what they should have written in.  The QUEEN as the ultimate consequence of whoever that one dude was introducing individuality to the Borg, not some always there you just didn't know BS. 

It also mirrors the Alien (movie) evolution from a faceless every alien is a breeding machine to a queen/hive dynamic.  They both lose some of their more alien (as in strange) nature, and become something more approachable by the viewing public at large.  We can understand a hive structure more. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Eh - not that they ever knew what they were doing with the Borg, but she was a bad fit.

[Buster's Uncle]

I mean, they're supposed to be a big group mind - I can see the appeal to the writers to put a face on the Borg, but it really takes something away, too.  Some Doctor Who fans really dislike Davros for the same reason; Dalek stories tend to end up being about him and not them.  That's sorta what I'm saying here, too.

Like, it's better horror, and you can't deny that there's a horror element to the Borg at their best, when it's this faceless, implacable, unstopable horde that you can't even talk to...

[Unorthodox]

I mean, they're supposed to be a big group mind - I can see the appeal to the writers to put a face on the Borg, but it really takes something away, too.  Some Doctor Who fans really dislike Davros for the same reason; Dalek stories tend to end up being about him and not them.  That's sorta what I'm saying here, too.

Like, it's better horror, and you can't deny that there's a horror element to the Borg at their best, when it's this faceless, implacable, unstopable horde that you can't even talk to...

Yes, you do lose something...which is why I think the Alien queen is a mistake.  THOSE things are truly ALIEN.  But in Trek, PARTICULARLY in the TNG world, I feel the queen works better.  ESPECIALLY since Locutus already established the borg putting a face on the evil to better assimilate humanity, and Hugh (had to google it) added the concept to the collective already.  Basically, IMO, they had already lost the faceless, completely alien evil, and the Queen was the best possible step they could take. 

[Buster's Uncle]

They never had a plan for the Borg, and some of the ad-hoc stuff they slapped together as they went was tres' lame.  Voyager made it a lot worse, of course.

[Unorthodox]

We weren't watching Voyager by the time they got around to the Borg. 

[Buster's Uncle]

hEt was a Kes fan?

That was a pity; everybody liked Kes.

[Buster's Uncle]

Copernicus On The Science Of STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS!!
 

For those who don’t know me, I occasionally write movie reviews for Ain’t It Cool News, but I’m also a professional astronomer.  I occasionally write articles on the science of movies (most recently, AVENGERS), not because I want to nitpick at every little thing, but because it is a good chance to sneak in a little knowledge about how the universe works.  But I also do it because I get annoyed when writers get lazy and don’t think twice or talk to a scientist, and as a result produce movies that are way less cool than they ought to be.  And at the same time, I want to celebrate those awe-inspiring moments in movies that do mean more if they are based in real science. 

 

 

NIBIRU, SERIOUSLY?

Sadly, right from the title card you can tell STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS has disdain rather than respect for science.  The planet Kirk and company are there to interfere with is named Nibiru.  This is a made up idea by some certified nutbars who have claimed that it is a rogue planet variously hiding in our own solar system(!) or about to zoom through it, somehow ending life on Earth by bringing about a “pole shift,” or some such [nonsense].  Nibiru was originally mixed up in this Comet Hale-Bopp craziness in 1997, then it was claimed it would destroy humanity in 2003, and then people attached it to 2012 Maya stupidity.   

I know Bob Orci, one of the writers of Star Trek, is a conspiracy nut.  We’ve gotten into arguments about whether the Big Bang happened.  Maybe he was just trolling professional astronomers by slipping Nibiru in there?  After all, he didn’t like my take on the science of the 2009 STAR TREK, even though I was positive on the movie.  I don’t care what the reason is -- stunts like this are a slap in the face to what made Star Trek great in the first place.  One of the many legacies of Star Trek is thousands of astronomers and astronauts who were inspired to devote their lives to uncovering the awe and wonder of the universe because of the show’s message of cooperation and exploration.  Shame on you, JJ Abrams and Bob Orci, for defiling the legacy of Star Trek by valuing lazy delusional paranoia over its true principles:  critical thinking and reason.

 

 

THE VULCAN-OLOGIST

According to the dialogue near the beginning of the film, a volcano is about to erupt on the planet that will wipe out all life on it, or at least civilization.  Is this plausible?   It is true that large volcanic eruptions over Earth’s history have killed tens of thousands of locals at a time.   And Earth’s history is filled with records of volcanic eruptions affecting temperatures globally, sometimes for years after the eruption.  Effects have even included the “year without a summer.”  Some have speculated that the one of the largest known volcanic eruptions in Earth’s history, the Toba event from about 70,000 years ago, was responsible for a genetic bottleneck in human mitochondrial DNA.  However, that idea seems to be contradicted by other evidence, so isn’t widely believed.

But what about other planets?  At 14 miles high and covering the size of France, Olympus Mons on Mars makes Earth volcanoes look puny in comparison.  And Venus may have been resurfaced by volcanism about 500 million years ago.  Io, a moon of Jupiter, is constantly being repaved by sulphur-spewing volcanoes.  Some shoot so high, they almost launch material into orbit.

But all of these scenarios have problems for wiping out all life on a planet.  It takes many volcanic eruptions to cause catastrophic global effects.  So stopping just one won’t do very much in the long term.  On a volcanically active planet, there will be more.

Well, what if the planet were much smaller than Earth?  Could you wipe out all life then?  There are two problems with that -- one is that the surface gravity would be lower, so we’d see Kirk and crew bouncing all around.  And the second is that small planets cool faster (that depends on the ratio of surface area to volume) and so don’t have a molten core, or volcanism, for long -- not on human evolutionary timescales.  What about Io, you say?  As a moon of Jupiter, it isn’t huge.  That’s true, but its interior doesn’t cool because it is constantly heated by tidal forces from Jupiter.

What if all the humanoids only occupy a small region of the planet?  That’s problematic because they would have been prone to catastrophe in the past.  Basically, if life evolves on a planet for billions of years, it has to be stable on billion year timescales against catastrophes wiping out all life, even if it might have the occasional devastating event.

But the real problem is that if a planet is that volcanically active, plugging up a single volcano (a) isn’t likely to work, and (b) is just a short term solution.  Why isn’t it likely to work?  Let’s calculate how much energy is in a supervolcanic eruption -- the kind that didn’t even succeed at wiping out humans, but was the best the Earth could do.  These explosions measure an 8 (the highest ranking) on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, and are thought to eject 1000 cubic kilometers of stuff more than 25 km high. 

Great, we can estimate how much energy this is!  It is just gravitational potential energy:  U=mgh, where m=mass, h=height, and g=acceleration due to gravity (9.8 m/s2).  How much does 1000 cubic kilometers of the Earth’s mantle weigh?  The density is about 4000 kg per meter cubed.  And there are a billion cubic meters in a cubic kilometer.  So we have m = 4000 km/m3 (1000 km3) (109  m3 / km3) = 4x1015 kg.  In round numbers, that makes the energy, U = mgh = 4x1015 kg (10 m/s2) (25,000 m) = 1021 J.  A large nuclear weapon releases about 1017 J.  So this volcano has the energy of about 10,000 of the largest nuclear weapons.  That’s about how many there are on Earth.  So basically, Spock’s little ice plug has to hold back the equivalent energy of all the nuclear weapons on Earth.  And the newly-frozen surface that he’s standing beside is just the tip of the iceberg.  And heat is just a small part of it.  There are massive pressure forces in the planet too.

So he isn’t likely to succeed.  But if he could, how would he go about it?  There are endothermic reactions on Earth, like those “ice packs” that aren’t ice at all, but chemicals in a container you can break to mix them and turn the thing cold.  That absorbs heat to change chemical bonds, but it is too inefficient for the amount of energy absorption we need here.  And besides, they tell us that this is a “cold fusion device.”  Ok, that makes no sense.  Cold fusion, has of course been debunked -- this sounds like just another Orci / Abrams attempt at getting crackpottery being discussed by more people (see FRINGE).  And besides, cold fusion is supposed to gain energy, not absorb it.   

But ok, if I had to design something that you might call a “cold fusion device,” and have it get rid of energy, how would it work?  Well, iron-56 is the most tightly bound atomic nucleus. Every time you fuse two nuclei lighter than that together, you get energy.  That’s what powers the sun.  Only hydrogen and helium (and a little lithium) were created in the Big Bang.  All the other elements up to iron were forged in a star.  But stellar fusion only works up to iron.  If you try to fuse any two elements to make something heavier than that, you lose energy instead of gaining it.  But you can do fusion beyond iron inside a certain kind of supernova (which is what I study professionally).  That’s how we get all the elements heavier than iron.  Take gold, for example.  It was created in a supernova -- but it took energy to produce it. 

So my idea for a “cold fusion device” would be to do just that:  the kind of fusion where you absorb energy instead of gaining it.  Looking at this chart, to get the biggest energy sink, we want to somehow fuse iron-56 (binding energy 8.8 Megaelectron Volts (MeV) per nuclear particle, or nucleon) to uranium-238 (7.6 MeV per nucleon).  Doing that, we can absorb 8.8-7.6 = 1.2 MeV / nucleon = 2 x 10-13 Joules (J) / nucleon. To absorb 1021 J, it would take 1021 J / 2 x 10-13 J per nucleon = 5 x 1033 nucleons.  Since Fe-56 has 56 nucleons (protons and neutrons) per atom, it would take 5 x 1033 / 56 = 1032 atoms of iron.  A mole of iron (6 x 1023 atoms) has 56 g of it, so 56g (1032 atoms) / (6 x 1023 atoms) = 1010 g = 107 kg = 2 x 107 lb.  So to absorb all the energy in the volcano, Spock’s “cold fusion device” would have to weigh 20 million pounds!  He’d start with that much iron and end up with about that much uranium.  If he wanted to be an alchemist, he could start with a bigger bomb and turn it all into gold.  (Medieval alchemists failed because they didn’t have hot enough ovens).

Also:  why didn’t they just beam the “bomb” right into the volcano?  They couldn’t beam into the volcano because they needed a direct line of sight?  [nonsense], the Enterprise beams people through entire planets on a daily basis.  You never hear:  “Beam me up, Scotty.”  “But Cap’n we have to wait until our orbit is above your position, so hold on for an hour or so.”  And if so, big deal, fly over the damn thing and beam it in.  And don’t give me some BS about how Spock had to arm it.  We already have volcano-exploring robots.  No, correction, we already had them twenty friggin years ago.

 

 

WE ALL LIVE IN A YELLOW ENTERPRISE

But now here’s the really ridiculous part.  Why was the Enterprise hiding underwater?  It makes no goddamn sense.  You can’t transmit electromagnetic waves underwater, at least not normal ones, since saltwater attenuates them.  This is a huge problem for submarines.  Normal radio communications don’t work.  Only extremely low frequency (ELF) waves (3-300 Hz) will penetrate a significant distance undersea.  Because of the low frequency, these transmissions have low bit rates -- you can only transmit text, and only a few characters a minute.  And it is one-way -- from a land base to a submarine -- the tricks you have to use to do this are such that you couldn’t have a transmitter on a sub.  So the messages tend to be short -- like “surface” or “send a buoy to the surface to communicate.”  Or, my favorite, go to the underwater telephone!  They have these stations set up where they can communicate acoustically.  You can’t reply using ELF from the sub because these are very long wavelength waves -- thousands of kilometers.  You’d need an antenna a good fraction of the size of the Earth to transmit.  The US military had a batshit insane plan, Project Sanguine, to build 6000 miles of antenna covering 40% of the state of Wisconsin, powered by 10 underground power plants.  They ended up devising another trick, using the Earth itself to act as part of the antenna.  Now they probably use HAARP to make the ionosphere into an antenna.

In the actual movie, I think they can still communicate with the Enterprise underwater (fine, who knows how those damn communicators work -- they do have “subspace” communications in Star Trek after all), but they can’t use the transporters.  Indeed you couldn’t -- those things have to be either beamed energy or matter, and that wouldn’t work underwater. 

But you know else wouldn’t work underwater?  Everything!  Take thrusters, for example, which are simple plasma jets that we see working later in the movie.  Or the shields, which are no doubt electromagnetic (as opposed to the metal and kevlar shields on the International Space Station).  I’m just giving them the fact that the force fields that provide structural integrity when the ship experiences extreme accelerations can save them from the underwater pressure. 

But the main point is that, as every engineer knows, if you are building something, every new requirement forces you to make design tradeoffs.  So if you are building mankind’s foremost tool for exploring vast distances in the galaxy, you want it to excel at that.  You can’t have the design compromised by all these idiotic things that would allow it to go underwater just in case there was a sub-moron for a starship captain.  This is why you never see flying cars, car-boats, airplane-boats, ship-trains, etc., outside of a few nuts who don’t understand this design principle.  It is *way* better to design a boat that is good at being a boat and a car that is good at being a car, instead of something that sucks at both.

 And the only reason they were underwater was to hide!?!  You don’t have to hide when you can friggin’ orbit and you are dealing with a paleolithic society.  And how, exactly, are you hiding, when you are parked right next to this giant settlement of people!  You had to get down there and get out somehow?  And by hiding in the water, you give up your most important ability.  The ability to [intercourse gerund] teleport!  Oh you’ve got some arrows?  That’s nice, I can DISAPPEAR!  Jesus this version of Kirk is criminally stupid.  Oh and one other thing.  This isn’t science, but I can’t help myself.  The real Kirk wouldn’t run from tribesmen, or any other threat for that matter.   

Interestingly enough, when Kirk and Bones jump in the water, they rocket down to the Enterprise.  Jet boots!  I was watching the movie with my friend and fellow astrophysicist, Ben Mazin, who invented something called Jet Boots -- a diving propulsion system used by militaries.  He flipped out.  Real-world Jetboots don’t emit bubbles, but the ones on Star Trek do.  This raises the question -- why were Kirk and Bones wearing this underwater propulsion system in the first place?  Seems like they knew they were going to have to jump off a cliff and swim to the enterprise.  So that monster they were going to hitch a ride on was only to take them a few hundred meters?  Sounds like a ridiculous plan.

Also, would they be ok from the pressure if they zoomed down underwater like that?  Remarkably, yes!  People have free-dived hundreds of meters.  Your lungs shrivel into a tiny ball from the pressure, but blood plasma seeps in, keeping them from completely collapsing and damaging them.  Free divers can go much farther down than SCUBA divers, because they aren’t breathing the high pressure air that divers breathe.  That leads to nitrogen dissolved in the bloodstream, and when you try to rise too quickly, you could get the bends.  Now, once Kirk and McCoy were onboard the submerged Enterprise, they, along with the rest of the crew, would be breathing high pressure air. So there’s a limit to how fast the Enterprise could safely rise, which would decrease the pressure.  And even then, nitrogen would remain in the bloodstream of all the crew members on the Enterprise for 24 hours.  You aren’t supposed to fly for 24h after diving (much less go into space), because the low cabin pressure on airplanes would cause that nitrogen to outgass from your blood and tissues and give you the bends.  So, good job, Kirk, you’ve killed the entire crew because of your stupid desire to take the Enterprise underwater.

 
(Continued next post)
 

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/62867