- 1 week ago
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson rewatches 16 sci-fi movies and reveals just how accurate Hollywood’s take on the cosmos and beyond really is.
*Credits:*
Director: Jeremy Clowney
Director of Photography: Alex Sablow
Editor: Louville Moore
Talent: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Senior Producer: Michael Beckert
Creative Producer: Camille Ramos
Line Producer: Jen Santos
Production Manager: Evie Roop
Talent Booker: Jenna Caldwell
Camera Operator: Chloe Ramos
Gaffer: David Djaco
Sound Mixer: Tyson Dai
Production Assistant: Jayden Bier
Post Production Supervisor: Jess Dunn
Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino
Supervising Editor: Rob Lombardi
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Executive Producer: Cara Marceante
Director, Creative: Nick Collett
Director, Programming: Jeremy Clowney
*Credits:*
Director: Jeremy Clowney
Director of Photography: Alex Sablow
Editor: Louville Moore
Talent: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Senior Producer: Michael Beckert
Creative Producer: Camille Ramos
Line Producer: Jen Santos
Production Manager: Evie Roop
Talent Booker: Jenna Caldwell
Camera Operator: Chloe Ramos
Gaffer: David Djaco
Sound Mixer: Tyson Dai
Production Assistant: Jayden Bier
Post Production Supervisor: Jess Dunn
Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino
Supervising Editor: Rob Lombardi
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Executive Producer: Cara Marceante
Director, Creative: Nick Collett
Director, Programming: Jeremy Clowney
Category
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00First of all, one should never watch Star Wars for its science.
00:05Just leave science at home.
00:08Hey GQ, Neil deGrasse Tyson here.
00:10You're a personal astrophysicist.
00:12And today we're going to look at scenes from sci-fi films
00:15to decide whether they got the science right or wrong.
00:21This is The Breakdown.
00:27The day after tomorrow.
00:30These tornadoes are forming so fast.
00:33What?
00:34Oh, oh my God.
00:36Lisa, are you getting this on camera?
00:38This tornado just came and erased the Hollywood sign.
00:41The Hollywood sign is gone.
00:42It's just shredded.
00:55What?
00:56What can you see?
00:57Is anyone hurt?
00:58I wouldn't be surprised there is so much damage down there.
01:01And there are people down there taking pictures.
01:04Hey, what the heck are you guys doing?
01:06Go for cover.
01:07You can't stay here.
01:09Get out of here.
01:10I've never understood why in disaster films, the objects of disaster tend to aim for monuments
01:21and things we especially care about.
01:23You have all the area of California, the tornado is hitting the Hollywood sign.
01:29Come on, have you ever been to the Hollywood sign?
01:30There's so much else it could have hit, and it's not.
01:33It aimed for the Hollywood sign.
01:35So that pisses me off.
01:36Okay?
01:37A.
01:38B, these are circulating currents.
01:42They correctly show them turning counterclockwise.
01:46Storm systems turn counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere.
01:50But watch.
01:51If two storms turning counterclockwise are too close to one another, then the air moving this
01:58way on this side cancels the air moving that way on the other side.
02:05So you can't have two storms too close to one another because they'll cancel each other
02:10out on the side that faces the two of them.
02:13And they'll either merge to become one or they'll just cancel each other out completely.
02:18And so we're looking at these two tornadoes adjacent to one another that you can't, thermodynamically
02:25and the fluid dynamics of air will not permit that.
02:34And so while I was watching this movie, I was just pissed off the whole time.
02:38And we got a guy in a helicopter commenting that people are on the ground taking pictures.
02:45The dude's in a helicopter around a tornado.
02:49And he's worried about someone on the ground taking pictures?
02:52Who's at risk here?
02:53Who do you think is at risk?
02:56The helicopter that's in the air that's moving or someone planted on the ground?
03:02So anyhow, climate change in general will be responsible for extremes of weather conditions
03:11that'll take us outside of our comfort zone of how and why we built cities where they are.
03:17Oh, there's a flood.
03:19I don't like that flood.
03:21Let's build embankments to prevent the flood from happening in the future.
03:25Oh, here's an even bigger flood.
03:26Let's build the embankments even bigger.
03:28It got really hot in the summer.
03:30Let's bring in air conditioning.
03:31And so over the years and over the decades, a city will adjust itself to the range of climate
03:37that it experiences.
03:38This is quite normal and natural.
03:41If it gets a lot of snow, you bring in snow removal.
03:44Once you've established that, then the city moves on decade by decade, accommodating its
03:50weather extremes.
03:51Until you have climate change where weather extremes outstrip your historical record of
03:58weather extremes.
03:59And when it outstrips it, everything you had done before to prep yourself is no longer sufficient.
04:05It'll be hotter than ever before.
04:07It'll have more rain than ever before, less rain than ever before.
04:10You'll have floods greater than ever before, and you're not prepared for it.
04:21It's gwinecd.
04:27You're the one who has a small ship.
04:29It's going to be better for it.
04:29It's going to be better for it.
04:29It's going to be better for it.
04:40It's going to be faster.
04:43pressurized to something that you can breathe, because human beings are living in the vessel,
04:49there's a breach of pressure between what's in the vessel and what's outside the vessel.
04:53Air will rapidly equilibrate.
04:56Rapidly.
04:57Air pressure moves basically at the speed of sound.
05:00So you have a break in any kind of containment.
05:05The air that's inside tries to equilibrate with the vacuum of space.
05:10And the air inside loses to that contest.
05:14And so you lose all the air out into space.
05:18And anything that's in that draft is going to get pulled with it.
05:22But it happens very quickly, because you don't have an infinite amount of air inside your vessel.
05:28So, by the way, in the film The Martian, I would say it got more physics correct than any other
05:35sci-fi film ever made.
05:38I got one of the highest compliments I've ever received from the author of the story, Andy Weir.
05:44He's a software engineer turned novelist.
05:47He's scientifically literate.
05:49When he was writing this story, he would later share with me the fact that if he wanted to play
05:54loosey-goosey with the physics,
05:56he imagined I was looking over his shoulder.
06:00And he didn't want me tweeting about that later if he didn't get the physics right.
06:05So he put in extra effort to get the science more broadly and the physics and the chemistry and the
06:12engineering correct in this film.
06:14It has my highest marks for scientific accuracy.
06:17Let's keep watching.
06:35Pause right here.
06:36All right, they got something wrong there, but I'm a fan of a Mark Twain edict,
06:44which is first get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure.
06:51This should be instructions for any artist who wants a little bit of creative freedom at the edge of what
06:57they're doing.
06:57So here it's a clever mechanism to retrieve Mark Watney from space using this tethering system.
07:06Okay, and as they shortened the tether, they got closer and closer until they met.
07:12All right, here's the problem with that.
07:14So I'm going to give Andy Ware a hall pass on this because it was a clever idea how to
07:21retrieve your fellow astronaut from free-floating in space.
07:27However, if you are moving around one another at any given distance, and then you, by some mechanism that you're
07:36connected, bring yourselves closer to each other, you spin up faster.
07:43You know this because this happens on an ice skating rink with a skater who starts, a figure skater, who
07:51starts with their arms outstretched, and then they start spinning at whatever rate.
07:57Then as they bring their arms in, they spin faster and faster and faster.
08:03And they spin fastest when their arms are like right on their axis of rotation.
08:09So it's called the law of conservation of angular momentum.
08:13And as that happened, they should have been spinning faster and faster and faster.
08:16And they didn't, but I'm going to give them a hall pass.
08:27He got the angular momentum wrong 100%.
08:30But the idea that you would retrieve someone by that mechanism, I give him full marks there.
08:39Interstellar.
08:40Let's just hope there's still someone there to save.
08:59A couple of things.
09:01That black hole, you have to consider that's what a black hole looks like in front of you.
09:08Because of the distortion of space and time in its vicinity.
09:12So there are things behind the black hole that are brought into view to the side and in front of
09:18the black hole just because of the distortions in space.
09:21So this shape, this sort of looks like a turntable with a black sphere in the middle and light on
09:31the top, this is a full three-dimensional object projected onto your viewing surface because of the distortions of space
09:41and time.
09:42So just, I want to just make that clear.
09:45And you only get to see the black hole because there's material swirling down into it and that's what you
09:51see.
09:52If you didn't have material swirling down into the black hole, it would just be this black thing there with
09:57some distortions of starlight behind it.
09:59So, this is a black hole with what we call an accretion disk.
10:02They're using the black hole to slingshot to come around to get another trajectory.
10:08Okay.
10:09You have to come in a little close to do that to get the extra sort of force of gravity.
10:13If you come close to a black hole, time slows down for you relative to the rest of the universe.
10:19The strength of gravity will slow down your time, but so will high speeds.
10:24Both of these, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, will slow down your time.
10:30And we call it the theory of relativity, but it's all fact.
10:34All right.
10:34It's just, we know this happens.
10:37We've experimented on it.
10:39It just is.
10:40Okay.
10:42On a level where our GPS satellites are in a lower gravitational field than we are, because they're farther away
10:49from Earth.
10:50As a result, their time moves faster than it does for us here on Earth.
10:55Yet, they're the timekeepers for the world time system.
10:59So, how does that work?
11:00We have to pre-correct, pre-adjust the time that we get from GPS satellites to accommodate general relativity.
11:09That's how we know this works.
11:11We know it.
11:12Okay.
11:13Interstellar is another film of very high physics integrity.
11:17You know why?
11:18It's executive producer.
11:20It's a professor of physics at Caltech.
11:23His name is Kip Thorne.
11:25He's a professor of physics specializing in relativity and large-scale universe and the Big Bang and all of this.
11:34In fact, he would subsequently win the Nobel Prize for co-discovering.
11:40He's a professor of physics and gravitational waves with the observatory called the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory, sensibly abbreviated
11:50as LIGO.
11:52This observatory detects ripples through the fabric of space caused by colliding black holes and other objects of high gravity
12:00that collide.
12:02He's all in on it. He's not just an advisor to someone else's story, it's his story.
12:07He brought on Christopher Nolan to help tell that story.
12:10So you know that physics is going to be airtight the whole film.
12:22The flux capacitor stores...
12:26This fucker selects...
12:27But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.
12:311.21 gigawatts!
12:341.21 gigawatts!
12:37Pause right here.
12:38He's talking about the energy he needs to move through time through the flux capacitor.
12:44By the way, there's such a thing as flux in physics and such a thing as a capacitor in electronics.
12:49But there's no such thing as a flux capacitor.
12:51Just putting it out there, okay?
12:53This is the fanciful juxtaposition of words that sound cool together.
13:01So you're all familiar with watts, okay?
13:04Light bulbs have wattages.
13:06That's the rate at which the bulb is consuming energy.
13:09Watts, okay?
13:10So you turn on a 100 watt bulb.
13:14That is 100 joules per second.
13:19So we're perhaps most familiar with wattage with light bulbs.
13:23Old timers will remember incandescent bulbs, 40 watts, 60 watt, 100 watt.
13:29And notice the higher wattage bulbs were brighter, but that's not what wattage is measuring.
13:36Wattage is measuring the rate at which it's consuming energy.
13:39When we convert it over to LEDs, they're way more efficient at producing visible light than incandescent bulbs are.
13:48So when you turn on an LED, five minutes later it's still cool to your touch.
13:52An incandescent bulb, five minutes later it'll burn your fingers.
13:56Well, why does it get hot?
13:57Because most of the energy of an incandescent bulb is coming out in infrared that is not illuminating anything.
14:04You're paying to heat the room mostly with the light bulbs you have turned on.
14:08So LEDs are much more efficiently putting their energy in the visible spectrum.
14:13In Back to the Future, it's at 1.21, he said gigawatts, it's gigawatts.
14:19Gig is a billion.
14:22So you have watts, then you have kilowatts, that's a thousand.
14:26Then you have megawatts, which is a million.
14:29You have gigawatts, which is a billion.
14:321.21, he said gigawatts, it's gigawatts of energy consumption, which is what that flux capacitor required to have them
14:43move through time.
14:44That's a lot of power that's necessary, and you can't really just generate that.
14:48Certainly not in 1955, where he had gone back in time to inadvertently visit.
14:54And how does he travel back in time? He's got to hit 88 miles per hour?
14:58Okay.
14:59I mean, it's a movie, and it's science fiction, and it just makes shit up.
15:04Okay, so 88 miles per hour.
15:06Maybe they felt 90 miles per hour would have been too round a number.
15:11So you get a number that's not round, makes it sound a little more precise.
15:14So it's like 1.21 gigawatts.
15:17So you throw in this extra precision to make it sound more sciency than it is probably necessary.
15:25But, yeah, it's all complete fiction that he's going through time in a DeLorean hitting 88 miles per hour with
15:33a flux capacitor being fed 1.21 gigawatts of power.
15:39I haven't looked lately about the energy content of a lightning strike.
15:44What I can tell you is that there's a lot of energy in a lightning strike, but what they need
15:51is power.
15:52And power is energy over time.
15:55So even if he got 1.21 gigajoules of energy, to get a gigawatt, you'd have to sustain that level
16:08of energy output over time.
16:11And this is not addressed in the film at all.
16:15X- Apocalypse.
16:39Yeah, that could happen.
16:43I mean think about it if you move a million times faster than everything else in your scene
16:48then you have power over
16:53things in motion that would create an outcome that you want to avert so if you move faster than
17:00bullets you can see a bullet coming out of a gun towards a person you could just slide the person
17:05over six inches the bullet will completely miss them instead of kill them and in here he's saving
17:10all the students of the school and being very clever about it of course so yeah it's a the
17:17relativity of time in this scene is pretty much how it would unfold if you could move that fast
17:26relative to everything else and still have cognitive process think about it if he's moving
17:33that fast is his brain thinking that fast and now they're x-men so of course we grant them that
17:39but
17:39there are other factors to consider how quick are your thoughts it's not just how fast can you
17:46physically move but the neurosynapses in your brain can they process information at the speed that he
17:52is in order to save all those students and the teachers of the school now what I would have done
17:57if I had those powers is prevented the explosion in the first place seems to me you should have the
18:04power to do that then you wouldn't have to do any of this and meanwhile the school dick gets destroyed
18:10so anyhow sure we'll give it to him they're x-men come on deep impact
18:40first of all it's not a disaster movie unless you take out the statue of liberty okay that's apparently
18:47base facts about any disaster movie you're gonna you're gonna share with us a b uh let's contrast this
18:57film with Armageddon similar plot appeared within a couple of years of this film there's a killer
19:04asteroid coming to take out the earth the problem was in Armageddon the asteroid bits all hit earth
19:13landmarks one piece of asteroid hit the Chrysler building you know hit all these places we care
19:19about and are familiar with when most of earth is not inhabited and most of the earth is water this
19:25film
19:25which had actual NASA advisors said if an asteroid is going to hit earth it's probably not going to
19:31hit land you still want to destroy cities because that's what makes it the disaster movie but you can
19:37do that not with the pieces of rock hitting the cities themselves you have the rock hit the ocean and
19:43let
19:43the tsunami take out the cities that's way more interesting than just a rock hitting a building and
19:49that's exactly what this film did so it landed in the ocean and the tsunamis were pretty well represented
19:59there when they were on the shoreline you saw the you saw the surf go out before it came back
20:06in why
20:07because the tsunami is a huge wave where does it get the extra water it sucks up the water before
20:13it
20:14before it makes landfall and so that was accurately portrayed in this film and the size of the of the
20:22wave happened to be the size of the World Trade Center okay that you're gonna do that okay and so
20:28that's
20:29pretty much how that scene would play out if we were in fact hit by an asteroid that size by
20:37the way the
20:37asteroid would have been going anywhere upwards of 10 to 20 miles per second and that one looked like
20:45it was moving a little slower than that that made it a little more dramatic in the sky rather than
20:50just
20:50a streak of light so I'll give it to them give them a hall pass on showing an asteroid moving
20:56that slowly
20:57but when you're moving 20 miles per second if you're high up then the angle that you cross in the
21:05sky
21:06you'd be able to sort of watch 20 miles per second but if it's that close to you 20 miles
21:10per second is
21:11from where you are to be on the horizon in one second your horizon is not even 20 miles away
21:17standing
21:17here looking at the ocean surface whether or not they knew it they had to slow that down to make
21:23an
21:23interesting scene for the cinematic drama okay I don't have a problem with that that's Mark Twainian
21:32getting their facts straight and then distorting them at their leisure for the drama of it so what
21:40they didn't do right was the impact point on the earth they showed this shock wave rapidly moving
21:47across earth surface that wave is not going to move faster than the speed of sound speed of sound at
21:54sea
21:54levels 750 miles an hour so it would move and it would be devastating but air molecules cannot
22:02communicate with each other faster than the speed of sound would allow it so in a sense they sped that
22:08up but they made you think that that's what you would have seen if you had borne eyewitness to it
22:14so
22:14yeah really nice dramatic film they got 80% of the science right and it kind of felt like how
22:23people would
22:24actually behave under all those situations Morgan Freeman as president best American president
22:31portrayal in a movie ever you just hear him give his speech before and after you say that's the kind
22:38of person I want leading my world that's the kind of person I want leading my country and even the
22:44world
22:45so best president ever
22:49men in black
23:09stop right there gotta love the end of men in black
23:12it's it's what our greatest fears and imagination would hold for us that our entire universe is just
23:23some little bit of substance within a marble being played by aliens on some other planet and we're just a
23:39marble in a bag of marbles think about that might be like a multiverse of marbles so there's a pro
23:45it's fine men in black for that movie fine fine
23:50but you want to analyze that one step in
23:54the laws of physics do not manifest the same way on all scales you know back when we were discovering
24:01the atom
24:02people said wait a minute there's an atom and there's electrons that orbit a nucleus that's kind of just like
24:10planets orbiting a sun
24:12maybe we have this pattern all the way down and all the way up
24:17so it was kind of
24:19so it was kind of philosophically wishful thinking that the universe would be so ordered
24:25and what we would learn is that no electrons don't orbit
24:31their nucleus
24:32they surround the nucleus in the sort of probability clouds
24:36but so hooked were we on this concept of an orbit
24:40we use the word orbital
24:41orbital
24:42to describe electrons moving around the nucleus we couldn't shake the word orbit
24:48orbital
24:49so electrons are in orbitals around a nucleus
24:52which is fine but it betrays the fact that we had wishful thinking going in in the first place
24:58so if you're going to show aliens
25:01that are playing with our entire universe
25:06consider that our entire universe at 13.8 billion light years across
25:11if anything coherent is going to happen in the universe
25:15it's going to take at least 13.8 billion years for a signal to cross the universe for that universe
25:22to do anything coherent
25:23now you have a creature
25:26that's
25:27way bigger than our universe playing with our universe in that way
25:31that means the creature is even larger
25:34so it's not obvious how you would have a creature larger than our universe
25:37coherently just playing with that somehow the the connectivity
25:43of decision making within that creature
25:47has any active awareness of what it's doing
25:51at any given time
25:53but i'm not going to worry about that
25:56it's a fanciful
25:59spooky
26:01frightening
26:03idea of what our universe might be in the presence of aliens by the aliens were great
26:09they were non-humanoid aliens love it
26:12uh too many humanoid aliens out there in hollywood maybe it's because an actor has to don
26:17a costume so they look human got two eyes and nose a mouth you know ears neck shoulders legs
26:24knees elbows fingers and toes
26:27they're humanoid oh they have pointy ears oh they have a bald head and they're gray oh oh okay
26:33they're they're humanoid they look more human than most life on earth looks human think about it
26:41crabs worms oak trees spiders
26:45these are all life forms that have dna in common with us
26:50and they don't look anything like us you're going to have an alien come from another planet
26:54and it's going to walk towards you with arms and legs please
26:59star wars episode 7 the force awakens
27:02put him up that ship
27:04that one's garbage
27:11the garbage will do
27:22it's
27:22stop right there first of all one should never watch star wars
27:27for its science just leave science at home just let it be it's a space opera
27:37you know cowboy wild west opera staged in space
27:42good and evil but i thought i would comment
27:46that bb8 which i think is objectively cuter
27:52than r2d2 i don't want to start a fight
27:55bb8 is a smooth rolling spherical ball
28:01it would have skidded uncontrollably on sand
28:07you ever tried to drive a car on sand with treaded tires
28:11that's hard enough you're going to be a smooth metal ball please
28:17with no treads
28:19if bb8 would have just
28:22wandered aimlessly until someone picked it up and brought it to its destination so i had an issue
28:29with bb8's mobility in this especially since most of the places bb8 was portrayed in the force awakens
28:36was on sand but other than that fine the movie but why should i even complain when they have
28:42everything else that's violating laws of physics so who might have then single out bb8 in this way so
28:49how does anything move at all
28:52it's from friction
28:54we think of friction as something bad let's reduce friction
28:57put some oil in some wd-40 whatever life would not be possible without friction
29:02when you walk down the street it's because there's friction between your feet
29:08the soles of your feet and the sidewalk you're pressing against earth
29:13earth is then pushing you forward in equal and opposite force that's what enables you to move
29:18forward at all think about it if you had wet ice as soles on your feet and i put you
29:28on a wet ice
29:29ice rink you're not walking at all every step you take you're going to slide
29:35because there's essentially zero friction in that setup and so if bb8 wants to try to
29:41propel itself forward most of the time it would just be spinning out
29:48that's what we're going to do
29:48star wars
30:04we're in a galaxy far away is it the future is it the past you know who knows
30:11but everything's different from anything we're experiencing here on earth what i do know
30:16is that a lightsaber is the star wars version of a sword obviously because
30:26in a day when you had sword fights you are one-on-one in combat you know what made one
30:33-on-one combat
30:33obsolete the handgun now i don't have to walk up to you i could shoot you from a distance
30:41so why do they still have lightsabers in this other world when they have guns
30:48i see you at a distance i shoot you and i keep walking
30:51what's up with that lightsaber for me is a regressive weapon relative to all the other weapons available
30:58not only in our current time but in the future or in the past or wherever the hell star wars
31:04takes
31:04place that's why we still don't have sword fights when we have battles it's over it's over so
31:13lightsaber i happen to have one right here
31:17this one let's see am i a good guy or a bad guy yeah good guy so
31:27so presumably this thing is made of light okay turns out light
31:35passes through itself
31:39who knew so two lightsabers if it's purely made of light there are called lightsabers after all
31:48would just pass through each other like they weren't even there
31:51not fundamentally different from what would happen if you had two flashlights
31:56or even two lasers
31:57lightsabers so this is a a bit of fiction now i posted that on the internet that they would just
32:10pass through one another and a physics colleague of mine from the uk said if the lightsabers were
32:16made of high energy gamma rays then two gamma ray lightsabers the light would actually interact
32:24i conceded that if this were high enough energy that's exactly what would happen but green light
32:30does not have sufficient energy to make that happen neither does red light
32:34so there had to be something else going on in this fictional other universe but all i can say is
32:41i've had a choice between a lightsaber and a gun i'm choosing a gun
32:50one last thing about star wars
32:54those tie fighters
32:55okay uh they make the sound
33:00i'm not good at that but you know what i'm talking about they make that sound in the atmosphere of
33:06planets
33:07in the same way they make that sound in the vacuum of space
33:13what's up with that
33:15first there's no sound in space as
33:18anyone who knows space knows apparently sci-fi writers don't know this so
33:23explosions in space you can hear it but tie fighters if you're making the sound that's them moving
33:27through the air they should not be making that same sound moving through the vacuum of space
33:32just saying but again it's star wars so why comment on any physics at all alien
33:49they tried to make that alien different from your typical hollywood alien
33:55with the gray skin and bald head and big eyes they wanted to make this especially terrifying
34:03and they spent a lot of time thinking about what its mouth would look like with teeth
34:09and it's got drooling saliva
34:13by the way the name they give to this alien has an official name it's called a xenomorph
34:19uh spelled with an x if you look at it illustrated it's got a head two arms legs
34:28and a tail okay so it's kind of reptilian a little bit but it still has sort of humanoid
34:36fundamentals it doesn't look like a worm or crab or tree or a lobster one thing i found in my
34:46studies
34:46of aliens as well as any study of fairy tales is that you know what's scarier than just dying
34:56getting eaten that is far more terrifying than just getting shot or falling off a cliff we know
35:03that from our fairy tales hansel and gretel was there a witch that's going to eat them there's
35:09little red riding hood the wolf is going to eat her the three pigs the wolf is going to eat
35:14the pigs
35:15the box the pick your fairy tale somebody's getting eaten but in alien disaster films in alien horror
35:25films it's the threat of getting eaten that seems to be the greatest fear and there's no exception there
35:33in alien and the more terrifying you can make the mouth the greater you have exaggerated the fear of
35:41being eaten and so got to give it credit for that sigourney weaver perfectly cast in that role
35:49jurassic world stand down hey hey what did i just say
35:57delta i see you back up
36:02okay good
36:05good couple of things those in the franchise are known as velociraptors i work at the american museum
36:12of natural history where i serve as director of the attached hayden planetarium but many of my
36:18colleagues are experts in dinosaurs you can find velociraptor fossils on display in our dinosaur halls
36:24and they are about this big about the size of a large dog they're not the size as portrayed in
36:32jurassic park
36:34and i think i know why because if it's just the size of a dog it's not scary how do
36:40you make something
36:41scary that's a dinosaur you make it eye level with you those velociraptors look straight on
36:50to human eyes and that kind of makes them a little more terrifying because they're seeing into your
36:56soul of fear and they know when you're afraid whereas if the dinosaur is really big you just
37:03hide under a rock jump into a hole and they're not really staring you down it's a different kind of
37:09fear
37:09factor when it is a dinosaur with a big mouth and big teeth and is your size looking you straight
37:18in
37:18the eye by the way my colleagues at the american museum of natural history were one of the first
37:26to realize that the tail of t-rex doesn't drag on the ground when i grew up all representations of
37:34t-rex
37:35were t-rex was standing erect with a dragging tail once we learned that the hip socket resembled that of
37:41birds and birds are all descendants of dinosaurs we realized it probably moved the way
37:48birds do rather than godzilla right and so birds are positioned differently and so all the tails of
37:56those dinosaurs are pointing straight away straight off the back rather than dragging on the ground
38:03so that was accurate paleontology captured in that film just in time by the way because that realization
38:11in research papers came out right about when the first jurassic park film arrived
38:22yeah they made some attempt to make it real and that's good no problem there
38:30oh and also what is the big fear in jurassic park not that you will die but that you will
38:36get eaten
38:36once again star trek the reboot
38:42now now now do it now
38:44now now now now now
38:47hold on hold on
38:48oh
39:01if you're in free fall
39:03towards earth we think oh you'll keep accelerating that's true except there's a point where air
39:08resistance stops that stops your accelerating and you'll reach what we call terminal velocity
39:13your terminal velocity can be as high as a couple hundred miles an hour or much lower depending on
39:21how much air resistance you you give to the atmosphere and so there's a point where they're not
39:27accelerating they're just move falling at a constant speed but it's still high drama and they get beamed
39:33aboard just before they die which is not uncommon in hollywood i don't know what check off did there
39:40that no one else could have done i don't know why he had special powers of how to lock on
39:46a moving
39:46target but
39:49he managed give him credit consider that anytime they beam down to a planet
39:56the planet is in motion so are they they're orbiting the planet the planet is orbiting the host star
40:03if you beam to anywhere you're beaming onto a moving target
40:07if you're beaming off from anywhere you're beaming from a moving target
40:11so they don't make that point
40:14generally when they beam back and forth but i'm just letting you know
40:18everything there is in motion so if you're going to now beam people back safely because they're
40:23falling towards a planet who who cares they're not falling to the planet as fast as the planet is orbiting
40:29the host star
40:31so this should not have been as complicated as they indicated but it would have been less dramatic
40:38and it is a movie so you got to give it to them project hail mary
40:45trays are live looking both ways it is time go it's time go
40:56so
41:05so
41:22Let's pause here for a moment.
41:24You've got to love that scene.
41:25And they have that angelic music to go with it.
41:30He's moving through the astrophage.
41:32And the astrophage is this life form they had discovered that absorbs energy from a star.
41:41And here they are glowing from this energy.
41:43Very beautiful.
41:44Very beautiful scene.
41:46And especially with the angelic music in the background.
41:50If you've seen the film, you remember it's kind of like a buddy film.
41:52It's an alien buddy film between...
41:55And the iridian life form, this craboid.
41:57We called him Rocky.
41:59And Rocky, completely adorable.
42:01But, again, this story is written by Andy Weir, who had handed me the compliment that he feared I was
42:13looking over his shoulder as he was doing the physics for The Martian.
42:18In this film, he once again paid high attention to physics, to chemistry, to biology.
42:26And he, once again, blew open the Hollywood stereotype by having an alien that's not humanoid.
42:34It's craboid.
42:36In fact, it lives in a different kind of atmosphere.
42:38It doesn't breathe oxygen.
42:39What's up with all the aliens that visit Earth, they step off their spacecraft, and they're just breathing our oxygen?
42:44What's up with that?
42:46People aren't thinking how creative the universe might be.
42:50All the ways of being alive beyond the ones that our own physiology and our own biosphere have delivered to
42:59us.
43:00So Andy Weir goes there.
43:02And more power to him.
43:05Independence Day.
43:20This film has the exact plot line of War of the Worlds, written by H.G. Wells.
43:27What is it?
43:28They're evil Martians that come to Earth, and they want to kill us, and we finally defeat them in the
43:33original story because they get infected by a germ to which we humans on Earth are immune.
43:41Here, they're defeated by a virus of what kind?
43:45A computer virus.
43:47Remember, Jeff Goldblum, the geek character, uploads a computer virus to defeat their defenses.
43:55So allowing our military to then attack.
43:59In that particular scene, all the missiles going by, they made these sounds.
44:03Of course, they're in the vacuum of space.
44:05There would have been no sound.
44:06That entire scene would have had no sound at all.
44:09But once again, it's a movie, and they want to entertain you, and they want you to feel like you're
44:15there, and they don't want it to be silent movie.
44:18So there it is.
44:21And it's funny, once again, the aliens, they had a big old head, but they still had two eyes and
44:28nose and mouth and arms and legs.
44:30Still humanoid with just a different shaped head.
44:33And because those aliens were evil, we felt good that we could kill them with our nukes.
44:42But why are we imagining aliens to be evil?
44:45Where does that come from?
44:47What is motivating that?
44:49And I ask myself, we're supposing the aliens will be evil based on no prior knowledge at all.
44:57But you know what we do know?
45:00How we would treat one another if one part of our civilization had higher technology than another.
45:09Ask yourself, in our own civilization, what has happened when one part of our civilization has higher technology than another,
45:18and they come upon them?
45:19It has never boded well for the lower technologically empowered civilization.
45:26They've been killed, slaughtered, enslaved, diseased.
45:30It's never ended well for them.
45:32So, every time we portray aliens with higher technology encountering us, and we show them to be evil, I think
45:40we're holding up a mirror to our own souls.
45:44A mirror to how we know we would treat one another.
45:50And so here we are attacking the aliens back.
45:54Feels good.
45:55Independence Day.
45:57Okay, okay, match it up with our July 4th celebration, kick some alien ass.
46:05But it might be that when aliens ultimately visit, they're some of the most peaceful creatures we would have ever
46:11imagined.
46:12But that doesn't make an interesting movie, does it?
46:17The Avengers.
46:37You have the Tesseract, which you activated in such a way, it pries open a wormhole.
46:42And a wormhole will connect one part of space-time to another just by stepping through the hole.
46:47That's exactly what's portrayed there.
46:49And I think they did a good job, because that wormhole, you could see from Earth, there's clouds in our
46:55normal atmosphere, and it pried it open.
46:58Then you saw stars on the other side.
47:00And then the evil others, wherever they're from, I don't remember, they come through, and now you have all these
47:07superheroes battling one another.
47:10So, a wormhole is just a portal.
47:13You step through, you're in another place at another time.
47:16By the way, on paper, we know how to make a wormhole, except we don't have the right materials to
47:22succeed.
47:23You need negative matter.
47:27Ordinary matter collapses space and time.
47:32That's how you get a black hole.
47:34Negative matter would have negative gravity, if such a substance existed.
47:38And negative gravity would pry open the fabric of space and time, enabling you to construct wormholes.
47:43For now, it remains science fiction.
47:45If you have the power to open a wormhole, it seems to me you'd have the power to close it
47:49back.
47:50Whatever the mechanism is that's actively keeping it open, if you shut off that mechanism, it might close back on
47:57itself.
47:58If you get rid of the negative matter, you just put it somewhere else, remove its configuration, it would immediately
48:06close back on itself.
48:07We could try to make a wormhole, but it's unstable in the absence of negative matter.
48:13You actively pry it open, but it immediately closes back.
48:17So, the natural state of a wormhole is to be closed.
48:21You have to actively keep it open.
48:23So, I'm not worried about what it takes for them to re-close the wormhole.
48:28Tenet.
48:39Christopher Nolan does it again.
48:40This director, he's somehow managed to attach himself to all manner of films that wreak havoc with the timeline of
48:52the world.
48:53Tenet is probably one of the crowning achievements of that effort.
48:58Think about it.
48:59We live in time as prisoners of the present, forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future.
49:12We're kind of locked in the present.
49:15If you unlock that and then portray things that could happen, they're all mind-bending because our brain is not
49:24wired to think that way.
49:25So, all of these scenes shown in reverse and then in forward motion and reverse again.
49:32And it's a remarkable cinematic achievement to not only have a story that contains that level of time-bending phenomena,
49:46but also to be able to portray it in a way that's cinematically interesting and be part of a larger
49:52story that is itself compelling.
49:55Credit to Christopher Nolan.
49:57In fact, I interviewed Christopher Nolan on my podcast, StarTalk, after I forgot what movie he had just made.
50:03But if you want to sort of catch up with the conversation I had with him,
50:07where we get into his fascination with the timeline that we experience, check it out.
50:17Dig it up in our archives.
50:19Thank you, GQ, for having me.
50:21I delight in highlighting the science that Hollywood gets right, but more commonly, the science that Hollywood gets wrong.
50:32Until the next time we gather, I bid you to keep looking up.
50:37Thank you, GQ.
50:38Thank you, GQ.
50:38Thank you, GQ.
50:39Thank you, GQ.
50:39Thank you, GQ.
50:40Thank you, GQ.
50:40Thank you, GQ.
50:40Thank you, GQ.
50:40Thank you, GQ.
50:40Thank you, GQ.
50:41Thank you, GQ.
50:41Thank you, GQ.
50:41You
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