What's the worst depiction of science did you see in fiction?

[Accelerator]

Can be anything from terrible shows on biology and genetic engineering, or things which make you say "no. It does not work like that!"

[Eldan]

2012.

To quote:
"The neutrinos have mutated, and they are heating up the planet".
and a bit later:
"The neutrinos are now acting like microwaves".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGf0AHky0Os

Then, at the end of the movie, it stops for some reason that's never mentioned.

Also, nice bit of side stupidity: American scientist has to fly to India to hear that sentence, instead of doing what any normal scientist would do, read an email with the results.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and the machine that manipulates the DNA of water. :smallannoyed:

[factotum]

Dara O'Briain did a hilarious skit on that whole thing where he said they might as well have been saying "The Latinos are mutating!". He actually got the real actor who played the role in the movie to come on and do his version of it as well...

For really ropey science I don't think you can go far wrong with "Sunshine". I mean, the entire premise of the movie (we're going to restart a failing Sun by chucking a really big bomb into it) is dodgy to start with, then it has the usual ridiculousness, like a chap who floats away from the spacecraft instantly freezing solid and breaking up into icy chunks.

[Celestia]

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and the machine that manipulates the DNA of water. :smallannoyed:
I think Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs gets a pass because it's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. If you expected hard science from a movie with that kind of title, then I genuinely don't know what to tell you.

[Psyren]

The human batteries thing from the Matrix.

[t209]

The human batteries thing from the Matrix.
You know back Executives assume that people won’t under using humans as memory storage despite 40k’s own idea of using humans as memory storage (not the “Psychic as human batteries for a vegetable mummy called Emperor”, I meant the servitors and cogitators along with Servo Skulls).
But you can add 40k’s inconsistent weapon stats (the fluff, not crunch) to imitate real life weapons to it (including Lasgun claiming you have power of modern tanks yet failed to do anything in-game to tanks).

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I think Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs gets a pass because it's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. If you expected hard science from a movie with that kind of title, then I genuinely don't know what to tell you.

The same could be said of every work of fiction ever, by virtue of it being fiction, what’s your point?

Now what they could have done was have the machine screw around with air microbes - something that actually has DNA - and make the food out of those instead. There would, naturally, still be some magic science involved, because it’s still a kids’ movie, but then it would be a tiny bit educational - “hey kids, there are things living in the air!” - instead of just being flat out wrong. :smallyuk:

[The Glyphstone]

The Core.

All of it.

[Psyren]

The Core.

All of it.

The Core was on my list as well but disaster movies usually require a contrivance of some kind, so I was slightly more forgiving there.

[KillianHawkeye]

This isn't as bad as what's already been posted, but the one I remember hurting my brain was Pacific Rim.

Specifically, the part where all of the mechs are taken out by an EMP blast, except the one used by the heroes because having a nuclear power source somehow made it "analog" and immune to an EMP? Sorry, no. All the rest of the computer equipment on that thing is still fried even if the power source still works. :smallsigh:

[BeerMug Paladin]

Not quite science, but the thing that came to my mind immediately was the high school class in Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie) giving students ethics homework and treating morality like it was a branch of mathematics, where moral conclusions can be derived from self-evident first principles and just lead to a perfect and absolute moral system. For some reason, I took that reading as a genuine belief of the author and not parody. I haven't bothered to re-read it to check again if it was parody, but... If it wasn't... Woo boy.

Could have just stuck out to me because I'm a mathematician.

Anyway, worst depiction of science in fiction might be hard to do. I tend to ignore science babble in movies because paying attention to it usually just means I can choose to nitpick a movie's inner world if I really wanted to. And that's pointless, because it's way too easy to mess stuff like that up on accident. It can get very silly, though, like in 2012's mutating neutrinos (I'm sure the writers of that just read about the solar neutrino problem and probably thought their explanation was based on that). Choosing what science words to choose for their a justification for the plot isn't usually important for most movies anyway. The fact that I could probably come up with more believable science-flavored nonsense than some random writer I never met usually has no direct bearing on whether the writer's skill at general storytelling is good. Although I think the best writers tend to avoid producing science-babble.

I think I'll say the worst depiction is every time science is represented as engineering superpowers. Because probably 99% of scientist characters are just Superpowered-Engineer-Gal/Dude. Because instant-epiphany knowledge and immediate engineering knowhow is about as far removed from real science as you can get. But that informs the general public's notions of what to expect a scientist, and by extension all science, to be like.

Since this is an extremely common trend to treat science as nothing but a specific branch of wizardry, I nominate just about every random action blockbuster movie from the last few decades for this. But has anyone else ever seen Voyage Dans La Lune? The moon has a face. They go there and back in a few minutes. No spacesuits are worn. People are living on the moon. Impractical rayguns. Absolutely atrocious.

[Bavarian itP]

The human batteries thing from the Matrix.

That is not at all a problem. Humans darkening the sun (somehow) because machines run on solar power, that's the problem. Because humans run (indirectly) on solar power too.

[Khedrac]

Honourable mention goes to Evolution...

[Kantaki]

Honourable mention goes to Evolution...

Wasn't that a shampoo ad?:smalltongue:

[Kitten Champion]

Gonna have to say The Day After Tomorrow -- the Roland Emmerich disaster movie about climate change. There have been more absurd depictions of science certainly, but it made a very real and urgent issue in our world seem like it was not much different than the alien invasion from Independence Day or the trite silliness of The Core. Just another Hollywood spectacle disaster that's really hard to take seriously when your characters are being literally chased by cold like it was a Ring Wraith or something.

I mean, Emmerich meant well, he usually does... but maybe this wasn't the subject for him to tackle?

[Sermil]

The one that probably bothered me the most was the scene in Gravity where Kowalski (George Clooney) is about to heroically detach the cable that's attaching him to Dr. Stone, so at least one of them can survive, and there's clearly tension on the cable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYDaIyfitn8

Which makes no sense, he should have just snapped back towards the ISS as soon as they reached the end of the tethers.

I know it's not the most egregious bad science in a movie, but it stood out because Gravity is otherwise pretty careful to show fairly realistic zero-g maneuvering and physics, so it really stood out when they suddenly abandoned the realistic for "high tension on a line so that we can have a dramatic moment". I vaguely recall that not 10 minutes earlier, the movie was showing Dr. Stone getting snapped forward on that same line every time she reached the end of it, and it not having tension for more than a moment.

(And yes, I'm aware that there were a few other places where the movie played loose with orbital mechanics, but they were subtle, off-screen things. The rope tension was very obvious and on-screen.)

That's always bothered me more than, I dunno, Bruce Banner obviously doubling in mass because he gets angry. Marvel isn't trying to be realistic. Gravity is.

[LibraryOgre]

No love for Tugg Speedman's Scorcher hexalogy?

[Traab]

Two Hackers One Keyboard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ) Probably one of the best ever hilarious representations of what hacking is and trying to stop it... by having two people typing on the same keyboard at the same time.

[mucat]

One of my personal anti-favorites is Interstellar. Not that they did a terrible job with the whole General Relativity theme -- though they didn't do a great job either; Kip Thorne must have been pulling his hair out to hear the film's PR crew boasting about his participation, even though they obviously rarely took his advice -- but the characters of all the scientists in the film were awful.

Zero curiosity, zero creative problem-solving, zero drive for adventure or discovery, and a general sense that none of them actually liked doing science. They passively accepted problem after problem as unsolvable except in one specific, contrived way that would advance the plot...and then, whenever that failed too, admitted glumly that yeah, the plan had an obvious flaw they could have seen coming at any time.

Whole plot lines were built around the assumption, unquestioned in-universe, that scientists do not actually care about science unless they have a specific emotional stake in the outcome. (Apparently they will, grudgingly and with much whining, do science to build a better future for their own children, but never for the simple thrill of discovery.)

The one scientist, offscreen for much of the movie, who they all talked about in awed tones as "the best of us" turned out, when we finally met him, to be yet another bored and boring whiner. "Yeah, I suppose after decades out of touch we could talk about what we've both discovered. But none of us actually care. Why don't you listen instead to my trite monologue about family and memory, while ignoring all signs of the next easily preventable catastrophe."

[Yora]

The dumbest thing I heard of are certainly mutating neutrinos.

The dumbest thing that I actually saw myself are probably the human batteries. (Whatever you use to feed the humans would get you more energy if you just burn it as fuel.) Which is unfortunate, because human brains as computer processors at least make hypothetical sense.

[Traab]

The dumbest thing I heard of are certainly mutating neutrinos.

The dumbest thing that I actually saw myself are probably the human batteries. (Whatever you use to feed the humans would get you more energy if you just burn it as fuel.) Which is unfortunate, because human brains as computer processors at least make hypothetical sense.

Or at least its the kind of thing we cant already prove is stupid and wrong as we dont really have a way to wire up vast herds of humans into a network for processing power. But we DO know about the energy potential of humans and the cost involved.

[Knaight]

That is not at all a problem. Humans darkening the sun (somehow) because machines run on solar power, that's the problem. Because humans run (indirectly) on solar power too.
Darkening the sun pretty much just means increasing atmospheric albedo - which is not only very doable, but something that appears to have been done. It's an extreme scorched earth strategy that invites comparisons to chemotherapy (kill everyone, kill them slightly faster), but this part makes sense. Meanwhile the thermodynamics involved in humans as a heat source make no sense whatsoever.


The same could be said of every work of fiction ever, by virtue of it being fiction, what’s your point?
They can set different expectations for hardness though, and something based on an actual picture book for children sets an expectation looser than something like Star Wars, which sets expectations looser than The Expanse, which sets expectations looser than The Martian, which sets expectations looser than "The Cold Equations". A lot of the more egregious cases are less about the absolute hardness and more about the extent to which they set expectations of hardness and then profoundly fail to meet them.

Which brings me to What The Bleep Do We Know. It may or may not qualify, as the people who made it were under the impression they weren't making fiction, but it's a train wreck of a "documentary". Highlights include interpreting the observer effect in quantum mechanics as involving actual consciousness, interpreting different magnifications of the same crystal structure as different crystal structures (which then got tied into the failure to understand the observer effect), and then somehow managing to present psychology even less fact based than their physics. The bonus part of this for me personally was seeing this at school, presented for educational purposes - and not in the context of practice dismantling ridiculous nonsense.

Claiming dramatizations of actual real science as your standard and then managing levels of blatantly incorrect that make actual fantasy series based on, say, historical alchemy look scientific by comparison is about as big a gap as you can create.

[JadedDM]

These are all great examples, but for me, personally, the stuff that really chaps my hide are the things that almost every work of fiction gets wrong, to the point that laypeople start to believe that is how the science actually works, and it even influences their judgment on things.

For instance, cloning. Almost every work of fiction depicts cloning as basically xeroxing a living being. Thus, a clone made from me would be a fully grown adult, with all my memories and personality, and would likely even believe he was the original JadedDM and I was the clone. And as a result, I've had arguments with people who think cloning should forever remain outlawed, because they sincerely think that if human cloning were possible, identity theft cases would go through the roof, and anyone who wants to and can pick another person's hair out of a comb and make as many duplicates of that person as they want.

That sort of thing.

[KillianHawkeye]

These are all great examples, but for me, personally, the stuff that really chaps my hide are the things that almost every work of fiction gets wrong, to the point that laypeople start to believe that is how the science actually works, and it even influences their judgment on things.

For instance, cloning. Almost every work of fiction depicts cloning as basically xeroxing a living being. Thus, a clone made from me would be a fully grown adult, with all my memories and personality, and would likely even believe he was the original JadedDM and I was the clone. And as a result, I've had arguments with people who think cloning should forever remain outlawed, because they sincerely think that if human cloning were possible, identity theft cases would go through the roof, and anyone who wants to and can pick another person's hair out of a comb and make as many duplicates of that person as they want.

That sort of thing.

This is one that Star Wars shockingly got right. All of the Jango Fett clones were genetically altered to achieve adulthood in a handful of years (unlike Boba Fett, an unaltered clone, who grew at regular speed), they all had individual identities, and had to be educated (indoctrinated) by the cloners to fulfill their job as soldiers. All in all, pretty realistic.

[Mechalich]

They can set different expectations for hardness though, and something based on an actual picture book for children sets an expectation looser than something like Star Wars, which sets expectations looser than The Expanse, which sets expectations looser than The Martian, which sets expectations looser than "The Cold Equations". A lot of the more egregious cases are less about the absolute hardness and more about the extent to which they set expectations of hardness and then profoundly fail to meet them.


Pretty much this.

Ultimately misuse of science has to do with the verisimilitude of the work in question. Does the misuse of science break the suspension of disbelief necessary to make the piece function? In something like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs the answer is pretty much always no, because the suspension of disbelief necessary already requires you to accept blatant absurdities, such that any errors with regard to actually extant phenomena are irrelevant because its a gonzo fantasy reality anyway.

It also matters how important any specific plot point is to the overall narrative. The 'humans as batteries' issue from the Matrix is such an egregious example because it's foundational to the entire setup. Once you realize it makes no sense the whole structure of the world collapses. That's different from say, Spock somehow observing the destruction of Vulcan propagating at faster than light speed in Star Trek (2009), which merely breaks a single shot in the film.

[Lurkmoar]

The Core.

All of it.

You beat me to it.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Does the misuse of science break the suspension of disbelief necessary to make the piece function? In something like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs the answer is pretty much always no,

Maybe not for you, but I was twitching every time it got brought up in-movie. :smallannoyed: If it had been a throw-away gag it would have been fine, but with the entire plot hinging on such eye-gougingly bad science it was badly distracting.

[OracleofWuffing]

In really quick terms, Phantasy Star Online had "Photon Weaponry." If you dug real hard and sniffed the right corners, the premise of which is that they use a chain or emission of accelerated photons, so they do damage by moving faster than the speed of light and touching something. That's not the bad part. I enjoy it's sequel, Phantasy Star Online 2, but hoo boy does it have rough edges: Photons are now abundantly omnipresent particles which are controlled by emotions.
Photons are also capable of achieving sentience and forming a living creature based off of the memories of an ancient person.

At least there's a Photon Wave attack...

[warty goblin]

In really quick terms, Phantasy Star Online had "Photon Weaponry." If you dug real hard and sniffed the right corners, the premise of which is that they use a chain or emission of accelerated photons, so they do damage by moving faster than the speed of light and touching something. That's not the bad part. I enjoy it's sequel, Phantasy Star Online 2, but hoo boy does it have rough edges: Photons are now abundantly omnipresent particles which are controlled by emotions.
Photons are also capable of achieving sentience and forming a living creature based off of the memories of an ancient person.

At least there's a Photon Wave attack...

I mean photons are pretty abundant in the grand scheme of things. And if you're a bioluminescent fish, also controlled by your fishy fishy feelings.

Under no circumstances however are they going faster than the speed of light. Scientifically speaking, that's sort of always a real no-no.

[Ramza00]

Not quite science, but the thing that came to my mind immediately was the high school class in Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie) giving students ethics homework and treating morality like it was a branch of mathematics, where moral conclusions can be derived from self-evident first principles and just lead to a perfect and absolute moral system. For some reason, I took that reading as a genuine belief of the author and not parody. I haven't bothered to re-read it to check again if it was parody, but... If it wasn't... Woo boy.

Could have just stuck out to me because I'm a mathematician.


Starship Troopers (1997 Film) is a Paul Verhoeven directed movie (you are probably also familiar with him for Robocop) critiques of society and culture is what he does. Once can use the word "satire" but satire is not exactly the right word for it. There is a great 2020 retrospective of Starship Troopers in the New Yorker by David Roth. I am not linking to these things for it is probably best not to go too deep for we have rules about real world events, politics, etc and things that critique / satire real world things will probably make us start talking about the real / original things that inspired the cultural critique.

-----

Note Starship Troopers is loosely based on the idea of a Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers (1959.) I say loosely for the Director and the Writter of the film never finished reading it. Heinlein has some politics in the real world, but he also advances similar but different politics in that book, but also illustrates that those politics were kind of destructive to the main character even if the book simultaneously celebrates them.

It is complicated and I am dropping this stuff now :smalltongue:

(I like / love the 1997 Film.)



I mean, Emmerich meant well, he usually does... but maybe this wasn't the subject for him to tackle?

The Patriot was not the right subject for him to tackle for other reasons. I adore the Stargate and Independence Day movies but simultaneously he helped make alien conspiracies and shadow government distrust more popular.

Real world consequences being affected by his movies are often a side effect that can't be limited to a single movie that he made. (But hey I got SG1 out of all this, so *shrug* it is a mixed bag.)

[Accelerator]

Maybe not for you, but I was twitching every time it got brought up in-movie. :smallannoyed: If it had been a throw-away gag it would have been fine, but with the entire plot hinging on such eye-gougingly bad science it was badly distracting.
It's a cartoon where meatballs and spaghetti fall from the sky. I think the walking tv already clued the watchers that there will be no science. Only fantasy

[Brother Oni]

Technically not science (it's compliance), but anything involving the pharmaceutical industry, clinical trials and generally anything involving how medicines are made, tested and authorised for sale.

Most egregious was in the TV series Leverage, where the main protagonist figured out a pharmaceutical company was re-using a previously failed drug after 5 seconds of looking at the drug's chemical structure on the company's promotional material. Although to be honest, if the marketing guys are that stupid, the company deserves to be shut down.

About the only two things I've seen that accurately represent the process are:

The West Wing, when they discuss a company price gouging a product that costs cents to make, which is immediately countered by that the second pill costs cents but the first cost $35 million (although that figure is normally north of $350 million these days)
The Fugitive film when Tommy Lee Jones' character realises that pharma company involved is a massive multi-billion dollar company and calls it a monster (big pharma is quite scary when you look at the scope of what they're involved in - the largest is just behind Apple in the list of top 50 companies by revenue).


That said, big pharma haven't done much to dissuade people that they're not big and evil, especially when their CEOs have come out with comments worthy of the best cartoon moustache twirling villains (see Nexavar and the then Bayer CEO).

[Altair_the_Vexed]

The one that probably bothered me the most was the scene in Gravity where Kowalski (George Clooney) is about to heroically detach the cable that's attaching him to Dr. Stone, so at least one of them can survive, and there's clearly tension on the cable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYDaIyfitn8

Which makes no sense, he should have just snapped back towards the ISS as soon as they reached the end of the tethers.

I know it's not the most egregious bad science in a movie, but it stood out because Gravity is otherwise pretty careful to show fairly realistic zero-g maneuvering and physics, so it really stood out when they suddenly abandoned the realistic for "high tension on a line so that we can have a dramatic moment". I vaguely recall that not 10 minutes earlier, the movie was showing Dr. Stone getting snapped forward on that same line every time she reached the end of it, and it not having tension for more than a moment.

(And yes, I'm aware that there were a few other places where the movie played loose with orbital mechanics, but they were subtle, off-screen things. The rope tension was very obvious and on-screen.)

That's always bothered me more than, I dunno, Bruce Banner obviously doubling in mass because he gets angry. Marvel isn't trying to be realistic. Gravity is.
Yes, but they haven't reached the end of their tethers, have they? They're still moving, and the parachute is slowly taking up the tension, because it's a loose tangle of cords and cloth, rather than a single line designed to be used as a tether.

Everyone bashes this scene in particular, but in the wide shots, you can clearly see they're still moving - they have momentum. Clooney's character is the experienced astronaut, he knows that although they feel weightless, their momentum will get them both detached as the parachute cords are still unravelling - behind Bullock's character, where she can't see.

I saw that the first time I watched the movie, and I'm always surprised other science fans don't seem to have noticed. We're supposed to be observant, people.

[Rater202]

The entire moral ambiguity of the ending of The LAst of Us and pretty much the entire justification for the Last of Us Part II not being a horrible tragedy where the sociopathic villain gets away with murder is dependant on the idea that a surgeon can create a vaccine on the first try when he has no idea what he's working with and is actively planning to destroy the source for a potential vaccine in the process of studying it.

1: The very fact that the surgeon is planning this is proof that he has no idea what he's doing and is grossly unqualified to do any kind of research at all: The first rule of science is "don't destroy the thing you're studying, especially if you can't get more." Followed by "all experiments much be repeatable and tested multiple times to ensure accurate and precise data" which can't happen if you destroyed the only one of the things you're studying in existence.

In other words, clearly this surgeon failed science class in high school.

2: Beyond that: You can only make so much of a vaccine at a time. Even if successful, he'd maybe have enough for a dozen people.

3: Vaccines don't work that way. You can't vaccinate against a fungal infection.

4: What no one seems to get in stories like this is that a vaccine only stops someone from becoming a zombie, it doesn't stop them from being eaten by zombies and that's the bigger concern. Coming back as a zombie is really only an issue is if you get attacked and survive.

5: Ellie's immunity is becuase she's already infected with a benign strain of the fungus so the parasitic strain can't take root. It is explicitly stated that they've tested her blood and it is saturated with fungal spores. You don't need to cut out Ellie's still living brain and dissect it t study the fungus growing in it, just culture it from the spores in her blood you ****ing moron!.

Infect rats or another human analogwith spores extracted from Ellie's blood, study the pathology in rats, and then dissect them to see what happened. Repeat, introduce differing variables one at a fricking time until you're pretty sure you have rats that are immune, expose them to the parasitic strain to see if they're infected, repeat from step one as often as needed until you can make immune rats, then repeated the perfected process on human volunteers(actual healthy adult volunteers who know the risks, not children that you did it to without asking while they were out cold and helpless, ya goddamn sociopaths) to see if it will take.

If it is possible to replicate Ellie's immunity, approaching the process rationally and ethically while following the scientific method is far, far, far more likely to get results than murdering a child.

(It also assumes that a group of terrorists who screw over people they've made deals with and are willing to murder a child would be willing to share what little vaccine they have instead of hoarding it for themselves if they pull a blasphemous unholy child-murder powered anti-miracle out of their ass, but that's more socioplagy and I assume that we're focused more on the hard sciences here.)

That goes for every media where fatally vivisecting, or murdering and then disecting, the only source of the wrid biology thing to figure out how it works.

Not only is it immoral, it is scientifically unethical and just utterly stupid.

It's one thing to discect a member of an alien species that came to Earth as part of a hostile militerisic invasion force if you've already killed it in battle and want to figure out where to aim your guns or if issuing special bullets would be cost effective.

It's something else entirely to kidnap and murder a friendly alien or mutant superhero for... Hell if I know the reason beyond "for science."

Even ignoring the lack of morality and ethics involved, I garruntee you that there's nothing you can learn from doing that that makes up for the loss of the subject you destroyed in the process of the vivisection.

[Yora]

Speaking of cloning complete copies of people. When was the last time anyone has seen that being done in a movie or show? All the examples I can think of are from the 90s.
I think since then it has become common knowledge that clones are just time delayed twins. I don't remember seing memory cloning in ages.

[Kitten Champion]

It is plausible to vaccinate against fungal infections. Such vaccines have been pursued by much of big pharma, though one has yet to succeed past early clinical stages.

There's been one in the works (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42517-y) for Candida which has shown promise, but... ya'know, vaccine development takes time.

[Rater202]

Speaking of cloning complete copies of people. When was the last time anyone has seen that being done in a movie or show? All the examples I can think of are from the 90s.
I think since then it has become common knowledge that clones are just time delayed twins. I don't remember seing memory cloning in ages.
It still gets used by Marvel Comics, by Mister Sinister and the Jackal... But they're kind of grandfathered in and, at least in universe it's mentioned that it's the specific methodologies they use to make clones that result in memory carry-over.

It is plausible to vaccinate against fungal infections. Such vaccines have been pursued by much of big pharma, though one has yet to succeed past early clinical stages.

There's been one in the works (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42517-y) for Candida which has shown promise, but... ya'know, vaccine development takes time.

Okay. Dos that invalidate anything else I said about the completely lack of scientific anything int he plan to murder a fourteen-year-old and try to make a vaccine after destroying the one and only source of the non-parasitic version of the fungus?

[Khedrac]

There's also the new-series Dr Who epsiode where the lab handing a really deadly disease has an automatic vent into the atmosphere protocol for emergencies! I mean, why bother with a bio-hazard lab in the first place...

[Kitten Champion]

Okay. Dos that invalidate anything else I said about the completely lack of scientific anything int he plan to murder a fourteen-year-old and try to make a vaccine after destroying the one and only source of the non-parasitic version of the fungus?

If you're criticizing them for their lack of scientific understanding? A little.

Also,


April 28th. Marlene was right. The girl's infection is like nothing I've ever seen. The cause of her immunity is uncertain. As we've seen in all past cases, the antigenic titers of the patient's Cordyceps remain high in both the serum and the cerebrospinal fluid. Blood cultures taken from the patient rapidly grow Cordyceps in fungal-media in the lab... however white blood cell lines, including percentages and absolute-counts, are completely normal. There is no elevation of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and an MRI of the brain shows no evidence of fungal-growth in the limbic regions, which would normally accompany the prodrome of aggression in infected patients.

Is the only explanation given for her immunity, which is to say they don't know. Nothing about benign spores in any source that I can find.

[Giggling Ghast]

That is not at all a problem. Humans darkening the sun (somehow) because machines run on solar power, that's the problem. Because humans run (indirectly) on solar power too.

I don’t think they affected the sun, but instead blackened the skies. That’s actually more plausible than the “human battery” plot device, since climate engineering is an actual thing.

And while it would obviously be detrimental to life on Earth, I think humanity only “scorched the skies“ when it became clear the machines would win the war and the human race was doomed.

[Rater202]

If you're criticizing them for their lack of scientific understanding? A little.

Also,



Is the only explanation given for her immunity, which is to say they don't know. Nothing about benign spores in any source that I can find.

They are still going to destroy the onl source of the benign form of the fungus in the process of studying it.

the project is still being done by a surgeon who sees nothing wrong with murdering a child(a gross violation of the Hippocratic oath) who doesn't understand basic scientific concepts like "don't destroy the thing you're studying" and "seriously, it's the only one and you explicitly don't know how it works, don't destroy it" instead of anyone even remotely qualified to try and make a vaccine.

Also, the line "as we have seen in all past cases" is a qualifier that means he is currently talking about the ways in which Ellie is like previous infected that have been studied.

Like all previous infected subjects, Ellie has high levels of cordyceps antigens in her (blood) serum and cerebrospinal fluid and samples of her blood, when exposed to fungal growing media, rapidly grow crodyceps, which is the indication that her blood is saturated with fungal spores.

He then goes on to describe the ways that her infection is differant.

Look. Ellie was, per the DLC story in the first game, infected by a completly ordinary bite from an ordinary infected. Either the fungus mutated after she was bitten, inwhich case killing her is stupid becuase it would destroy the neign fungus... Or Ellie herself has a genetic mutation that makes the fungus not fully infect her, inqhich case her immunity can't be replicated by cutting her brain out, you'd need to sequence her genome, figure out what combination of genes made her immune, and then give up becuase gene therapy that extreme is currently impossible.

Eitherway, there's no point in cutting out her brain. In one it's completely pointless in the other it's actively harming your chances of success.

I'm assuming it's the fungus, because that means it might actually be possible to replicate, but if it's Ellie then he goes from being an utter moron to murdering a child for literally no reason.

[Vahnavoi]

Whether it's Life, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant etc., it seems that everyone in sci-fi horror is completely incapable of following basic work safety protocols. How hard is it to wear a helmet? Or just keep it on? You're visiting an exoplanet, even if the air is theoretically breathable, you don't want to contaminate the surroundings with your own microbial life! Sheesh. And what's with the tendency to break quarantine? Good Christ!

It often looks like whoever's in charge of recruiting these people specifically picks the least competent, over-emotional, over-gullible morons.

[Fyraltari]

There's also the new-series Dr Who epsiode where the lab handing a really deadly disease has an automatic vent into the atmosphere protocol for emergencies! I mean, why bother with a bio-hazard lab in the first place...

Well since someone brought Doctor who up...

So, four daleks (a species of spece alien nazis) realize that their creed of being the ultimate life form is flawed since they keep losing. To try to shake things up they inject human DNA in their leader (he actually consumes a whole guy and merge with him). As this initial test looks successful (the guy claims to be experiencing more hatred than before which is good for the daleks) they decide to inject human captives with dalek DNA to turn them into human-daleks. However when the dalek-human start to feel compassion and realize they're the bad guys, the other daleks decide to go behind his back and completely replace the captives' DNA with dalek DNA. This is (apparently) successful as they have a bunch of robotic-acting humans. However they refuse to obey their orders to EX-TER-MI-NATE the daleks' ennemies. Turns out that's because our hero, The Doctor (himself an alien of the Time Lord species) hugged the lightning rod that powers the daleks' DNA injecting machine ans so transmitted a pinch of his DNA to the human-daleks thus giving them a conscience.

So not only are the subjects completely human looking despite having no human DNA whatsoever, not only does conscience originate from your DNA (despite the dalek's 24/7 life supports having machine messing with their brains to ensure they stay unable to feel anything but hatred) but DNA is carried by electricity.

And you want to know the best part? The lightning rod didn't even conduct electricity! It attracted solar winds!


I'm generally forgiving of bad science in Doctor Who because it's not hard science at all, but that was the resolution to the episode.

[Peelee]

Well since someone brought Doctor who up...

So, four daleks (a species of spece alien nazis) realize that their creed of being the ultimate life form is flawed since they keep losing. To try to shake things up they inject human DNA in their leader (he actually consumes a whole guy and merge with him). As this initial test looks successful (the guy claims to be experiencing more hatred than before which is good for the daleks) they decide to inject human captives with dalek DNA to turn them into human-daleks. However when the dalek-human start to feel compassion and realize they're the bad guys, the other daleks decide to go behind his back and completely replace the captives' DNA with dalek DNA. This is (apparently) successful as they have a bunch of robotic-acting humans. However they refuse to obey their orders to EX-TER-MI-NATE the daleks' ennemies. Turns out that's because our hero, The Doctor (himself an alien of the Time Lord species) hugged the lightning rod that powers the daleks' DNA injecting machine ans so transmitted a pinch of his DNA to the human-daleks thus giving them a conscience.

So not only are the subjects completely human looking despite having no human DNA whatsoever, not only does conscience originate from your DNA (despite the dalek's 24/7 life supports having machine messing with their brains to ensure they stay unable to feel anything but hatred) but DNA is carried by electricity.

And you want to know the best part? The lightning rod didn't even conduct electricity! It attracted solar winds!


I'm generally forgiving of bad science in Doctor Who because it's not hard science at all, but that was the resolution to the episode.

"it's not hard science" is a bit overly generous (https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=4043). :smallwink:

[Brother Oni]

"it's not hard science" is a bit overly generous (https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=4043). :smallwink:

It has however, given the best phrase ever to describe how time travel works (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2nNzNo_Xps).

[Ramza00]

Speaking of cloning complete copies of people. When was the last time anyone has seen that being done in a movie or show? All the examples I can think of are from the 90s.
I think since then it has become common knowledge that clones are just time delayed twins. I don't remember seing memory cloning in ages.

Battlestar Galactica remake.

But you are correct we are getting different stories now a days, with different tropes. Lot more "groundhog day" type stuff.

[Fyraltari]

"it's not hard science" is a bit overly generous (https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=4043). :smallwink:

Oh no! People are enjoying a show that, you, personally, do not like! Do you
A) Accept that différent people like different things or
B) make a comic calling them stupid with no standards and put it on the internet?

If you chose B, congratulations! Nobody outside of your echo chamber will care!

Seriously, I enjoy SMBC, but this one isn’t the comic’s high point.

[Psyren]

That is not at all a problem. Humans darkening the sun (somehow) because machines run on solar power, that's the problem. Because humans run (indirectly) on solar power too.

It's absolutely a problem because they keep the humans alive by feeding them other humans. Even with perfect energy transfer from the dead humans to the living ones, you can't create enough (any) excess energy for the machines that way.


Darkening the sun pretty much just means increasing atmospheric albedo - which is not only very doable, but something that appears to have been done. It's an extreme scorched earth strategy that invites comparisons to chemotherapy (kill everyone, kill them slightly faster), but this part makes sense. Meanwhile the thermodynamics involved in humans as a heat source make no sense whatsoever.

Yeah, that.

[Sapphire Guard]

Bonus point re TLOU: Being quiet shouldn't hide you from echolocation.

[Ramza00]

It's absolutely a problem because they keep the humans alive by feeding them other humans. Even with perfect energy transfer from the dead humans to the living ones, you can't create enough (any) excess energy for the machines that way.



Yeah, that.

Yeah to my understanding with the animatrix and fan theories that there is not a single machine "goal" where all the machines are unified around, instead there are machines factions and one of those factions is they respect the elder humans, their parents, and the matrix goal is to preserve humans in a wildlife preserve / zoo / assistance living center for humans are like their elderly parents and no longer can be trusted to live a free life without hurting the machines or the greater environment.

Yet not all machines feel this way, and thus people like Agent Smith think this goal is antithetical to perfection. You are keeping ants around for you identify somewhat with antsthe humans as ancestors.

Likewise the battery story is told by Morpheus who does not understand The Purpose of The Matrix (as evident by the 2nd movie in the trilogy) and Morpheus is a false prophet who is trying to be logical with the perceptions he can see but he is not seeing the entire thing and thus his explanation of the order of things is just flat out wrong. He is explaining the demiurge without understanding the logos that created the demiurge, and thus he gets lots of stuff wrong. Then again the machines such as Smith, the Merovingian, even the Architect get stuff wrong too for there is not a unified goal that unites all the machines and creates the order. Each individual machine which has free will (and not all machines have free will) can have their own different goals and thus showing Machine Families in the 3rd movie, and the fact Machines can rebel in the 2nd movie (the oracle speech but also Agent Smith choosing not to be deleted / recompiled) means there is no ultimate order but there may be beauty in this chaos for things can transform and be different than our goals and expectations, we can be surprised in this machine dominated world and this is what gives The Oracle and some other machines hope.

[Vinyadan]

Whether it's Life, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant etc., it seems that everyone in sci-fi horror is completely incapable of following basic work safety protocols. How hard is it to wear a helmet? Or just keep it on? You're visiting an exoplanet, even if the air is theoretically breathable, you don't want to contaminate the surroundings with your own microbial life! Sheesh. And what's with the tendency to break quarantine? Good Christ!

It often looks like whoever's in charge of recruiting these people specifically picks the least competent, over-emotional, over-gullible morons.
I haven't seen Life, but I think these movies could be used to teach about safety on the workplace.

Jurassic Park: The Lost World: Incompetence kills.

Prometheus: Always wear your personal protective equipment.

Alien: Covenant: Do not improvise.

[Psyren]

*snip*

I don't particularly care whether Morpheus' explanation was erroneous or not; it was still a depiction of bad science in a fictional work that went unquestioned by said work, so I brought it up here.


Whether it's Life, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant etc., it seems that everyone in sci-fi horror is completely incapable of following basic work safety protocols. How hard is it to wear a helmet? Or just keep it on? You're visiting an exoplanet, even if the air is theoretically breathable, you don't want to contaminate the surroundings with your own microbial life! Sheesh. And what's with the tendency to break quarantine? Good Christ!

It often looks like whoever's in charge of recruiting these people specifically picks the least competent, over-emotional, over-gullible morons.

Yeah, Prometheus/AC were extremely bad too.

[dancrilis]

What's the worst depiction of science did you see in fiction?

That people who know how to use a computer are in fact mages capable of doing almost anything in the space of a half dozen keystrokes.

[Ramza00]

I haven't seen Life, but I think these movies could be used to teach about safety on the workplace.

Jurassic Park: The Lost World: Incompetence kills.


The funny thing about Jurassic Park: The Lost World is all the people there were smart enough to not make those mistakes, and they realized they made those mistakes and in a different mindset they would not make those mistakes.

But they were


distracted by other humans
distracted by their ideas
distracted by the things they value including their past exes
in awe of the dinosaurs
in awe of their own nobility for they are going to save everyone
yadda, yadda, yadda


And this combination of distraction and awe,this "Not Being Present", gets everyone killed. And as soon as they return to being present and mindful they dramatically reduced the danger and eventually tech was able to conquer nature again.

In some ways The Lost World is a better movie about Hubris than the first Jurassic Park. It was going to a place you never had mastery over and thinking you have mastery over it, not being present, and that thing eats you alive. And the reason all those people are "SLOPPY" even though they should know better is they did not have the presence of mind to use the knowledge which they actually possessed.

-----

I love this movie for precisely the reasons other people hate it. It is SO HUMAN and people who hate it think they would be super-competent for they are logicians or something. The scared 12 year old was the only one who was acting with sense for she was scared and realized she did not know much and thus was actually taking steps in order to be more safe.

I wonder if one of the reasons why I liked this movie for I too was a child of divorce.

[McNum]

This isn't as bad as what's already been posted, but the one I remember hurting my brain was Pacific Rim.

Specifically, the part where all of the mechs are taken out by an EMP blast, except the one used by the heroes because having a nuclear power source somehow made it "analog" and immune to an EMP? Sorry, no. All the rest of the computer equipment on that thing is still fried even if the power source still works. :smallsigh:
Funny thing is, they had a perfectly good excuse sitting right there. Gypsy Danger is a later generation nuclear powered Jaeger. Early Jaegers had nuclear reactors, but exposed pilots to radiation. GD therefore had generous amounts of radiation shielding installed, which is a perfectly serviceable excuse for how it can take an EMP hit and keep going. It's insulated.

Obviously that still has problems, but we're talking about a world where giant robots fight monsters. It'll do.

Now if you want to go for another Pacific Rim thing, there is that whole bit about how "No alloys!" is a good thing. Because clearly, it is not. And I don't think you could build anything like a Jaeger without some serious materials science and metallurgy happening.

[GrayDeath]

This isn't as bad as what's already been posted, but the one I remember hurting my brain was Pacific Rim.

Specifically, the part where all of the mechs are taken out by an EMP blast, except the one used by the heroes because having a nuclear power source somehow made it "analog" and immune to an EMP? Sorry, no. All the rest of the computer equipment on that thing is still fried even if the power source still works. :smallsigh:

Now THAT could ahve been explained by the mech being nuclear powered and hence VERY much radiaton shielded. And would have worked too....but...ah well.
it was a great bombast movie otherwise ^^


Whether it's Life, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant etc., it seems that everyone in sci-fi horror is completely incapable of following basic work safety protocols. How hard is it to wear a helmet? Or just keep it on? You're visiting an exoplanet, even if the air is theoretically breathable, you don't want to contaminate the surroundings with your own microbial life! Sheesh. And what's with the tendency to break quarantine? Good Christ!

It often looks like whoever's in charge of recruiting these people specifically picks the least competent, over-emotional, over-gullible morons.

Absolutely agreed.

Really, I WANTED to like the movies, but they were going about it (Interstellar has the same problem with "Oh, the planet orbits a black hole, no we wont scan for anything, we just land and overlook km high waves....ah dont get me STARTED) as freshly and unknowingly as if this was the fiorst season of Star Trek.

[comicshorse]

Multiple mentions of 'Doctor Who' and no mention of the WORST science episode. I do, of course, refer to ''Kill The Moon'. Where it is revealed the moon is a giant egg that is about to hatch a butterfly type creature which will devastate Earth. Luckily the Moon hatches a creature which instantly lays an egg the exact same size and mass as the Moon (because mass just can be wished into existence right ?) and flies off

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_the_Moon

[Peelee]

Oh no! People are enjoying a show that, you, personally, do not like! Do you
A) Accept that différent people like different things or
B) make a comic calling them stupid with no standards and put it on the internet?

If you chose B, congratulations! Nobody outside of your echo chamber will care!

Seriously, I enjoy SMBC, but this one isnÂ’t the comicÂ’s high point.

I don't recall Weinersmith calling anyone stupid with no standards. I recall him explaining why he doesn't like a show in a humorous context. Not much different than the headbrick comic, except that you enjoy what the former skewers and (I assume) do not care about what the latter skewers.


I don't particularly care whether Morpheus' explanation was erroneous or not; it was still a depiction of bad science in a fictional work that went unquestioned by said work, so I brought it up here.

IIRC originally the humans were supposed to be the processing power got the Matrix, not the energy source, but some high-up thought that would confuse people and wanted it changed.

I can't ever recall a source for that, though, so feel free to disbelieve.

[Divayth Fyr]

With that idea, why bother with humans in the first place? If the point of the farms is to keep up the Matrix that is used to keep the people in farms, seems like you could do without either ;)

[Giggling Ghast]

Well, presumably the Matrix would have had a different purpose if humans were the source of processing power, not energy.

[Ibrinar]

Oh no! People are enjoying a show that, you, personally, do not like! Do you
A) Accept that différent people like different things or
B) make a comic calling them stupid with no standards and put it on the internet?

If you chose B, congratulations! Nobody outside of your echo chamber will care!

Seriously, I enjoy SMBC, but this one isn’t the comic’s high point.

Guess when somebody recommends something with "get through the first 400 chapters and it gets good" I can't find it silly anymore. (Number isn't hyperbole but something I have seen in the last few days, readers really into reading translated chinese xianxia seem to develop lots of patience.) Honestly the comic is a pretty good description both of people recommending you go through lots of something until it finally gets good and of reading trashy stuff with elements you like. You learn to ignore the worse parts, grow fond of the characters, or well grow too annoyed and drop it. But going through enough of something not particularly good can work to a degree.

[Fyraltari]

Multiple mentions of 'Doctor Who' and no mention of the WORST science episode. I do, of course, refer to ''Kill The Moon'. Where it is revealed the moon is a giant egg that is about to hatch a butterfly type creature which will devastate Earth. Luckily the Moon hatches a creature which instantly lays an egg the exact same size and mass as the Moon (because mass just can be wished into existence right ?) and flies off

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_the_Moon
Ooh, don’t forget the giant microbes. In space.

I don't recall Weinersmith calling anyone stupid with no standards. I recall him explaining why he doesn't like a show in a humorous context. Not much different than the headbrick comic, except that you enjoy what the former skewers and (I assume) do not care about what the latter skewers.
No, the difference is that the Doctor Who comic consists purely of « this show is bad, but if you watch it long enough your standards of quality will lower ».The American football one, however, is not about the game itself or the people who enjoy it, but about the universities that spend a fortune on it for no adequate reasons and justify it by downplaying the very real danger it contains and using misleading language.

One comic is « this thing is bad and people who enjoy it are wrong » the other is « this behaviour is a dangerous and here are three arguments why ». The second comic’is a critique wrapped in a joke, the first is an insult wrapped in a joke.

Also it doesn’t have anything to do wether DW is hard or soft sci-fi so I am kind of puzzled Asnières to why you brought it up.

Guess when somebody recommends something with "get through the first 400 chapters and it gets good" I can't find it silly anymore. (Number isn't hyperbole but something I have seen in the last few days, readers really into reading translated chinese xianxia seem to develop lots of patience.) Honestly the comic is a pretty good description both of people recommending you go through lots of something until it finally gets good and of reading trashy stuff with elements you like. You learn to ignore the worse parts, grow fond of the characters, or well grow too annoyed and drop it. But going through enough of something not particularly good can work to a degree.
Thing is, most Doctor who fans will tell you that the Revival’s first season is one of the best and will actively discourage you from trying to watch all 700 episodes.
I have never met a fan claiming that it gets good once you get through X dozens of episode.

[Peelee]

No, the difference is that the Doctor Who comic consists purely of « this show is bad, but if you watch it long enough your standards of quality will lower ».The American football one, however, is not about the game itself or the people who enjoy it, but about the universities that spend a fortune on it for no adequate reasons and justify it by downplaying the very real danger it contains and using misleading language.

One comic is « this thing is bad and people who enjoy it are wrong » the other is « this behaviour is a dangerous and here are three arguments why ». The second comic’is a critique wrapped in a joke, the first is an insult wrapped in a joke.

Pretty sure the American football one is also specifically about the game itself and the people who enjoy it, and numerous other comics he has made could be read as insults wrapped in jokes if one were to be uncharitable about them all. I think this is a Chef-from-South-Park situation, really - the voice actor was fine with jokes aimed at things he did not particularly care about, but once there were jokes about things he did particularly care about, he suddenly became critical of the show.

[Rater202]

"Nuke it, it's the only way to be sure."

Unless it's explicitly the bad guy using the problem as an excuse or hoping to use the nuke to cover up evidence, chances are no, there are better options.

Let's look at Resident Evil, a franchise that uses the trope correctly.

There was a good reason to nuke Raccoon city: Between all known versions of Re2 and RE3, as well as the Outbreak games that take place in Raccoon city at the same time, it is established that the T-Virus has tainted the vast majority of the local water supply and infected most of the population. At least one zombie got out of quarantine. In addition to the zombies, there were powerful mutants, some born from the infection and some not, who were a lot harder to put down than the standard zombies: I have to imagine that people saw Nemesis Spider-Manning it's a way around the city in it's various forms in the REmake 3, or crap's sake. There were infected lions, alligators, and elephants from the zoo and those are gonna be harder... Ad finally, the T-Virus is known to infect everything, all kinds of animals and at least one kind of plant. If they'd left the city quarantined indefinitely then the possibility of mosquitos feeding on zombie blood and/or laying eggs in infected water come summon comes up... which could lead to giant mosquitos, mosquitoes that spread the virus, or god knows what else. Or if tainted water got ino the ground or, a nearby lake or river the infection could spread to a whole new city. Or worse.

It'd been weeks after the initial outbreak when the decision to nuke the city was made. By that point, the vast majority of the population was either infected or dead and anyone who reasonably could have gotten out had gotten the hell out of dodge. Even then, they gave at least 24 hours notice and aired broadcasts warning anyone who might be left to get the hell out becuase we are nuking the city and were willing to call off the nuking if a cure could be obtained.

I was impossible to contain the city indeifntly and they needed to be absolutely sure that a virus that infects everything and turns anything it infects into a man eating monster was completly sterilized.

Comparitivily: A dozen Xenomorphs? Doens't need to be nuked. Pautbreak of romero style shambling zombiens who don't infect everything and don't have super hunmn strength and go down to bullets? Doesn't need to be nuked. Especially if the infection doesn't spread through bite.

If it has to go through effort to spread the infection or parasite and dies to normal bullets, nuking it will cause more damage than it could possibly do in the time it would take a couple of strike teams to clear out the infestation.

[Fyraltari]

Pretty sure the American football one is also specifically about the game itself and the people who enjoy it, and numerous other comics he has made could be read as insults wrapped in jokes if one were to be uncharitable about them all. I think this is a Chef-from-South-Park situation, really - the voice actor was fine with jokes aimed at things he did not particularly care about, but once there were jokes about things he did particularly care about, he suddenly became critical of the show.

I don't know if he made several about American Football, I know only this one (https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2778), which is not about the game (how enjoyable it is, the rules, etc) but about the university culture surrounding it.

Also, you failed to adress the other point I made: one comic has actual fact-based arguments (the money spent, the damage done), the other is just "this show is bad".

You claiming that I am being unfair doesn't make it so. Because I am fine with people making fun of things I like, I make fun of things I like all the time. But there's a different between making fun of something and telling the people who enjoy that thing that they have no taste.

[Rater202]

I think this is a Chef-from-South-Park situation, really - the voice actor was fine with jokes aimed at things he did not particularly care about, but once there were jokes about things he did particularly care about, he suddenly became critical of the show.

Uhh. This isn't exactly accurate.

I don't want to get too into it becuase of the forum's rules on religion and politics and stuff, but Issac Hayes was supposedly fine with the jokes aimed at his particular group... Until he had a really bad stroke and was given a script to read while not quite in his right mind.

According to Hayes' son, Hayes' was in no condition to be taken serious and was just saying what he was told to say when he made those criticisms, and he didn't so much quit the show so much as people from his group quit for him and made threats to get Hayes' contract terminated.

There was a reason why the episode where they killed off Chef depicted him as being brainwashed by the group he fell into.

It's actually a messed up and very sad stroy.

[Peelee]

Uhh. This isn't exactly accurate.

I don't want to get too into it becuase of the forum's rules on religion and politics and stuff, but Issac Hayes was supposedly fine with the jokes aimed at his particular group... Until he had a really bad stroke and was given a script to read while not quite in his right mind.

According to Hayes' son, Hayes' was in no condition to be taken serious and was just saying what he was told to say when he made those criticisms, and he didn't so much quit the show so much as people from his group quit for him and he wasn't in a position to argue.

There was a reason why the episode where they killed off Chef depicted him as being brainwashed by the group he fell into.

I originally had a parentheses in which I noted that I would much rather use a different analogy but couldn't think of one offhand, and then replaced it with just being vague enough about it. However, I would still prefer a different analogy, for the reasons you note (which I was not aware of, thanks!).

I don't know if he made several about American Football, I know only this one (https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2778), which is not about the game (how enjoyable it is, the rules, etc) but about the university culture surrounding it.

Also, you failed to adress the other point I made: one comic has actual fact-based arguments (the money spent, the damage done), the other is just "this show is bad".

You claiming that I am being unfair doesn't make it so. Because I am fine with people making fun of things I like, I make fun of things I like all the time. But there's a different between making fun of something and telling the people who enjoy that thing that they have no taste.
First off, that one is obviously about badminton. Second off, that comic is a complete strawman argument by its very nature. Third off, the comic explicitly talks about issues with the sport and the viewers.

And yet you don't seem to have any issues with any of those issues. But you dislike when he makes a comic about Doctor Who. He's also taken on Superman no small amount of times, do you take issue with those? The Batman ones? Any of the ones where he basically points out how something is ridiculous in his opinion?

[Rater202]

I originally had a parentheses in which I noted that I would much rather use a different analogy but couldn't think of one offhand, and then replaced it with just being vague enough about it. However, I would still prefer a different analogy, for the reasons you note (which I was not aware of, thanks!).

It's actually really sad. On first viewing the episode looks petty and spiteful but when you know the whole story it becomes clear that Parker and Stone were just expressing their anger and grief over losing a friend becuase a third party took advantage of him when he was vulnerable.

[Peelee]

It's actually really sad. On first viewing the episode looks petty and spiteful but when you know the whole story it becomes clear that Parker and Stone were just expressing their anger and grief over losing a friend becuase a third party took advantage of him when he was vulnerable.

Sounds like it. Also is vaguely remniscient of the McDonalds Coffee court case in which a party with vast coffers can control the narrative for the general public.

[Sapphire Guard]

"Nuke it, it's the only way to be sure."

Unless it's explicitly the bad guy using the problem as an excuse or hoping to use the nuke to cover up evidence, chances are no, there are better options.

Let's look at Resident Evil, a franchise that uses the trope correctly.

There was a good reason to nuke Raccoon city: Between all known versions of Re2 and RE3, as well as the Outbreak games that take place in Raccoon city at the same time, it is established that the T-Virus has tainted the vast majority of the local water supply and infected most of the population. At least one zombie got out of quarantine. In addition to the zombies, there were powerful mutants, some born from the infection and some not, who were a lot harder to put down than the standard zombies: I have to imagine that people saw Nemesis Spider-Manning it's a way around the city in it's various forms in the REmake 3, or crap's sake. There were infected lions, alligators, and elephants from the zoo and those are gonna be harder... Ad finally, the T-Virus is known to infect everything, all kinds of animals and at least one kind of plant. If they'd left the city quarantined indefinitely then the possibility of mosquitos feeding on zombie blood and/or laying eggs in infected water come summon comes up... which could lead to giant mosquitos, mosquitoes that spread the virus, or god knows what else. Or if tainted water got ino the ground or, a nearby lake or river the infection could spread to a whole new city. Or worse.

It'd been weeks after the initial outbreak when the decision to nuke the city was made. By that point, the vast majority of the population was either infected or dead and anyone who reasonably could have gotten out had gotten the hell out of dodge. Even then, they gave at least 24 hours notice and aired broadcasts warning anyone who might be left to get the hell out becuase we are nuking the city and were willing to call off the nuking if a cure could be obtained.

I was impossible to contain the city indeifntly and they needed to be absolutely sure that a virus that infects everything and turns anything it infects into a man eating monster was completly sterilized.

Comparitivily: A dozen Xenomorphs? Doens't need to be nuked. Pautbreak of romero style shambling zombiens who don't infect everything and don't have super hunmn strength and go down to bullets? Doesn't need to be nuked. Especially if the infection doesn't spread through bite.

If it has to go through effort to spread the infection or parasite and dies to normal bullets, nuking it will cause more damage than it could possibly do in the time it would take a couple of strike teams to clear out the infestation.

Agreed on every point.

[Lord Raziere]

I have never met a fan claiming that it gets good once you get through X dozens of episode.

Well here is the thing: your talking about a western franchise. those reboot and do soft resets all the time. The Doctor's regeneration is specifically designed so that there is multiple jumping on points without worrying about what happened before, while also not really destroying continuity like DC constantly does.

when you get into anime, the situations different: in Naruto for example its one continuous journey and story for about 600+ chapters. the whole point is show this one character growing from an incompetent weak child to competent powerful adult. meaning you can't do the same reset thing you can do with many western characters, because those are often written in a static archetypical manner where all their childhood growth already happened and the story is about whatever they are doing when they're competent adults, and when thats done you can snap them back to their original competent adult status because Batman, The Doctor, Superman and so on we're originally written as competent adults. Naruto on the other starts off as incompetent weak child and his big powerful feats are end-game story stuff as well as his story being resolved by then. him resetting would mean resetting him back to being a child. therefore instead of doing that...they make an anime about his son, which will probably be just as long. the only anime character I've seen to be written like people like Superman or the Doctor is Ash Ketchum and people hate ash ketchum, because is constantly an incompetent child and being reset back to being one.

I imagine the same problem holds true for xianxia: the story is probably about how the protagonist grows and becomes competent with his power while also growing up a little, with their mastery tied to their character growth, because the story is about the character growing more competent, powerful and developing as a person. resetting is not an option because....that invalidates the entire story. The Doctor's stories on the other hand aren't tied to his growth as a person in particular: they're tied to him experiencing certain situations and how he deals with them whether he grows from it or not. his competence does not change.

Sorry but I don't pay attention to the science much in fiction to get angry over it...

[Fyraltari]

First off, that one is obviously about badminton. Second off, that comic is a complete strawman argument by its very nature. Third off, the comic explicitly talks about issues with the sport and the viewers.
And yet you don't seem to have any issues with any of those issues.
If you say so. The point remains however, that it goes further than "this thing is not enjoyable and the people who enjoy it are wrong".


But you dislike when he makes a comic about Doctor Who. He's also taken on Superman no small amount of times, do you take issue with those? The Batman ones?
I recall a number of comics where he makes fun of the characters of Batman and Superman. I recall none where he insults people for enjoying these characters and there stories. In fact he seems to enjoy them too, from what I can tell. Do you have a specific comic in mind that consists purely of "this comic book/movie/whatever is dumb and people liking it are wrong"? Because if he did, it would have been unbecoming of him, just as if he'd made the same about things I dislike such as association football, Twilight,South Park or the Matrix movies.

Any of the ones where he basically points out how something is ridiculous in his opinion?
I have no problem with him making fun of things he finds ridiculous. I just think that insulting people for liking a show you dislike is a complete waste of time.

This kind of negativity is all too common and the internet where people thinks it's acceptable to mock people for reading Twilight or watching Big bang Theory or whatever.

Frankly this whole thing is a non-issue, Weinersmith has made a comic that I think was bad. That doesn't invalidate all is other comics nor does it diminish my enjoyment of them nor does it make him a bad person or an unfunny comedian. Nobody hits the mark 100% of the time or with 100% of their audience.

[Psyren]

IIRC originally the humans were supposed to be the processing power got the Matrix, not the energy source, but some high-up thought that would confuse people and wanted it changed.

I can't ever recall a source for that, though, so feel free to disbelieve.

I had heard about the "neural net" justification too - but battery is what we got in the movie.


With that idea, why bother with humans in the first place? If the point of the farms is to keep up the Matrix that is used to keep the people in farms, seems like you could do without either ;)

Indeed, though this could be handwaved by simply making them shackled AI. If their purpose was something like World Peace, keeping all humans comatose in a dream world for eternity would achieve that.

[Traab]

"Nuke it, it's the only way to be sure."

Unless it's explicitly the bad guy using the problem as an excuse or hoping to use the nuke to cover up evidence, chances are no, there are better options.

Let's look at Resident Evil, a franchise that uses the trope correctly.

There was a good reason to nuke Raccoon city: Between all known versions of Re2 and RE3, as well as the Outbreak games that take place in Raccoon city at the same time, it is established that the T-Virus has tainted the vast majority of the local water supply and infected most of the population. At least one zombie got out of quarantine. In addition to the zombies, there were powerful mutants, some born from the infection and some not, who were a lot harder to put down than the standard zombies: I have to imagine that people saw Nemesis Spider-Manning it's a way around the city in it's various forms in the REmake 3, or crap's sake. There were infected lions, alligators, and elephants from the zoo and those are gonna be harder... Ad finally, the T-Virus is known to infect everything, all kinds of animals and at least one kind of plant. If they'd left the city quarantined indefinitely then the possibility of mosquitos feeding on zombie blood and/or laying eggs in infected water come summon comes up... which could lead to giant mosquitos, mosquitoes that spread the virus, or god knows what else. Or if tainted water got ino the ground or, a nearby lake or river the infection could spread to a whole new city. Or worse.

It'd been weeks after the initial outbreak when the decision to nuke the city was made. By that point, the vast majority of the population was either infected or dead and anyone who reasonably could have gotten out had gotten the hell out of dodge. Even then, they gave at least 24 hours notice and aired broadcasts warning anyone who might be left to get the hell out becuase we are nuking the city and were willing to call off the nuking if a cure could be obtained.

I was impossible to contain the city indeifntly and they needed to be absolutely sure that a virus that infects everything and turns anything it infects into a man eating monster was completly sterilized.

Comparitivily: A dozen Xenomorphs? Doens't need to be nuked. Pautbreak of romero style shambling zombiens who don't infect everything and don't have super hunmn strength and go down to bullets? Doesn't need to be nuked. Especially if the infection doesn't spread through bite.

If it has to go through effort to spread the infection or parasite and dies to normal bullets, nuking it will cause more damage than it could possibly do in the time it would take a couple of strike teams to clear out the infestation.

I agree with the resident evil argument, that was well done. I disagree with aliens. Keep in mind, nuking the site from orbit was suggested AFTER the marine kill squad tried and failed to contain the xenomorphs. The risk of further loss of life due to the presence of DOZENS of xenos, not just a dozen, plus further life lost in an effort to scour every square inch of this giant facility to find all the aliens AND eggs so the process cant repeat itself later, means just obliterating the entire infestation so nothing can survive is the safe option. And keep in mind its being suggested by the already traumatized ripley after facing even more aliens and seeing the marines get their butts kicked. She is neither military nor is she a company woman so her suggestion comes from not giving two wet farts about the bottom line of the company and wanting to take the simplest, safest course of action.

[Peelee]

If you say so. The point remains however, that it goes further than "this thing is not enjoyable and the people who enjoy it are wrong".


I recall a number of comics where he makes fun of the characters of Batman and Superman. I recall none where he insults people for enjoying these characters and there stories. In fact he seems to enjoy them too, from what I can tell. Do you have a specific comic in mind that consists purely of "this comic book/movie/whatever is dumb and people liking it are wrong"? Because if he did, it would have been unbecoming of him, just as if he'd made the same about things I dislike such as association football, Twilight,South Park or the Matrix movies.

I have no problem with him making fun of things he finds ridiculous. I just think that insulting people for liking a show you dislike is a complete waste of time.

This kind of negativity is all too common and the internet where people thinks it's acceptable to mock people for reading Twilight or watching Big bang Theory or whatever.

Frankly this whole thing is a non-issue, Weinersmith has made a comic that I think was bad. That doesn't invalidate all is other comics nor does it diminish my enjoyment of them nor does it make him a bad person or an unfunny comedian. Nobody hits the mark 100% of the time or with 100% of their audience.
Far be it from me to say he's thrown up nothing but gold. I'm not saying you shouldn't like some of his comics, I'm saying that the reason you're giving for not liking a specific comic is... interesting. He's not mocking fans. He's mocking the show, using two people talking about it as the medium to make the joke. He's not saying "fans are stupid for liking this." Except maybe the fans who act like the ones he is portraying. If that is not how you act, then I cannot see why you are upset about it.

In a similar vein, Ryan Johnson and several other notable people have gone off on how certain detractors of The Last Jedi are trolls and man-babies. I disliked The Last Jedi, yet I never felt like he was aiming any invective at me.

I had heard about the "neural net" justification too - but battery is what we got in the movie.
Oh, no argument that the "battery" part that made the cut was stupid. But it could have actually made sense.

[Fyraltari]

Far be it from me to say he's thrown up nothing but gold. I'm not saying you shouldn't like some of his comics, I'm saying that the reason you're giving for not liking a specific comic is... interesting. He's not mocking fans. He's mocking the show, using two people talking about it as the medium to make the joke. He's not saying "fans are stupid for liking this." Except maybe the fans who act like the ones he is portraying. If that is not how you act, then I cannot see why you are upset about it.

Ah, I think I see the disconnect. Let's dissect the frog, shall we?
we have two character one who is apparently watching DW for the first time and one who is apparently showing it to her. The first woman's initial reaction is "this show is terrible" which is answered with "of course it is." Stating that the bad quality of the show is not a question of opinion. The next two panels consist of the long time fan stating "You have to let it grind you down for a while. Let it lower your standards for plot, character, dialog and acting." Followed by stereotypical brainwashing speak ("Yes. Forget my child, all will be well.") This is stating that the show has subpar writing and acting and that the only way to enjoy it, is to have low expectation of those things. The next panel is the 10th Doctor providing an (exaggerated) example of the bad writing displayed by the show by stating "We can time-travel directly into the plot hole" not meant to represent any particular moment of the show but a "typical" resolution of an episode of the show. (The "" are here because a disspointingly high number of episodes don't actually use the time machine to solve the problem at hand.) The last panel consists of the new fan praising the cleverness of the bad writing with a pained expression on her face her standards for cleverness having been lowered by exposure to DW. The votey is one of the two (I'm actually not sure which) demanding "all of it." I'm guessing this is conveying the complete change of mind of the new fan?

So, what is Weinersmith saying here? That DW has bad writing, plot, dialog and characters, that, on some level, all fans of the show know this but watching the show has lowered their expectation of quality and that that is the only way to enjoy that show. So yes, he is definitely mocking the fans. And no, he isn't mocking some subgroup that has this behaviour rather than the whole fandom because if that was what he'd have contrasted that behaviour with that of more reasonable fans.

Like the second-to-last panel on itself is a good joke, and if the entire comic had been a parody of the show itself it probably would have been good. There's plenty to mock: the mary-sueness of the Doctor, the Britishness of absolutely everything, the weirdness of the plot, the bad special effects and costumes, etc. But the comic doesn't focus on the show, not even to say why it's bad, it focuses on the fans and judges them for liking the show.


Edit: If you have an alternate reading of that comic, I'm interested in reading it.

[Peelee]

Ah, I think I see the disconnect. Let's dissect the frog, shall we?
we have two character one who is apparently watching DW for the first time and one who is apparently showing it to her. The first woman's initial reaction is "this show is terrible" which is answered with "of course it is." Stating that the bad quality of the show is not a question of opinion. The next two panels consist of the long time fan stating "You have to let it grind you down for a while. Let it lower your standards for plot, character, dialog and acting." Followed by stereotypical brainwashing speak ("Yes. Forget my child, all will be well.") This is stating that the show has subpar writing and acting and that the only way to enjoy it, is to have low expectation of those things. The next panel is the 10th Doctor providing an (exaggerated) example of the bad writing displayed by the show by stating "We can time-travel directly into the plot hole" not meant to represent any particular moment of the show but a "typical" resolution of an episode of the show. (The "" are here because a disspointingly high number of episodes don't actually use the time machine to solve the problem at hand.) The last panel consists of the new fan praising the cleverness of the bad writing with a pained expression on her face her standards for cleverness having been lowered by exposure to DW. The votey is one of the two (I'm actually not sure which) demanding "all of it." I'm guessing this is conveying the complete change of mind of the new fan?

So, what is Weinersmith saying here? That DW has bad writing, plot, dialog and characters, that, on some level, all fans of the show know this but watching the show has lowered their expectation of quality and that that is the only way to enjoy that show. So yes, he is definitely mocking the fans. And no, he isn't mocking some subgroup that has this behaviour rather than the whole fandom because if that was what he'd have contrasted that behaviour with that of more reasonable fans.

Like the second-to-last panel on itself is a good joke, and if the entire comic had been a parody of the show itself it probably would have been good. There's plenty to mock: the mary-sueness of the Doctor, the Britishness of absolutely everything, the weirdness of the plot, the bad special effects and costumes, etc. But the comic doesn't focus on the show, not even to say why it's bad, it focuses on the fans and judges them for liking the show.


Edit: If you have an alternate reading of that comic, I'm interested in reading it.

I hate Romeo and Juliet. I think it's terrible. I had someone studying for an English degree, who loved Shakespeare, say, "of course it's terrible, that's the point!" I was able to divorce that one person from all other Shakespeare afficianados who believe that Romeo and Juliet is not terrible. Similarly, I am able to divorce the avid watcher in the comic, who exists solely to espouse Weinersmith's point of view, from all other Doctot Who fans.

[Fyraltari]

I hate Romeo and Juliet. I think it's terrible. I had someone studying for an English degree, who loved Shakespeare, say, "of course it's terrible, that's the point!" I was able to divorce that one person from all other Shakespeare afficianados who believe that Romeo and Juliet is not terrible. Similarly, I am able to divorce the avid watcher in the comic, who exists solely to espouse Weinersmith's point of view, from all other Doctot Who fans.

But that was an actual person you encounter in reality. That wasn't a fictional character in a comic trying to make a point. If you make a character that you define as belonging to a group and give that character characteristics you are implying that these characteristics are true of every member of that group. Especially when the situation that character is presented in is initiating another character into the group by transmitting these characterisitcs to them.

By the logic you present one could look at WWI French propaganda posters like say this one https://accrobac.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/fig-17.jpg and claim that the artist isn't trying to portray all Germans as a people of subhuman monsters because you can, without any prompt from the work itself, divorce the real German persons from the one who exists solely to push a political agenda.

[Peelee]

But that was an actual person you encounter in reality. That wasn't a fictional character in a comic trying to make a point. If you make a character that you define as belonging to a group and give that character characteristics you are implying that these characteristics are true of every member of that group. Especially when the situation that character is presented in is initiating another character into the group by transmitting these characterisitcs to them.

By the logic you present one could look at WWI French propaganda posters like say this one https://accrobac.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/fig-17.jpg and claim that the artist isn't trying to portray all Germans as a people of subhuman monsters because you can, without any prompt from the work itself, divorce the real German persons from the one who exists solely to push a political agenda.

How crowded do you want the comic to be? Would you like a disclaimer on it? Imean, you're comparing a comic to a propaganda poster. The two serve radically different functions. Dude thought "hey, i can make a joke about Doctor Who" and then drew it. There's no hidden agenda here.

Though I have to note that there's a good chance the hovertext was spot-on.

[Fyraltari]

How crowded do you want the comic to be? Would you like a disclaimer on it? Imean, you're comparing a comic to a propaganda poster. The two serve radically different functions. Dude thought "hey, i can make a joke about Doctor Who" and then drew it. There's no hidden agenda here.
Oh no, I agree the agenda isn't hidden at all. It's pretty clear that the point is calling DW fans people with no standards who like a bad show.

And no these don't serve two radically different functions: they're both caricatures, one's political and one is about a show the artist doesn't like that's the only difference. Caricature is very simple, you portray a member of your target group as being bad and by the simple fact of that character being the sole representative of their group you send the message that all members of that group are bad in the same way. Like that's the entire basis of representation.


Though I have to note that there's a good chance the hovertext was spot-on.
Maybe so. Though, frankly, I'd side with Weinersmith over anyone writing hatemail over comic on the internet any day.

[Keltest]

Oh no, I agree the agenda isn't hidden at all. It's pretty clear that the point is calling DW fans people with no standards who like a bad show.

And no these don't serve two radically different functions: they're both caricatures, one's political and one is about a show the artist doesn't like that's the only difference. Caricature is very simple, you portray a member of your target group as being bad and by the simple fact of that character being the sole representative of their group you send the message that all members of that group are bad in the same way. Like that's the entire basis of representation.


Maybe so. Though, frankly, I'd side with Weinersmith over anyone writing hatemail over comic on the internet any day.

I think its pretty clear that theyre cracking a joke about how they arent impressed with Doctor Who.

I am deeply curious as to why you are choosing to read this particular comic so much more literally than any of the others. SMBC is not a terribly serious comic on the best of days. Why would they suddenly be declaring their opinion to be the only valid one?

[Peelee]

Oh no, I agree the agenda isn't hidden at all. It's pretty clear that the point is calling DW fans people with no standards who like a bad show.
According to you. I see no such thing, clearly or otherwise.

And no these don't serve two radically different functions
Propaganda is designed to influence people's beliefs in a specific and particular way. Comics are used to make people laugh. Sometimes comics can be a medium by which to tell a story where the author wants to make statements about the world, such as Order of the Stick, but once-a-day comics with no overarching storylines and no repeat or returning characters makes that remarkably difficult. SMBC has, on occasion, done this, but every time it has been abundantly clear - which is to say, inarguable, because in all the ones I can think of, the author effectively breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to the audience as himself in such cases.

[Fyraltari]

I think its pretty clear that theyre cracking a joke about how they arent impressed with Doctor Who.

I am deeply curious as to why you are choosing to read this particular comic so much more literally than any of the others. SMBC is not a terribly serious comic on the best of days. Why would they suddenly be declaring their opinion to be the only valid one?

I am not deniying that this is a joke. I'm just saying that it's a mean-spirited one. And the thing is, it's not actually calling out anything about the show, it's just declaring it bad in general and leaving it at that. It's basically the "stop having fun guys" meme in comic form.

For example this comic (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-11-08) makes fun of a particular argument, but it does so by pointing out why the argument is wrong.

EDIT:

According to you. I see no such thing, clearly or otherwise.
What do you see, then? What do you think is the joke?

Propaganda is designed to influence people's beliefs in a specific and particular way. Comics are used to make people laugh. Sometimes comics can be a medium by which to tell a story where the author wants to make statements about the world, such as Order of the Stick, but once-a-day comics with no overarching storylines and no repeat or returning characters makes that remarkably difficult. SMBC has, on occasion, done this, but every time it has been abundantly clear - which is to say, inarguable, because in all the ones I can think of, the author effectively breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to the audience as himself in such cases.
See above.

EDIT2: For clarification, the propaganda comic was meant as an example of the mecanism of the joke, caricature, not of its goal.

[Keltest]

I am not deniying that this is a joke. I'm just saying that it's a mean-spirited one. And the thing is, it's not actually calling out anything about the show, it's just declaring it bad in general and leaving it at that. It's basically the "stop having fun guys" meme in comic form.

For example this comic (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-11-08) makes fun of a particular argument, but it does so by pointing out why the argument is wrong.


Im pretty sure i saw them calling out the use of ridiculous technobabble to solve a problem that, when critically examined, either makes no sense or doesn't do what its supposed to do.

And they arent wrong. Doctor Who is very much a "turn off your brain to be entertained" show, which doesnt strike me as terribly offensive in and of itself unless you already thing that such media is badwrongfun.

[DataNinja]

Maybe not my place to chime in, but the Doctor Who one did definitely feel... a little rather mean-spirited in execution, even if that wasn't the intent. I definitely felt a little bit uncomfortable with it, at least. It did feel like it was lampooning the people as much as the product. And, I do think that's the main issue with it.

It wasn't entirely clear at first glance if it's from the place of an avid fan poking fun at their own hobby and interests, or someone just wanting to call people idiots. Given the other comics that I've read, I'd be inclined to say the former, but it just... I dunno, it feels like it misses the mark. Goes a bit too far past the playful insulting I'm used to seeing as in-jokes in communities, at least for my tastes.

[tiornys]

Not the worst in an objective sense, but in terms of a story element that threw me out of of the story so hard that I could no longer enjoy a movie that otherwise would have been entertaining? Stealth.

The premise had promise as far as relatively mindless entertainment goes: AI fighter drone goes rogue and a group of highly skilled pilots have to try to deal with it. And I can come up with all sorts of semi-plausible ways for the AI to go rogue. Foreign agents infected it with a virus? Fine. Its controllers loosen the constraints on the AI just that hair too much in response to some sort of training incident? Solid. Some random transmission ends up sending it insane? I could roll with that.

What I could not tolerate as the cause for the AI to go rogue? A bolt of lightning. Because the plane isn't basically a faraday cage. And the electronics are totally not shielded. And lightning is absolutely going to reprogram an AI instead of just frying it.

Heck, I could have gone with even this if it had fried the control module of the AI instead of somehow just scrambling it. But no. Just no.

[hungrycrow]

I agree with the resident evil argument, that was well done. I disagree with aliens. Keep in mind, nuking the site from orbit was suggested AFTER the marine kill squad tried and failed to contain the xenomorphs. The risk of further loss of life due to the presence of DOZENS of xenos, not just a dozen, plus further life lost in an effort to scour every square inch of this giant facility to find all the aliens AND eggs so the process cant repeat itself later, means just obliterating the entire infestation so nothing can survive is the safe option. And keep in mind its being suggested by the already traumatized ripley after facing even more aliens and seeing the marines get their butts kicked. She is neither military nor is she a company woman so her suggestion comes from not giving two wet farts about the bottom line of the company and wanting to take the simplest, safest course of action.

Ripley also knows there are people that want to study the xenomorphs. If they didn't deal with the situation, there was every chance that some other moron would come and try to bring the xenomorphs offworld, giving them a chance to reach a more populated area. And of course that's exactly what ended up happening.

[Brother Oni]

Comparitivily: A dozen Xenomorphs? Doens't need to be nuked.

If it has to go through effort to spread the infection or parasite and dies to normal bullets, nuking it will cause more damage than it could possibly do in the time it would take a couple of strike teams to clear out the infestation.

To support the other comments, it wasn't a dozen xenomorphs - they estimate a 30% casualty rate during the initial battle of Hadley's Hope, with all the other colonist carried off to become hosts. Population of Hadley's Hope was 158, so 70% of 157 (minus Newt) gives you somewhere in the ballpark of 110 xenomorphs, with an unknown number of eggs, and the hypothesis of the queen not confirmed yet.

The question to nuke or not to nuke is moot though - sometime during their fortification of Operations, Bishop noticed the colony's nuclear reactor was damaged (either through neglect or by weapons fire) as the emergency venting was visible. They had a couple of hours left, which expedited Bishop's trip out to the colony's antenna to remote pilot the remaining dropship down to pick the survivors up.

The colony was getting nuked, one way or another.

[Rater202]

To support the other comments, it wasn't a dozen xenomorphs - they estimate a 30% casualty rate during the initial battle of Hadley's Hope, with all the other colonist carried off to become hosts. Population of Hadley's Hope was 158, so 70% of 157 (minus Newt) gives you somewhere in the ballpark of 110 xenomorphs, with an unknown number of eggs, and the hypothesis of the queen not confirmed yet.

The question to nuke or not to nuke is moot though - sometime during their fortification of Operations, Bishop noticed the colony's nuclear reactor was damaged (either through neglect or by weapons fire) as the emergency venting was visible. They had a couple of hours left, which expedited Bishop's trip out to the colony's antenna to remote pilot the remaining dropship down to pick the survivors up.

The colony was getting nuked, one way or another.

There's some expanded universe stuff where nukes get considered way too early. I used the line from the movie but I was talking about the trope in general.

Of the top of my head, I don't think nuking the town in th second AVP movie was necessary. Granted, in that case the Government was being depicted as evil (deliberately corralling civilians into the blast, anyone?)

Oh, while we're at it: The New PRedator Movie? With the new faction of predators that genetically enhance themselves with traits extracted from their favorite prey?

Autism doesn't work that way. I'd forgive the Predator for not knowing better, since from his PoV it's just a kid who figured out how technology far more advanced than his planet has access to. Super intelligence would be the default assumption, but a human scientist should freaking no better that Autism is absolutely ancient an therefore logically can't be the next step in evolution, and likewise while Autism could help in a survival scenario... Only if you're a lot higher functioning than that boy is depicted as being.

[Khedrac]

Ooh, don’t forget the giant microbes. In space.

What about Star Trek Voyager's giant viruses?

[McNum]

The evolution talk made me remember one silly thing that bugged me about Avatar. (The movie, not the show with the airbender.)

The Na'vi don't make sense. They don't have enough limbs. Look around Pandora, at all the large animals. Six limbs. Everywhere. But the Na'vi? Four limbs.

I mean look around at mammals, birds, and even fish on Earth. Four limbs is the common trend, and sure enough, we, too, have four limbs. But the limb paradigm on Pandora is six. So the Na'vi, too, should have six limbs.

[Fyraltari]

What about Star Trek Voyager's giant viruses?
Having never watched Star Trek, I can't say.

[Traab]

Having never watched Star Trek, I can't say.

Oh it was glorious. The ships cook (among other things) brings on some new cheese to the ship, somehow a virus is missed by the biological filters meant to catch these things, and it started to grow. Not as much in numbers, but in size. Until they went from, iirc how they described it, from microscopic to macroscopic. Eventually being large enough to treat a living human as if it were a single cell it wanted to inject itself into. You had people fighting cgi floating tops the size of their torso with a stabby lance on the bottom trying to figure out how to stop them. I honestly forget how they were stopped but I think it was something like, the doctor created an antibody and set it off in the environmental control area to spread through the ship. Voyager was the best star trek for terrible episodes. The most infamous being the time they made a shuttle reach "Infinite speed" and that somehow made the pilot evolve into a giant salamander that kidnapped the captain, evolved her, then mated and released babies into the wild before being turned back.

[Knaight]

Most egregious was in the TV series Leverage, where the main protagonist figured out a pharmaceutical company was re-using a previously failed drug after 5 seconds of looking at the drug's chemical structure on the company's promotional material. Although to be honest, if the marketing guys are that stupid, the company deserves to be shut down.

Speaking of that chemical structure, it was possibly the most absurd depiction of a chemical I've ever seen - and I'm including the various ludicrous DNA depictions. I'm pretty inured to weird chemical structures between other media depictions and a passing interest in highly unstable structures that take forms that ping as intuitively wrong (e.g. a 3 carbon ring with only double bonds), but that thing? It looked like someone rammed a few bravais lattices they saw in a crystal chem book together, randomized position a bit, then drew lines between atoms that were vaguely near each other almost at random.

Plus, this was supposed to be a drug - at least throw in a benzene ring or 3 somewhere, they basically always show up.

[Brother Oni]

Speaking of that chemical structure, it was possibly the most absurd depiction of a chemical I've ever seen - and I'm including the various ludicrous DNA depictions. I'm pretty inured to weird chemical structures between other media depictions and a passing interest in highly unstable structures that take forms that ping as intuitively wrong (e.g. a 3 carbon ring with only double bonds), but that thing? It looked like someone rammed a few bravais lattices they saw in a crystal chem book together, randomized position a bit, then drew lines between atoms that were vaguely near each other almost at random.

Plus, this was supposed to be a drug - at least throw in a benzene ring or 3 somewhere, they basically always show up.

I vaguely remembered a reasonable standard flat 2d representation, so I double checked.

I must have blanked it from my memory and my subconscious replaced it with something I work with like an innate defence mechanism for my sanity, because what in the dear sweet monkey loving periodic table is this monstrosity?

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWNkMDI5NWEtZGE1ZS00YzVmLTk2OWMtMmI3ZGIxZmM1Mj MzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTEzNDY5MjM@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,17 73,1000_AL_.jpg

[Cikomyr2]

This is one that Star Wars shockingly got right. All of the Jango Fett clones were genetically altered to achieve adulthood in a handful of years (unlike Boba Fett, an unaltered clone, who grew at regular speed), they all had individual identities, and had to be educated (indoctrinated) by the cloners to fulfill their job as soldiers. All in all, pretty realistic.

Of all the things wrong about Attack of the Clones, the clones were not one of them.

[Traab]

I vaguely remembered a reasonable standard flat 2d representation, so I double checked.

I must have blanked it from my memory and my subconscious replaced it with something I work with like an innate defence mechanism for my sanity, because what in the dear sweet monkey loving periodic table is this monstrosity?

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWNkMDI5NWEtZGE1ZS00YzVmLTk2OWMtMmI3ZGIxZmM1Mj MzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTEzNDY5MjM@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,17 73,1000_AL_.jpg

Looks like my gumball machine after I left it in the sun for too long. Lots of random colored balls here and there with melted strings of something combining them randomly.

[Caledonian]

I thought Frozen II was terrible for a bunch of reasons, but I especially hated they way they used "water has a memory" in their fantasy. It's a clear and obvious reference to the polywater pseudoscience scam.

Pixar has really, really gone downhill.

[Keltest]

I thought Frozen II was terrible for a bunch of reasons, but I especially hated they way they used "water has a memory" in their fantasy. It's a clear and obvious reference to the polywater pseudoscience scam.

Pixar has really, really gone downhill.

Or it could just be a convenient plot device with a superficial resemblance to the scam? I honestly cant tell if this is tongue in cheek or not.

[Forum Explorer]

The entire moral ambiguity of the ending of The LAst of Us and pretty much the entire justification for the Last of Us Part II not being a horrible tragedy where the sociopathic villain gets away with murder is dependant on the idea that a surgeon can create a vaccine on the first try when he has no idea what he's working with and is actively planning to destroy the source for a potential vaccine in the process of studying it.

1: The very fact that the surgeon is planning this is proof that he has no idea what he's doing and is grossly unqualified to do any kind of research at all: The first rule of science is "don't destroy the thing you're studying, especially if you can't get more." Followed by "all experiments much be repeatable and tested multiple times to ensure accurate and precise data" which can't happen if you destroyed the only one of the things you're studying in existence.

In other words, clearly this surgeon failed science class in high school.

2: Beyond that: You can only make so much of a vaccine at a time. Even if successful, he'd maybe have enough for a dozen people.

3: Vaccines don't work that way. You can't vaccinate against a fungal infection.

4: What no one seems to get in stories like this is that a vaccine only stops someone from becoming a zombie, it doesn't stop them from being eaten by zombies and that's the bigger concern. Coming back as a zombie is really only an issue is if you get attacked and survive.

5: Ellie's immunity is becuase she's already infected with a benign strain of the fungus so the parasitic strain can't take root. It is explicitly stated that they've tested her blood and it is saturated with fungal spores. You don't need to cut out Ellie's still living brain and dissect it t study the fungus growing in it, just culture it from the spores in her blood you ****ing moron!.

Infect rats or another human analogwith spores extracted from Ellie's blood, study the pathology in rats, and then dissect them to see what happened. Repeat, introduce differing variables one at a fricking time until you're pretty sure you have rats that are immune, expose them to the parasitic strain to see if they're infected, repeat from step one as often as needed until you can make immune rats, then repeated the perfected process on human volunteers(actual healthy adult volunteers who know the risks, not children that you did it to without asking while they were out cold and helpless, ya goddamn sociopaths) to see if it will take.

If it is possible to replicate Ellie's immunity, approaching the process rationally and ethically while following the scientific method is far, far, far more likely to get results than murdering a child.

(It also assumes that a group of terrorists who screw over people they've made deals with and are willing to murder a child would be willing to share what little vaccine they have instead of hoarding it for themselves if they pull a blasphemous unholy child-murder powered anti-miracle out of their ass, but that's more socioplagy and I assume that we're focused more on the hard sciences here.)

That goes for every media where fatally vivisecting, or murdering and then disecting, the only source of the wrid biology thing to figure out how it works.

Not only is it immoral, it is scientifically unethical and just utterly stupid.

It's one thing to discect a member of an alien species that came to Earth as part of a hostile militerisic invasion force if you've already killed it in battle and want to figure out where to aim your guns or if issuing special bullets would be cost effective.

It's something else entirely to kidnap and murder a friendly alien or mutant superhero for... Hell if I know the reason beyond "for science."

Even ignoring the lack of morality and ethics involved, I garruntee you that there's nothing you can learn from doing that that makes up for the loss of the subject you destroyed in the process of the vivisection.

I think she actually bites someone and causes an outbreak at one point, so it's not the spores that are benign, not that the scientist in question was aware of that event.

Otherwise, yeah, totally agree. That's not how you study anything, let alone something you are hoping can be used to save humanity from a deadly disease. Actually on that note, there's a problem with the whole concept. By the time the games take place, the infection has stalled out. The places where people live don't really have a lot of infections. A vaccine might be useful, but it's hardly going to fix the world.

[Phobia]

No Ellie biting someone specifically does not cause an outbreak.

The infected also specifically migrant and move around through populated areas the characters say.

[Rater202]

I think she actually bites someone and causes an outbreak at one point, so it's not the spores that are benign, not that the scientist in question was aware of that event. This is literally the first I'm hearing about this.

If it is something unique about Ellie, then it's especially dumb that they're cutting her open. It might be something structural in her brain and taking her brain apart might show that... But all you're doing is murdering a child to satisfy your own curiosity.

If it's genetic, you're gonna need a team of geneticists and biochemists to figure out what it is and either synthesize the chemical cause or a gene therapy to replicate it.

A handful of surgeons can't do crap. They are not remotely qualified for this kind of thing, and again, the very fact...

Seriously. I have to question how this guy passed medical school if he failed medical ethics so badly.

If he is an actual medical doctor then he isn't allowed to do this kind of thing.
Otherwise, yeah, totally agree. That's not how you study anything, let alone something you are hoping can be used to save humanity from a deadly disease. Actually on that note, there's a problem with the whole concept. By the time the games take place, the infection has stalled out. The places where people live don't really have a lot of infections. A vaccine might be useful, but it's hardly going to fix the world.

I think I covered that with the "a vaccine doesn't stop you from being eaten."

You only need to worry about being infected if you walk through a spore patch or get bitten and don't die.

[Caledonian]

I was annoyed almost continually by Interstellar, even from the beginning. I presume the destruction of Earth's ecosystems was being caused by a genetically-engineered microbe intended to 'fix' nitrogen, but the scientists in the movie said it breathed the gas. You cannot respire with nitrogen under Earth-like conditions, it's one of the most neutral substances that exists in nature, and virtually all life on Earth depends on either partnerships with microbes that naturally evolved enzymatic processes to fix it or soaking up bound nitrogen formed in atmospheric electrical discharges.

Still, the movie was at least interesting until they passed through the wormhole. Then it became a nightmare of ignorant stupidity.

[JadedDM]

This is literally the first I'm hearing about this.

Is this confirmation that you never actually played the game then?

At one point Ellie bites Abby. Abby never turns, so that suggests she cannot spread the infection to others.

[tomandtish]

Starship Troopers (1997 Film) is a Paul Verhoeven directed movie (you are probably also familiar with him for Robocop) critiques of society and culture is what he does. Once can use the word "satire" but satire is not exactly the right word for it. There is a great 2020 retrospective of Starship Troopers in the New Yorker by David Roth. I am not linking to these things for it is probably best not to go too deep for we have rules about real world events, politics, etc and things that critique / satire real world things will probably make us start talking about the real / original things that inspired the cultural critique.


Not so much bad science as scientist in denial. "They're just bugs". Yes, bugs who are able to accurately target earth from another star system with a meteor.


Whether it's Life, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant etc., it seems that everyone in sci-fi horror is completely incapable of following basic work safety protocols. How hard is it to wear a helmet? Or just keep it on? You're visiting an exoplanet, even if the air is theoretically breathable, you don't want to contaminate the surroundings with your own microbial life! Sheesh. And what's with the tendency to break quarantine? Good Christ!

It often looks like whoever's in charge of recruiting these people specifically picks the least competent, over-emotional, over-gullible morons.


Very much this. Stupid scientists bother me much more than bad science (which I can uually ignore). In addition to the three examples above, let's see...

Lost in Space (Netflix remake): "The atmosphere is safe, no need for suits". "How can you tell?". "Because there's a hole in yours". Yes, because there could never be anything (pathogen, chemical, etc.), that takes more than 30 minutes to obviously impact someone.

The Meg: We've built a $1.3 billion dollar facility here which is completely wasted if the bottom is solid instead of a gaseous layer as we suspect. As opposed to taking a ship and sub out there, fining out, and THEN building the facility. (and it's the admission of the people who built it and want it to work that it;s a waste of money if the bottom is solid).

Hell, even Stargate SG-1. It's a show I love but man can they be stupid. No real quarantine procedures. Here's how you need to do it. Alpha site: This is the default SG base. Missions leave and return from here. No one returns to earth without x hours in quarantine. Beta site: This is where you go if you can't return to alpha site for some reason, including known infection. Omega site: Has care taking team which goes nowhere other than earth (after quarantine). This is where you evacuate from earth to.

But instead they haul stuff through all the time, and unless they already know of a problem there's no quarantine at all.

[Rater202]

Is this confirmation that you never actually played the game then?

At one point Ellie bites Abby. Abby never turns, so that suggests she cannot spread the infection to others.

No.

It is confirmation that I have never heard of Ellie causing an outbreak.

{scrubbed}

[Forum Explorer]

No Ellie biting someone specifically does not cause an outbreak.

The infected also specifically migrant and move around through populated areas the characters say.

And they clear out the zombies, and the cities are pretty fortified for exactly that reason.


This is literally the first I'm hearing about this.

If it is something unique about Ellie, then it's especially dumb that they're cutting her open. It might be something structural in her brain and taking her brain apart might show that... But all you're doing is murdering a child to satisfy your own curiosity.

If it's genetic, you're gonna need a team of geneticists and biochemists to figure out what it is and either synthesize the chemical cause or a gene therapy to replicate it.

A handful of surgeons can't do crap. They are not remotely qualified for this kind of thing, and again, the very fact...

Seriously. I have to question how this guy passed medical school if he failed medical ethics so badly.

If he is an actual medical doctor then he isn't allowed to do this kind of thing.

I think I covered that with the "a vaccine doesn't stop you from being eaten."

You only need to worry about being infected if you walk through a spore patch or get bitten and don't die.


No.

It is confirmation that I have never heard of Ellie causing an outbreak.

{scrub the post, scrub the quote}

I found what I was thinking of. Ellie bites someone, and claims that she can spread the infection, but we never see if that is true as stuff goes down really soon afterwards, and I think the person she bites ends up dying before the game ends.

[Rodin]

I thought Frozen II was terrible for a bunch of reasons, but I especially hated they way they used "water has a memory" in their fantasy. It's a clear and obvious reference to the polywater pseudoscience scam.

Pixar has really, really gone downhill.

I dunno why you're blaming Pixar, they had nothing to do with Frozen or Frozen 2. To date they have made only one "Disney princess" movie, and that's Brave.

Pixar's most recent five films:

Cars 3 - Meh.
Coco - Excellent.
Incredibles 2 - Pretty good.
Toy Story 4 - Haven't seen myself, but it got rave reviews and a bunch of awards.
Onward - Struck down by coronavirus shortly after it entered theaters, so hard to say.

All told, it seems like Pixar is still going strong. They've always had a mix of "good to great" films with a few standouts in both directions.

[Rater202]

Toy Story 4 - Haven't seen myself, but it got rave reviews and a bunch of awards.

Without any spoilers... So, the team from Pixar that's in charge of al the Toy Story movies worked with Square Enix and Tetsuya Nomura when writing and designing the Toy Story World for Kingdom Hearts III.

Looking at the timelines, they were probably doing this at the same time as they were making Toy Story 4.

You can tell. They don't come out and shout it at you, but the film and the original story from the game touch on a lot of the same themes.

And that's a good thing.

[Keltest]

Hell, even Stargate SG-1. It's a show I love but man can they be stupid. No real quarantine procedures. Here's how you need to do it. Alpha site: This is the default SG base. Missions leave and return from here. No one returns to earth without x hours in quarantine. Beta site: This is where you go if you can't return to alpha site for some reason, including known infection. Omega site: Has care taking team which goes nowhere other than earth (after quarantine). This is where you evacuate from earth to.

But instead they haul stuff through all the time, and unless they already know of a problem there's no quarantine at all.

Stargate at least has the excuse that the actual, physical stargates are whats limiting them in their locations. You cant exactly retrieve a gate from inside another gate. For the first few years especially, they have exactly one option on where to go to that they know is clean.

The wiki also indicates that the alpha site was in fact planned to be used for quarantine should such be necessary. The big issue with using the alpha sites as the primary base is that, due to not being on earth, they have access to basically no resources except what is immediately on hand, and have, IIRC, no means of communicating with earth save for turning on the stargate and tossing letters through. That makes it not great for a primary command hub given the political situation on Earth.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Ah, I think I see the disconnect. Let's dissect the frog, shall we?
we have two character one who is apparently watching DW for the first time and one who is apparently showing it to her. The first woman's initial reaction is "this show is terrible" which is answered with "of course it is." Stating that the bad quality of the show is not a question of opinion. The next two panels consist of the long time fan stating "You have to let it grind you down for a while. Let it lower your standards for plot, character, dialog and acting." Followed by stereotypical brainwashing speak ("Yes. Forget my child, all will be well.") This is stating that the show has subpar writing and acting and that the only way to enjoy it, is to have low expectation of those things. The next panel is the 10th Doctor providing an (exaggerated) example of the bad writing displayed by the show by stating "We can time-travel directly into the plot hole" not meant to represent any particular moment of the show but a "typical" resolution of an episode of the show. (The "" are here because a disspointingly high number of episodes don't actually use the time machine to solve the problem at hand.) The last panel consists of the new fan praising the cleverness of the bad writing with a pained expression on her face her standards for cleverness having been lowered by exposure to DW. The votey is one of the two (I'm actually not sure which) demanding "all of it." I'm guessing this is conveying the complete change of mind of the new fan?

So, what is Weinersmith saying here? That DW has bad writing, plot, dialog and characters, that, on some level, all fans of the show know this but watching the show has lowered their expectation of quality and that that is the only way to enjoy that show. So yes, he is definitely mocking the fans. And no, he isn't mocking some subgroup that has this behaviour rather than the whole fandom because if that was what he'd have contrasted that behaviour with that of more reasonable fans.

Like the second-to-last panel on itself is a good joke, and if the entire comic had been a parody of the show itself it probably would have been good. There's plenty to mock: the mary-sueness of the Doctor, the Britishness of absolutely everything, the weirdness of the plot, the bad special effects and costumes, etc. But the comic doesn't focus on the show, not even to say why it's bad, it focuses on the fans and judges them for liking the show.


Edit: If you have an alternate reading of that comic, I'm interested in reading it.
I hope to not re-ignite this discussion, but I do want to note that I have actually been on both "sides" of the conversation happening in this comic for different franchises. One of those conversations involved Dr. Who, specifically. And I have seen more than a few shows where my overall opinion of the show's popularity is accurately (and humorously) expressed by that particular comic.

I would say that this is an accurate representation of the quality of some shows I still enjoy watching and would have the same sort of conversation with people about if I were to try and explain my liking of it to them right now. I believe a lot of people call this phenomenon "guilty pleasure" entertainment. Examples would risk derailing the thread further. So don't ask.

[Lord Raziere]

I hope to not re-ignite this discussion, but I do want to note that I have actually been on both "sides" of the conversation happening in this comic for different franchises. One of those conversations involved Dr. Who, specifically. And I have seen more than a few shows where my overall opinion of the show's popularity is accurately (and humorously) expressed by that particular comic.

I would say that this is an accurate representation of the quality of some shows I still enjoy watching and would have the same sort of conversation with people about if I were to try and explain my liking of it to them right now. I believe a lot of people call this phenomenon "guilty pleasure" entertainment. Examples would risk derailing the thread further. So don't ask.

Yeah but....

the comic just sounds like internet bucketcrab mentality that I see so much these days. everyone is just out to pull down other peoples enjoyment of something else without considering their feelings, as if no one is allowed to have things that are sacred or enjoyable anymore, and every time someone expresses an opinion an internet bucket crab will come along to pull you down into the bucket of hate and argumentation for no reason other than they don't like people being above it. its depressing.

[Caledonian]

I dunno why you're blaming Pixar, they had nothing to do with Frozen or Frozen 2.

I acknowledge that it's a non-sequitur, but it's still true.

[tomandtish]

Stargate at least has the excuse that the actual, physical stargates are whats limiting them in their locations. You cant exactly retrieve a gate from inside another gate. For the first few years especially, they have exactly one option on where to go to that they know is clean.

The wiki also indicates that the alpha site was in fact planned to be used for quarantine should such be necessary. The big issue with using the alpha sites as the primary base is that, due to not being on earth, they have access to basically no resources except what is immediately on hand, and have, IIRC, no means of communicating with earth save for turning on the stargate and tossing letters through. That makes it not great for a primary command hub given the political situation on Earth.

Actually radio waves go through both ways just fine, so communication isn't a problem. And given what they are doing quarantine should be a default before anyone goes back to earth, since they don't wear protective gear unless they already know of a problem.

[Keltest]

Actually radio waves go through both ways just fine, so communication isn't a problem. And given what they are doing quarantine should be a default before anyone goes back to earth, since they don't wear protective gear unless they already know of a problem.

Its easy to forget, but the SGC does a lot of prep work with robots and such before they send any of the SG teams through. We just dont see it because its boring. And radio waves require that the gates be open, which is extremely non-ideal for, say, emergency communication.

[Caledonian]

Earth is the most heavily- and densely-populated human planet in the known universe in Stargate SG-1, so it's actually more likely that we'd bring novel diseases to other worlds than something nasty back to Earth. It's one of the pesky issues - like the human natives of other planets speaking English - that I'm willing to tolerate in the context of a half-hour TV show.

[Kitten Champion]

I dunno why you're blaming Pixar, they had nothing to do with Frozen or Frozen 2. To date they have made only one "Disney princess" movie, and that's Brave.

Pixar's most recent five films:

Cars 3 - Meh.
Coco - Excellent.
Incredibles 2 - Pretty good.
Toy Story 4 - Haven't seen myself, but it got rave reviews and a bunch of awards.
Onward - Struck down by coronavirus shortly after it entered theaters, so hard to say.

All told, it seems like Pixar is still going strong. They've always had a mix of "good to great" films with a few standouts in both directions.

Onward is quite good, not the strongest of their productions certainly but definitely typical of their overall quality. Its biggest issue is its... Pixar-ness? As in, it feels like it's doing the Pixar formula that we're now pretty familiar with so it doesn't feel as fresh when it bends genre conventions and subverts audiences expectations but more "Yes, that is a Pixar film in 2020".

Cars is the only Pixar production which feels like it only exists for the merchandising.

As to Stargate, the writers do go through some effort of showing Stargate command isn't incompetent in terms of its precautions and procedures, but it just happens in the margins as Keltest pointed out and there's a degree of "for drama" that hits every long-running SF thing. I think the biggest logical jump the franchise takes on a show-to-show basis is ignoring all the language barriers across space and time, but you have to recognize that making the series work in any practical sense means you simply have to accept it and move on.

[tomandtish]

Earth is the most heavily- and densely-populated human planet in the known universe in Stargate SG-1, so it's actually more likely that we'd bring novel diseases to other worlds than something nasty back to Earth. It's one of the pesky issues - like the human natives of other planets speaking English - that I'm willing to tolerate in the context of a half-hour TV show.

Season 1: They brought back one illness, 3 aliens (including 2 goa'uld) and robot dopplegangers.

Season 2: One goa'uld (Tokra fortunately), one genocidal human, a hostile alien sphere that impaled Jack, a virus that mutated Teal'c, angry spirits (while they knew about them, going to a quarantine site would have kept them from earth), connected a black hole to earth, and yet another alien.

And that's just the first two seasons.

Edit: And oh yes, I agree they'd probably be wiping out civilizations left and right with diseases they brought.

[KillianHawkeye]

Oh it was glorious. The ships cook (among other things) brings on some new cheese to the ship, somehow a virus is missed by the biological filters meant to catch these things, and it started to grow. Not as much in numbers, but in size. Until they went from, iirc how they described it, from microscopic to macroscopic. Eventually being large enough to treat a living human as if it were a single cell it wanted to inject itself into. You had people fighting cgi floating tops the size of their torso with a stabby lance on the bottom trying to figure out how to stop them. I honestly forget how they were stopped but I think it was something like, the doctor created an antibody and set it off in the environmental control area to spread through the ship. Voyager was the best star trek for terrible episodes. The most infamous being the time they made a shuttle reach "Infinite speed" and that somehow made the pilot evolve into a giant salamander that kidnapped the captain, evolved her, then mated and released babies into the wild before being turned back.

You've got two different episodes mixed in your head. The cheese infection was from the end of the first season and it infected Voyager's system of bioneural circuitry, which was a big problem because the bioneural gel packs can't be replaced for some reason. They kill off the bacteria by flash heating entire system.

The macrovirus episode is in the middle of season 3, and it's very similar to the Next Generation episode where Captain Picard returns to find the ship adrift and the entire crew affected by the de-evolution virus. The macrovirus got on to the ship by escaping the transporter buffer when the Doctor transported back from an infected alien colony. They end up luring all the macroviruses to the holodeck, because macroviruses hate holograms for some reason, and throwing an anti-virus bomb inside to kill them.

Source: Currently re-watching ST:Voyager



Earth is the most heavily- and densely-populated human planet in the known universe in Stargate SG-1, so it's actually more likely that we'd bring novel diseases to other worlds than something nasty back to Earth. It's one of the pesky issues - like the human natives of other planets speaking English - that I'm willing to tolerate in the context of a half-hour TV show.

Point of fact: Stargate SG-1 and it's spin offs have all been hour-long TV shows.

[Peelee]

You've got two different episodes mixed in your head. The cheese infection was from the end of the first season and it infected Voyager's system of bioneural circuitry, which was a big problem because the bioneural gel packs can't be replaced for some reason.

Oh, that's because they have to ration power since they are far away from any resupply stations, so they can't make use of the replicators like in other series. The holodecks, of course, can run full-steam ahead, since they are on a different power grid somehow despite also failing whenever overall shipboard systems fail and yeah I hate Neelix and any plot device that was instituted to help justify Neelix.

[KillianHawkeye]

Oh, that's because they have to ration power since they are far away from any resupply stations, so they can't make use of the replicators like in other series. The holodecks, of course, can run full-steam ahead, since they are on a different power grid somehow despite also failing whenever overall shipboard systems fail and yeah I hate Neelix and any plot device that was instituted to help justify Neelix.

While it's true that they ration the replicator usage on the ship, this was different. Necessary components would definitely get priority, but they literally say the gel packs can't be replicated. I just watched that episode a little over two weeks ago.

[tomandtish]

Oh, that's because they have to ration power since they are far away from any resupply stations, so they can't make use of the replicators like in other series. The holodecks, of course, can run full-steam ahead, since they are on a different power grid somehow despite also failing whenever overall shipboard systems fail and yeah I hate Neelix and any plot device that was instituted to help justify Neelix.

Could also be something that can't be replicated. There are a few things like that.

[Peelee]

I now want a Star Trek where the Ferengi abandon gold-pressed latinum in favor of bioneural gel packs as a medium of exchange.

[LibraryOgre]

I now want a Star Trek where the Ferengi abandon gold-pressed latinum in favor of bioneural gel packs as a medium of exchange.

I'm wondering how a few years of Rom's leadership will change the Ferengi...

[Peelee]

I'm wondering how a few years of Rom's leadership will change the Ferengi...

Everyone thinks he's an idiot but he has unknowingly solved all of Ferengi society's problems because the rest of the government wasn't around when he needed something.

[Bohandas]

Anything with a scientist villain (who isn't depicted as a charlatan) who tries to destroy something because their theories can't explain it. That's also a red flag that the people who made the film are probably crackpots.

EDIT:
Oh, and as a seperate thing, a special honorable mention goes to Jurassic Park. But, not because the dinosaur cloning thing, that's just them getting the timescale wrong, it would be plausible if they were working with something more recently extinct and had a truly epic research budget. No, I'm citing Jurassic Park due to the implication that what happens in the film is somehow a danger of cloning, despite the fact that it happened with normal animals in the San Francisco Zoo TWICE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Zoo_tiger_attacks). And also because of Jeff Goldblum's character. I'm still not sure whether that character was supposed to be a blowhard or if it was the writers who were blowhards.

EDIT:
Honorable mention also to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The kicker for that one is a scene at the end where they actually get something right for once, but you can tell that it was by accident. (the bit about the "laser capable of emitting a beam of pure antimatter", which ultimately is just a regular laser because the photon is it's own antiparticle, and thus is indeed a thing that exists, but also totally unimpressive)


While it's true that they ration the replicator usage on the ship, this was different. Necessary components would definitely get priority, but they literally say the gel packs can't be replicated. I just watched that episode a little over two weeks ago.
Wouldn't inability to replicate something imply that either A.) It shouldn't be able to be sent by transporter either OR B.) that it has a soul of some sort. If I recall correctly the replicator, transporter, and holodeck are all supposed to be based off of the same core technology

[Brother Oni]

And also because of Jeff Goldblum's character. I'm still not sure whether that character was supposed to be a blowhard or if it was the writers who were blowhards.

Most definitely the character. While most scientists tend to have the same traits due to their job, that doesn't mean they all have the same personality - they're people like everybody else and run the whole spectrum of society, including rock star (Dexter Holland of the Offspring, Brian May of Queen, Brian Cox of D:Ream).

Bear in mind that Ian Malcolm was invited at the request of the park's insurance investigator - it doesn't surprise me that he picked a scientist of the wrong discipline (a mathematician) rather than the paleontologist and paleobotanist that John Hammond brought (I think there's a line in the film which comments on this).

[Rater202]

I mean, I can see the logic of having an expert in numbers and probability as part of a group meant to evaluate the safety of a park.

IT's not nessesarily good logic, or very well executed, but in theory they could crunch the numbers and run the odds of something going horribly wrong.

Not that there was much time for that before everything went horribly wrong.

Honestly, most of the blame is on the park itself. They spared no expense but really, they should have. I see the appeal of electric cars than run on a track, but they should have been hybrids or at least able to be driven manually with onboard battery for exact the problems tha happened in the movie.

When I was a kid seeing it young and not paying much attention I kept asking why they didn't just drive the damn cars to the end of the circuit. Took me years to get that they literally couldn't.

Every pen kept in place with electric fences should have had it's own emergency generator.

And so on and so forth.

Tha'ts not a science thing it's just a "did not think this through" thing.

[Bohandas]

Well since someone brought Doctor who up...

So, four daleks (a species of spece alien nazis) realize that their creed of being the ultimate life form is flawed since they keep losing. To try to shake things up they inject human DNA in their leader (he actually consumes a whole guy and merge with him). As this initial test looks successful (the guy claims to be experiencing more hatred than before which is good for the daleks) they decide to inject human captives with dalek DNA to turn them into human-daleks. However when the dalek-human start to feel compassion and realize they're the bad guys, the other daleks decide to go behind his back and completely replace the captives' DNA with dalek DNA. This is (apparently) successful as they have a bunch of robotic-acting humans. However they refuse to obey their orders to EX-TER-MI-NATE the daleks' ennemies. Turns out that's because our hero, The Doctor (himself an alien of the Time Lord species) hugged the lightning rod that powers the daleks' DNA injecting machine ans so transmitted a pinch of his DNA to the human-daleks thus giving them a conscience.

So not only are the subjects completely human looking despite having no human DNA whatsoever, not only does conscience originate from your DNA (despite the dalek's 24/7 life supports having machine messing with their brains to ensure they stay unable to feel anything but hatred) but DNA is carried by electricity.

To be fair, the Doctor does seem to be at least partially an energy being (IIRC they appear to breifly convert into pure energy during regenerations) so it kind of makes sense if you accept that premise, although it does call into play all the problems with the concept of energy beings


Darkening the sun pretty much just means increasing atmospheric albedo - which is not only very doable, but something that appears to have been done. It's an extreme scorched earth strategy that invites comparisons to chemotherapy (kill everyone, kill them slightly faster), but this part makes sense. Meanwhile the thermodynamics involved in humans as a heat source make no sense whatsoever.

And double that effect when you consider the power expense of running the Matrix on top of it. Especially considering that the Matrix is completely unnecessary to the Machines' plans and the fact that it is their chosen method for restraining the humans in the power plant proves that they're not really as bad and unfeeling as all that because if they were they would have just used a nailgun.

Also, scorching the sky isn't even the number two most ridiculous thing in The Matrix. It's at best a distant #4 after the power plant, the idea that dying in the mateix would somehow make you die in real life, and the scene in Reloaded where Neo logs into the Matrix via mental telepathy.


Likewise the battery story is told by Morpheus who does not understand The Purpose of The Matrix (as evident by the 2nd movie in the trilogy)

How is it evident by the second film? Because of the Architect's speech? The Architect is, as the creator of the Matrix, probably the least trustworthy character in the film series.


I mean photons are pretty abundant in the grand scheme of things. And if you're a bioluminescent fish, also controlled by your fishy fishy feelings.

Under no circumstances however are they going faster than the speed of light. Scientifically speaking, that's sort of always a real no-no.

And more importantly, in the particular case of photons the idea is inherently self-contradictory


Sounds like it. Also is vaguely remniscient of the McDonalds Coffee court case in which a party with vast coffers can control the narrative for the general public.

I mean, yeah, it was served at a completely unreasonable temperature but that isn't really inappropriate. ALL coffee is served at a completely unreasonable temperature. That's why I don't drink coffee or hot tea.


I thought Frozen II was terrible for a bunch of reasons, but I especially hated they way they used "water has a memory" in their fantasy. It's a clear and obvious reference to the polywater pseudoscience scam.

I haven't seen Frozen 2, but I will say that if there is any place for water memory to be a thing, it's in fantasy.


Speaking of that chemical structure, it was possibly the most absurd depiction of a chemical I've ever seen - and I'm including the various ludicrous DNA depictions. I'm pretty inured to weird chemical structures between other media depictions and a passing interest in highly unstable structures that take forms that ping as intuitively wrong (e.g. a 3 carbon ring with only double bonds), but that thing? It looked like someone rammed a few bravais lattices they saw in a crystal chem book together, randomized position a bit, then drew lines between atoms that were vaguely near each other almost at random.

Plus, this was supposed to be a drug - at least throw in a benzene ring or 3 somewhere, they basically always show up.

To be fair, if it's that unusual it kind of makes sense he'd be able to recognize it. Like, he wouldn't have to go through and examine its details because there's only one thing that looks like that

[Fyraltari]

Yeah but....

the comic just sounds like internet bucketcrab mentality that I see so much these days. everyone is just out to pull down other peoples enjoyment of something else without considering their feelings, as if no one is allowed to have things that are sacred or enjoyable anymore, and every time someone expresses an opinion an internet bucket crab will come along to pull you down into the bucket of hate and argumentation for no reason other than they don't like people being above it. its depressing.
Bucketcrab, is that a Discworld reference or are you and Pratchett both referencing something I am not aware of?

To be fair, the Doctor does seem to be at least partially an energy being (IIRC they appear to breifly convert into pure energy during regenerations) so it kind of makes sense if you accept that premise, although it does call into play all the problems with the concept of energy beings
Regeneration is inconsistent as all heck (it was originally a feature of the TARDIS) but nothing in the TV show suggests the Doctor is made of energy. The closest I can think of is when Four's regeneration involved a mental projection of his future self but, when put in context with Third's regenaration, it's clear that this isn't a bit of Time Lord biology but something stemming with the religious beliefs of one of the writer so I won't discuss it.

[Lord Raziere]

Bucketcrab, is that a Discworld reference or are you and Pratchett both referencing something I am not aware of?


It refers to how crabs behave in a bucket. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality) when you put a bunch of crabs in one, when a crab tries to escape, another crab will pull the escapee down back into the bucket, rather than allow them to go free. thus despite one crab being able to go free, they ensure the groups collective demise because they can't bear to see another crab get what they don't have.

I am not well versed in Terry Pratchett, and it wasn't intended as such.

[Eldan]

(e.g. a 3 carbon ring with only double bonds)

Is... that a thing? That makes my brain hurt to think about.

[Bohandas]

Bucketcrab, is that a Discworld reference or are you and Pratchett both referencing something I am not aware of?

Regeneration is inconsistent as all heck (it was originally a feature of the TARDIS) but nothing in the TV show suggests the Doctor is made of energy. The closest I can think of is when Four's regeneration involved a mental projection of his future self but, when put in context with Third's regenaration, it's clear that this isn't a bit of Time Lord biology but something stemming with the religious beliefs of one of the writer so I won't discuss it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVEY5AL5zzk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AxCoMbiZfk

During many of the later regeneration sequences the Doctor's body appears to briefly be entirely converted into the regeneration energy

[Fyraltari]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVEY5AL5zzk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AxCoMbiZfk

During many of the later regeneration sequences the Doctor's body appears to briefly be entirely converted into the regeneration energy

Seems to me like it's just spilling energy out so bright it's hard to see through. If you pause the first video at 1:03 you can still see Tenant's face morphing into Smith's.

[Bohandas]

fair enough.

On a different note, has anyone seen Ad Astra. While the weird disasters the plot revolves around stand out as particularly nonsensical there is little if anything in the movie that does make sense either sciemce-wise or plot-wise

[Traab]

What I really liked was, a site named Cracked did a video on jurassic park pointing out how monumentally stupid they were, and mostly it had nothing to do with the huge holes in the facility, it was mainly stuff like, "Why dinosaurs? You have cloning tech, you could solve like 75% of the major health issues in the world today with that, and have literally all of the money that can be printed or represented by zeroes on a computer. And thats just the START. Cloning can be used to bring back extinct species of animals AND PLANTS. Monsanto would commit seppuku once InGen starts recreating lost crops, altering current ones in thousands of ways to make them better, healthier, hardier, able to grow anywhere, etc etc etc. Not too mention bringing back a variety of extinct modern animals and helping to keep endangered species able to procreate with the fresh batch just introduced. A dino park would be the last thing on the list and done as a pure vanity project because the cost involved in making it at this point is so negligible to the company that already has all of the money in existence that they can do it on a whim.


Also, to whoever pointed it out that I mixed up episodes, thanks for that, its been so many years, and there have been so many absurd episodes, they do tend to kind of merge together.

[Keltest]

What I really liked was, a site named Cracked did a video on jurassic park pointing out how monumentally stupid they were, and mostly it had nothing to do with the huge holes in the facility, it was mainly stuff like, "Why dinosaurs? You have cloning tech, you could solve like 75% of the major health issues in the world today with that, and have literally all of the money that can be printed or represented by zeroes on a computer. And thats just the START. Cloning can be used to bring back extinct species of animals AND PLANTS. Monsanto would commit seppuku once InGen starts recreating lost crops, altering current ones in thousands of ways to make them better, healthier, hardier, able to grow anywhere, etc etc etc. Not too mention bringing back a variety of extinct modern animals and helping to keep endangered species able to procreate with the fresh batch just introduced. A dino park would be the last thing on the list and done as a pure vanity project because the cost involved in making it at this point is so negligible to the company that already has all of the money in existence that they can do it on a whim.


Also, to whoever pointed it out that I mixed up episodes, thanks for that, its been so many years, and there have been so many absurd episodes, they do tend to kind of merge together.

I thought the part being a vanity project was pretty explicit in the work?

[Kitten Champion]

What I really liked was, a site named Cracked did a video on jurassic park pointing out how monumentally stupid they were, and mostly it had nothing to do with the huge holes in the facility, it was mainly stuff like, "Why dinosaurs? You have cloning tech, you could solve like 75% of the major health issues in the world today with that, and have literally all of the money that can be printed or represented by zeroes on a computer. And thats just the START. Cloning can be used to bring back extinct species of animals AND PLANTS. Monsanto would commit seppuku once InGen starts recreating lost crops, altering current ones in thousands of ways to make them better, healthier, hardier, able to grow anywhere, etc etc etc. Not too mention bringing back a variety of extinct modern animals and helping to keep endangered species able to procreate with the fresh batch just introduced. A dino park would be the last thing on the list and done as a pure vanity project because the cost involved in making it at this point is so negligible to the company that already has all of the money in existence that they can do it on a whim.


Funnily enough, this came up in SFDebris' examination of Jurassic Park -- novel and movie. As far as I can recall from that, Crichton explains "why dinosaurs" and the answer is fairly simple, by focusing the research towards the entertainment industry they hope to avoid government intervention. As generally the entertainment industry comes under far less legal scrutiny than biomedicine, agriculture, military, or many other conceivable applications that might lead to the State seizing their enterprise.

Basically, Crichton's Jurassic Park is made by amoral capitalists who don't give a damn about dinosaurs, the park is a Trojan Horse designed to get around governmental backlash.

...though the movie ignores that and endeavours to make Hammond a Willy Wonka-esque character trying to materialize his personal dream.

[Dienekes]

I thought the part being a vanity project was pretty explicit in the work?

Yup. To paraphrase an eloquent pterodactyl:

But I don’t want to cure cancer I want to turn people into make a theme park for dinosaurs

[Peelee]

I mean, yeah, it was served at a completely unreasonable temperature but that isn't really inappropriate. ALL coffee is served at a completely unreasonable temperature. That's why I don't drink coffee or hot tea.
...it was served significantly hotter than it is supposed to be (barely ten degrees Fahrenheit below boiling) and also gave her third degree burns on her genitals and thighs. And when she sued for medical costs, McD's began a smear campaign against her painting the suit as frivolous.

Now then... did someone say JURASSIC PARK?!

Most definitely the character. While most scientists tend to have the same traits due to their job, that doesn't mean they all have the same personality - they're people like everybody else and run the whole spectrum of society, including rock star (Dexter Holland of the Offspring, Brian May of Queen, Brian Cox of D:Ream).

Bear in mind that Ian Malcolm was invited at the request of the park's insurance investigator - it doesn't surprise me that he picked a scientist of the wrong discipline (a mathematician) rather than the paleontologist and paleobotanist that John Hammond brought (I think there's a line in the film which comments on this).
The paleontologist and paleobotanist were demanded by the lawyers - Hammond just tried to cover his ass on appearances by picking them up himself (fitting, since Hammond covering his ass on appearances is kind of a theme in the story). And Malcolm was picked because he was already involved in a consultant role (just like Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler were) due to his work on chaos theory being a point of interest to InGen in regards to their park.

ETA: So the book goes into more detail on this than the movie, but in the movie it's still the insurance adjusters who insist on Grant:

GENNARO: If two experts sign off on the island, the insurance
guys'll back off. I already got Ian Malcolm, but they think he's too
trendy. They want Alan Grant.

Further, in both the book and the movie, Malcolm already knows exactly what is going on at the island, which further highlights his reason for being brought on as a consultant for the inspection. The only objection to him from anyone other than Hammond was that Malcolm was not a conservative-enough choice for the suits. Hammond, of course, tries to claim credit for bringing Grant and Sattler when that was mandated by the insurers. Because that's who Hammond is.

What I really liked was, a site named Cracked did a video on jurassic park pointing out how monumentally stupid they were, and mostly it had nothing to do with the huge holes in the facility, it was mainly stuff like, "Why dinosaurs? You have cloning tech, you could solve like 75% of the major health issues in the world today with that, and have literally all of the money that can be printed or represented by zeroes on a computer.
John Hammond explicitly explains why he doesn't use his technology for medical purposes - he didn't want any government or lobbying groups being able to potentially have a hand in his pricing structure. A theme park does not serve any interest for the common good, so he can charge whatever he damn well likes and nobody could contest it. Despite seeming congenial, Hammond was a huckster and an ******* (again, kind of a theme in the first book and movie).

And thats just the START. Cloning can be used to bring back extinct species of animals AND PLANTS. Monsanto would commit seppuku once InGen starts recreating lost crops, altering current ones in thousands of ways to make them better, healthier, hardier, able to grow anywhere, etc etc etc.
InGen did clone extinct plants, which Dr. Sattler immediately points out are poisonous and further indicates that they are just grabbing everything they can and not paying attention to how dangerous what they're doing is. Hell, the foolhardy plant cloning is foreshadowing!

Seriously, I'm surprised Cracked didn't also try to claim that Nedry was responsible for everything that happened so that their article could achieve a trifecta of wrong.

[Eldan]

What I'm mainly wondering, if we're starting to talk about experts signing off on safety... where's the safety expert in the team? A paleontologist can tell you maybe how much muscle power a T-Rex will have, or how intelligent a raptor might be in navigating obstacles, but surely, you'd then want at least one expert on keeping modern large animals contained to say if those safety features are adequate. Paleontologists would be terrible at rating security features.

[Traab]

They were going off the movie, not the book, so if it wasnt mentioned in the film, it wasnt a part of the video they did. I dont recall them ever covering why not solve every medical issue ever in the film. As for hammonds character, I took him to be the man with the dream and the funding to make it happen, not a huckster. The closest we get to that is his little chat about running a flea circus when he was younger and even then that was about how he wanted to make something REAL with this park. And yes I know about the plants, thats why I included their ability to clone animals and plants in my post. If they can bring back dino era plants, they can do all sorts of things with what we currently have.

Cracked has a history of intentionally ignoring context in their articles in order to trigger lots of comments and clicks as people come back over and over to argue over how sauron is actually the good guy in lord of the rings and whatnot, but in this they seemed to stay pretty on target, again, just talking the movie, not the book that covered so much more due to not having a time limit. This is not an attack on you its a legit request, could you post a link to the movie scene where the medical potential gets brought up and explained away? I havent watched the actual film in so long its entirely likely I just forgot it was there.

[Peelee]

What I'm mainly wondering, if we're starting to talk about experts signing off on safety... where's the safety expert in the team? A paleontologist can tell you maybe how much muscle power a T-Rex will have, or how intelligent a raptor might be in navigating obstacles, but surely, you'd then want at least one expert on keeping modern large animals contained to say if those safety features are adequate. Paleontologists would be terrible at rating security features.

It's less safety than it is liability. The inspection was triggered by the cold open with the raptor - there was a $20,000,000 lawsuit from the family. Given that it's effectively a zoo, they would already have all the necessary paperwork and inspections to satisfy the investors. The trick is that it's a zoo with new animals who have never been kept in captivity before, so they're looking for experts on those animals (Grant) and also behavioral statistics (Malcolm). It's also basically a final run-through - everything is set for them to open, it's just cold feet at a major potential liability problem at the 11th hour. Gennaro himself is ready to shut the whole shebang down at the drop of a hat, even knowing what they have, but once he sees it he immediately realizes the cash cow they have and stops caring. It's not hard to imagine the inspection is a fig leaf.

ETA:
They were going off the movie, not the book, so if it wasnt mentioned in the film, it wasnt a part of the video they did. I dont recall them ever covering why not solve every medical issue ever in the film. As for hammonds character, I took him to be the man with the dream and the funding to make it happen, not a huckster. The closest we get to that is his little chat about running a flea circus when he was younger and even then that was about how he wanted to make something REAL with this park. And yes I know about the plants, thats why I included their ability to clone animals and plants in my post. If they can bring back dino era plants, they can do all sorts of things with what we currently have.

Cracked has a history of intentionally ignoring context in their articles in order to trigger lots of comments and clicks as people come back over and over to argue over how sauron is actually the good guy in lord of the rings and whatnot, but in this they seemed to stay pretty on target, again, just talking the movie, not the book that covered so much more due to not having a time limit. This is not an attack on you its a legit request, could you post a link to the movie scene where the medical potential gets brought up and explained away? I havent watched the actual film in so long its entirely likely I just forgot it was there.

Just double-checked and you're right, they skipped that part in the movie. Also, the movie does try to portray Hammond as less of an ass than he was in the book, but he is still very much an ass. He can't be bothered to deal with a person who died because of what he brought into the world. He is forced to bring in Dr. Grant, then claims full credit for getting Grant in the helicopter ("I brought a scientist, you brought a rock star."). In the board room, when all three experts brought in specifically for the assessment give him absolutely dreadful reviews right off the bat, he handwaves away their complaints. He keeps insisting that they spared no expense when his dealings with Nedry show significant sparing of expenses where the public cannot see. He openly admits to his background as a huckster. He brings children to a safety inspection triggered by a fatality. These are not signs of a good person. These are signs of a narcissistic *******.

[Dienekes]

What I'm mainly wondering, if we're starting to talk about experts signing off on safety... where's the safety expert in the team? A paleontologist can tell you maybe how much muscle power a T-Rex will have, or how intelligent a raptor might be in navigating obstacles, but surely, you'd then want at least one expert on keeping modern large animals contained to say if those safety features are adequate. Paleontologists would be terrible at rating security features.

Didn’t they have Muldoon for that?

Of course no one listened to his extremely good advice about raptors “They should all be destroyed.”

[Cikomyr2]

I am unsure if it's science or communication problem. But I hate the forced conflict of Scientists/Church in stories where scientists are piercing the veil between worlds, and the church having actual proof of the supernatural just give vague warning to make them stop.

The real scientitic approach would be to determine if the Church 'a experience can be proved to be reliable, and then gather as much intel about the other side from this experience as possible. Just because it's coated in supernaturalism doesn't mean it's not valuable intel.

[Peelee]

Didn’t they have Muldoon for that?

Muldoon was a game warden, Arnold was an engineer (who has worked for the military and for various major theme parks in the novels but not specified in the books). Both would have valuable insight on the park. And yes, Muldoon arguing against the very existence of the raptors should have been taken into consideration (also he pushed for significantly more militarized security in the novel, which was largely shot down by Hammond).

[tomandtish]

The biggest problem with Malcom is that he may be a hotshot chaos theorist, but when it comes to determining the safety of the park (as intended by investors) he's actually useless because all he does is say things are going to fail because they are going to fail. If you want people to take you seriously, you're going to have to provide concrete reasons. "This won't work because of X". "There's a 95% probability that if you do this Y will occur". (And clearly show how you came up with your answers). With all the money invested in the project no one's going to shut it down just because someone says it isn't going to work.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Add my voice to the Hammond is an irresponsible huckster in Jurassic Park, the novel.


Oh, and as a seperate thing, a special honorable mention goes to Jurassic Park. But, not because the dinosaur cloning thing, that's just them getting the timescale wrong, it would be plausible if they were working with something more recently extinct and had a truly epic research budget. No, I'm citing Jurassic Park due to the implication that what happens in the film is somehow a danger of cloning, despite the fact that it happened with normal animals in the San Francisco Zoo TWICE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Zoo_tiger_attacks). And also because of Jeff Goldblum's character. I'm still not sure whether that character was supposed to be a blowhard or if it was the writers who were blowhards.

In my view, the book wasn't so much about "the dangers of cloning" as it was about "the dangers of having irresponsible, but powerful people making decisions about science". It was very critical of Hammond as a character and pretty clearly lays the majority of the blame for the disaster on him. To my recollection, I believe it was Ian who uses an analogy about how stupid people with deep pockets can effectively buy a dangerous thing like "a black belt in martial arts" and play with it like a toy, without having to undergo the process of learning restraint. They can now just play with their new "black belt" without respect for how that toy can severely injure or kill people unintentionally.

Heck, in the book, Hammond dies because he goes for a walk after all hell has broken loose and is contemplating on how he's going to just clean up the mess he's got and just try to push through the opening of the park again despite all that happened. He manages to injure himself because he suddenly realizes he's in a potentially dangerous situation and doesn't know the layout of his own park. He's ultimately killed because he wandered off alone at the end of the story for almost no reason. Because he assumed the danger was over. To the best of my recollection, at least.

Yet the movie framed the guy as a whimsical, lovable character. But so much of the plot hinges on his irresponsible behavior that it was impossible to cut all of it out, so the movie still has a bit of it in there. It just glosses over it as much as it can with emotional manipulation so you're kind of left with a weird mixed message about him. He's just the cool grandpa who's showing you dinosaurs. Isn't he cool? Hmm, I guess that oopsie could've happened to anyone! Pobody's nerfect!

Probably a smart decision for an adaptation, honestly. Hammond is as close to a primary villain that Jurassic Park has. But the kind of villain he is would probably honestly be a bit difficult to portray in a movie. And maybe a little too upsetting for the fun adventure tone the movie wanted to aim for. Realistic villainy is sort of a downer like that.

As for Ian Malcom. Well, someone needed to deliver the warning of danger in the movie, and since Dr. Sadler and Dr. Grant (our main perspective characters) couldn't do it lest they be regarded as unlikeable pessimists by the audience, it fell to only Ian. Who couldn't point out that Hammond put highly toxic plants in the lobby of the main building because it wasn't his specialty. (Which is the only foreshadowing of danger I recall which was non-Ian based but involved those three characters and was left out of the movie.)

To my recollection, Ian was a character who expressed the sentiment of "We're dealing with something here with too many unknowns to fully understand what's going on, let alone find a way to manage responsibly". I think in some sense, the book just needed a character to make it clear to the audience that when "unexpected problem 7" shows up in the plot, it wasn't exactly something that they should understand was a contrivance or just an oversight they could pretend wouldn't happen in a more realistic depiction. Because of the park's nature as a completely unprecedented construction, "unexpected problem x" was always going to have been an issue with the park.

Ian Malcom's role is to remind the audience that the real world is inconvenient and messy and doesn't care what you think.

"Unexpected problem X" is a pretty common thing in Crichton's works, come to think of it. It's a fun theme for science-fiction to embrace. Scientists are often very surprised.

[LibraryOgre]

Ian Malcolm strikes me as the guy who just released a book about his particular discipline that is really hot on the New York Times Bestseller List, so Hammond got him to come to the project because it looked cool to have this current celebrity looking at your project. It would be like having Stephen Hawking come to look at your park about real aliens that you reconstructed from Roswell DNA, only to find out that the ship that crashed at Roswell was the Nostromo.

[jayem]

Yup. To paraphrase an eloquent pterodactyl:

But I donÂ’t want to cure cancer I want to turn people into make a theme park for dinosaurs

Plus in a doubly Doyleist sense:
We don't want to watch a movie about curing cancer we want to watch a movie about scary dinosaurs and brave contempory people.
That means we have to accept that for 'reasons' a theme park makes sense, or only watch clones of After Amy

(Similarly for the Matrix, we need a plot inspiring reason why the world we perceive isn't the real world.)

[Aeson]

Funny thing is, they had a perfectly good excuse sitting right there. Gypsy Danger is a later generation nuclear powered Jaeger. Early Jaegers had nuclear reactors, but exposed pilots to radiation. GD therefore had generous amounts of radiation shielding installed, which is a perfectly serviceable excuse for how it can take an EMP hit and keep going. It's insulated.
Radiation shielding still has issues as an explanation for why it wouldn't shut down, though, because radiation shielding goes between the reactor and anything - people, most electronics, structural elements that don't absolutely need to be in the high-radiation region - that you want to protect against radiation damage, which means that it's in the wrong place to protect those things against an externally-generated EMP.


Now if you want to go for another Pacific Rim thing, there is that whole bit about how "No alloys!" is a good thing. Because clearly, it is not.
I don't remember the part of the movie that you're referring to, but I would point out that any given alloy is not necessarily strictly superior to any other specific alloy or metal; they can be both better and worse depending on what properties you're looking at. If it's structural, though, it probably was better than pure iron, unless someone chose really dumb materials - not, mind you, that someone who decided skyscraper-sized bipedal machines that have a soft requirement for two drivers/pilots and fight giant dinosaur-like monsters with pseudomedieval weaponry and giant robotic fists is necessarily someone I expect to be making completely rational, well-founded decisions.

[McNum]

Radiation shielding still has issues as an explanation for why it wouldn't shut down, though, because radiation shielding goes between the reactor and anything - people, most electronics, structural elements that don't absolutely need to be in the high-radiation region - that you want to protect against radiation damage, which means that it's in the wrong place to protect those things against an externally-generated EMP.
I did say it was an explanation that wouldn't hold up to any serious scrutiny, but it's better than it being analog. "Ours is a nuclaer model, so it has shielding." Done. Run with it. Go hit a monster in the face with a tanker in downtown Hong Kong.


I don't remember the part of the movie that you're referring to, but I would point out that any given alloy is not necessarily strictly superior to any other specific alloy or metal; they can be both better and worse depending on what properties you're looking at. If it's structural, though, it probably was better than pure iron, unless someone chose really dumb materials - not, mind you, that someone who decided skyscraper-sized bipedal machines that have a soft requirement for two drivers/pilots and fight giant dinosaur-like monsters with pseudomedieval weaponry and giant robotic fists is necessarily someone I expect to be making completely rational, well-founded decisions.
Of course, of course. It's more that they put it as a sense of pride that their giant death robot contains no alloys, as in none at all, that's ridiculous. Because I simply cannot believe that to be true. Use the right material for the right job, especially when you're building giant robots that's the last hope of mankind. If you need some pure materials for that? great. Need alloys for it? Great. But don't make it a point of pride that it doesn't contain one of those. Because that's silly.

[warty goblin]

I did say it was an explanation that wouldn't hold up to any serious scrutiny, but it's better than it being analog. "Ours is a nuclaer model, so it has shielding." Done. Run with it. Go hit a monster in the face with a tanker in downtown Hong Kong.


Of course, of course. It's more that they put it as a sense of pride that their giant death robot contains no alloys, as in none at all, that's ridiculous. Because I simply cannot believe that to be true. Use the right material for the right job, especially when you're building giant robots that's the last hope of mankind. If you need some pure materials for that? great. Need alloys for it? Great. But don't make it a point of pride that it doesn't contain one of those. Because that's silly.

Particularly if you are building your giant robot out of ferrous metals. If you're not using alloys, you've got armor only very slightly ahead*, technologically speaking, with USS Monitor back in 1861. Good old HMS Dreadnought from 1906, with its nice thick belt of cemented and surface hardened Krupp steel, is, metallurgically speaking, way ahead of, and way better protected than, Ye Olde Iron Robot. Hell, a reasonably upper class knight circa 1450 will have more advanced armor, albeit a 2mm thick breastplate is probably not ideal protection from giant monsters.

*Since one would assume they're at least taking advantage of modern smelting techniques to get the slag out.

[Lurkmoar]

Has the Assassin's Creed Animus been mentioned yet?

Apparently, you have the memories (literal memories) in your blood that you play like a video game! Edit: Oh, you can have memory bleed and die from it too.

[Ramza00]

Ian Malcolm strikes me as the guy who just released a book about his particular discipline that is really hot on the New York Times Bestseller List, so Hammond got him to come to the project because it looked cool to have this current celebrity looking at your project. It would be like having Stephen Hawking come to look at your park about real aliens that you reconstructed from Roswell DNA, only to find out that the ship that crashed at Roswell was the Nostromo.

So the fault with the Ian Malcolm character lies with Crichton and it is not Steven Spielberg or David Koepp job to fix it with not doing a good job explaining the purpose of the Ian Malcolm character inside the text and why he is there at this presentation (outside the text his purpose is for Crichton to give rants about Human Nature.)

-----

Malcom job is to explain the principle of "emergence" where things can have properties independent of the original thing by mixing two factors together. Economics and a whole other host of math fields deal with this all the time. (Likewise certain philosophies and religions such as Buddhism also deal with this.) Things can be more than the sum of their parts A+B is not just AB but sometimes putting A and B next to each other you get something new aka C.

So Ian Malcom math job with emergence is Chaos Theory which sounds like gobbledygook you will have some fictional Malcolm Gladwell sell on the NYT. But what it is really is talking about interconnectedness, feedback mechanisms, how you can't create a perfect science experiment, fractals, etc.

His job is to be a math skeptic saying you can solve everything with statistics and calculus, while simultaneously the study of this is precisely a math job.

He is hired by the insurance people to be the skeptic whose says ignore the people who say you can insure this just like a zoo but just make the zoo bigger.

-----

An example of Chaos Theory and the illusion of knowing things via math is that famous Tesla announcement about their new pickup truck. They tested the windows and windshield numerous times saying it was a A) bulletproof against a 9mm round fired by a gun, and B) a sledgehammer, and C) a big metal ball the size of your fist thrown by a muscly guy.

All of these are true if you do only A, or only B, or only C. But if you do B, and C together (let alone A+B+C) you will break the glass for what happens is you damage the glass with the sledgehammer and it looks fine with no obvious fault to the human eye, but that changes the molecular comprehension of the glass and the places the glass attaches to the pickup truck and thus when you then hit it with the metal ball there is no more ability to give for the glass is no longer in the pristine condition of the first place.

It is the interconnectedness of things that Chaos Theory studies, and change only a few small variables and you can create big changes. Especially in systems that never stop (for they are dynamic), and are real life and not some controlled experience. (Yes I am comparing Elon Musk to John Hammond (Mr. Spared No Expense)

-----

And chaos theory is not just a thing about books with dinosaurs you use it with any complicated thing like weather modeling. Furthermore if we had a couple of these people at wall street and government regulatory bodies we wouldn't have such severe losses with 2008 with things like Credit Default Swaps for guess what the economy of city A is tied to city B is tied to city C and you should not sell a credit default swap insurance asset / derivative for all those things are actually linked when the economy tanks all them will tank at pretty much the same time and thus your derivative has a chance of bankrupting the insurance issuer. Yadda, yadda, yadda (you get the point.)

Just because something has never broken before, even never broken in 1 year, 10 years, 100 years does not mean it is invincible. That is Ian Malcolm's job, his job is to tell you that things such as 1000 year storms do exist. Furthermore to remind you that dinosaurs* are not like other animals and thus Michael Crichton "Magic" may suddenly happen and the park breaks down.

(I have my problems with Crichton, some things about science, magic, etc I feel he is kind over the top with.)

-----





So yeah Ian Malcolm had a purpose for the story, but Crichton did a horrible job writting that purpose well in the Book but also the Movie Screenplay which Crichton gets credit for with David Koepp.

[Mechalich]

So yeah Ian Malcolm had a purpose for the story, but Crichton did a horrible job writting that purpose well in the Book but also the Movie Screenplay which Crichton gets credit for with David Koepp.

Almost every major Crichton novel has a character who is immensely smarter than everyone else, has some distinctly non-conventional view or approach, is initially derided for this, and is then ultimately justified by the end. This is one of the established criticisms of his works in circulation (also that these characters grew to be more and more self-insert-y over time). In Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm is said character.

It's not that Malcolm's purpose isn't reasonable, it is, or that his character isn't justified in being very smart, a genius mathematician taking a big paycheck from a large corporate account is absolutely a career choice that's out there. It's mostly that everyone else, especially all the park personnel, make unnecessarily foolish decisions which Malcolm is later able to criticize, which is particularly true in the book version where the Park is comically unprepared to run even as a regular zoo and takes one shortcut after another to save money. Hammon says 'spared no expense' a lot, but this is in fact a blatant lie and if he'd been even slightly less penny-pinching (like by paying Nedry even a fraction of what he was worth) the whole disaster probably would have never happened. I mean, there would have eventually been some kind of incident, but almost certainly nothing movie scale.

Admittedly, there's no particularly easy way to unleash your dinosaurs-eating-people monster scenario in the 20th century. No matter what you do, it's going to take some major contrivances to get around the 'and then security just shot them all dead' problem.

[Ramza00]

Agreed Mechalich, complete and utterly agree.

(I was just complaining about having the Malcolm character was a good idea, and he actually makes sense, and then he can't be explain to the audience for Crichton did that part badly yet everyone remembers Malcolm being the self-insert character pointing out all the computer flaws like the tracking problems.
It is like Crichton couldn't tell if he wanted to make a small point about stupid individual humans or a big point like humans as a society are bad with estimating risk and how risk is interdependent. It feels off and sloppy.)

But super agree with the other points you brought up.

[Peelee]

Agreed Mechalich, complete and utterly agree.

(I was just complaining about having the Malcolm character was a good idea, and he actually makes sense, and then he can't be explain to the audience for Crichton did that part badly yet everyone remembers Malcolm being the self-insert character pointing out all the computer flaws like the tracking problems.
It is like Crichton couldn't tell if he wanted to make a small point about stupid individual humans or a big point like humans as a society are bad with estimating risk and how risk is interdependent. It feels off and sloppy.)

But super agree with the other points you brought up.

It's Crichton. You can sum up his points as "technology bad".

[Arcane_Secrets]

There's also the new-series Dr Who epsiode where the lab handing a really deadly disease has an automatic vent into the atmosphere protocol for emergencies! I mean, why bother with a bio-hazard lab in the first place...

I noticed that too and it was really bad.

Oh-and sharks don't roar. Too many bad Syfy movies to name them all because they kind of blur into bad cgi.

[Rater202]

It's Crichton. You can sum up his points as "technology bad".

I don't know, I think the novel about copywriting genes and cell ownership had a point.

It is kind of bullcrap that a doctor could be looking at a leftover slide of my blood from bloodwork I got done eight years ago, discover that my blood cells have some useful unique mutation, replicate it for study, make something of it, and then patent my unique genes and make a fortune without giving me any when he's making that money on my DNA.

Or, to use a historical example, the Lacks family are owed billions for all the profit that' been made on selling different strains of Hela, which is especially disgusting becuase the hospital and doctor who made Hela from Hernreitta's cancer cells actively chose not to patent the original strain. The way the laws are written, they're never gonna get a dime.

And, to Crichton's credit, the court ruling that said that the company that patented a man's cell line were allowed to take his and his children's cells whenever they wanted whether they agreed to or not was overturned and the company ridiculed for the audacity of trying to get slavery reinstituted.

On the other hand, IIRC in that book Crichton also used the name of one of his critics for a character who molests babies band has a microscopic whatsit.

Basically, shoot the messenger but the messege in fine.

[Bohandas]

I don't know, I think the novel about copywriting genes and cell ownership had a point

That's not the point that was being made though, Dr.Malcolm's point was more of a "hurr durr things will go wrong if you try to play god" type thing, furthermore, the intellectual property thing is really more of an issue with intellectual property than with technology regardless

EDIT:
And the stupidity lies in the fact that the disaster had exactly nothing to do wih playing god and everything to do with the zoo being poorly designed

[snowblizz]

Hammon says 'spared no expense' a lot, but this is in fact a blatant lie and if he'd been even slightly less penny-pinching (like by paying Nedry even a fraction of what he was worth) the whole disaster probably would have never happened. I mean, there would have eventually been some kind of incident, but almost certainly nothing movie scale.
I'm not prepared to give it to Nedry here. If Nedry was worth more he should not have contracted so cheap. Paying Nedry more would just have meant it cost more. Hammond clearly had reservations about Nedry, and he should have listened to his gutinstinct and picked someone else. The hilarious part is he kinda tries doing Nedry a favour too. But you are correct Hammond does definitely not not spare any expense. Arguably his ability to tell where to put the money (more security, less fancy food) is deeply flawed. However, not not sparing expensive by paying Nedry more would not have helped.


Has the Assassin's Creed Animus been mentioned yet?

Apparently, you have the memories (literal memories) in your blood that you play like a video game! Edit: Oh, you can have memory bleed and die from it too.
No I don't think it has. But you are also overstating it. You have literal memories in your blood from your ancesters, DNA memory. Which isn't as off as it may sound as a lot of DNA isn't actually used to create us and IIRC theorized to be e.g. left over virus DNA and such. Playing your memories can only be done after they have been processed by a really powerful computer, though technology advances as the series go on so the technology becomes less invasive and more portable. The first versions of the Animus needed you to like hook up in the spine and stuff and it took time for them to process the memory data from you DNA.

As a game device it's a really good explanation for how come you can experience things like it is a game. Unlike say some other game that just randomly insists you are in history. Even Elder Scrolls sorta went with the gameification idea so one of the powers you have as chosen one seems to be Save and Reload.

Where it *really* goes off the rocker is when inanimate items have memory DNA though in the later series. Assuming you can buy into the whole idea that memories can be stored in DNA.

[Fyraltari]

Even Elder Scrolls sorta went with the gameification idea so one of the powers you have as chosen one seems to be Save and Reload.

The canonicity of that is wildly debated.

[Androgeus]

Where it *really* goes off the rocker is when inanimate items have memory DNA though in the later series. Assuming you can buy into the whole idea that memories can be stored in DNA.

Are you talking about the spear in Odyssey? Because I'm fairly sure it's Kassandra/Alexios's DNA that's been left on it that you relive memories from.

[Rater202]

That's not the point that was being made though, Dr.Malcolm's point was more of a "hurr durr things will go wrong if you try to play god" type thing, furthermore, the intellectual property thing is really more of an issue with intellectual property than with technology regardless

EDIT:
And the stupidity lies in the fact that the disaster had exactly nothing to do wih playing god and everything to do with the zoo being poorly designed

Different book.

The conversation moved from JP to Crichton in general, so I made a comment about NEXT, which was a criticism of how the law treats genetic research an he products thereof, particularly how it's drought from abuse.

I think the criticism of gene and cell ownership is a perfectly valid one, even if Crichton himself and the book are.... Yeah and saying that it boils down to "science bad" is... Meh.

[snowblizz]

Are you talking about the spear in Odyssey? Because I'm fairly sure it's Kassandra/Alexios's DNA that's been left on it that you relive memories from.

Origins and Odyssey. But they make a specific mention of this as a breakthrough that they can now somehow "read items". I think in Origins (set before Odyssey) it's brought up as the new and next step Layla is working with for Abstergo. The way the spear is used there's no way there's any Kassandra/Alexios DNA left on it. Plenty of other people's DNA though... DNA couldn't survive in the conditions most of these artefacts are aquired anyway. In Origins I thought they'd use a mummy as the source but I think they then used an item. Been awhile since I played through.

I strongly remember there was something odd with the whole getting DNA off items I reacted to. I just have the mental picture it was somehow something more than just random DNA left over on something you handled.

[factotum]

I always interpreted the Animus and its variants in Assassin's Creed as a purely gameplay-inspired reason for why you can play the games the way you do, rather than anything meant to be scientifically rigorous. It's like the New-U stations in Borderlands, which clearly exist in the game's universe but which conveniently don't work for anyone other than the player character. As such, I don't really care too much about them. I actually find it more annoying, for example, that some of the stuff you get blueprints for in Subnautica can only be manufactured using alien technology that nobody knows exists--it's like the famous Star Trek sensors that can detect forms of energy nobody knew about before!

[snowblizz]

I always interpreted the Animus and its variants in Assassin's Creed as a purely gameplay-inspired reason for why you can play the games the way you do, rather than anything meant to be scientifically rigorous.
Well that is basically what it is. It is as I said a very good way of having both your this is a videogame and this is reality at the same time cake. It is a very elegant solution to limit the players interactions with the world and removing the real world/game barrier by the game itself embracing the fact that is is a simulation. In the early installations where "real world" and simualtion is blended there are differences in gameplay, as in real world does nto come with all enhancements simulation does. It is rather meta. Not sure if I make sense. (Even though the real world/simualtion isn't perfect, you can mess up and reload on the real world parts too, cause you know, it has to be). Contrasted to stuff like Call of Duty where if I mess up and die well hey it's just a game and I reload. The AC series embraces this aspect.

However, it does *claim* to be based on science (not all of it science that may exist, the is a strain of the Precursor science/artefacts being effectively magic), in this case genetic memories being an actual thing, so for the purposes of this thread it can be argued.

I actually wanted to defend the Animus and attendant technologies as it does, in the context of the game it sort of holds together.

Some of the story bits of how the Animus technology is used, improved and spread holds up quite well IMO in it's own world.

[Jan Mattys]

And the stupidity lies in the fact that the disaster had exactly nothing to do wih playing god and everything to do with the zoo being poorly designed

You see, I'm not sure Dr. Malcolm would agree.
In THIS PARTICULAR here and now, yes, you are right. The security was ridiculous, the IT admin was alone, overworked and underpaid, the research behind some of the cloning absolutely questionable (poisonous plants, frog dna...), and yadda yadda yadda.

But I think Malcolm's point is that even if you managed to close all those gaps, there would still be something out there ready to turn your park into a failure, and a dangerous one at that. The idea is that it doesn't matter *what* makes you lose control. Someting *will*. And the more dangeorous the thing you are trying to control is, the worse it'll be for everyone when you will lose said control over it.

[Dienekes]

You see, I'm not sure Dr. Malcolm would agree.
In THIS PARTICULAR here and now, yes, you are right. The security was ridiculous, the IT admin was alone, overworked and underpaid, the research behind some of the cloning absolutely questionable (poisonous plants, frog dna...), and yadda yadda yadda.

But I think Malcolm's point is that even if you managed to close all those gaps, there would still be something out there ready to turn your park into a failure, and a dangerous one at that. The idea is that it doesn't matter *what* makes you lose control. Someting *will*. And the more dangeorous the thing you are trying to control is, the worse it'll be for everyone when you will lose said control over it.

I think the issue is, Malcolm’s talk of chaos theory as a means that demonstrating the level of control required for this to work out is impossible. And I believe the evidence that other zoos have lost control of their animals would just further Malcolm’s point. He’d likely say that it proves we can’t control environments full of animals we know and live with. The hope of controlling super predators from before the evolution of man is impossible.

But, the failures of the Park don’t really fit that type of failure under scrutiny. Sort of. In the books it’s abundantly clear that Hammond is cutting corners. And so the parks failure can be put under mismanagement. The movie seems to portray him as the benevolent grandfather watching his dreams go up in smoke. To my completely untrained in Park control eye it doesn’t look cheap. If we listen to Nedry he comments that he’s not being paid enough, but every scene we see him in he is being pointlessly entitled, cruel, and cheap. Which I believe we’re meant to think that he’s the one with the inflated sense of self worth.

Which means the failure of the Park was less about chaos and more about direct villainy.

However, interestingly chaos theory does directly destroy one plan that required inhuman control of the environment: Nedry’s. The random storm completely messes up his timetable, forces him to take greater risks and ultimately ends in his death.

[Keltest]

Chaos theory aside, i do think there is some merit to the idea that large scale and ambitious projects have correspondingly large and ambitious problems. But thats an argument in favor of foresight and careful preparation, not against having large projects. Sure, we cant make a perfect zoo (or anything else) that will never fail and be 100% happy forever, but that doesnt mean the problems that will show up are insurmountable either.

[Peelee]

I'm not prepared to give it to Nedry here. If Nedry was worth more he should not have contracted so cheap. Paying Nedry more would just have meant it cost more. Hammond clearly had reservations about Nedry, and he should have listened to his gutinstinct and picked someone else. The hilarious part is he kinda tries doing Nedry a favour too. But you are correct Hammond does definitely not not spare any expense. Arguably his ability to tell where to put the money (more security, less fancy food) is deeply flawed. However, not not sparing expensive by paying Nedry more would not have helped.


I think the issue is, Malcolm’s talk of chaos theory as a means that demonstrating the level of control required for this to work out is impossible. And I believe the evidence that other zoos have lost control of their animals would just further Malcolm’s point. He’d likely say that it proves we can’t control environments full of animals we know and live with. The hope of controlling super predators from before the evolution of man is impossible.

But, the failures of the Park don’t really fit that type of failure under scrutiny. Sort of. In the books it’s abundantly clear that Hammond is cutting corners. And so the parks failure can be put under mismanagement. The movie seems to portray him as the benevolent grandfather watching his dreams go up in smoke. To my completely untrained in Park control eye it doesn’t look cheap. If we listen to Nedry he comments that he’s not being paid enough, but every scene we see him in he is being pointlessly entitled, cruel, and cheap. Which I believe we’re meant to think that he’s the one with the inflated sense of self worth.
It's cut out of the movie, likely because as pointed out, the film almost exclusively portrays him in a bad light, but in the novel it's revealed that Hammond grossly misled the bidders on the scope of the project, which was why Nedry bid so low, and then went on to professionally sabotage and blackmail Nedry at every turn - using InGen's vast financial reserves to burn bridges between Nedry and other clients. They also forced Nedry to do work that was not contracted, such as future support after the initial build while not paying any more for it. Nedry was an ass, for sure, but there's no indication he would have done anything for Dodgson if he hadn't been completely screwed for his work on JP. And that the movie does keep in. "Don't get cheap on me Dodgson. That was Hammond's mistake."

Which means the failure of the Park was less about chaos and more about direct villainy.
100% incorrect. The park had already fallen before any of the events we see in the movie (even the raptor attack in the beginning). Grant finds a hatched egg in the park. This tells us several things: first, the dinosaurs have been breeding (which is the obvious takeaway), but more importantly, and what most people seem to gloss over, that they have been breeding for quite some time. He's just arrived and has already found a fully hatched egg. They had no control over the island.*

Further, the type of egg is also interesting. It's explicitly called out as a raptor egg in the novel, but the movie skips this line. However, we can see that it is the exact size, color, and texture of the eggs we see in the incubation room early in the movie - which are raptor eggs. This was probably a simple cost-saving feature - they have a scene with eggs already, why not reuse a prop? But regardless of whether it was intentional or not, the end result is that we have a hatched raptor egg outside of the raptor enclosure. Which tells us something else - not only can the dinosaurs breed, they can also escape. All before Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Dr. Malcolm ever set foot on the island. Nothing in the movies made them lose control, those events were just a perfect storm that highlighted (not instigated) their lack of control.

The island was already lost. They just didn't know.

*Again, this is where the novel really shines but the movie loses a lot of its punch, but in the book, they have a computer tracking each and every dinosaur they have to keep an accurate count - except they never thought about more dinos without their intervention, so it was capped for a max and only designed to look for losses, and when that cap was removed, it showed far more of several dino species and immediately showed not only proof of their failure but also the sheer extent of it as well.

[Vinyadan]

Chaos theory aside, i do think there is some merit to the idea that large scale and ambitious projects have correspondingly large and ambitious problems. But thats an argument in favor of foresight and careful preparation, not against having large projects. Sure, we cant make a perfect zoo (or anything else) that will never fail and be 100% happy forever, but that doesnt mean the problems that will show up are insurmountable either.
I think this is a very good point, and it ties in with what the Park would have been.

Let's image that NASA had made the park. I say NASA, because they have absurdly costly programs to send people to operate in extremely dangerous environments. They train the hell out of them, they have lots of scientists behind them, they also experiment before the fact through simulations (you know, zero pressure, zero gravity, acceleration, diet, hydration... And, once the astronauts are in space, they keep them busy and strictly monitored, because that's an experiment, too.

Following the same approach, NASA would have started through simulations while a bunch of engineers would have had to calculate the forces necessary to keep dinosaurs in their place. Many other experts would have worked out behaviour and conditioning, as well as biological quirks. You know, make a dinosaur mock-up using old chicken blood and elaborating it like the dino DNA is going to be, and see what happens. They would have made a climatic analysis, and looked for the safest place to build the park. And so on, and so on.

It's pretty clear that Hammond, in the movie, wasn't going for this. He was going for the wow, and this kind of preliminary research was the exact opposite of the wow.

There's also another factor, which is the choice of having dinosaurs "in the wild". One of the themes of the movies is that life will find a way, and the wild offers a lot of ways. The dinosaurs are in an area which his very lightly, almost barely anthropized. The delusion is that taking a "human structure" and filling it with inhuman life to the brim human rules will be able to stand.

Add in a couple freak occurrences (life finds a way through frogs, the hurricane, and an unfaithful worker), and you get the perfect storm.

However, even with NASA and a safe place in an heavily anthropized area, the result would probably have been something like Fukushima (I mean, we still need a movie, right?). But then it's a lot more difficult to realistically show interesting characters making the wrong choices.

About Jurassic Park, I think that it deserves a reverse award for most ludicrously unlikely computer interface ever shown on screen... except that 3d interface really existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)). I've read that what is shown in the movie is actually a demo of it.

[Willie the Duck]

Speaking of that chemical structure, it was possibly the most absurd depiction of a chemical I've ever seen - and I'm including the various ludicrous DNA depictions.
If we want DNA depiction examples, Gene Roddenberry’s: Earth Final Conflict had three-stranded DNA (in a human-alien hybrid savior character, who also is going to enter ‘the next phase’ of evolution). I think Xfiles might have had triple stranded DNA as well in an inbred hillbilly clans’ stillborn baby, but that might have been some other messed up science (like maybe all three males contributed sets of chromosomes, but the mother didn’t? It’s been over 20 years since I saw it).

Looking at 90s/early 2000s sci fi, there’s also Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda and forcefields – now, since force fields are sci-fi gibberish, usually one doesn’t critique them. However, in Andromeda, I seem to recall them having the forcefields actually work differently from episode to episode. Same, I think, with artificial gravity.


I now want a Star Trek where the Ferengi abandon gold-pressed latinum in favor of bioneural gel packs as a medium of exchange.
I seem to recall a TNG episode where Riker bribes some Ferengi with “biomedical gel,” so there appears to be some precedent.


I am unsure if it's science or communication problem. But I hate the forced conflict of Scientists/Church in stories where scientists are piercing the veil between worlds, and the church having actual proof of the supernatural just give vague warning to make them stop.
TV writers get conflicts, and also who-hates-who wrong so often. Doctors hate surgeons, MDs hate PHDs, applied scientists hate theoretical scientists, etc. etc. I mean, at the individual level, this is true, but on the aggregate, groups tend to have friction with people with whom the directly interact (or even those who might have overlapping niches, as I do see some back-and-forth between Psychiatrists and Psychologists with prescriptive authority), not that person 2-3 lanes over.

[Poldon]

Piling onto Jurassic Park, those aren't velociraptors. Velociraptors are much smaller, about turkey-sized. I won't blame the movie-makers for the lack-of-feathers issue, due to the release date. Sure they knew (or at least suspected) these animals were feathered, but it hadn't really entered the public consciousness yet. It seems Crichton was using inaccurate resources.

Michael Crichton, who wrote the book which "Jurassic Park" is based on, and director Steven Spielberg were both aware of the Velociraptor's less than intimidating size back when the movie was being developed in the early '90s.

The Velociraptor we see on screen ended up based off of another dinosaur, Deinonychus. This is partially because Crichton based his novel on Gregory Paul's "Predatory Dinosaurs," which "labeled the Velociraptor as a Deinonychus subspecies."
-"What Velociraptors are really like" - Business Insider (can't link yet, sorry)

I don't however, believe a dinosaur zoo (if it were possible in the first place) is doomed to failure. Dinosaurs are animals, and humans have great experience controlling animals, even large ones. Jurassic Park the park, was doomed through mismanagement and a willful ignorance of reality around them. Yes, there would be emergent, unpredictable problems. Even zoos lose animals (and occasionally people die), but even a T. rex could be managed, using trial-and-error. Use a closed, secure area. Study its abilities. How high can it jump? What kind of force can it bring to bear? Electrified cables probably aren't going to cut it, but a 10-meter concrete barrier that's backed by earth, with an electrified fence on top and viewing platforms above/behind this? That'll probably do it. The velociraptors as portrayed? First, get rid of the trees. No climbing allowed. Concrete paddock, walls 4-5 meters. The key is to observe the animals. If they're exploring a weakness, getting close to escape, than make the wall taller. It works in real zoos. And always have a re-containment plan, even if it's killing the animal.

[Peelee]

I don't however, believe a dinosaur zoo (if it were possible in the first place) is doomed to failure. Dinosaurs are animals, and humans have great experience controlling animals, even large ones. Jurassic Park the park, was doomed through mismanagement and a willful ignorance of reality around them.
Agreed on all points.

Yes, there would be emergent, unpredictable problems. Even zoos lose animals (and occasionally people die), but even a T. rex could be managed, using trial-and-error.
In the novel, Grant was frequently called about various issues regarding dinosaur behavior at all times, including in the middle of the night (much to his consternation, as he was not privy to what they were doing at the time). They were actively on top of adapting to and attempting to anticipate unexpected behaviors.

Use a closed, secure area. Study its abilities. How high can it jump? What kind of force can it bring to bear? Electrified cables probably aren't going to cut it, but a 10-meter concrete barrier that's backed by earth, with an electrified fence on top and viewing platforms above/behind this? That'll probably do it.
In the novel, there were large moats (i don't remember the exact width, but 10 meter sounds roughly correct) around most enclosures with the electrified fences on the outer edge of the moat.

The velociraptors as portrayed? First, get rid of the trees. No climbing allowed. Concrete paddock, walls 4-5 meters. The key is to observe the animals. If they're exploring a weakness, getting close to escape, than make the wall taller. It works in real zoos. And always have a re-containment plan, even if it's killing the animal.
Those are adamantly not how real zoos work - zoos are conservationist. The well-being of the animal is one of their top priorities. In emergency situations, if the case calls for it, yes, they will kill an animal, but these are exceptionally rare circumstances, and for enclosure practices they try to accommodate the animal as much as possible.

All that being said, Jurassic Park is not a zoo. It is a theme park with live attractions, so I still largely agree.

Oh, and in the novel, Muldoon does try to implement a significantly more militarized security protocol in the event of animal mishandling or escape, and is largely shot down by Hammond (though he does get some concessions and has a few weapons lockers with munitions capable of handling the animals on the island). Like, as much as I love the movie, the novel blows it out of the water.

Let this be a warning to you all, this is what happens when someone mentions Jurassic Park around me.:smallwink:

[Forum Explorer]

Piling onto Jurassic Park, those aren't velociraptors. Velociraptors are much smaller, about turkey-sized. I won't blame the movie-makers for the lack-of-feathers issue, due to the release date. Sure they knew (or at least suspected) these animals were feathered, but it hadn't really entered the public consciousness yet. It seems Crichton was using inaccurate resources.

-"What Velociraptors are really like" - Business Insider (can't link yet, sorry)

I don't however, believe a dinosaur zoo (if it were possible in the first place) is doomed to failure. Dinosaurs are animals, and humans have great experience controlling animals, even large ones. Jurassic Park the park, was doomed through mismanagement and a willful ignorance of reality around them. Yes, there would be emergent, unpredictable problems. Even zoos lose animals (and occasionally people die), but even a T. rex could be managed, using trial-and-error. Use a closed, secure area. Study its abilities. How high can it jump? What kind of force can it bring to bear? Electrified cables probably aren't going to cut it, but a 10-meter concrete barrier that's backed by earth, with an electrified fence on top and viewing platforms above/behind this? That'll probably do it. The velociraptors as portrayed? First, get rid of the trees. No climbing allowed. Concrete paddock, walls 4-5 meters. The key is to observe the animals. If they're exploring a weakness, getting close to escape, than make the wall taller. It works in real zoos. And always have a re-containment plan, even if it's killing the animal.

Speaking of accuracy about the dinosaurs, the novel actually had one of the scientists suggest to Hammond that they modify the dinosaurs more, to make them slower, less violent, ect. You know, basically making them more suited for zoo life. The scientist pointed out that none of their guests would actually know what dinosaurs are like, so they could modify them however they liked, and Hammond shot him down.

If anything, that's the lesson I took from Jurassic Park (the Novel). That scientific endeavors should not be motivated by corporate greed or controlled by non-scientists. Because their goals run contrary to good scientific processes or the common good of society. Which has happened in the past with new medicines and the like.

[Peelee]

Speaking of accuracy about the dinosaurs, the novel actually had one of the scientists suggest to Hammond that they modify the dinosaurs more, to make them slower, less violent, ect. You know, basically making them more suited for zoo life. The scientist pointed out that none of their guests would actually know what dinosaurs are like, so they could modify them however they liked, and Hammond shot him down.

If anything, that's the lesson I took from Jurassic Park (the Novel). That scientific endeavors should not be motivated by corporate greed or controlled by non-scientists. Because their goals run contrary to good scientific processes or the common good of society. Which has happened in the past with new medicines and the like.

It's not even the scientists; twice now I've had reason to bring up Muldoon's desired security environment and how it was vetoed, and he's not a scientist at all, but he is a top notch game warden. I would change just that part of your statement - "non-scientists" to "non-experts". Listen to the people who damn well know what they're talking about. Hell, that's supposed to be why Hammond got them in the first place!

[Ramza00]

Piling onto Jurassic Park, those aren't velociraptors. Velociraptors are much smaller, about turkey-sized. I won't blame the movie-makers for the lack-of-feathers issue, due to the release date. Sure they knew (or at least suspected) these animals were feathered, but it hadn't really entered the public consciousness yet. It seems Crichton was using inaccurate resources.

-"What Velociraptors are really like" - Business Insider (can't link yet, sorry)


(Agrees with Poldon and adds some more info with links.)

Yep some of the dinosaur stuff is based off 1988 book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World which is full of illustrations. This book included some dinosaurs with feathers but also tried to create a new taxonomy for dinosaurs and say Velociraptor was related to Deinonychus and the new meta-category should be called Velociraptor even though the scientists were still debating this and you should really go with the names everyone else is going with but no the illustrated book wanted to do its own thing. (Now the writer is not following the science but if his idea turns out to be true you usually name the meta category under the older name of the first found dinosaur of the class, so it is defensible but I would argue you should be following the consensus with things like names.)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/you-say-velociraptor-i-say-deinonychus-33789870/

But yeah it is Deinonychus. Grant's dig is in North America the location of Deinonychus not Mongolia the location of Velociraptors. Furthermore Crichton consulted with the famous John Ostrom. John Ostrom is a big deal in the dinosaur world for several reasons.


He is the person who found the Deinonychus in the 1964 and more skeletons in the 1960s and 1970s (there was an earlier skeleton found in the 1931 but it was more fragmentary so they did not know what they had merely it was different than other dinosaur skeletons in the same area.)
Importantly John Ostrom skeleton was an almost intact skeleton and this allowed a better understanding of the dinosaur.
John Ostrom's skeletons reconceptualized how we thought of dinosaurs for the first time. We understood they, dinosaurs with some species, can be fast, active, agile and sometimes warm-blooded. This one skeleton indicating a new type of dinosaur with John Ostrom launched something called the "Dinosaur Renaissance." Besides changing how scientists view dinosaurs with activity level, energy level, are they cold or warm blooded (or both depending on which species for Dinosaurs are merely a meta-category and each individual species may be different over hundreds of millions of years) ... Ostrom's research in the 60s and 70s also re-ignited the debate whether Dinosaurs and Birds are related or not.


So yeah Crichton consulted with John Ostrom about his research and his experiences looking for Dinosaurs in North America such as Deinonychus. Grants into about "a big turkey" with the kid is partly Crichton summarizing the idea shift that had happened over the last 25 years at the time. Well in their consultations Crichton tells Ostrom (over the phone) that he is going to rename the dinosaur and call it Velociraptor even though most of the inspiration in his book is based off Deinonychus. (links to source for that 2nd claim, read it in the author's own words not my summarization.)

https://news.yale.edu/2015/06/18/yale-s-legacy-jurassic-world



Let this be a warning to you all, this is what happens when someone mentions Jurassic Park around me.:smallwink:

Why are you warning us about fun?

[Tvtyrant]

I always found it frustrating that they wanted to make dinosaurs extremely intelligent. Dinosaurs were dumb by modern standards, the smartest of them were moderately intelligent and the dumbest make rhinos look brilliant. The book at least mentioned that Stegosaurus was imbecilic, but the magic raptors got worse with each story.

[BeerMug Paladin]

It's not even the scientists; twice now I've had reason to bring up Muldoon's desired security environment and how it was vetoed, and he's not a scientist at all, but he is a top notch game warden. I would change just that part of your statement - "non-scientists" to "non-experts". Listen to the people who damn well know what they're talking about. Hell, that's supposed to be why Hammond got them in the first place!
Nah, he got them so he could put their names on the promo material and use their reputations and their involvement in the project to brag about the excellence of his park to his investors, to the media and eventually, his potential customers.

C'mon, you know I'm right. That's the only use people like Hammond have for experts.

To uncharacteristically mention something on-topic, years ago I saw some trash (probably Asylum) movie on a cable channel that I can't recall the name of. I was only passively watching it while chatting with a friend, but if I recall correctly it had GMO corn getting eaten by... Locusts maybe? Which then grew larger and started killing people. Typical monster movie stuff, really, but the locusts weren't gigantic, they were just twice normal size or something. The whole swarm was treated as the monster.

The kicker? The killer insects were defeated by healthy eating. I can't recall for certain what happened (because I was too busy laughing at the stupidity) but the killer insets came at the main character and instead of disintegrating him or making his body explode like he was being pummeled by machine gun fire like had happened to everyone else, the bugs just insti-died. I think the main character was a vegan or something? I think after that they concluded it was because he only ate non-GMO plants or something. And the swarm was killing everyone else because they had GMO stuff in their bodies and it's what the bugs were trying to eat all along.

I wanted the rest of the movie to be the characters walking around and aggressively eating carrots at the monsters and forcing everyone to become vegan at gunpoint, but alas, they went with a completely unsurprising resolution of rigging up a machine to... Spray non-gmo corn oil into the air to defeat the swarm, I think? Or just made a GMO-on-the-outside, non-GMO-inside bomb to lure them in and blow them all up? It was probably the second one, since that's a less creative and worse notion.

But at least monster bugs being defeated by healthy eating was memorable. I'm gonna go eat some carrots now.

[LibraryOgre]

A closer look at Velociraptors. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCLjWYrJlcQ)

[Peelee]

Nah, he got them so he could put their names on the promo material and use their reputations and their involvement in the project to brag about the excellence of his park to his investors, to the media and eventually, his potential customers.

C'mon, you know I'm right.
Big game wardens aren't really household named, so that's not really adding in a lot of marketing to anyone but maybe the investors (and he had other, better tricks for the investors). John Arnold, Robert Muldoon, these were guys at the top of their games who were clearly the right fits for their roles. Hammond was just such a raging narcissist that he thought he knew better than anyone else about everything else.


To uncharacteristically mention something on-topic, years ago I saw some trash (probably Asylum) movie on a cable channel that I can't recall the name of. I was only passively watching it while chatting with a friend, but if I recall correctly it had GMO corn getting eaten by... Locusts maybe? Which then grew larger and started killing people. Typical monster movie stuff, really, but the locusts weren't gigantic, they were just twice normal size or something. The whole swarm was treated as the monster.

The kicker? The killer insects were defeated by healthy eating. I can't recall for certain what happened (because I was too busy laughing at the stupidity) but the killer insets came at the main character and instead of disintegrating him or making his body explode like he was being pummeled by machine gun fire like had happened to everyone else, the bugs just insti-died. I think the main character was a vegan or something? I think after that they concluded it was because he only ate non-GMO plants or something. And the swarm was killing everyone else because they had GMO stuff in their bodies and it's what the bugs were trying to eat all along.

I wanted the rest of the movie to be the characters walking around and aggressively eating carrots at the monsters and forcing everyone to become vegan at gunpoint, but alas, they went with a completely unsurprising resolution of rigging up a machine to... Spray non-gmo corn oil into the air to defeat the swarm, I think? Or just made a GMO-on-the-outside, non-GMO-inside bomb to lure them in and blow them all up? It was probably the second one, since that's a less creative and worse notion.

But at least monster bugs being defeated by healthy eating was memorable.
I don't know why it sounds like you disliked this film, it seems to be both scientifically accurate and entertaining!

[Ramza00]

I always found it frustrating that they wanted to make dinosaurs extremely intelligent. Dinosaurs were dumb by modern standards, the smartest of them were moderately intelligent and the dumbest make rhinos look brilliant. The book at least mentioned that Stegosaurus was imbecilic, but the magic raptors got worse with each story.

Blame the Alien Franchise mixed with Steven Spielberg originally being a horror director.

You need an intelligent enemy if it chases you through several environments. Else you have environmental set pieces where you are at risk but once you leave the environment a different predator has to be the source of threat (or a different form of tension where the environment itself is unsafe.)

[BeerMug Paladin]

Big game wardens aren't really household named, so that's not really adding in a lot of marketing to anyone but maybe the investors (and he had other, better tricks for the investors). John Arnold, Robert Muldoon, these were guys at the top of their games who were clearly the right fits for their roles. Hammond was just such a raging narcissist that he thought he knew better than anyone else about everything else.
I picture that the names are there so investors who are skeptical of Hammond may dig into the background of the other people and then conclude that this is a real serious project that's worth consideration. You know, people who would do a cursory sort of examination and see the names and backgrounds of people involved, but not actually ever have enough insight or direct knowledge to know that Hammond himself would just veto anything he deemed "unnecessary".

Similar to being skeptical of certain directors, producers and actors but still being willing to reconsider something they're involved with if it has other names attached to give more confidence that the project is worth paying attention to. Because movies and television is just like business investment.

I don't know why it sounds like you disliked this film, it seems to be both scientifically accurate and entertaining!
Having a movie like that on in the background while mostly just talking with friends is the optimal viewing experience. Judging it as a movie, it's utter trash. As background ambience for a hangout, it's perfect. Still probably loses out to a decent album of music, though.

If I ever get to direct a movie, I will definitely have the aggressive consumption of some vegetable feature as someone's plan A for conflict resolution. So at least in that regard, I can say it's given me something to amuse myself with. I'm thinking of an action-comedy with a lovable doofus main protagonist. Super Mario Bros. 2, obviously.

[Traab]

I don't know, I think the novel about copywriting genes and cell ownership had a point.

It is kind of bullcrap that a doctor could be looking at a leftover slide of my blood from bloodwork I got done eight years ago, discover that my blood cells have some useful unique mutation, replicate it for study, make something of it, and then patent my unique genes and make a fortune without giving me any when he's making that money on my DNA.

Or, to use a historical example, the Lacks family are owed billions for all the profit that' been made on selling different strains of Hela, which is especially disgusting becuase the hospital and doctor who made Hela from Hernreitta's cancer cells actively chose not to patent the original strain. The way the laws are written, they're never gonna get a dime.

And, to Crichton's credit, the court ruling that said that the company that patented a man's cell line were allowed to take his and his children's cells whenever they wanted whether they agreed to or not was overturned and the company ridiculed for the audacity of trying to get slavery reinstituted.

On the other hand, IIRC in that book Crichton also used the name of one of his critics for a character who molests babies band has a microscopic whatsit.

Basically, shoot the messenger but the messege in fine.


Huh, interesting, the owning their blood and being able to take it without consent thing? That popped up awhile back in a fanfic based on jurassic park I read. It was a crossover with harry potter and took place during the first movie, but at one point harry got infected by a bunch of samples one of the scientists (I think Dr Wu) had been working on to frankenstein dinos into new forms. He actually tried to sue to have ownership over harry because he "stole his work" and thus Wu should be allowed to use him as a guinea pig for experiments to recover what he could. Similar arguments about slavery were made in the defense before they literally just walked out the courthouse and dared them to try anything stupid. Makes me wonder if the author was a chrichton fan.

[Tvtyrant]

Blame the Alien Franchise mixed with Steven Spielberg originally being a horror director.

You need an intelligent enemy if it chases you through several environments. Else you have environmental set pieces where you are at risk but once you leave the environment a different predator has to be the source of threat (or a different form of tension where the environment itself is unsafe.)

I always thought those getting tracked movies were imitating our innate fear of leopards. Things that you lose track of and then they suddenly ambush you from crazy positions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxiwY35txy8), invisible when you aren't looking at them, kills their prey almost instantly.

[Vinyadan]

I always thought those getting tracked movies were imitating our innate fear of leopards. Things that you lose track of and then they suddenly ambush you from crazy positions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxiwY35txy8), invisible when you aren't looking at them, kills their prey almost instantly.
Is that Australia? Is that a drop bear?

[Fyraltari]

Having a movie like that on in the background while mostly just talking with friends is the optimal viewing experience.

I will never understand this « movie as background » thing. Why do you need a background for anything? It’s flashy and noisy, it’s just distracting. I spent some time with an American-Irish family who had a TV set in every room and always turned it on when they entered the room once. It just made following what was happening on the screen impossible and hard to focus on whatever was happening in reality.

[Ramza00]

I will never understand this « movie as background » thing. Why do you need a background for anything? It’s flashy and noisy, it’s just distracting. I spent some time with an American-Irish family who had a TV set in every room and always turned it on when they entered the room once. It just made following what was happening on the screen impossible and hard to focus on whatever was happening in reality.

People are different biology wise even in the same family (and thus mostly the same genes.) There is a signal to noise ratio with arousal where the ideal arousal is in the medium zone. Too much arousal and you have bad focus and too little arousal you have a different form of bad focus. The term for this biology wise is known as "Yerkes-Dodson Law" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law , it is a "phenonemna" scientists have known about for a 100 years now.


We are now finding out the specific receptor targets of why this is (it is not one chemical in your brain but dozens.)
For example with norepinephrine and adrenaline two neurotransmitters you need to trigger the Alpha 2a receptors to get the medium arousal and not enough norepinephrine or adrenaline to make it easier to use your frontal lobe. Too much norepinephrine and adrenaline and you trigger the Alpha 1 and Beta 1 receptors and it is harder to use your frontal lobe. Likewise a similar phenomena happens with Dopamine where you need D2 receptors to be triggered but not too much D2 receptors. D2 receptors are looking for short bursts of dopamine. D1 receptors are long for longer sustained burst of dopamine and thus the interaction of these two help your brain figure out what is important and salient.
Likewise we have stress hormones called Glucocorticoid (Glucose + Cortex + Steroid, Glucocorticoid is an abbreviation) where your ideal process is in the middle zone.


Some people purposefully insert music for it helps arousal and getting the rhythm helps them. Likewise with other people adding people talking helps them get aroused but also it helps them block out distractions if at the right volume for those people talking on the tv become white noise.

*Shrug* our brains are weird. I will like to emphasis there is not a 1 side fits all with it. Each people may need different inputs to get that ideal arousal zone. Some people need to be psyched up while other people need someone to help comfort them and calm down for they are overcharged already.


I always thought those getting tracked movies were imitating our innate fear of leopards. Things that you lose track of and then they suddenly ambush you from crazy positions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxiwY35txy8), invisible when you aren't looking at them, kills their prey almost instantly.

My point was the Raptors in the first movie appeared smarter than leopards or lions. And they only get smarter as the movie franchise gets longer. Originally scene with the kitchen is meant to elicit Alien franchise but also have a horror aspect where it feels familiar, it feels ordinary like your home or a hotel kitchen. The danger is not just outside where John Ray Arnold, Robert Muldoon, and Ellie Sattler are turning back the power on. The leopard / raptors are not just dangerous in their native environment. No it is now one greater stage of horror where the Raptors can hunt you in your prefered environment and even in your human "home" you are not safe.

This escalation of horror in Jurassic Park 1 is where the Dinosaurs went from Man vs Animal to Man vs Alien (in a Raptor form.) You are now fighting a dangerous being that feels "other" in a way that scares you primally in a terror form of way.

[Rater202]

It's cut out of the movie, likely because as pointed out, the film almost exclusively portrays him in a bad light, but in the novel it's revealed that Hammond grossly misled the bidders on the scope of the project, which was why Nedry bid so low, and then went on to professionally sabotage and blackmail Nedry at every turn - using InGen's vast financial reserves to burn bridges between Nedry and other clients. They also forced Nedry to do work that was not contracted, such as future support after the initial build while not paying any more for it. Nedry was an ass, for sure, but there's no indication he would have done anything for Dodgson if he hadn't been completely screwed for his work on JP. And that the movie does keep in. "Don't get cheap on me Dodgson. That was Hammond's mistake."

100% incorrect. The park had already fallen before any of the events we see in the movie (even the raptor attack in the beginning). Grant finds a hatched egg in the park. This tells us several things: first, the dinosaurs have been breeding (which is the obvious takeaway), but more importantly, and what most people seem to gloss over, that they have been breeding for quite some time. He's just arrived and has already found a fully hatched egg. They had no control over the island.*

Further, the type of egg is also interesting. It's explicitly called out as a raptor egg in the novel, but the movie skips this line. However, we can see that it is the exact size, color, and texture of the eggs we see in the incubation room early in the movie - which are raptor eggs. This was probably a simple cost-saving feature - they have a scene with eggs already, why not reuse a prop? But regardless of whether it was intentional or not, the end result is that we have a hatched raptor egg outside of the raptor enclosure. Which tells us something else - not only can the dinosaurs breed, they can also escape. All before Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Dr. Malcolm ever set foot on the island. Nothing in the movies made them lose control, those events were just a perfect storm that highlighted (not instigated) their lack of control.

The island was already lost. They just didn't know.

*Again, this is where the novel really shines but the movie loses a lot of its punch, but in the book, they have a computer tracking each and every dinosaur they have to keep an accurate count - except they never thought about more dinos without their intervention, so it was capped for a max and only designed to look for losses, and when that cap was removed, it showed far more of several dino species and immediately showed not only proof of their failure but also the sheer extent of it as well.

Tha'ts actually a pothole. They werne't cloning eggs, they were cloning embryos and implanting them into preexisting eggs(I want to say ostritch but it's been years since I've seen the movie)

So a "natural" raptor egg shouldn't have looked like the eggs in the lab, unless the dinos are more tinkered with than previously thought.

[Tvtyrant]

Is that Australia? Is that a drop bear?

Yes. It drops, it is a desert, and it looks like a bear.

[Dienekes]

100% incorrect. The park had already fallen before any of the events we see in the movie (even the raptor attack in the beginning). Grant finds a hatched egg in the park. This tells us several things: first, the dinosaurs have been breeding (which is the obvious takeaway), but more importantly, and what most people seem to gloss over, that they have been breeding for quite some time. He's just arrived and has already found a fully hatched egg. They had no control over the island.*

Further, the type of egg is also interesting. It's explicitly called out as a raptor egg in the novel, but the movie skips this line. However, we can see that it is the exact size, color, and texture of the eggs we see in the incubation room early in the movie - which are raptor eggs. This was probably a simple cost-saving feature - they have a scene with eggs already, why not reuse a prop? But regardless of whether it was intentional or not, the end result is that we have a hatched raptor egg outside of the raptor enclosure. Which tells us something else - not only can the dinosaurs breed, they can also escape. All before Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Dr. Malcolm ever set foot on the island. Nothing in the movies made them lose control, those events were just a perfect storm that highlighted (not instigated) their lack of control.

The island was already lost. They just didn't know.

*Again, this is where the novel really shines but the movie loses a lot of its punch, but in the book, they have a computer tracking each and every dinosaur they have to keep an accurate count - except they never thought about more dinos without their intervention, so it was capped for a max and only designed to look for losses, and when that cap was removed, it showed far more of several dino species and immediately showed not only proof of their failure but also the sheer extent of it as well.

In the book it’s presented that way. But in the movie, I don’t think so. Because it has nothing to do with the reason they abandon the park. Actually it’s directly shown that the raptor fences are on, until they shut them down and we see the huge hole where the beasts escape. We don’t see the heroes terrorized by dinosaurs that were born without tabs placed on them. No. We see the ones that escaped because Nedry turned off the fences and then Arnold rebooted the system. That’s on them, not chaos.

Saying your theme and hypothesis on life is utterly meaningless if the actions of the plot don’t follow through with it.

The solution to wild dinos could very well have been, hiring some hunters in the years it would take them to be fully grown. Or maybe that wouldn’t have worked for another reason. We don’t know, because that story isn’t in the movie and has little to do with the focus of the action.

[Peelee]

John Ray Arnold
I see what you did there.

Tha'ts actually a pothole. They werne't cloning eggs, they were cloning embryos and implanting them into preexisting eggs(I want to say ostritch but it's been years since I've seen the movie)

So a "natural" raptor egg shouldn't have looked like the eggs in the lab, unless the dinos are more tinkered with than previously thought.
In the novel, they crated their own artificial eggs, but in the movie, yes, they used large bird eggs. However, we have numerous fossils of dino eggs, so they could likely have altered the appearance of the eggs to resemble actual dinosaur eggs. After all, the entire park is built on window dressing, so why not there as well?

Yes. It drops, it is a desert, and it looks like a bear.
You've clearly never seen a drop bear, they are far scarier than that.

In the book it’s presented that way. But in the movie, I don’t think so. Because it has nothing to do with the reason they abandon the park. Actually it’s directly shown that the raptor fences are on, until they shut them down and we see the huge hole where the beasts escape. We don’t see the heroes terrorized by dinosaurs that were born without tabs placed on them. No. We see the ones that escaped because Nedry turned off the fences and then Arnold rebooted the system. That’s on them, not chaos.
In the movie its presented that way as well; Grant finds hatched eggs. Dinos are definitely breeding and escaping enclosures. Even in the novel, we don't see the heroes terrorized by dinosaurs that were born without tabs places on them.

Saying your theme and hypothesis on life is utterly meaningless if the actions of the plot don’t follow through with it.
That does follow through on the theme, though. If Nedry was the sole cause, then life didn't find a way; someone just messed up. However, if they were breeding and escaping before that, then life did find a way, and Nedry and the tropical storm just showcased it.

[Dargaron]

To uncharacteristically mention something on-topic, years ago I saw some trash (probably Asylum) movie on a cable channel that I can't recall the name of. I was only passively watching it while chatting with a friend, but if I recall correctly it had GMO corn getting eaten by... Locusts maybe? Which then grew larger and started killing people. Typical monster movie stuff, really, but the locusts weren't gigantic, they were just twice normal size or something. The whole swarm was treated as the monster.

The kicker? The killer insects were defeated by healthy eating. I can't recall for certain what happened (because I was too busy laughing at the stupidity) but the killer insets came at the main character and instead of disintegrating him or making his body explode like he was being pummeled by machine gun fire like had happened to everyone else, the bugs just insti-died. I think the main character was a vegan or something? I think after that they concluded it was because he only ate non-GMO plants or something. And the swarm was killing everyone else because they had GMO stuff in their bodies and it's what the bugs were trying to eat all along.

I wanted the rest of the movie to be the characters walking around and aggressively eating carrots at the monsters and forcing everyone to become vegan at gunpoint, but alas, they went with a completely unsurprising resolution of rigging up a machine to... Spray non-gmo corn oil into the air to defeat the swarm, I think? Or just made a GMO-on-the-outside, non-GMO-inside bomb to lure them in and blow them all up? It was probably the second one, since that's a less creative and worse notion.

But at least monster bugs being defeated by healthy eating was memorable. I'm gonna go eat some carrots now.

It's worse than Asylum: you're describing the Syfy Original Movie "Locusts: the 8th Plague."

[Dienekes]

In the movie its presented that way as well; Grant finds hatched eggs. Dinos are definitely breeding and escaping enclosures. Even in the novel, we don't see the heroes terrorized by dinosaurs that were born without tabs places on them.

True. We see a little girl eaten by them which starts the whole plot instead. And it takes a huge bit at the end to demonstrate how the dinosaurs have migrated to the mainland and the world is forever changed all regardless of Nedry’s antics.


That does follow through on the theme, though. If Nedry was the sole cause, then life didn't find a way; someone just messed up. However, if they were breeding and escaping before that, then life did find a way, and Nedry and the tropical storm just showcased it.

Again, they say it’s the theme. The hark upon it being the theme several times. The awed tones when Grant realizes “Ian was right.” Are all big blinking lights that go “This is deep!”

But the action of the movie has nothing to do with it. Remove Malcolm and the eggs and the plot is unchanged. Nedry does some corporate espionage and releases dinosaurs.

[Peelee]

Again, they say it’s the theme. The hark upon it being the theme several times. The awed tones when Grant realizes “Ian was right.” Are all big blinking lights that go “This is deep!”

But the action of the movie has nothing to do with it. Remove Malcolm and the eggs and the plot is unchanged. Nedry does some corporate espionage and releases dinosaurs.

True. Which, tangentially, brings up another point (purely IMO) the movie has going for it. IIRC, Nedry didn't shut off any dinosaur fences, because that would be a ridiculous thing do to - he only shut off perimeter fences so that he could move freely throughout the park in that time gap. Arnold shut down the whole system to bypass Nedry's lockout, but because it had never been done before, they didn't know about a glitch where it only came back with auxiliary power, which wasn't enough to power any of the fences. I like that better because it's nonsensical for Nedry to shut off power to areas that could be catastrophic, like the T-Rex paddock, when all he needs is the fences between him and the dock - sure, they're probably tied in to other systems, but it's doubtful they would keep perimeter fences and dino enclosure fences on the same systems - and we can tell they don't in the movie, at least, because they comment on how Nedry didn't turn off the raptors' fences.

[Traab]

True. Which, tangentially, brings up another point (purely IMO) the movie has going for it. IIRC, Nedry didn't shut off any dinosaur fences, because that would be a ridiculous thing do to - he only shut off perimeter fences so that he could move freely throughout the park in that time gap. Arnold shut down the whole system to bypass Nedry's lockout, but because it had never been done before, they didn't know about a glitch where it only came back with auxiliary power, which wasn't enough to power any of the fences. I like that better because it's nonsensical for Nedry to shut off power to areas that could be catastrophic, like the T-Rex paddock, when all he needs is the fences between him and the dock - sure, they're probably tied in to other systems, but it's doubtful they would keep perimeter fences and dino enclosure fences on the same systems - and we can tell they don't in the movie, at least, because they comment on how Nedry didn't turn off the raptors' fences.

He also shut down the dino tour jeeps for some reason. Was that intentional to try and draw attention away from where he wandered off too? I was also thinking about how fast he died to the spitty bois. Its kind of odd timing really. Even if the fences DID all go down, unless the dinos were constantly attacking them, how would they even know that quickly? Its like, within a couple hours of the power going out, all the dinos were roaming free. Nedry lasted maybe a half hour from shutting down the security? I had to watch the scene again as I remembered he drove off the road and got stuck but he clearly didnt drive into an enclosure, he ran through a cheap wooden guardrail type fence separating about 20 yards of space between roads. So yeah, wtf was that all about? Heh, I almost wish instead of getting eaten then he made it to the docks, the boat left, so he spends most of the rest of the movie trying to lay low, not knowing just how *&^%*&^% the park is right now then maybe gets eaten towards the end, or worse yet, left behind by the survivors who never knew he was still around.

[Peelee]

He also shut down the dino tour jeeps for some reason. Was that intentional to try and draw attention away from where he wandered off too? I was also thinking about how fast he died to the spitty bois. Its kind of odd timing really. Even if the fences DID all go down, unless the dinos were constantly attacking them, how would they even know that quickly? Its like, within a couple hours of the power going out, all the dinos were roaming free. Nedry lasted maybe a half hour from shutting down the security? I had to watch the scene again as I remembered he drove off the road and got stuck but he clearly didnt drive into an enclosure, he ran through a cheap wooden guardrail type fence separating about 20 yards of space between roads. So yeah, wtf was that all about? Heh, I almost wish instead of getting eaten then he made it to the docks, the boat left, so he spends most of the rest of the movie trying to lay low, not knowing just how *&^%*&^% the park is right now then maybe gets eaten towards the end, or worse yet, left behind by the survivors who never knew he was still around.

It would have fit well if they had firmly established that the dinos were already capable of escaping, since almost everyone kept to vehicles or the even more high-security buildings aside from the Muldoon and Harding would be the only ones to have any reason to roam freely so the absence of previous attacks could be explained. Also, I imagine he shut off the jeeps so that there would be less chance of anyone seeing him doing his dirty deeds on the road, since there were only two gas-powered jeeps and they all knew Dr. Sattler and Dr. Harding were in the other one.

[Rater202]

I assumed that almost everything was on one set of power circuits so when he shut down the fences he shut down just about everything else too.

This might be a mandella effect thing, but I distinctly remember the lights in one of the buildings going off.

[Peelee]

I assumed that almost everything was on one set of power circuits so when he shut down the fences he shut down just about everything else too.

This might be a mandella effect thing, but I distinctly remember the lights in one of the buildings going off.

A security camera shut off at a set time, but that's about it. In the movie, the big, system-wife power failure was when they reset the system but breakers had tripped so most power systems stayed off. Nedry **** down some systems but left others. And while I'm sure some systems were tied together, it makes no sense to tie, say, the jeep system and the T-Rex fences together.

[sktarq]

Tha'ts actually a pothole. They werne't cloning eggs, they were cloning embryos and implanting them into preexisting eggs(I want to say ostritch but it's been years since I've seen the movie)

So a "natural" raptor egg shouldn't have looked like the eggs in the lab, unless the dinos are more tinkered with than previously thought.
well they say ostrich ova...which is questionable if they are talking about implanting the DNA into zygote-cell-type-eggs or the whole schebang. In the books the eggs were plastic.


As for my own views on REALLY painful bad science in movies.


This movie left me on an hour long rant after when I saw it i theatres...but was so boring I only stayed awake in anger and my GF fell asleep on my shoulder....Where to start... okay lets handwave the ability for an animal to be that big and not have legs so thick they can't move, that they can absorb/metabolize radiation, etc....Firstly if you have a bunch of radioactive dust spread over a town (the one in Japan from early in the movie) and an isotope undergoes decay say in the house...even if the damn MUTO can absorb it it would still have to get to the MUTO...which would mean it would still have to pass through the geiger counter between the site of the decaying isotope and the muto itself. Which means the gieger counter should still be buzzing away.

Also the movie shows Godzilla swimming from Hawaii to California under a USN Aircraft Carrier...CV88 which according the wiki is a Nimitz Carrier version of the Saratoga (the last actual USN Saratoga is CV-60 a Forrestal Class)...Well the front does look right for a Nimitz...now Nimitz are powered by a pair of atomic reactors...hey isn't that going to be an issue since these guys all seem to be drawn to sources of radiation?) So that boat NOT being attacked is now an issue.

Also they are using a single atomic bomb to attract these guys as a lure? umm...Such weapons doesn't produce much radiation before you set them off. And it is not like there are not plenty of larger sources of radiation in the area. How about Lawrence Livermore Laboratories just north of Berkley, they can't say it doesn't exist in this movie as they mention getting advice from there at a different point in the movie.

Also there are much larger sources of radiation than our wee like atomic bombs (per-detonation)...Hell if the MUTO was really radiation hunger it would just go find a Radon leaking hillside here in California (we have plenty of them) and have a nice lie-down. Much bigger meal than that bomb.

ALSO so when they show up to Yucca mountain they have a big crew and even helicopters....Now if there was a hole in the side of the mountain those whirlybirds would be in a very good spot to see it...So we can presume it isn't there...Yet by the time they get down to the corridor where the MUTO bits were stored it punches up and out into the Las Vegas sunshine...Without anyone noticing until the open the door....Y'all left a bunch of people somewhere as there are a bunch fewer people down in the corridor than would be needed to run that convoy you showed up in...no alarms for what would basically be earthquake? nah?

Also since we see several doors in this corridor and only one has the ominous beam of sunlight we can get an idea how big the spaces are...so how did the MUTO we see having JUST escaped fit into that space? And since the doors had little windows in them did nobody notice a wall of flesh pressed up against the glass? Thee is a serious conservation of mass issue here

Speaking of conservation of mass. A pet peeve of mine is monsters that don't. Prometheus is a classic example. The little cephalopd looking creature removed via surgery and is then locked in the Medbay...now in a couple hours the door is opened and it is multi-ton lovecraftian horror show....Now even if we handwave some serious cell division and protein replication speed issues...where did it get the material to incorporate into its own structure to do this? No since it was growing inside a human body I think we can take a mainly HNCO basic structure as given...Now Ash mentioned the facehuggers have a polarized silicon exoskeleton though since humans only have 5-10 grams of silicon in their bodies I think we can say they must pick up that silicon post-chestbursting and the room-squid also shows no sign of an exoskeleton...so we still need lots of Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon compounds....the room is not that clear but doesn't show obvious signs of being eaten and if the thing could eat the walls the idea that the door held it in and still works is...a stretch. Now the original Alien also had this to some degree but it disappeared for a longer time before showing up fully grown...the AVP ones doesn't have this excuse they are adults in no time...not to pick on the Alien franchise here but the this is a bloody annoying trope...and all this stuff is based on a near perfect conversion of food to body mass. Which as monsters I'll let them handwave a bunch and maybe they have alternate energy sources...but still . . . I mean Life was not great in this too but better for example.

I went to see Splice (2009) in the theatre...on a first date...it was VERY awkward. and the disgust, awkward, will-kill-your-libido, WTH, etc panoply of reactions did dull the reaction absolute slaughter of the science involved. . . honestly I don't even want to think about that movie anymore so I won't go into the details. But it was BAD

Oh boy....So first of all that rocket at the end has a mini warp core in it....as it gets from somewhere that humans can live and breathe okay to the local sun in a couple seconds (vs say 8+ min from earth to our sun at light speed)...then the effect spread across the star basically instantly and it goes out....huh? okay even if you managed to halt the fusion reaction at the star's core, having somehow punched in through the superdense plasma it would still be very very hot...so much so it would be glowing hot for millions of years...hell it may take 10K years for light produced at the core to even reach the surface and those won't be stopped by fewer photons coming up behind. And somehow they are going to use some lithium isotope to do this? okay you I class hobbyist rocket there just plain doesn't have the payload to do anything to a star...but lets handwave all of the above...and somehow they stop the fusion in the star...that won't mean the gravity due to the stars mass turns off, so the mass of the star would still be effecting the ribbons path...thus negating the whole point...if one wanted to be extra persnickety one could point out that their trick would mean that less mass has been converted to energy, less coronal mass has been expelled and the mass associated with the photons that have passed the ribbon if the star had been "on" would instead be near the star's original position so the star would actually have a VERYVERYVERYVERYveryveryvery*very24 slightly more gravitational effect on the ribbon in the other damn direction....this was so painful to watch I had to apply Whiskey bottle directly to gullet in order to minimize next day head pain...fortunately I was Scotland at the time and it was cheaper than it would be here.

in talking about messing with stars with very bad science...I don't remember this well enough to write my exact complains with confidence...Also not being a masochist I don't want to refresh my memory enough to do so....but it was painful the first time.

[Rater202]

A security camera shut off at a set time, but that's about it. In the movie, the big, system-wife power failure was when they reset the system but breakers had tripped so most power systems stayed off. Nedry **** down some systems but left others. And while I'm sure some systems were tied together, it makes no sense to tie, say, the jeep system and the T-Rex fences together.

I mean, having all of the fences on the same power system is stupid. What's worse than the T-Rex escaping? The T-Rex, all of the raptors, and the poison spitting turkeys all escaping at once. (and, in the Tell-Tale game that takes place concurrently, the Troodons and I want to know how badly they screwed up cloning Troodons to make "slightly smarter than normal raptors" into that nightmare.)

At bare minimum, each enclosure should have had its own backup generator in or near that specific enclosure and not directly connected to the grid in case the grid went down.

Obviously, since the track the jeeps were on runs past multiple enclosures and all the fences were on the same circuit, the track was plugged ino the same electrical lines that were already running the same route.

Basically,the kind of thing that sounds logical until you remember that those enclosures are full of predatory dinosaurs that see moderately large mammals as either ideal prey(the raptors), the mother load(the spitters), or a nice snack(Rexey) respectively.

[sktarq]

....

At bare minimum, each enclosure should have had its own backup generator in or near that specific enclosure and not directly connected to the grid in case the grid went down.....

Eh between the moats, the reliability of the main generator (geothermal-fuel tanks were for emergencies and the grid did not go down until the Arnold shut it down), etc the books had a MUCH more sensible system. It was a human error of not realizing that the system was designed to not start-short-repeat and thus had to manually restarted. Much easier to run that way off of a minimal human input when running. Which would in theory be more realiable that way.


Also totally forgot as I only know it from the book and was thinking movies....


This is the only book I have ever hate read...not sure if that is the right term even...I was more in shock in how bad the science was and kept reading in the horror of wondering how bad it could be...It was like a car-crash of science in written form.
I think one of things I really got thrown by was how easy the stuff he got wrong would have been easy to get right. Like antimatter destroying a like amount of matter when they touch. That magnetic bottles work for more than just antimatter...that we have been carefully working with antimatter since the fifties so it wasn't new. A canopy sun reflector/shade parachute. it goes from weakness to weakness.

I mean I do try to give lots of handwave space. but two main issues come with this stuff.
If you add some scieince-y thing it doesn't change how the rest of science works. the addition of your monster doesn't change how gravity works unless that is very much established as power of the monster. It won't effect how building fall over or don't...how missiles work etc. and if the change has existed for more than the intro of the movie then you have to deal with the consequences of whatever scieincy change you made. Made a free energy source in something better explain why it isn't used to power a whole bunch of the world or show the change of the world being powered by this same technology you introduced.

also thinking such changed make a better story and/or are more cinematic etc just annoys me...They all bring me well out of the story and always have.

[Ramza00]

Honestly for a Zoo running electric fences as the only point of failure is kind of silly / stupid.

That said I can imagine John Hammond doing that for it costs actual money to important bulldozers to build a moat, or lots of cement to build a wall for a zoo. Sure it would pay for itself long term, but it would still be outrageously expensive creating a separate island with no infrastructure whatsoever and then create a theme park like experience on top of it with roads, concrete, electricity, etc.

[Tvtyrant]

Honestly for a Zoo running electric fences as the only point of failure is kind of silly / stupid.

That said I can imagine John Hammond doing that for it costs actual money to important bulldozers to build a moat, or lots of cement to build a wall for a zoo. Sure it would pay for itself long term, but it would still be outrageously expensive creating a separate island with no infrastructure whatsoever and then create a theme park like experience on top of it with roads, concrete, electricity, etc.

Another aspect is that his funders are going to pull the funding because of how over budget they were and dinosaurs killing a girl on the mainland. The whole soft opening was to show off to the investors banker/lawyer and get the stamp of some experts so he can get the money to keep the project going. They weren't ready to launch at all and were broke, the whole thing was originally much smaller based on the DNA tech they invented and Hammond saw the park as a way to get rich without getting imminent domained by governments wanting his tech.

[JadedDM]

I just remembered. Wasn't there a scene in one of the new Star Trek films where they use a cold fusion bomb to freeze an erupting volcano? Or did I just dream that madness up on my own?

[DataNinja]

I just remembered. Wasn't there a scene in one of the new Star Trek films where they use a cold fusion bomb to freeze an erupting volcano? Or did I just dream that madness up on my own?
Yes, that was the opening scene of Star Trek: Into Darkness.

...look, there are reasons that that one's horrible, and completely mars the new Star Treks. The other two were decent, that one was just awful throughout. I feel like that scene is the least of its issues. :smallamused:

[Peelee]

Eh between the moats, the reliability of the main generator (geothermal-fuel tanks were for emergencies and the grid did not go down until the Arnold shut it down), etc the books had a MUCH more sensible system.

For those who have not read the book, that "etc." includes aam advanced CCTV camera system that cover something like 93% of the island which includes motion trackers on all known dinos which record their movements in (IIRC, may be a bit off here) 1 hour intervals, all of which you can pull up and overlay on each other to get a full range of where every dinosaur likes to go in the entire history they've been in the enclosures and at what times, and also counts how many dinosaurs of each species there is in the park.

It was a very impressive system.

[BeerMug Paladin]

For those who have not read the book, that "etc." includes aam advanced CCTV camera system that cover something like 93% of the island which includes motion trackers on all known dinos which record their movements in (IIRC, may be a bit off here) 1 hour intervals, all of which you can pull up and overlay on each other to get a full range of where every dinosaur likes to go in the entire history they've been in the enclosures and at what times, and also counts how many dinosaurs of each species there is in the park.

It was a very impressive system.

Plus, I'd like to add that on top of that, they thought they programmed a nutrient deficiency into the dinosaurs' diet that they could only get from deliberate meals prepared by the staff. So if any dinosaurs did somehow escape or weren't where the staff thought they were, they wouldn't get their food-medicine and would quickly weaken and die.

I've been wanting to see someone mention this for a few pages now. But yes. It was a believably impressive system with apparently multiple redundancies.

If it were possible, I'd wager that if most people here had someone sit down and explain all the security systems in Jurassic Park to them, but not say it was Jurassic Park's security system, they'd be content it was good, failsafe, security.

But again, we're talking about the novel of many thousands of words, not the movie with limited seconds of time. We probably like Jurassic Park too much for the sanity of this thread, Peelee.

[Tvtyrant]

Plus, I'd like to add that on top of that, they thought they programmed a nutrient deficiency into the dinosaurs' diet that they could only get from deliberate meals prepared by the staff. So if any dinosaurs did somehow escape or weren't where the staff thought they were, they wouldn't get their food-medicine and would quickly weaken and die.

I've been wanting to see someone mention this for a few pages now. But yes. It was a believably impressive system with apparently multiple redundancies.

If it were possible, I'd wager that if most people here had someone sit down and explain all the security systems in Jurassic Park to them, but not say it was Jurassic Park's security system, they'd be content it was good, failsafe, security.

But again, we're talking about the novel of many thousands of words, not the movie with limited seconds of time. We probably like Jurassic Park too much for the sanity of this thread, Peelee.

I totally forgot about that. Wasn't synthesis of the nutrient from one of the species they spliced DNA from?

[Ramza00]

Plus, I'd like to add that on top of that, they thought they programmed a nutrient deficiency into the dinosaurs' diet that they could only get from deliberate meals prepared by the staff. So if any dinosaurs did somehow escape or weren't where the staff thought they were, they wouldn't get their food-medicine and would quickly weaken and die.

I've been wanting to see someone mention this for a few pages now. But yes. It was a believably impressive system with apparently multiple redundancies.

If it were possible, I'd wager that if most people here had someone sit down and explain all the security systems in Jurassic Park to them, but not say it was Jurassic Park's security system, they'd be content it was good, failsafe, security.

But again, we're talking about the novel of many thousands of words, not the movie with limited seconds of time. We probably like Jurassic Park too much for the sanity of this thread, Peelee.

Speaking about that essential diet thing or the dinosaurs going into a coma and die. Lysine is an essential amino acid to make proteins from the DNA template. Amino Acids are an intermediary building block. There are 21 amino acids in all multicellular organisms.

We all have amino acids but animals have a smaller group than those 21 amino acids called "essential amino acids." There are 9 of these and all animals must eat other animals or eat plants for they can't make 9 of those amino acids. Thus you will always get them from diet. And guess what type of amino acid Lysine is? Lysine is an essential amino acid.

Thus the Lysine contingency does not make sense. It would make sense if it was one of the 6 amino acids that are considered "Conditionally essential" where our body can make the amino acid by converting other things into the amino acid but there is a gene that does this and even then it prefers to get it through diet for it is inefficient. It would also make sense if they were one of the 6 amino acids considered non-essential for our body can almost effortless make those amino acids.

But nope Mr. Harvard Medical School Michael Crichton got a key detail wrong if we want to nitpick the science. :smalltongue: Great idea but it does not pick sense to pick Lysine as the amino acid to tell your story.

[Peelee]

I totally forgot about that. Wasn't synthesis of the nutrient from one of the species they spliced DNA from?

No, they deliberately engineered all the dinosaurs to not be able to synthesize lysine. Which, amusingly, kind of fits this thread, in that no animals naturally produce lysine (including humans, IIRC), and get it from their diet to begin with. Of course, I only knew that by looking it up, and stuff like that I can give a pass on anyway; authors ain't perfect, they'll get stuff wrong sometimes, and trying counts. So yeah, having an extra safeguard by engineering them to be reliant on the special diets only InGen knows about and specifically provides makes sense as an extra redundant backup, and further reinforces that they took a ton of precautions.

ETA: Dammit, Ramza!

Also,for those who haven't read it, I rechecked the book. The camera system covered 92% of the park, while the remaining 8% was unable to be covered due to a river's motion and convection currents screwing up the motion sensors. There was a dynamic map that could pinpoint any specific animal in the park in real-time within five feet. This function could be used for up to every single known animal at once, each tagged with a code number. This was updated every thirty seconds, done by motion sensors. The motion sensors did not tell the species, but was tied into image recognition software directly from the video feed. The category tally was updated every fifteen minutes - that was what I mentioned earlier, where the computer has an expected number of dinosaurs (eg. 2 T-Rexes, 8 Velociraptors, etc), and would count up to the expected number of dinosaurs for each species. This was done independently and not based on the tracking data. Once an animal stops moving, the numbers in the category tally doesn't count the animal anymore and an alert is signaled. Each dinosaur enclosure had a moat, between 12 and 30 feet deep depending on animal size, surrounding the enclosure. Outside of the moats were the electrified fencing carrying 10,000 volts. The computers were hardened against electronic interference, did not connect to the outside world, had independent power and independent backup power, all heavily automated so that it could be run by a skeleton crew of one person if needed. If any animals knowingly escaped, they had taser shock guns, electrified nets, tranquilizers, two specially built laser-guided missile launchers (the compromise between management and Muldoon when he threatened to walk for not getting a full complement of shoulder-mounted TOW missile launchers), and Muldoon had requisitioned three unspecified "larger weapons" which Hammond cut to one (and which was in the jeep Nedry took). And, finally, the dinosaurs were engineered to not synthesize lysine and would die without the lysine-enriched foods they were fed by the park within 24 hours (and we can assume that in Jurassic-Park-World, all animals normally do synthesize lysine and this would be an effective measure).

While they definitely cut back on the handheld weapons, they sure as hell didn't skimp on large-scale security measures.

[snowblizz]

While they definitely cut back on the handheld weapons, they sure as hell didn't skimp on large-scale security measures.

Not that hadnheld weapons, rocketlaunchers or a minigun helped them much in Jurassic World.

[Rater202]

Not that hadnheld weapons, rocketlaunchers or a minigun helped them much in Jurassic World.
To be fair, Jurassic World is defined by "We've managed to fix all the mistakes from the first time... Let's make some new ones!"

Like deliberately engineering a scary superpredator out of the most dangerous animals on the island and few extras, up to and including the smartest and most sadistic predator you have, giving it legitimate superpowers, and then locking said aggressive predator in a pen that's far too small and deliberately mistreating it.

This is a thing you see in JW fanfics from time to time: The Indominus wasn't evil. The Indimonus was a horrible Frankensteinian mismatch of different kinds of predatory instincts, was explicitly made with human DNA according to the script so might even be fully sapient, and was treated like absolute **** for its entire life, then it got loose.

Even the expanded universe stuff says this: In the games where you can make your own park, you can clone an indominus. It's hard to keep it happy and it will break out if you don't, but you can keep it happy and have it successful in the park.

No clue what's wrong with the Indoraptor or why it was obsessed with hunting Maisie... Though until JW3 confirms that she's fully human I'm gonna assume that she's got some Raptor DNA in there somewhere becuase she's a clone and acts like a raptor.

[snowblizz]

No clue what's wrong with the Indoraptor or why it was obsessed with hunting Maisie... Though until JW3 confirms that she's fully human I'm gonna assume that she's got some Raptor DNA in there somewhere becuase she's a clone and acts like a raptor.

Its small size means it is an even bigger richard than it's progenitor.:smallbiggrin:

[Eldan]

Speaking about that essential diet thing or the dinosaurs going into a coma and die. Lysine is an essential amino acid to make proteins from the DNA template. Amino Acids are an intermediary building block. There are 21 amino acids in all multicellular organisms.

We all have amino acids but animals have a smaller group than those 21 amino acids called "essential amino acids." There are 9 of these and all animals must eat other animals or eat plants for they can't make 9 of those amino acids. Thus you will always get them from diet. And guess what type of amino acid Lysine is? Lysine is an essential amino acid.

Thus the Lysine contingency does not make sense. It would make sense if it was one of the 6 amino acids that are considered "Conditionally essential" where our body can make the amino acid by converting other things into the amino acid but there is a gene that does this and even then it prefers to get it through diet for it is inefficient. It would also make sense if they were one of the 6 amino acids considered non-essential for our body can almost effortless make those amino acids.

But nope Mr. Harvard Medical School Michael Crichton got a key detail wrong if we want to nitpick the science. :smalltongue: Great idea but it does not pick sense to pick Lysine as the amino acid to tell your story.

There are ways around essential amino acids. For example, aphids have essential gut microbes that produce some of them.

[Eldan]

[security measures]

It's been something like 15 years since I read the book, but didn't they also evacuate most of the crew due to hurricane and run the island on a skeleton crew? So that normally, there wouldn't be just one guy running the local computers like Nedry was?

[hungrycrow]

It's been something like 15 years since I read the book, but didn't they also evacuate most of the crew due to hurricane and run the island on a skeleton crew? So that normally, there wouldn't be just one guy running the local computers like Nedry was?

That seems a little silly though. Wouldn't you need more security and technicians on hand during a storm?

[Eldan]

Probably. In-universe: insurance demands. Out of universe: the park has to fail catastrophically somehow while the heroes are there.

[Grim Portent]

Why even build a park full of dangerous creatures in an area prone to violent weather that could damage safety mechanisms?

Stick it in a desert and pump water in, this has the dual benefit of any escaped animals needing to travel through barren wilderness to get anywhere they can hide, as opposed to just walking into the dense foliage around the park, and being more accessible to potential guests.

[Cikomyr2]

Probably. In-universe: insurance demands. Out of universe: the park has to fail catastrophically somehow while the heroes are there.

But it's a voodoo shark explanation.

Dont get me wrong, you are 100% right about potentially evacuating everyone as a security measure for the insurers. But then, you keep the visitors?

[Traab]

Why even build a park full of dangerous creatures in an area prone to violent weather that could damage safety mechanisms?

Stick it in a desert and pump water in, this has the dual benefit of any escaped animals needing to travel through barren wilderness to get anywhere they can hide, as opposed to just walking into the dense foliage around the park, and being more accessible to potential guests.

Ok, and how do you keep the dinosaurs alive in this desert? It takes more than water to be a reasonable living condition for them. Good luck turning the desert into an oasis fit for dinosaurs without basically exponentially increasing your yearly budget trying to keep everything alive in some of the harshest conditions outside of antartica.

[Kantaki]

Why even build a park full of dangerous creatures in an area prone to violent weather that could damage safety mechanisms?

Stick it in a desert and pump water in, this has the dual benefit of any escaped animals needing to travel through barren wilderness to get anywhere they can hide, as opposed to just walking into the dense foliage around the park, and being more accessible to potential guests.

Isn't the place being inaccessible half the point?
If you put it somewhere people can get on their own you can't add the two 5,000,000$ helicopter tickets to the 10,000,000$ for the zoo*.

*Without the hotel or the rides. Eating at the restaurants is extra too.:smalltongue:

[Traab]

Isn't the place being inaccessible half the point?
If you put it somewhere people can get on their own you can't add the two 5,000,000$ helicopter tickets to the 10,000,000$ for the zoo*.

*Without the hotel or the rides. Eating at the restaurants is extra too.:smalltongue:

I think they have ferry services to the island. Nedry certainly was leaving by boat. But getting to costa rica would be an interesting thing. The government must have been salivating at the boost to tourism cash they would be getting.

[Brother Oni]

Why even build a park full of dangerous creatures in an area prone to violent weather that could damage safety mechanisms?

Because it's the closest they could get to the US (to get the most accessibility to the largest tourist market) and still find a government amendable to a massive multi-billion dollar theme park full of dinosaurs in their territorial waters.

Speaking of which - Peelee and BeerMug Paladin: was the island picked for the park set off the cost of Costa Rica in the novels like in the movies?

[Rater202]

Isn't the place being inaccessible half the point?
If you put it somewhere people can get on their own you can't add the two 5,000,000$ helicopter tickets to the 10,000,000$ for the zoo*.

*Without the hotel or the rides. Eating at the restaurants is extra too.:smalltongue:

Also, as the second movie shows that having Dinosaurs in a place where they can reach a city if they escape is a bad idea.

[Poldon]

Those are adamantly not how real zoos work - zoos are conservationist. The well-being of the animal is one of their top priorities. In emergency situations, if the case calls for it, yes, they will kill an animal, but these are exceptionally rare circumstances, and for enclosure practices they try to accommodate the animal as much as possible.

You're right, of course. I was simply imagining some sort of worst case scenario. Tranquilizers would be tried before escalating to lethal means. Which brings to mind Jurassic World, when they apparently didn't think they needed darts that could pierce scales in a park full of large, dangerous, prone-to-escape animals covered in scales.

While I'm on the subject of inconsistent security systems in the JP franchise, in the film, the T. rex pushes the Jeep over some sort of cliff separating paddock from road, despite walking from paddock to road. Is there any explanation for this?

And as someone mentioned Star Trek, I'll add the concept of the iso-unit. What the heck is an isoton? Iso- means "same!" The prefix seems to be slapped in front of units all the time in the later shows (looking at you, Voyager). We have perfectly good units already; use them!

[Vinyadan]

OK, I am not sure if this counts, but yesterday I got curious about who gave the strongest punch ever, and Google was clogged with the declarations of Dana White, aka Mr MMA, who says: "Francis Ngannou has the world record for the most powerful punch. His punch is the equivalent to 96 horsepower, which is equal to getting hit by a Ford Escort going as fast as it can. It's more powerful than a 12 pound sledgehammer getting swung full force overhead..."

According to a guy on Reddit,


"To match the kinetic energy of a Ford Escort (1,804,640 J), Ngannou would need a 22 pound fist that he can throw at supersonic speeds (1300 mph; Mach 1.7)."

Now, these data are equivalent to 129,000 units on the testing machine. Which units? It's unknown. Maybe it's how many large pigs he can take out with a single punch. But punching power shall herefore be calculated in Ford Escorts/Groins.

[Peelee]

It's been something like 15 years since I read the book, but didn't they also evacuate most of the crew due to hurricane and run the island on a skeleton crew? So that normally, there wouldn't be just one guy running the local computers like Nedry was?
Yes, but Arnold would be the one guy running the local computers in this sense (and, in both novel and film, he was). Nedry was the one who built the computer system and was being forced to do debug work that was not included in his contract (this is not made explicit in the film, but contextually, Nedry and Hammond's arguments seem to sound like it is still the case. That's just my headcanon though). Nedry was a solo practitioner regardless.

Also, tropical storm, not hurricane.

Not that hadnheld weapons, rocketlaunchers or a minigun helped them much in Jurassic World.
Which was silly, but Indominous Rex also was a different beast altogether. If Muldoon had been alive and present for that, he would almost certainly have quit no matter what they offered him as long as the I. Rex was around, IMO. Muldoon was one of the best characters in the book, and was far and away the one most worth listening to.

That seems a little silly though. Wouldn't you need more security and technicians on hand during a storm?
Not really; the park was specifically designed to run almost completely autonomously. They knew what kind of issues they would be facing regarding storms, that likely factored into how they built the automation systems in the park.

Why even build a park full of dangerous creatures in an area prone to violent weather that could damage safety mechanisms?
The weather couldn't (and didn't).

Because it's the closest they could get to the US (to get the most accessibility to the largest tourist market) and still find a government amendable to a massive multi-billion dollar theme park full of dinosaurs in their territorial waters.

Speaking of which - Peelee and BeerMug Paladin: was the island picked for the park set off the cost of Costa Rica in the novels like in the movies?
Yes, one of the biggest reasons they leased an island off the coast of Costa Rica was because of the lack of government intervention to restrict them. Even just before the InGen incident (as a pre-prologue to the book calls it), an EPA agent visited Grant and Sattler and all but said how the American government was basically investigating the Hammond Foundation for wildly erratic behavior, such as funding only cold-weather digs (above the 45th parallel) when the best research was done in hot climates, stockpiling the largest private supply of amber in the world, leasing an island 100 miles off Costa Rica for a "biological preserve" though the island was almost perpetually covered in fog and was perceived as worthless by both the US and CR governments, a company called InGen paying Grant a consultant's fee in connection to the island which he didn't even recall at first and then said was "weird as hell" which Grant eventually cancelled as it got too weird, and the Hammond Foundation funding Grant's projects almost immediately after the deal with InGen was cancelled. The EPA itself got interested once the Office of Technology Transfer informed them of Ingen shipping three Cray XMP super computers to Costa Rica, which represented more computing power than any other privately held company in America, as well as transferring Hood automated gene sequencers - a machine so new that they hadn't been put on any restricted lists yet, with claims that any gene lab in the country would be lucky to have one, while InGen put twenty-four in Costa Rica. All of this was claimed to be an internal transfer between divisions in the company and not for export. Effectively, the US government could tell that InGen was very obviously setting up the most powerful genetic engineering facilities in the world, specifically in a country with practically no regulations over it. Obviously we know how all those pieces fit together, but the US government was very clearly interested in what the hell they were doing and yet powerless to look into it.

I'd also like to emphasize here just how amazingly good the book is, and recommend to every single person who hasn't read it that you absolutely read it; even knowing the broad stokes of the plot, a huge amount of the events are new, and just so many things happen - I like to joke that it took all three Jurassic Park movies just to cover most of what happened in the first book, and even then they're missing a whole lot. Crichton deliberately overcrowded the cast just so that he could have kill of a significant amount of them. Also, who lives and who dies is pretty inconsistent with the movie, and you truly get the sense that no character is safe until you've hit the last page. Hell, I love it so much my wife got me a premium version of it for a birthday, where the cover is full leather and textured to resemble dinosaur skin. It's super cool.

[Chen]

Not necessarily bad science but while we’re on the Jurassic Park stuff, why is the end of Jurassic World considered a problem? Even if literally 500 dinosaurs (Im pretty sure it was less) escaped, how is this even a remote problem for mankind? Humans are exceptionally good at wiping out species even when we’re not trying to. Some government would put a bounty on dinosaurs and we’d have this mess cleaned up in a week or two.

[sktarq]

You're right, of course. I was simply imagining some sort of worst case scenario. Tranquilizers would be tried before escalating to lethal means. Which brings to mind Jurassic World, when they apparently didn't think they needed darts that could pierce scales in a park full of large, dangerous, prone-to-escape animals covered in scales.

While I'm on the subject of inconsistent security systems in the JP franchise, in the film, the T. rex pushes the Jeep over some sort of cliff separating paddock from road, despite walking from paddock to road. Is there any explanation for this?

And as someone mentioned Star Trek, I'll add the concept of the iso-unit. What the heck is an isoton? Iso- means "same!" The prefix seems to be slapped in front of units all the time in the later shows (looking at you, Voyager). We have perfectly good units already; use them!

On Trek....this is totally head cannon but I took it as measurements made in the same relativistic fields...basically what things would be without relativistic effects. Newtonian measurement.

And yes the earth of the T-Rex paddock does go from being slightly higher than the road level (as seen in the shot where the goat is brought out and then lies down) to being MUCH lower when the Jeep is pushed over it....is the most glaring inconsistency in the movie IMO.

JW....I just don't know where their security was TBH.
None of it made sense...like if there was a single gate failure the geriatric T-Rex would be in middle of the most visitor dense section of the island...no defense in depth anywhere. Also since they trained the Ultra-Mossie to leap from the water (also by what mosquito did they get it's DNA?) You'd think they would need to prevent the big gal from jumping out and snapping up a couple of guests or even just hurting itself. But the ending shows her eating a large morsel (Indom) in a guest walking area...

[Peelee]

You're right, of course. I was simply imagining some sort of worst case scenario. Tranquilizers would be tried before escalating to lethal means. Which brings to mind Jurassic World, when they apparently didn't think they needed darts that could pierce scales in a park full of large, dangerous, prone-to-escape animals covered in scales.

While I'm on the subject of inconsistent security systems in the JP franchise, in the film, the T. rex pushes the Jeep over some sort of cliff separating paddock from road, despite walking from paddock to road. Is there any explanation for this?
Nope. In the movie, Hammond mentions the concrete moats in the conference room, so the moats are still a security feature. However, the T-Rex simply steps out. When he shoves the jeep into the enclosure, the big drop is (I assume) supposed to be the moat... except that it's not a moat and is just part of the paddock. So yeah, it's an enormous continuity error. The best way to reconcile this, purely IMO, is that there is a decline on the right-middle-ish area of the paddock and the T-Rex pushed the jeep off on the extreme right side, where the difference in elevation created an effective cliff. Because yeah, it's kind of silly.

[LibraryOgre]

Because it's the closest they could get to the US (to get the most accessibility to the largest tourist market) and still find a government amendable to a massive multi-billion dollar theme park full of dinosaurs in their territorial waters.

Speaking of which - Peelee and BeerMug Paladin: was the island picked for the park set off the cost of Costa Rica in the novels like in the movies?

You talk like Florida isn't a thing. :smallbiggrin:

[Cikomyr2]

Also, as the second movie shows that having Dinosaurs in a place where they can reach a city if they escape is a bad idea.

Thats a T-Rex, and they were trying to capture it alive.

It's not like a T Rex is godzilla level of survivability against weapon fire.

Smaller Dinos might have been more manageable.

[Peelee]

Not necessarily bad science but while we’re on the Jurassic Park stuff, why is the end of Jurassic World considered a problem? Even if literally 500 dinosaurs (Im pretty sure it was less) escaped, how is this even a remote problem for mankind? Humans are exceptionally good at wiping out species even when we’re not trying to. Some government would put a bounty on dinosaurs and we’d have this mess cleaned up in a week or two.

We're good at wiping out some species, and those tend to be species that are easily wiped out. If you want a real-world example of something super hard to wipe out, Hurricane Andrew provides a glimpse into how this could be remarkably bad:
During the storm, a facility housing Burmese pythons was destroyed, allowing many of them to escape into the Everglades. Although Burmese pythons – native to Southeast Asia – had been sighted in Everglades National Park since the 1980s, the destruction of this facility contributed significantly to the establishment of breeding populations in Florida. Due to rapid reproduction and ability to prey on many species,[93] the population of Burmese pythons has exploded, with possibly as many as 300,000 in the Everglades alone.[94] Efforts have been made to curb the thriving population of these invasive snakes, including a ban on importation of the species to the United States since January 2012,[95] the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in 2008 regulating that boa and python owners have permits and tag their snakes,[96] and Burmese python hunting contests.[97] In March 2017, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) began its Python Elimination Program. Qualified individuals became authorized to capture Burmese pythons on SFWMD properties, with minimum wage pay as compensation and a bonus of $50 for a python at least 4 ft (1.2 m) in length, plus an additional $25 for every foot beyond 4 ft (1.2 m). Further, compensation was set at $200 for finding a nest with eggs. By May 2018, 1,000 Burmese pythons were captured through that program alone.

Also, at one point when India was under British control, the British offered a bounty on cobras, since they were becoming such a problem. The bounty program was incredibly successful - so much so that the British realized than many people were breeding cobras purely for the bounties, and so stopped the program. The breeders, now having a worthless supply of cobras, released them into the wild, which resulted in even more cobras than before the program started.

Dodos, as it turns out, were easy to find and kill, which is why there are none left. Evolution, in a sense, at work. Dinos? Who knows.

[sktarq]

You talk like Florida isn't a thing. :smallbiggrin:

They expressly wanted to avoid being under US regulation. And had already bought islands for JP-Japan and JP-Europe.

[Vinyadan]

Also, at one point when India was under British control, the British offered a bounty on cobras, since they were becoming such a problem. The bounty program was incredibly successful - so much so that the British realized than many people were breeding cobras purely for the bounties, and so stopped the program. The breeders, now having a worthless supply of cobras, released them into the wild, which resulted in even more cobras than before the program started.

I think that the problem there was that Indians probably had extremely low incomes, while cobras are disproportionately dangerous when compared to their size, which means that they need little food or room, plus they don't eat something the Indians would eat. By comparison, a bounty system hugely helped eradicating wolves from the Alps over a century, starting in the Napoleonic era.

[Tvtyrant]

I think that the problem there was that Indians probably had extremely low incomes, while cobras are disproportionately dangerous when compared to their size, which means that they need little food or room, plus they don't eat something the Indians would eat. By comparison, a bounty system hugely helped eradicating wolves from the Alps over a century, starting in the Napoleonic era.

And all efforts to remove Yellow Jackets or Starlings are utter failures, only one country has stopped Norwegian Bilge Rats, and we can't save the bees with worldwide efforts.

Wolves are unfortunately large predators, the most fragile part of the ecosystem. Look at how many foxes and coyotes survive despite human eradication efforts and it becomes obvious the niche is the problem. th

With Dinosaurs I think the little raptors are the biggest issue, and maybe midsized herbivores getting into deserts where they are better adapted than mammals.

[Chen]

We're good at wiping out some species, and those tend to be species that are easily wiped out. If you want a real-world example of something super hard to wipe out, Hurricane Andrew provides a glimpse into how this could be remarkably bad:

Also, at one point when India was under British control, the British offered a bounty on cobras, since they were becoming such a problem. The bounty program was incredibly successful - so much so that the British realized than many people were breeding cobras purely for the bounties, and so stopped the program. The breeders, now having a worthless supply of cobras, released them into the wild, which resulted in even more cobras than before the program started.

Dodos, as it turns out, were easy to find and kill, which is why there are none left. Evolution, in a sense, at work. Dinos? Who knows.

Big animals that need a ton of food and in limited numbers would be wiped out easily. It’d be akin to Rhinos or Elephants. If we had no restrictions on hunting those humans would wipe them out in short order. We’ve almost wiped them out WITH all the restrictions we have.

[Ramza00]

I think that the problem there was that Indians probably had extremely low incomes, while cobras are disproportionately dangerous when compared to their size, which means that they need little food or room, plus they don't eat something the Indians would eat. By comparison, a bounty system hugely helped eradicating wolves from the Alps over a century, starting in the Napoleonic era.

Siberian Tiger is another example. This species used to not have that name but a dozens of names including “Korean Tiger” , "Amur tiger", "Manchurian tiger", and "Ussurian tiger", etc. Except we no longer call it those other names for we hunted the Siberian Tiger to extinction with the exception of Siberia.

Japan when occupying Korea 1910 to 1945, but in the 1910s occupying Japan of Korea had a Tiger and Leopard extermination program (hunting and poisoning) and thus by 1921 it was believed the last surviving Tiger was killed. The Tiger in Korea had several cultural meanings in Korea for thousands of years but Imperial Japan saw the extermination of it as power politics indicating how powerful the occupying nation state was.

So what I am saying is I believe that given money or some other social good like esteem I believe humanity would find a way to hunt dinosaurs to death if this became the goal of someone with power and thus financial or other resources.

[Willie the Duck]

Big animals that need a ton of food and in limited numbers would be wiped out easily. It’d be akin to Rhinos or Elephants. If we had no restrictions on hunting those humans would wipe them out in short order. We’ve almost wiped them out WITH all the restrictions we have.

It would be amusing to have a fictional 'post Dinosaur Island' world where the T-Rexes and not-velociraptors were all gunned down/starved within a year of escaping, but some tiny little dinos (maybe actual velociraptors, or something even more innocuous) ended up being an invasive species that decimated the corn/rice/cotton crops or out-competed grazing cattle/goat/pigs and lead to major upheaval of the human agricultural economy.

[Peelee]

Big animals that need a ton of food and in limited numbers would be wiped out easily. It’d be akin to Rhinos or Elephants. If we had no restrictions on hunting those humans would wipe them out in short order. We’ve almost wiped them out WITH all the restrictions we have.

Oh, I'm sure the T-Rexes and Brachiosaurs would be gone tout de suite. But there's a difference between the star attractions and the majority of dinosaurs on the island. Good luck getting the Compys, for example.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Thus the Lysine contingency does not make sense.

But nope Mr. Harvard Medical School Michael Crichton got a key detail wrong if we want to nitpick the science. :smalltongue: Great idea but it does not pick sense to pick Lysine as the amino acid to tell your story.
I choose to believe that on Mr. Hammond's quest to be a cheapskate, he somehow managed to hire the one geneticist on Earth who could do all this amazing science, yet failed to remember this apparently basic bit of biochemical knowledge. For the record, though, I accept that your reading here is probably more accurate.

I actually don't recall if it was explained by anyone how this particular system failed, but in the sequence of events, it's pretty clearly implied to the reader that this can't possibly be working according to plan before it's even brought up. So the reader is led to be already rather skeptical of these people who claim that everything is under control. So really, if it never would have worked as intended to begin with, but fools the common person, it's an amazing detail!

Speaking of...

It would be amusing to have a fictional 'post Dinosaur Island' world where the T-Rexes and not-velociraptors were all gunned down/starved within a year of escaping, but some tiny little dinos (maybe actual velociraptors, or something even more innocuous) ended up being an invasive species that decimated the corn/rice/cotton crops or out-competed grazing cattle/goat/pigs and lead to major upheaval of the human agricultural economy.
It's implied that the compsognathus is likely becoming an invasive species on the mainland before the main events of the novel begin. At least I believe it was the compsognathus.

[sktarq]

I choose to believe that on Mr. Hammond's quest to be a cheapskate, he somehow managed to hire the one geneticist on Earth who could do all this amazing science, yet failed to remember this apparently basic bit of biochemical knowledge. For the record, though, I accept that your reading here is probably more accurate.

I actually don't recall if it was explained by anyone how this particular system failed, but in the sequence of events, it's pretty clearly implied to the reader that this can't possibly be working according to plan before it's even brought up. So the reader is led to be already rather skeptical of these people who claim that everything is under control. So really, if it never would have worked as intended to begin with, but fools the common person, it's an amazing detail!
There was a thing at the end of the book mentioning the never invasive speicies (which was implied to be raptors (young adult ones having been known to actually hide on the supply ships) or compy's and migrating in a line (roughly NE IIRC) and munching on chickens, soybeans, and other Lysine rich foods....
JP: The Lost World (the book...movie? what movie?) basically ignored it and said the whole thing failed in toto. Which would have been closer to real science anyway....



Speaking of...

It's implied that the compsognathus is likely becoming an invasive species on the mainland before the main events of the novel begin. At least I believe it was the compsognathus.
eh I'd think they'd die off by themselves tbh...mostly due to having a very wacked out immune system not really aimed at todays bacteria and viruses. The on site vet was pretty twitchy as it was even in the semi-controlled environment and even that required substantial use of the handwavium storywands.

Oh and as for Peelee's past comment saying that it was an impressive system. Eh. I'd disagree I would say it LOOKED like an impressive system but that was the point. Malcolm pointed out the 8% is highly contiguous and doesn't cover things like the significant underground spaces that were built. Also they broke, not the system per se, but the imagination of the people using it when they asked the system for the 293rd dino. So it was more impressive looking than actually impressive and that was kind of the point.
That they also mostly designed the whole system for both far fewer and slower less adept version of the Dinos...before they actually had any to test with...which probably didn't help

[Peelee]

I choose to believe that on Mr. Hammond's quest to be a cheapskate, he somehow managed to hire the one geneticist on Earth who could do all this amazing science, yet failed to remember this apparently basic bit of biochemical knowledge.
Hammond snagged the most promising doctors from the most prestigious schools so that he could brag on them... but got them fresh out of school, so he could underpay them. "Save no expense" was curtain dressing.

I actually don't recall if it was explained by anyone how this particular system failed, but in the sequence of events, it's pretty clearly implied to the reader that this can't possibly be working according to plan before it's even brought up. So the reader is led to be already rather skeptical of these people who claim that everything is under control.
In the film, it takes about a week or so to take effect, IIRC. In the novel, it's within 24 hours, but the herbivores eat naturally occurring incredibly lysine-rich foods, and the carnivores eat the herbivores.

[Chen]

Oh, I'm sure the T-Rexes and Brachiosaurs would be gone tout de suite. But there's a difference between the star attractions and the majority of dinosaurs on the island. Good luck getting the Compys, for example.

Agreed the small ones could be problematic. Though I dont recall seeing all that many small ones at the end of Fallen Kingdom.

[Tvtyrant]

Another point is the little compys are basically small flightless birds, if that niche were open it would presumably have been filled by a bird by now.

[Willie the Duck]

It's implied that the compsognathus is likely becoming an invasive species on the mainland before the main events of the novel begin. At least I believe it was the compsognathus.

Good lord, I seem to recall something like that (to note: I read that book before the movie came out, and haven't revisited it since)!