Category Archives: aliens

aliens, extrasolar planets, sci-fi movies

Alien Worlds in SciFi Movies

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Avatar’s Pandora is Beautiful

But Too Good to be True

So, we went to see Avatar last night — in glorious 3D at the IMAX theater.  It’s a beautifully rendered film and I was reminded of scenes from the game Uru (which, nearly a decade ago had similar lovely landscapes).  I won’t go into the storyline in case readers haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’d like to use the world Pandora (where the movie’s action takes place) as a way to talk about other worlds and why they’re never going to be quite like they’re portrayed in the movies.  We’re all pretty used to seeing alien worlds in movies like the Star Trek franchise, Star Wars and others.  There’s a long tradition in science fiction (movies and print) of casting them as places where humans can go and explore. Hence, they kind of have to be places where humans can exist, even if they can only do it in space suits and habitats.  That’s okay — most of us have grown up knowing that humans on the Moon or Mars will be wearing space suits for a long time.  And, that will probably be the case on at least some planets that humans may one day explore beyond the solar system.

However (there’s always a gotcha), the planets have to be at least somewhat approachable and not be instant deathtraps for human explorers.  Io, in our own solar system, is a place that might be fascinating to explore, but it’s embedded in a deadly zone of radiation trapped within Jupiter’s magnetosphere.  While you could theoretically send humans there, they’d have to be really well protected — not a simple thing to do!  And, their habitats might not last very long, shortening their useful exploration time.

Pandora is a planet that seems to be set next to a Jovian-type planet in the movie Avatar. As such, if this Jovian planet is anything like the solar system’s Jupiter, there’s bound to be a HUGE magnetic field emanating from it, and magnetic fields trap charged particles. Where you have charged particles, you get radiation — and voila, Pandora could well be a deathtrap for humans. Yet, in the movie, there are humanoids living there on a lush, green world that defies current understanding of how such a world could exist next to a gas giant. And, there ARE humans there, and we ARE told that Pandora’s atmosphere is deadly to the humans but not the native humanoids.   The humans walk around with masks on (presumably sucking in oxygen), but are otherwise dressed in shirtsleeves.

So, deadly atmosphere and a presumed high-radiation environment don’t exactly say “run around in t-shirts and shorts with a mask on” to me. But hey, I’m willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story — I just won’t suspend the laws that govern planetary atmospheres and magnetospheres.  As beautiful as Pandora is in the movie — and hey, I hope that we DO someday find a planet as beautiful as it is — it can’t really exist in reality in the given circumstances of the movie (i.e. smack up next to a Jovian planet, embedded in its magnetosphere, and very likely also feeling the force of the Jovian’s gravity via tidal forces).

That’s just one science quibble I have with the movie. There are others — but I think you see where I’m going with this. Real-life planets around other stars are going to be far more alien than our filmmakers can imagine. They’re going to have their own life forms and appearances and environments that follow the laws of nature.  I think that someday, when our descendents are exploring those worlds, they’ll look back on our movies (if they have access to them) and probably laugh at how simplistic our viewpoint was — that we could remake worlds in our own imaginations and image and ignore the science that governs how worlds are created and how they evolve (with life or without).

All that being said, I really enjoyed the movie. I’ll probably see it again just to catch some details in the story and sets that I missed the first time around.  As long as I (and you) go into it with eyes open to the nuances and enjoy it for what it is, that’s cool.

For another scientist’s viewpoint on Avatar, go to Seth Shostak’s discussion here.

Enjoy!

aliens, ufos

Aliens!!!

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Are They Out There?

What’s with all the interest in aliens lately?  CNN’s Miles O’Brien is “looking into” alien life, and over at Discovery Channel Space DISCO, our own favorite BadAstronomer, Phil Plait got interviewed about his view of aliens, UFOs and other such topics. Sure, aliens are a perennially interesting topic, as are UFOs. People LOVE to talk about them because — well, let’s face it — they’re mysterious and somehow related to space and the cosmos.

Any of us who write and/or talk about astronomy and space in public run into the inevitable questions from people who really ARE intrigued with the idea of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Usually they’re thoughtful and interesting questions from thoughtful people. But, sometimes you get the woo-woo contingent — the folks who have gone a little off the deep end for all things alien and UFO-ey.

Whenever somebody asks me about aliens, I always say what I think — that there’s no reason why life shouldn’t exist elsewhere in the universe. Of course, we haven’t found it yet. We will, eventually. Our methods are getting better all the time, as is our understanding of what it takes to create life and where it can flourish.

If somebody asks me about alien visitations of Earth, I usually say that there’s not a shred of reliable evidence to prove that aliens have been visiting us.  Bring me some evidence and I (and, more importantly, scientists who want to find evidence of alien life just as badly as the rest of us do) will take it seriously.

But, the kicker here is that it has to be real evidence. Blurry pictures of flying saucers aren’t going to be taken seriously. Nor are  garbled memories of body probes by big-eyed monsters, or strange archaeological finds that somehow are supposed to “prove” that aliens walked among, impressed,  or even impregnated ancient humans.Those all represent a lot of wishful thinking more than they do solid evidence. And, evidence is what science needs in order to establish the existence of life, aliens, and even flying saucers (if they really exist).

Go read Phil’s interview — he pretty much says the same thing and also brings up the fact that there are thousands and thousands of amateur astronomers watching the skies each night, and they’re not seeing aliens landing.  You’d think that if a self-respecting spaceship was going to come screaming for a landing, its ion trail would be completely obvious to a HUGE number of people who spend nearly every night studying the sky (and believe me, these folks KNOW their skies).

Well, evidence aside, let’s get to the question I asked at the top of this article: are THEY out there? That’s an excellent question. I don’t know if they are or not. We haven’t received any signals that we can recognize as alien communications to us from other star systems.

Yet.

Nobody’s landed here that we know of.

Yet.

If they’re out there, and I hope there are aliens out there exploring the skies (same as us), they’ll eventually get around to saying hi.  If we were “out there” exploring the galaxy, wouldn’t we do the neighborly thing and drop in for a visit?  Why, of course we would.  Space is big. It’s lonely. And, just like people who live in isolated parts of our own planet get together with their own neighbors for some socializing, I would like to think that beings who inhabit other planets out there in the vast stretches of the galaxy would also feel the need to greet the neighbors when they go exploring.

If they’re out there, eventually we’ll meet them.  What we do next — well, that depends on the situation when it happens. And, if you’re into science fiction, there are many, many excellent stories written about First Contact that represent our human condition and what might be like.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to go find some and read them.