SGU Episode 363
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Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday June 25th 2012 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
B: Hey everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson.
R: Hello everyone.
S: Jay Novella.
J: Hey Guys.
S: And Evan Bernstein.
E: Hey, hey, hey.
S: (laughs)
B: What's happening!?
(laughter)
E: What's happening!?
J: Hey, rerun.
B: The ectomorph, the endomorph and the mesomorph.
E: Gosh, that must be deeply stored somewhere in my brain, I can't believe I pulled that out.
This Day in Skepticism (0:40)
June 30, 1908 - The Tunguska event occurs in remote Siberia.
R: Well guess what was happening 104 years ago today.
E: What was happening 104 years ago today?
S: A great big space kablooie?
R: I don't know if I'd say a space kablooie because technically it kablooied in the Earth's atmosphere, but yes on June 30th 1908, something exploded near the Tunguska river in Russia and that is most likely to have been a meteoroid that exploded in mid-air and left tons of trees levelled and on fire and stripped of course.
B: 80 million trees, by the way. Lots o'trees.
R: That's a good factoid. I have a few more. The explosion was approximately 1000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
E: Much less deadly though.
B: I found a website that said it was equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs, so...
R: Hmmmm.
B: Um, so somewhere in there.
J: Yeah, but big. It was a big explosion.
E: Maybe 1000 Nagasaki bombs.
R: And in some places, the shock wave would have been equivalent to an earthquake of 5.0 on the Richter scale.
J: Whoa, that's big.
B: Wow.
S: I think you mean magnitude scale, not Richter.
R: The area of levelled forest was 2000, about 2000 square kilometres, or about 800 square miles.
J: Oh my god.
E: Wow. Devastating.
R: And this other interesting thing that I actually saw on the wikipedia page of all places, in 1938, a researcher did an areal photographic survey, but the photos he got were burned in 1975 by order of Yevgeny Krinov, who was the chairman of the committee on meteorites of the USSR academy of sciences and apparently, Krinov says he was burning them because they were a fire hazard.
J: He, wait wait wait. He burned them because they were a fire hazard.
R: Yeah.
J: Something's not right.
R: Yeah, it's possible that he actually burned them because it was a giant mystery and nobody knew the solution to it yet and it was embarrassing to Soviet scientists, but who knows.
S: SO there's still a bit of a controversy over what exactly exploded over Tunguska. Was it a meteoroid of a comet, basically ice with debris or just a chunk of ice? Probably not just a chunk of ice because there was some mineral debris discovered, but recently Italian researchers, I think we discussed this before, but they recently published some evidence saying that they think a big chunk of whatever it was actually impacted the lake a few miles from what was believed to be ground zero and there are two lines of evidence. One is that they have some seismic evidence to say that there's some big, solid chunk underneath there and second, that the silting is about 100 years worth of silt or sediment so that puts it, dates it about the right time as the Tunguska event.
B: Really?
S: Yeah. So it doesn't sound definitive, smoking gun evidence, but they have a pretty plausible hypothesis and they might actually be on the trail of a big chunk of whatever it was that impacted there.
J: Well what else could it possibly be, guys?
E: Alien ship?
R: It seems that the meteoroid exploding in mid-air is the most popular theory, but cometary fragment of ice is a big one just because there's a chance that it would have melted and therefore, you know, like the old using an ice pick as the murder weapon dealie? But and also that theory fits in with a lot of reports from people at the time who said that they saw strange blueness in the skies for the days following the explosion, it's suggested that maybe those came from the particles left in the air from a cometary fragment.
S: Yeah.
J: OK.
B: According to Don Yeoman, he's the manager of the Near Earth Object office at NASA's JPL, he said, his characterisation of this event is that it's the only entry of a large meteoroid we have in the modern era with first-hand accounts, which is interesting. It's the only one really that we have. We've been hit many times, but only once have we seen something this big and had somebody eyewitness it. And some of the eyewitness accounts were interesting. One guy is quoted as saying that suddenly in the North sky, suddenly the sky was split in two and high above the forest the whole Northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire. At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash.
J: Wow.
E: Wow.
B: He actually saw this thing, and another guys, it's amazing, the shock wave must have been pretty intense. This guy was sitting on his porch 40 miles away in Siberia, and he was hurled from his chair and he said his shirt felt like it was on fire. 40 miles away.
R: The eyewitness reports are really interesting to read because all of them sound like they were witnessing this apocalyptic event that must have just scared the pants off of them.
J: Oh hell yeah.
R: And it's really interesting to have them all describe something that epic, you know, and I mean just imagine being one of the only people in the world to have seen something like that, it's pretty incredible.
E: And survived to tell about it.
R: Yeah.
News Items
The Science of Prometheus (06:07)
E: Fire huh?
S: Yeah, hmm.
E: I heard Prometheus stole fire from the gods.
S: So we are about to talk about the movie Prometheus, this is an Alien prequel and we're going to talk about the science of this movie, it's a science fiction movie, the actually refer to a lot of different little bits of science throughout the movie, and it's a very fun way to talk about the science itself. This is going to be a massive continuous series of spoilers about the movie.
R: Which is why I would like to actually get off the call now because I was not able to see it this week.
S: You haven't even seen it yet?
E: Wha? But. Da.
R: I tried, I had friends in from out of town, I couldn't get there.
E: All right.
S: We we actually did wait a few weeks until the movie came, we didn't do this right away, although I saw the movie as soon as it came out, we wanted to wait so that people who really wanted to see the movie will have had a few weeks to do so before we talked about it on the show, but if you still haven't seen it and you want to without spoilers, just skip over this section and then come back and listen to it once you see the move. But if you didn't see the movie and you still want to listen to this segment, I'm just going to give you the quick overview. Some type of aliens arrive on a planet, we're meant to believe that this is the planet Earth, and the alien drinks some black goo and then disintegrates and seeds the oceans with his DNA. This happened apparently at some point in the past, but we're not really, it's not clear, is it the Earth? If it is the Earth, was this before any life evolved on the Earth? Was it just before human life evolved on the Earth? It's really not clear. Then we jump to the future, to the present day, actually no, about 100 years in the future when scientists are piecing together evidence of ancient alien visitors to the earth. They go to visit the apparent location of those aliens and they run into what turns out to be a military base of the creatures that made the aliens from the Alien movies. That's the basic plot. So now let's go back, we could probably take the scientific gaffes in the order in which they appear in the movie, or at least the big ones. So part of my problem with the movie, I mean I don't mind having things being ambiguous and mysterious, that's part of good story telling and science fiction. You don't need to know exactly why HAL went mental against the astronauts in 2001, that's fine, but it has to make some basic sense. The problem is that I can't find any way to make sense of the basic premise that some alien seeded his DNA on this planet and that somehow resulted in us.
E: Right, right.
B: Looking exactly like them.
E: A perfect match.
B: Like some DNA correlation.
J: Well it's not just that, Steve, it's that it's rewriting proven science, science that is globally accepted by those that believe in science. So the issue here is that right out of the gate, from the word go, the movie is starting with a premise that's going to rub a lot of the science fiction fans wrong, like it's taking some of your core audience and basically saying 'hey, for whatever reasons, I'm going to insult you right now'.
S: Right, so the thing is, it would be OK if it were just, it's planting its DNA on the pre-biotic Earth and that DNA eventually will evolve into all life on Earth, because we are really not sure how the first self-replicating molecules got onto the Earth, it could have been through panspermia, it could have self-assembled on the Earth and there are theories as to how that could have happened, but it actually isn't against established, proven science that the Earth was seeded with molecules, with organic or self-replicating molecules 4 billion years ago or 3.5 billion years ago.
J: Not fully-formed DNA though.
S: Well even DNA, that's a little bit of a stretch, but even that wouldn't be an assault on what we know happened, but here's the thing: how would that lead, 3.5 billion years later, to humans? Because human DNA is what was seeded, you know what I mean? That doesn't make any sense, that's the connection that's completely missing.
E: It's almost like they're suggesting two different biologies at work here, there's one that the Earth conjured up itself that contains everything except humans, or the close ancestors of humans, and the engineers are responsible for the humans that came along on earth, we've got two different biologies effectively.
S: But that's almost worse, because how are they so similar to the rest of life on Earth and clearly humans evolved on Earth from other life on Earth. We're not planted here from some other system.
B: Yeah, it would be obvious.
S: Yeah, so there's just no way to make the whole thing work, you know?
J: Right.
E: But what about the archaeology?
B: That's the other big one.
E: That's the next step.
S: I found that so annoying. So two of the main characters are archaeologists who uncover a cave painting in which a typical cave painting cave man is pointing at, it was like 5 or 6 or whatever, dots on the wall and they correlate to paintings from multiple other cultures from 2000 or so years ago, this cave painting was much older than 35,000 years, that's all that we are told. So we have different cultures painting these pictures of the seven dots and the archaeologists figure out that the dots are a star map.
J: Right.
S: This makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever.
B: On so many levels.
E: On a lot of levels. The place they go to is said to be 35 light years from earth, and even in 35,000 years, you're going to see shifts, in something that relatively close to the Earth. That map's not going to be worth anything.
J: But guys, even here, and I've read a lot of stuff online about this. The star system had to be close enough that they can get there sub-light speed in two years.
S: There's no way they got there sub-light speed in two years. There's no star that we could do that.
E: Well not, sub-light speed, yeah.
S: All right, we have to give them, and again I have no problem with these kind of super-technological gimmes in science fiction. They had to do some kind of super-luminal speed, they're going through wormholes or they're gating or something.
J: But Steve, never in the Alien science fiction universe do they go faster than light.
S: They had to, Jay. They had to.
J: When? But they never said it, OK maybe they had to, but it was never said or talked about, it was just in the background.
S: Yeah I know, but I'm willing to give that to them because it would take thousands, tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest stars sub-light, at anything with any reasonable acceleration.
B: Wait a second, if they're going at relativistic speed, maybe it's two years ship-time. Who knows what Earth-time would be. Although it would be kind of silly to get back to Earth and have it be 100,000 years later, that would be really silly if you plan on going back to Earth, but it's just something to consider.
S: Yeah, I'm talking Earth time. Ship time could be much shorter although it would still be more than two years, I believe, but then it would be hundreds or thousands of years on Earth time, it doesn't fit the story line. So look hey, we'll give that to them. They do some kind of faster-than-light travel. But here's the thing: Evan already alluded to the fact that over 30,000 years, the location of any stars in our vicinity would shift, they wouldn't be where they were. A star map that's more than 35,000 years old would be worthless. I also think the whole concept of just any two-dimensional pattern of dots being a star map that's going to direct us to a specific cluster of stars, we would have to assume that it was as seen from the perspective of the Earth, we wouldn't really know, are the stars actually close together or they only lined up in one direction? It's just not enough information, they should have had some more complicated graphic or glyph that's just more than five dots, you know?
J: Yeah.
E: Yep, agreed.
B: Yeah it sounds like they whipped together that idea, "oh let's do five dots" in one 20 minute meeting, "yeah let's just do that". They didn't give it much thought.
J: That's exactly what happened, Bob. It sounds like people came up with it that are science fiction fans but don't get science. "Oh yeah, it'll be these five stars!"
S: "It'll be a star map!" yeah.
J: Yeah it's so basic, it's like that idea is 30 years old.
S: Yeah, exactly. That's lazy old-school writing. And their discussion of it was confused, they said "so we found the system" meaning? What do you mean the system, there are five stars here. And they said "and there's a sun in the system" or "there's a sun in one of them". What do you mean there's a sun in one of them, aren't these all suns?
J: Yeah, and you don't have much of a system without a sun anyway. A system implies that there's a sun in there, right?
B: Yeah it does.
S: And somebody commented that it could have meant that there was a planetary system around one of the stars making it a sun, but it's still not the right nomenclature. Why didn't they say "and one of these stars has a planetary system around it"?
E: That's it, quick fix.
S: If they meant that, that's what they should have said. That part I found totally...
J: So two years goes by, now an incredibly rich guy hires these two scientists to basically lead up a mission to go to the planet and find the engineers.
S: Yeah, the engineers are the alien creatures that made Humans somehow.
E: Oh with an android, there's an android on the team too.
S: Yeah, best part of the movie, by the way, was the android.
B: Yeah, he was cool.
S: First of all I have to say I enjoyed watching the movie, it was gorgeous to watch, I mean just the images and everything were fabulous, I think it's worth seeing, the annoying parts are almost fun to be annoyed at, I like picking apart movies like this. The science wasn't the only problem, there were some major problems with the writing, I hated the way the characters were written, we can get this out of the way right now. One big problem was most of the main characters in the movie were scientists that were hand-picked to go on this trillion dollar mission to discover not only the fist contact with alien life but the aliens who may have been responsible for humanity or life on earth and who clearly had visited Earth and left a message to follow to go find them. Huge mission, right? And all the scientists are buffoons.
E: (laughs) every last one of them.
B: Plus they sign up for a four-year mission without knowing the details of what the hell they're doing, "yeah I'll do it". Wouldn't you ask for some details, I mean come on!
E: The geologist was just in it for the money, like he said.
S: Yeah. I'm just in it for the money.
B: He must have been really good.
E: Cheap.
S: Is that why they picked you for this mission?
E: Which one do you want to start with?
S: I mean they're all terrible. So they get on this, and it's actually a moon of a ringed gas giant, although Bob and I were talking about the fact that the tidal forces on this moon would have been enormous.
B: yeah, they would have been nasty, I mean the surface would have overturned itself in and out over the millennia, there really wouldn't be much on the surface, the tidal forces would have been nasty, it would have just basically be a volcanic planet I would guess from the proximity to its primary.
S: Maybe it was further away than it seemed.
E: It looked good.
B: It was just something that I noticed, the tidal forces.
J: We're like a total nightmare to people who make movies like this.
S: They can talk to scientists while they're writing the movie rather than afterwards.
B: Right, or talk to us, we'll help you out.
E: That's the thing, they probably did.
S: Yeah, Ridley, next time call us, please. So listen, so the scientists get to this planet, the find that there's artefacts and they essentially go into this big beehive-like complex or working structure. They're inside this place, the planet apparently has oxygen, I'm calling it a planet, it's really a moon but it's a world that people were on.
B: With 1 g apparently.
S: Very convenient 1 g, very nice. It had oxygen even though it didn't appear to have much life on it.
E: And nitrogen, yep.
S: But the carbon dioxide was too high for people to breathe, they would pass out from the CO2. So they had to have helmets on and apparently the air inside the structure was breathable, so now the scientists who are on a planet with alien life, what do they do? They take their helmets off.
E: Throw their helmet off.
S: "Well the air is breathable". What else can we be in isolation for?
E: Gee, microbes, bacteria.
B: Yeah, what about an airborne infection, hello.
J: Of course, anything guys, anything. And this is one of the big defining moments in this movie and in all science fiction movies, the big "take the helmet off" moment. Right? It's such an iconic mistake to make. Don't take your helmet off! It never leads to anything good, number one, and number two, every single time somebody takes their helmet off, they shouldn't!
E: But Jay, you don't understand, it lends dialogue to the people who have to say "no, don't take your helmet off, you shouldn't", "I'm taking my helmet off anyway".
J: Wait now Steve, you missed, I'm sorry I have to jump back to a moment in the movie that you missed because it happens to be the big defining "this movie is crap" moment for me, OK? So it's when the lead scientist says that the circles they found on all the drawings is not a star map but it's actually an invitation from the engineers who created the human race, right? And to cap it off, when she's asked how she knows that information is correct, she says she doesn't know, it's what she chooses to believe, and apparently that's good enough for all the other scientists on board because not one of them instantly pukes at that moment and says something like "hey, 300 years of science is not thrown away because you found an invitation". And then on top of that, I'll even go one step further, the truly profound sadness of the whole thing is that, according to the movie, she's right! She's actually right, all of that horrible thinking and lack of reasoning is correct in this ridiculous universe.
S: It actually wasn't a leap to say that, if you buy the whole star map thing and it was left obviously with multiple cultures, that we would see the pattern and everything, that they intended us to follow it. I mean that's what she was saying. And that's actually fine, that she concluded that, but the evidence and the logic led you to that not just "I choose to believe it, I have faith in it" and the fact that that statement went unchallenged by a room-full of scientists created the sense that these characters were not behaving like real scientists. But most of the time they weren't behaving like normal human beings, let alone scientists, they were doing things that were just stupid and were out of character and were completely inconsistent, the character writing was just terrible. So I agree with you Jay, it's part of what we're talking about, getting back to the taking the helmet off thing, the other thing was that you had no sense from the way these people were behaving, of any training or seriousness. There was no protocol. Wouldn't there be an elaborate protocol in terms of not getting infected when you're on a planet that you have a high, you're there because you think there's alien life there, and they would have some kind of protocol in place, but there was nothing, they were like high school kids exploring an abandoned building, it was just no sense that these people knew what they were doing or had any training or were prepared for this at all.
J: Right, the height of that lack of protocol comes about 15 minutes further into the movie when two of the scientists get stuck in another part of this spaceship/monument type deal, whatever the hell they're in, and they're in there overnight because all of the other scientists went back to the ship but they got lost and they get stuck in there which is ridiculous that the guy got lost in the first place.
S: Yeah, we have to pause, all right? Because this is another bit about not behaving like scientists. This is the geologist guy who is like "oh I'm just here for the money, I'm a tough guy". Now he turns into a little pansy because he, first of all, he bugs out, he wants to bug out because they found a dead body. "Oh my god, we found a dead body, I'm so scared, I'm getting out of here, screw you guys I'm going back to the ship". This is also the guy now who brought these laser-tracking devices that are in the process of completely mapping this entire structure. This is the guy who gets lost. The guy with the map, the 3D laser-generated map of the entire structure, he's the guy who gets lost.
E: Hey, he's just in it for the money Steve, come on.
J: Yeah. All right, so now these guys are in this room, they're in the room that has like all of these...
E: Pods.
J: Little pods that are reminiscent of Alien...
S: With the eggs.
J: The room with all the pods with the, if you remember, with the eggs that have... So that goo is actually the stuff that changes biology, OK? And there's worms on this planet that they show that are crawling around and the worms get in the goo and the goo turns the worms into the alien worms, like it's what an alien would be if it impregnated a worm, so the worm very quickly grows into this big worm, and the biologist of the crew, if you don't know what a biologist is, I'll remind you, it's the guy who understands, oh I don't know, biology, sees an alien worm thing come up. And his initial reaction is, "oh look, look how cute it is".
S: It doesn't look like a worm. It's the size of a beefy cobra and it adopts the stance and the attitude of a cobra, flaring its head, hissing, it's obviously, obviously, a threatening display and this guy goes "oh look at the cute little animal" I mean it was, like it was a puppy. This is the guy, this is the two guys who were leaving because they saw a dead body and they were freaked out by it and now he wants to play, to cuddle up with a hissing space cobra.
J: An alien, an alien! I don't care, if you see an alien and it looks like a little teddy bear, you run! It's an alien, for Christ's sake, the thing, who knows what's going on.
S: That's like, do you guys remember Galaxy Quest?
J: Yeah.
B: Yeah.
S: The cute little guys. "Look at the cute little guys", and they bare their teeth and they're horrible carnivores. Exactly, they're alien, you don't know what they are, you don't know the millions of threats that that thing could have evolved, and to assume, "oh the guy's a biologist so he must think that all life forms are cuddly even if they're carnivores". Again, the guy wasn't even behaving like a human being, let alone a biologist hand-picked to be the first biologist to study alien life.
E: Was that you guys' first moment of disgust with the movie, because that was it for me, where I became like "wow, they are really insulting my intelligence right now as a movie goer".
J: I'll agree with you Evan, you and I were sitting together and I remember us sharing a look at that moment.
E: We just sighed and were like, hands on our foreheads, like what are they doing?
J: This is a really good example of what I like to call John Carpenter's The Thing set the bar and you have to, from that moment forward, when that movie was created in the 80s, you have to live up to that movie, and here's why: The reason why that movie was insanely successful, where this movie blatantly fails is everybody in the thing did exactly what regular people would do, they were scared, they were cautious, they didn't really do anything stupid, they tried to talk about things, they tried to do the best job that they can and it was obvious that they were all relatively intelligent.
S: Yeah, they did a good job actually, that's the thing, it made the movie more scary because the people in the movie were like really being proactive and intelligent and they still got screwed! Whereas in this movie, it's like they're dead because they're stupid and they deserve to be dead.
J: That's right, at some point you just start going, first off you don't care about any of the characters, but when you don't care about characters in a movie, sometimes you start pitching for the other team, you're like "go get him, alien, yeah! Kill him, he's an idiot, I hate that guy!".
E: Save the human race!
S: Yeah. Here's the part where the acid gets sprayed in his face, here we go. Along the theme of scientists acting out of character. So the archaeologist gets infected with a space worm. He's looking in the mirror. A space worm crawls out of his eye. So clearly taking off the helmet was not a good idea, he's infected. And he doesn't mention it to anybody. And there's no isolation protocol. You know, he looked a little concerned for a moment there, but then I guess he figured everything was OK.
E: Oh yeah, I'm fine.
B: It wasn't the helmet though that got him, the android gave him the drink.
S: I know, but he didn't know that, at this point he should be thinking "jeez, I guess I shouldn't have taken my helmet off," not "oh I wonder if the android spiked my drink with aliens deliberately".
J: Yeah and they take their helmets off again the next day, he lets his wife who he loves take off her helmet again.
S: Yeah.
E: What about the head that they put in the bag?
S: So yeah so they find a decapitated head of one of the aliens who, they're humanoid, their DNA is "identical" to human DNA but they're like 8 feet, 9 feet tall and they're not exactly identical to humans. Anyway, they find the decapitated head, they mention that it's remarkably well preserved but they don't really offer any reasonable explanation for why the thing is fresh, it's not just well-preserved, it's fresh, like.
B: It's pliable, yeah.
S: It's like living-tissue fresh. And they're able to trick it into thinking it's alive by stimulating its locus ceruleus, so I guess they just chose a random name of a part of the brain to stimulate.
E: (laughs)
S: "Let's look up a brain, oh locus ceruleus we'll go with that one," you know.
E: Do a google search, quick! Brain parts.
J: And they stick like this meat tenderiser prong into the head and its eyes open up and it gets a horrified look on its face and then for no reason.
S: It explodes.
J: The head explodes.
S: Just because, you know. Because it was scared.
B: And there was no alien in it, it just exploded. It's like well why?
S: Because it was cool I guess. It just threw stuff all over the place.
E: Something's got to blow up.
J: Because it was mad, it was mad that they woke it up, and I'm not kidding when I say that.
E: You disturbed my slumber!
S: All right, one little thing, there's, at one point the scientists throw out the line that they're going to carbon 14 date the remains, right, it was the alien that they found? Now very quick background on how carbon 14 dating works: Carbon 14 is an isotope of carbon 12 which is the typical isotope. It's usually formed by cosmic rays colliding with nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, converting the nitrogen atom into carbon 14. This is incorporated into carbon dioxide, which gets incorporated into plants, which then get eaten by animals. So living creatures on Earth with have the same ration of carbon in their bodies as the ratio of carbon 14 to 12 in the atmosphere of the planet, it's sort of in this steady state. And then when you die, the carbon 14, now you're not replenishing your carbon 14 any more, so the carbon 14 spontaneously decays back into nitrogen, but the carbon 12 is stable, so the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 is, we know the starting point because we know what the ratio is in the atmosphere and then the amount of carbon 14 will decrease according to the half-life, which is about 5000 years, of carbon 14 decaying into nitrogen. So in order to do carbon 14 dating, you need to know what the steady state ratio or carbon 14 to carbon 12 is, and they make no mention of calibrating the carbon 14 dating to this world, this moon. Further, we have no idea what the aliens were eating, we don't know that they were eating plants or animals derived from this planet's atmosphere or if they brought food with them and what that ratio was, they really don't have any way of knowing how to calibrate the carbon 14 dating, you can't just apply it to this, to organic matter on an alien world in an unusual situation that you have no idea about.
B: And that's something that any scientist would have picked up. If they'd just run this by anybody, you know, at the very least they could have come up with something different, a different element, some other little titbit of technobabble that would sell the scene but not make it scientifically stupid.
S: Yeah.
E: But my fear here is that Ridley Scott and his team did that, they did consult scientists, they did get the correct ideas of these things, but they dismissed them, they decided to go a different direction because it wasn't cool enough in their minds. I think that's what happened.
B: Oh boy.
E: Because right, what, did Ridley Scott and the Prometheus crew find the most incompetent scientists in the world and gather them together as consultants for this movie?
S: I just don't think that they, I think that they just didn't listen to whatever consultants said.
E: They just didn't listen, right.
S: But it wouldn't have taken, it's not like it was an artistic thing. So you have the guy say "oh I'm carbon 14 dating this, assuming my calibrations are correct to this planet". You know, just throw something so that anybody who knows what it is won't be insulted by it or would go "oh well, they actually thought of it, that's cool" and if you don't know what it is, it just sounds like technobabble which lends to the atmosphere of the movie. You know, it's generally a good idea to write to sort of the most knowledgeable or the deepest level of your audience or always be one notch better than that. You never want to write on a level that is more ignorant than your audience is going to be and while a general audience may not pick up on a lot of these things, this is a science fiction movie, a lot of science nerds are going to watch it and pick it apart, which is what is happening. All right, we have to get some of the medical crap in the movie.
E: Well that was all good (laughs).
S: Yeah. So the main character who is the wife of the guy with the space worm, who got infected by the android, they have sex and apparently that's enough to inseminate her with alien genetic material, so she's rapidly growing an alien inside of her womb. She discovers this. Fortunately the ship has an automated surgical unit, you know, like this little box, you climb into it, the computer has attachments that will do surgery on you right?
B: This is my favourite little technological device, it was really cool, you plug in what kind of problem do you have? I have a penetrating wound, I've got a stye in my eyelid, whatever, you go in there and these robotic arms take care of your problem, slicing into you and doing whatever it takes and it's really cool, and I really love that scene, except...
S: Well the execution was crap. First of all, incorporate some diagnostics. The thing is that, other than the fact that this was all automated, the technology on display was very 2012.
B: It was basic, it was basic.
S: It was automated current-day surgery. It wasn't the kind of surgery you'd expect to be happening 100 years from now.
B: Right, that is true, it was a little simple and it seemed tailor made for that one specific kind of operation that she needed and they weren't really tools that I think were adaptable to all different types of things.
J: It actually had a claw like the claw that you would see in one of those machines where you drop the claw to get the plush doll. You didn't have like an articulate hand type of thing that, you know you'd have this robot hand in there that was much more articulated than a human hand. It just came out with this stupid hook claw and plucked, and takes something out of her body. Oh god, go ahead Steve, I don't want to take the medical aspect.
S: That's all right, I mean you're doing fine because it was that stupid. So it does essentially a caesarian section on her to extract this alien from her womb. First of all, they didn't preclude the actual surgery with any automated diagnostic, it's like I'm sure it could have imaged her and found exactly, done an automated diagnostic run, that would have been an nice addition, and then it slices into her pretty much like you would today, nothing laproscopic, nothing more technological, again this big claw descends, sort of grabs the thing by the head, there was no finesse, it looked it was going to drop the thing, I mean it really didn't look like a very sophisticated surgical attachment, you know. And then this is the worst part though, this is the killer.
B: yeah, this is bad.
S: So the surgery is done. There are two bad things. One is that it pulls out the alien and then she yanks the umbilical cord out of herself, right? So she detaches it from... so what is that umbilical cord attached to?
E: All her vitals.
S: Wouldn't it be attached to some kind of placenta. So if you just yank out and detach an umbilical cord from a placenta inside of you then you will bleed out fairly quickly. You can't leave a placenta inside of you and just yank the cord off.
E: But this is an alien.
S: You know, it would have been a nice little touch if she delivered the placenta too, or wouldn't the automated robot thing know, OK now we have to get rid of the placenta as well.
J: Or at least sew it up or something, anything.
S: But then the big thing was that in order to close this wound, so now it's cut through skin, sub-cutaneous tissue, fascia, abdominal muscle and then the womb.
E: Cockles.
S: And then to close all of that up, it just staples her skin shut.
E: Chooka chooka chooka.
S: That was it. Like I said, 2012 surgical technology.
J: At that point, she would need to lie in a hospital bed, even if she didn't bleed to death like Steve said, she gets up and does phenomenal feats of athletics after that.
B: Of running.
E: Running, jumping.
B: Her guts would have been on the floor even before she got out of that surgical pod.
S: Yeah so stapling the skin closed would not be enough to keep your abdomen shut. It would have been nice, technically they would have done at least three levels of suturing, the womb, the abdominal muscle, probably another deep layer, and then the skin, so three or four layers of closure to really close that wound, they didn't do that, and the other thing is, it's 100 years in the future. Staples, really? I mean come on, shoot some foam in there or have the healing lasers close it up. I would totally give them some hypothetical futuristic medical technology that allowed for almost instantly close and be healed to the point where she could run around without spilling her guts all over the floor, but all it did was put in one external superficial layer of staples and there was no appearance of any other advanced medical technology and then, as everyone said, she's running around, wincing at her stomach but running around. There's no way, she would have burst those staples wide open with what she was doing.
J: Yeah, but they were staples that were 100 years advanced, Steve come on.
S: It's not about the strength of the staples, it's about holding your guts in with your skin as opposed to all the layers of muscle and fascia that normally do it.
J: Garbage! What else you got?
S: It was terrible.
B: Yet again, another cool idea that they totally trashed, it could have been so much better. I still enjoyed that scene, just because the concept was so awesome, but the execution was oh guys, a little extra thought, an extra $1000 in your budget and you could have made it so much better.
J: Steve, I'm curious to know what you think in particular about why, in this movie, we don't connect with the characters, and we don't care about the characters because that's always the kiss of death for a movie.
S: Yeah, partly because, for example, with the geologist. What was his character? Who was this guy? First he's a tough guy, "I don't care", then he's techno-guy, whipping out the laser balls, and then he's afraid of a dead body, and then he's stupid. I don't know, I don't know who this guy was, he had no consistent character.
E: He's grossly incompetent.
S: You know what I mean? I can't really describe him, it's just like he was in every scene what he needed to be to clumsily push the plot forward and there was nothing there to connect with and the other characters, again there was, he was the worst in my opinion, but the other ones were flat in a lot of ways and they didn't, they were too stupid to really connect to. I thought they were so obviously plot devices, so when a character is a plot device, they're a redshirt, you're not meant to connect to them. It's like everyone in this movie was a redshirt, they were just there to, it's like the teenager in a horror movie who does the really "hello is there somebody there?" you know?
J: Yeah "I'm going to go take a shower over here now! Bill?"
E: (laughs)
S: Yeah, it's like you're there to be splattered, so immediately I'm not going to care about you because I already know that you're splatter fodder. That's why.
B: I always compare it to the characters in James Cameron's Aliens, the second Alien movie, because for me that's one of the science fiction epics, and I love the way he wrote his characters in that movie, almost every one of them, either I loved them or I hated them, but I had a strong connection or emotion, but all of these characters, like anybody in the entire movie, except the one guy that wasn't a human.
S: Right, exactly.
B: I didn't like any of the humans, like come on. Oh, pathetic, pathetic.
S: Game over man, game over!
B: Yeah.
J: I have the final comment, and I think you all will agree. An alien only shows up in the last 15 seconds of the movie.
S: An actual alien, yeah.
J: The whole movie was a set-up.
E: Yeah, and actual one.
J: For crying out loud, come on!
S: (laughs) It seemed gratuitous, and like "OK, this is supposed to get us excited for the next movie?" You know.
E: (laughs) Hey, but other than that guys, this movie was great! Woah! Other than that 50 minutes this was wonderful.
Time Slowing Down (42:04)
Quickie with Bob - Higgs Update (51:11)
Higgs announcement expected
Who's That Noisy? (53:42)
- Answer to last week: Wendy Wright
Questions and Emails
Nessie Disproves Evolution (57:29)
I saw this article today and was just absolutely amazed. I hope you're able to share it with your listeners. http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/education/how-american-fundamentalist-schools-are-using-nessie-to-disprove-evolution.17918511 Michael Denman United States
Science or Fiction (1:02:18)
Item number one. Awareness is the birthplace of possibility. Item number two. To know the world feel your body. Item number three. Established in Being, perform action. And item number four. Knowledge is the path to your own positivity. http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:10:11)
Ripley: Ash, can you hear me? Ash? Ash: [speaking in an electronic, distorted voice] Yes, I can hear you. Ripley: What was your special order? Ash: You read it. I thought it was clear. Ripley: What was it? Ash: Bring back life form. Priority One. All other priorities rescinded. Parker: The damn company. What about our lives, you son of a bitch? Ash: I repeat, all other priorities are rescinded. Ripley: How do we kill it Ash? There's gotta be a way of killing it. How? How do we do it? Ash: You can't. Parker: That's bullshit. Ash: You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. Lambert: You admire it. Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. Parker: Look, I am... I've heard enough of this, and I'm asking you to pull the plug. Ash: [Ripley goes to disconnect Ash, who interrupts] Last word. Ripley: What? Ash: I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies.
Scene from the movie, Alien
Announcements (1:11:41)
References
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