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Independence Day/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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** Just because it was written on a Mac doesn't mean it has to affect a Mac. The computer is just a tool to send a signal into the alien system. We can send computer signals through phonelines, radios, or even optic nerves. The hard part is the interface. Since Jeff discovered that the aliens were interfacing with our systems, deliberately or not, all he had to do was figure out a) how to reverse that process and b) discover how the alien systems arranged their command protocol structure. From there it would have been simple to scramble that structure at least for the time needed to destroy the mothership.
** The Earth scientists had access to an alien ship for 50 years. That's plenty of time to figure out how to affect its systems.
*** They've had an alien ship for 50 years, but according to Dr Okun ''"See, we can't duplicate their type of power so we've never been able to experiment. But since these guys started showing up, all the gizmos inside turned on. The last twenty four hours have been really exciting!"'' so they have no clue as to what it's operating system is
*** He could easily have meant that major systems like propulsion, weapons, and shields were inoperable, but there'd probably be a small onboard backup supply for very basic things like a simple computer interface.
** Given that Area 51 has been studying the alien scoutship for circa ''50 years?'' Really, the only implausibility would be if they ''hadn't'' bashed together some kind of adapter in that span of time.
*** WINE can't even run half of the windows apps properly yet we're supposed to buy that a virus written for a completely [[Alien OS]] is supposed to work? Have they not heard of sandboxing? Even if they had a compatibility layer to communicate using earth's satellites you'd think an alien species capable of interstellar flight would be aware of security concepts like sandboxing or perhaps not tying the fighter control system into the power core system. Also, even if the ships were able to communicate with the mothership there's no reason to assume that the OS is the same OS from 50+ years ago. I'm sure updates would have happened in that time span and still allowed for remote fighter control.
**** You're projecting human patterns of technological advance on to an alien race. It's entirely possible that they ''haven't'' changed the OS in 50 years, since, if it works, why replace it? Particularly since there is no indication that they've ever had any trouble with the technology letting them establish military supremacy in their prior conquests.
**** On top of that, there may be reasons as to why the alien race didn't have serious network security. They may be a telepathic hive race, for example (which is implied by the novelization), in which the idea that someone would access some part of the network that they aren't supposed to is unthinkable.
** True, but how similar do you think alien computers are to ours? Not a lot of similarity I would guess though - Area 51 would have to come up with the compiler as well...
*** Given that in the movie continuity, our computers were made largely ''from'' alien technology reverse-engineered by the Area 51 scientists, the answer to your question is 'Pretty damn similar to ours - in that universe, at least.'
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***** Unable to communicate with each other? Um, the TCP/IP protocol runs on every OS in the world!
***** Plus, you're forgetting that the iMac only has to communicate with the alien fighter that Area 51 has been studying for 50 years. The uplink to to the mother ship is by using their own fighter as a ''relay''. The backwards compatibility problem thus ''lies entirely on the aliens'', in that all that's needed is for their ''mothership'' to be able to sustain a network connection with an earlier model fighter.
****** And any interstellar empire would have to be capable of long-term backwards compatibility simply because when you send out a subgroup of your fleet to scout space for decades, you need to be able to work with your scouting party when they get back. Unless the alien civilization has a way to update every part of its computer infrastructure at the same pace, parts of it will be screwed after a while if there isn't at least 50-year of backwards compatibility available.
****** Also, most technologies plateau after a while. If you have a system that's worked perfectly well for the last 10,000 years, why bother to update it.
***** Okay, the fact that this bugs so many people bugs * me* . First off, it's the world's most expensive B-movie, so really it's not worth overthinking. Second, assuming that the Area 51 brain trust has been picking apart the fighter for decades, they would probably have a pretty good idea how to interface with it from Earth computers. Second, I've always found it ludicrous that somehow the fact that he's using a Mac makes it even less likely -- the PowerBook 5300 was in fact notoriously boring as far as hardware specs go (well, except for the igniting [[Li Ion]] batteries, but that seems to have been a problem for almost anyone who's ever used them). Goldblum's character most likely had access to the Area 51 technical data on the fighter's computers, and in all likelihood they also had a PCMCIA version of the interface kicking around. (I'm willing to handwave the driver issue.)
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** For what we know, maybe they used salt water for their methabolism, or had awesome desalinization plants.
*** Using the Earth's oceans as a natural resource? Preposterous! [[Battle: Los Angeles|No one would ever do that]].
** Duh, they attack the American southwest. They were attacking ''everywhere on the planet''. Plus, if you're going to attack population and military targets, the south west has plenty of them.
*** There's also that since water is freely available in space (comets, Saturn's rings, etc.), and a society with alien-tech nuclear reactors and hyperdrive probably doesn't have a burning need for petrochemical fuel, the resources they're after are likely heavy metals. And if you want those, it's time to strip-mine some planets.
**** It's also implied in the novelization that they [[I'm a Humanitarian|wanted us]] as well as the other resources.
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** The virus was for the shields. The nuke was for after that.
* Never mind cross-platform compatibility issues. Nukes, even really big nukes that don't have to be airdropped, aren't remotely powerful enough to blow up a moon-sized mothership. You could maybe handwave something about setting off a chain reaction, but there was a hell of a lot of empty space in that ship, and there's no overpressure wave in vacuum...
** Keep in mind that they were in what looks like the "center" of the ship - perhaps it was near the main reactors, or the ordnance, or whatever.
** The ship wasn't the size of the moon. If it was even close, that was before the dozens and dozens of city-ships split off from it. I think you're just overestimating the size of the thing, especially if we're to believe that Will Smith got out of the thing in 30 seconds.
*** Not only over-estimating, but flat-out ''ignoring'' what was said in the film: The whole kit-&-kaboodle was only one ''quarter'' the size of the moon to begin with, and as you said, that was ''before'' the city-ships detached.
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**** If that was the case, we ought to have seen multiple explosion chains gradually breaching the outer hull and the mothership progressively breaking up, not one big flash and boom and instant dust and debris as was actually shown.
**** In which case the nuke probably created the massive explosion by way of the alien equivalent of a warp core breach.
* No armed guards in the dissection lab?
** IIRC the guards got mind-controlled too.
** The guards probably thought that the surgical staff would be smart enough to slit the alien's throat or stab it in the eye if it woke up. The surgical staff wasn't so genre savvy.
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* Someone should fire the tactician who thought sending a wing of fighters armed with air-to-air missiles against a hovering, city-sized, advanced-alien-technology ship was a great idea.
** They didn't have a better idea at the time, and half-baked counterattacks are the natural consequence when your two largest cities and your capital are wiped out simultaneously.
** That doesn't justify why they decided to blow almost all their missiles attacking the outermost perimiter of the ship, instead of clearer targets like the suspected bridge section or their fighter launching bays, which would seem like standard procedure for any kind of military strike. I'll forgive them for not waiting for the [[Achilles' Heel]] / [[Wave Motion Gun]] to open up though, since I'm pretty sure nobody had survived seeing one in action.
*** No, the initial assault was an effort to test the defenses of the alien ship to see if they really could damage it. They didn't know if they could actually damage the alien vessel, but they probably weren't expecting that kind of a massive failure. Afterward, at Area 51, they were deploying the aircraft they had, with the munitions they had that survived the ''massive'' assault on all of their bases.
*** Also, they didn't yet know that there were fighter launching bays.
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** That alien fighter tech was so far advanced beyond what they encountered here, there was no real reason to keep improving it. Secondly, they did become suspicious. They locked it into the docking bay and opened the cockpit shield so they could see what was going on.
*** More likely, that's because it was an "uninvited guest". It hadn't been there along the journey, hence raised suspicions.
** Plus, how can we say at what rate their technology advances? It could be like ''Animorphs'', where human technological progress is unusually fast in comparison to most races.
** These aliens probably only develop their technology in big leaps when they conquer new planets. While travelling interstellar distances all their effort is probably concentrated on staying alive with limited resources, instead of wasting them on tinkering. When they have an entire planet to suck dry it's probably time to do some R&D.
** I think that the mothership was a generation vessel. When you are on a generation vessel, you do not waste time and resources on developing your technology. You use those to keep your population alive, while you crawl at sublight speeds to the next star. You clean it up, make planetfall, and improve your stuff in the following centuries. Oh,and before you ask, I think they didn't spot the ship as it entered the solar system because it was so damned black.
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** And the [[wikipedia:B52|B-52]] has been going since 1955. "Even while the Air Force works on new bombers scheduled for 2037 it intends to keep the B-52H in service until at least 2040, nearly 80 years after production ended. "
* That does bring up another JBM, though: don't the aliens have, like, serial numbers? The Area 51 vessel had been gone or missing (from the aliens' perspective) for ''fifty years'' or so. All of a sudden it shows up again in the middle of the assault on Earth, and attracts no real interest until it tries to move on its own? I mean, it does look like the alien equivalent of Homer Simpson is running the parking garage, but even so, that's like Amelia Earheart's plane suddenly showing up on an air traffic controller's boards tomorrow. It didn't cause a ''little'' interest at all?
** What if the missing fighter had been an advanced reconnaissance scout sent out ahead of the mothership, while the mothership had been decelerating from relativistic speed on entry into the solar system? In that case the time lapse between release of the scout and arrival of the mothership at earth could be much less than 50 years from the aliens' point of reference.
** They may have welcomed it with open arms because "Johnny's back!! He made it!!", then got suspicious once in telepathy range.
** Consider that as it approached, they overrode the aircraft controls and deliberately guided it into place - a heavy-handed version of the "unidentified aircraft, you will land here" speech. Then, after a few minutes of no contact with anyone on the aircraft, the aliens get suspicious - you can see that when they bring up a couple of other aircraft to cover the new arrival. Factoring in the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) command loop and the level of alien red-tape the alien air-traffic controller would probably have to dance through, not to mention the fact that they're probably dealing with an ongoing war that has the higher-ups' attention, response time is going to be slow. Also, don't forget that once the planet-ship arrived in orbit, the downed scout craft reactivated; the aliens may have assumed that a crashed spaceship had repaired itself and finally lifted off after being downed for years.
** It would make sense that the scout ship, if it had FTL communications, to have some sort of "Cryostasis," technology as well. Not because they're related, but because that means that they could send the scout ship on ahead, so they can report on it. The scout arrives and sends back an FTL communication, telling them about the world. But because they want to live to see their ship/return valuable technology, they cryo-freeze themselves or something like that. This would also conserve resources, such as food and/or water, and with little to no activity, stands a greater chance of avoiding detection by locals. It would make sense for them to use freezing or stasis technology on their motherships if they are, in fact, generational ships. It helps preserve the population of the species, keeps supply consumption to a minimum, and reduces the psychological issues of being crammed in a giant ship for fifty years at a time. This last "psychology" bit could just be me projecting on an alien race, though. So if they used some sort of stasis and joined back with the fleet, that could be perfectly natural for them.
* And are we really supposed to believe that the alien invasion force consisted of their ''entire species''? Where's the logic in occupying one planet at a time instead of expanding outward like a regular empire?
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*** For one thing, it ''would'' lead to total extinction. And even if it didn't, the world afterward would be in utter ruin, condemning billions to death. Defeating the enemy conventionally is preferable for that reason alone.
*** Had it worked, they would only need a few dozen nukes to get rid of the city destroyers and a few more detonated in space for the mother ship. Doesn't sound like something to bring about the death of billions of humans. And while nukes are icky, it's not like they make large swathes of land uninhabitable. Just ask the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki living there today.
*** "A few dozen nukes" of large enough yield to kill the city destroyers? Yes, that ''would'' do massive damage to the ecosystem and cause nuclear winter; it really doesn't take that many.
**** For reference, [[wikipedia:File:Worldwide nuclear testing.svg|here's]] a handy-dandy graph of how many nuclear detonations have occurred, broken down by year and country. Notice that in 1962 alone, almost 140 nukes were detonated worldwide. While the consequences of using nukes in habitable areas as opposed to dedicated nuclear testing grounds would be worse, we're not looking at an extinction level event by any stretch of the imagination.
*** Nuclear winter is also more likely to be caused by detonating nuclear weaponry over cities. The city destroyers appear to linger over cities when not immediately in motion. Destroying Houston alone should have some severe ecological consequences (on top of the damage the city destroyers' weapons have already done; leveling dozens of cities is also going to be releasing a lot of soot into the air too) Conclusions have already been reached that a small-scale, regional nuclear exchange (of only 750 kilotons - 50 individual initiations of 15 kiloton weapons) could cause devastating global consequences, let alone detonating dozens of megaton-level nuclear weapons over cities and potentially destroying the city destroyers, which would cause further damage. The weapon deployed by the B-2 bomber outside Houston looks like a B61 (don't quote me on that - it might be an AGM-86) which is a multi-megaton-yield weapon. That one initiation over Houston has probably done more ecological damage to Earth than a regional nuclear war. Conclusion: ''nukes are serious business, don't disregard how powerful they are.''
*** The weapon they deployed on Houston was 50-70 kilotons at most, more that enough to slag the down town area. Now with modern technology you could easy build and deploy a 100 megaton warhead that is small enough(<5 tons) to be carried on one ICBM. Each one of these devices would be more than three orders of magnitude more powerful than the weapon displayed in the film. It's the difference between shooting a man with a bb gun and a 20mm anti material rifle. Since there is no way that even 20% of that 1.5 gigatons of total yield was used to propel clay sized dust into the upper atmosphere it would not cause cooling more significant than that caused by a eruption of a large felsic/intermediate volcano.
**** It's not nuclear bombs themselves that cause nuclear winter, it's the cities they destroy. Setting an entire city on fire produces a lot of fine particulates that eventually migrate to the upper atmosphere and stay there for years. Setting 50-100 cities on fire is enough to significantly cool the Earth for periods of up to 15 years.
*** Why not set the bomb off ''under'' the alien ship? Let that mushroom cloud smack straight into the underside of the ship? The thing is 15km wide, it will either have to redirect the entire blast along the entire underside of its hull or absorb it all. Make it a full yield Tzar Bomba and we're talking [[Limit Break]]. The fireball for the HALF YIELD Tzar Bomba was an 8 km sphere. The mushroom cloud was 64km high.
*** [[Did Not Do the Research|You do realize that there was only one Tsar Bomba]], right? And it was such an oversized weapon that it was entirely impractical to field? The military can't exactly use weapons made by a different nation, thirty years ago, ''that don't exist anymore.''
*** Um. You realize the mushroom cloud is, like, a ''cloud'', right? It's just an aftereffect of the blast. It's not actually the damaging part.
*** Exploding it on ''top'' of the spacecraft would have been much better. You get to see if it penetrates the shield. If it does, the spacecraft crushes Houston, but at least we have the option of annihilation vs. nuclear winter. If it doesn't, then the nuclear explosion doesn't suck up material into the fireball (consequently producing very little fallout) and Houston gets destroyed by the aliens with their clean burning laserblasts. Win-win!
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** Yeah, the President specifically says "Why didn't you tell me about this?" and the SefDef responds with "Plausible deniability." Also, keep in mind that the President is aware of Area 51's ''existence'' just not the secret alien-containing underground bunker. The President may be CINC, but he isn't aware of everything; most likely what happened is whoever was President when the original aircraft landed ordered it hidden, and then classified the documents, and the military just quietly pushed it under the rug when the next administration came into power.
*** Still means the man has a legitimate beef over not being told about this as soon as the alien ships showed up. At that point, the Area 51 information has become, shall we say, immediately relevant.
*** True, but how long were the aliens in the sky before attacking anyway? A day at most, IIRC, arriving in the morning and blowing up the white house in the afternoon. That's 12 hours in which to contact the president. Sure, that seems like a lot, but the guy probably was making speeches all day and there were probably hundreds of people requesting meetings, as well as massive press presence near the white house waiting for an official statement following every new development. And it would probably be a bit suspicious to tell the secretary 'Hey, we are from the MIB. We have important information to share with the president regarding the alien invasion.', especially with a white house that is constantly filled with people who might just hear that. Not to mention that the person who knew the information likely had to fly to washington first. He could have arrived only an hour in advance of the attack, and be waiting for his appointment. If you really need a [[Hand Wave]]
*** The "person who knew the information" is the Secretary of Defense; not only is he already in Washington, but how long does it take ''him'' to get an emergency conference with the President? Drive time to the White House + 2 minutes?
* Anti-gravity might explain HOW the alien ships hovered,but it does nothing to explain why they weren't affected by atmospheric conditions,especially the wind. Ships of that size would have been buffeted by even the lightest breeze and them hovering directly over a spot in a major city (especially two close the ocean like LA & NYC)is ridiculous.
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***** Except that David likened the aliens' attack to a chess strategy. They were likely collecting information about Earth for the previous ~50 years. As much a wallbanger as it was, they did take over communications satellites; so if they kept up-to-date on hijacking the latest technology the humans had, collating important dates and holidays isn't much a stretch. Not that it probably would've matted at all, the aliens had the technology and luxury to attack whenever they wanted.
****** He compared them ''parking over the major cities and coordinating a simultaneous attack'' to a chess game. He said nothing about the date. The date was a coincidence. The president even said in his speech that "perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July".
****** Furthermore, the date "Fourth of July," as was stated in the movie, is an ''American'' holiday. That meant that, yeah, there were military forces off for the fourth ''in America,'' but last time I checked the Chinese still had a few million soldiers and nukes. Same with most of the other nuclear-capable powers of the world at the time. Granted, the United States has one of the most powerful military forces in the world, but at the same time, a) you people say that they were spying on us for years beforehand. Thus, the aliens would have known that they could not be hurt by our weapons as long as their shields held out. b) assuming point "a," then the aliens would have tried going for a more globally-accessible holiday, or period where the militaries are weakest. Off the top of my head, that would be towards the end of the year, when the holidays of multiple religious organizations take place: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Ramadan, the Winter Solstice, and more are all crammed into the end of the year, and are not America-exclusive.
** The answer might be in the novelization: while the big ships take care of the cities, the fighter escorts destroy all military installations within range.
** Actually, this troper remembers a scene, don't remember which, but a military aide tells General Grey "NATO and Western Allied installations were hit first."
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