Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale/No Sense of Mass: Difference between revisions

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* This is fairly common in [[Marvel Comics]]. Marvel measures its characters' [[Super Strength]] based on how many tons they can lift. The problem is most people at Marvel apparently don't know how many tons a given object weighs or how much space a set number of tons of a given material will take up. Even more confusingly, Marvel's strength tiers tend to end at 100+ tons, meaning 100 tons and any number above that.

** One image from Marvel Team-Up was fairly infamous in its time, even receiving a massive splash page and a ''really'' long apology from the editors in their 'No-Prize' one-shot dedicated to pointing out their own errors that readers caught. The image? Hercules, of the Avengers, towing ''the Island of Manhattan'' through the Atlantic, bringing it back into the Harbor, by means of a gigantic chain wound about himself - thus not only stating that Hercules is capable of pulling ''Manhattan'', BUT ALSO that Manhattan '''floats'''. Oh, if this wasn't ridiculous enough, he's pulling it back ''the wrong way around'', so that Uptown is now Downtown and the Battery is the northmost point of the island. [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_O4ZzhRdo84M/TIHO5JqzyEI/AAAAAAAABxQ/AuKC51FJBb4/s1600/10-hercules.jpg This happened.]

** Not to mention such a mass in close orbit around the earth would create massive earthquakes, storms and other weather phenomena.

** Interior shots of the mothership showed it to contain mostly empty space. This means the actual density of its structural materials must be much, much higher. The mothership must be made out of white dwarf matter or neutron star matter.

* The narration in ''[[Waterworld]]'' begins with: "The polar ice caps have melted, covering the Earth with water." Even if the entire arctic ice cap, and the ridiculously huge antarctic ice cap, were to completely melt, the extra water would only cause the sea level to rise some 200 meters. That's more than enough to flood all existing coastal regions, but it wouldn't ''begin'' to cover even the shortest mountain range, let alone bring the ocean to within a few meters of the top of Everest as shown at the end.

 

== Literature ==

** The average suburb is not self-contained. If you add in all the businesses, workplaces, industry, transportation and other infrastructures required to do that... it will start to feel rather more crowded.

*** Asimov also indicated that the structure of Trantor extended more than a mile underground and up to several hundred stories above ground. Taking into account the additional area therefore available, which may be a few hundred times the land area, the problem with Trantor isn't overcrowding, it's finding someone else to talk to face to face.

** Since the text makes only rare references to length, and very commonly notes mass as a determinant of acceleration, the author retconned in a new and much shorter length that delivered reasonable density.

* Weber does it also in his story ''Mutineer's Moon'' and sequels, in which the starting premise is that the Moon (i.e. Luna, Earth's natural satellite, ''that'' Moon) is actually a starship. Yes, the whole thing. It has a layer of rock around the outer hull carefully sculpted to match the surface appearance of the ''original'' Moon that once orbited the Earth, tens of thousands of years ago, before the starship removed it and took its place. Incidentally, the entire human population of the Earth in these books descend from the human crew of that starship.

** At no point does Weber write the ship as if it was 2,000 miles in diameter, though, nor is it ever seriously explained why it needs to be that big. He writes the starship as if it were a few miles in diameter.

** The book does state that the type of FTL engine used and the reactor to power it (as well as the [[Subspace Ansible|Hyperspace Radio]]) all reached optimum efficiency only when scaled up to planetoid dimensions. To give you an idea of just how much power their reactors put out, it took only six Battle Planetoids working together to force a star to go supernova.

** Given the information presented in the books it's entirely possible that the living areas of the ship are only a few miles across with the majority of the ship being dedicated to weapons/propulsion/power systems etc. Of course it still seems unlikely that such a large unit is really worth the resources (especially when it's demonstrated that smaller war ships can be FTL capable).

** [[All There in the Manual]] Dahak and the other planetoid sized ships were built in order to defend against the next genocidal attack by the Achuultani, so they'd want them big, not only so they could stuff in as many weapons as possible, but to [[Made of Iron|take a pounding as well.]] Given that ships like Dahak were intended to be deployed on picket duty for years, if not decades, they built the crew quarters with comfort in mind. You also need to take into account the hangar decks for the sublight ships. The volume isn't really wasted, and it turns out to even have something of a psychological effect; the aliens are ''terrified'' by the sheer size of the planetoids.

** Of course, ''Ringworld'' starts off with the Puppeteers fleeing the galaxy, dragging the five ''planets'' of their home system with them, which has its own host of Sense Of Scale problems (But come on, they're ''towing planets''. [[Rule of Cool|How is that not awesome]]?)

** The whole of ''[[Known Space]]'' is a region of around 30-60 lightyears in diameter, depending on time. The Ringworld and the Fleet of Planets are both far outside this, and the Fleet is moving along at a steady clip of .8c. The Puppeteers are long-term planners who are perfectly willing to move thousands of years in order to be safe.

* Also by Niven, in his ''[[The Integral Trees|Integral Trees]]'' setting: the so-called "integral trees" are plants in a free-fall environment typically between 50 and 100 kilometers long and 700 meters across. A small (few thousand people), fairly primitive (early Iron Age) society is harvesting these trees for lumber at an implied rate of one or two a year. Thing is, a single tree will yield about eight ''trillion'' board-feet of lumber, or about a century's output of the entire United States lumber industry.

** The limiting factor isn't the wood available. It's the food and water. The Smoke Ring being what it is, the people need to move fairly frequently to avoid starvation or thirst, and the more advanced societies don't move at all.

** To be fair, the ring-creators came into existence a couple seconds after the universe did, are born in black holes, have utterly ridiculous technology, and have a stable time-loop existence so that as soon as they came into existence, they were at their technological peak. They've had plenty of time.

*** And for all that, it sort of ''is'' the end of time (still-burning stars are starting to become scarce) before it all comes to fruition.

** Much worse is Orion Rock in Exultant, an asteroid said to be travelling a thousand years before reaching the black hole in the center of the galaxy. That's all fine and well, until a protagonist standing on it gets to ''see'' molecular clouds disappearing upon reaching the rock's destination. That means that the cloud is several orders of magnitude ''denser'' than any nebula ever known (probably around the density of water clouds), and that it has an impossibly crisp edge (going from that insane density to zero in only a few hundred kilometers tops).

** And then there's the [[Hand Wave]] that a dragon weighs only as much as it wants to and can carry as much as it wants to being a result of their [[Psychic Powers|telekinetic powers]] which only get discovered in one of the last books chronologically.

* Ship sizes in Andrey Livadny's ''[[The History of the Galaxy]]'' series can be a little off, at least [[All in The Manual|as described on his website]]. From 20-meter one-man [[Space Fighter|Space Fighters]] to 7-kilometer flagship cruisers, crewed by 150 people. While the author tries to explain it by having most systems be automated (in fact, entire ships can run without crews, using only AIs), this does not explain why the ships have to be so ridiculously big. Interestingly, one novel specifically mentions a heavy cruiser (about 5 km in length) with a crew of 2000. However, even that is an extremely-low number of people to run a ship this size. For reference, a [[Real Life]] ''Gerald R. Ford''-class aircraft carrier will be about 333 meters in length and have a crew of 4660. This is not even to mention the stress of trying to maneuver a 7-kilometer beast in battle. The only thing the author got right is that any ship larger than 500 meters is unable to enter planetary atmosphere without assistance from technical carriers (i.e. tugs). Even corvettes, which are 500 meters long, come equipped with additional planetary engines to allow them to survive re-entry.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

** No-one knew for sure that a quasar is a galaxy until the 1980s, and they don't look like one without additional information that wasn't available when the episode was made. This is more a case of [[Science Marches On]].

*** Even at the time the episode was made, we knew that quasars had enormous redshift, implying that they were ''extremely'' distant phenomena (as in ''billions'' of light-years away, far far outside our own galactic supercluster).

** Hilariously, the remastered version added stumpy little relativistic jets and an accretion disc.

** The episode "The Corbomite Maneuver" has the ''Enterprise'' encounter a mysterious cube, which Sulu says is 107 metres on each side and masses just under 11,000 metric tonnes. Scotty says it must be solid metal, leaving him wondering how it could be powered and how it moves around. But the quoted measurements give a density of about 9 kilograms per cubic metre, significantly less than styrofoam - implying the cube is almost certainly hollow (they may have been aiming for 9 tonnes per cubic metre, which is between the densities of iron and lead, and dropped a factor of a thousand somewhere).

* In at least one episode of ''[[The Next Generation]]'' turning off life support for five minutes was enough to exhaust the entire oxygen supply of the ship. Considering the absurdly spacious rooms, they should have lasted quite a while longer.

* Used intentionally and cranked up to 11 via the [[Rule of Funny]] in ''[[Psych]]'', where detective Shawn Spencer has to pretend to be the guide doing a laser light presentation at an observatory, but quickly makes it painfully obvious he knows ''nothing'' about space.

'''Shawn:''' And here is Monkey with Rash. The Egyptians used to set their clocks by it. And here is the Hammer of Jeff. }}

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* In the ''Wild Talents 2nd Edition'' superhero setting, one of the suggested campaign seeds is being part of an exploration team for a defunct alien "world-ship" that has moved into the solar system. The campaign text says, explicitly, "Every square inch of the 'ship', 6,123 miles in diameter, was to be searched under the express orders of Joint Space Command." This is a volume of over ''four billion trillion cubic meters'' they are talking about here. If the entire population of the planet Earth, all six billion people, were used for a search team, each person would still have to search over 660 billion cubic meters. Hope they packed a lunch!

** In the Progenitor setting for Wild Talents, the first superhuman was infused with 1% of the universe's Dark Matter energy. While obscenely powerful by supers game standards, her powers aren't anywhere near, say, Gurren Lagann level crazy, much less Bronze Age Superman crazy.

 

** Though the actual reason is that in Japanese, the same word is used to refer to planets, asteroids, galaxies, etc., the real confusion being why that was kept in the translation.

*** Probably to keep with the natural progression of things. Super Mario Land, Super Mario World, Galaxy was the next logical step.

* ''[[Halo]]'' is just as bad: while the games give no numbers, the novels cite insanely light weights for ships. The 480'ish meter long titanium armored frigate for instance is given a loaded mass of just 4,000 tons. Some rough math says that this results in a ship that's not quite lighter then air, which is about 1.2 kilos per cubic meter, but seeing as the frigate works out to something like 1.8 kilos per cubic meter it's damn close. It gets even more insane when we consider that the ship is supposed to be armed with a main gun that fires ''600 ton'' slugs.

** More fun! Doing the math from Halopedia, which gets info from the novels, the Orbital Defense Platforms fire 3,000 ton slugs at 60% light speed. This results in a projectile that has 11.62 teratons of kinetic energy. That's 11,620,000,000 kilotons. For reference, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had an energy yield of 15 kilotons or so, which makes that one slug over 774 million times as strong. For more realization of how ridiculous this number is, take the total energy consumption of the United States in 2005. Each one of these slugs, fired once every five seconds, contains about 467 times that amount.

 

 

* In ''[[Homestuck]]'', there are a couple examples. A fireball wrapping ''around'' the planet instead of simply blowing a hole in the crust, a star {{spoiler|twice the size of the universe, yet when a character flies next to it they are nowhere near dwarfed by that sheer size; they also plan to blow it up with something the size of a building that can eradicate something comparable to a solar system}}, and a few others. It's justified perhaps, via [[Functional Magic]].

 

** The Transformers Wiki has an entire page dedicated to the wackiness of Transformer [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Scale scale]. Included is a diagram demonstrating, on the basis of his size relative to Unicron, that Galvatron must be approximately ''the same size as Great Britain''.

** The size of Cybertron itself varies a lot in Transformers lore. Considering its inhabitants tend to be about 30 feet tall, it could be assumed that the planet is fairly big, but in fact when it gets knocked into Earth orbit (which happens twice in the series) it appears to be about the size of our Moon. Considering that Cybertron is apparently too big for Unicron to consume in planet mode, this means that the actual number of planets Unicron can consume without ripping them apart with his bare hands (which in the case of a planet like Earth would take a long time) is fairly limited.

** Even more confusion: in the ''Armada'' anime series, Unicron is said to have been biding his time, disguising himsself as one of Cybertron's moons!

** See [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Scale here] for more information.

 

== Other ==

** Cricket magazine had an even worse example in one of their stories. Not only was there a solid Dyson sphere, but "a small strip around the equator was far enough away to support life."

*** Even if you could build a solid Dyson sphere, nothing would "stick" to the inside surface, because there is no gravity gradient inside a hollow sphere. Nor would the sun have any particular reason to stay at the center of the sphere.<ref>Though, Star Trek does take place in a setting with cheap artificial gravity.</ref>

*** To compound their sins even worse, there is a ''visible curvature'' to the surface of the sphere as the Enterprise passes through the door -- on a sphere with about a 100 million km radius.<ref>That's about 2/3 the Earth's orbital radius; apparently it surrounds a smaller and weaker star.</ref>

*** To their credit the episode does say the structure is impossible. Or should be since it does in fact exist in their reality.

** In the [[Star Trek]] novel ''Inferno'' (book three of the Millennium trilogy) O'Brien is trapped in {{spoiler|a Pah-wraith hell featuring}} a solid-shell Dyson sphere. The sheer impossibility of the thing slowly but surely drives him insane. {{spoiler|Of course, being an illusion the whole time, it gets a pass on any sort of physical possibility}}.

* For years, the assumption among paleontologists was that Quetzalcoatlus, a pterosaur with a thirty-foot wingspan, long limbs, and a long neck to match, weighed less than a hundred kilograms, or not a whole lot more than a human. [http://www.flickr.com/photos/markwitton/1386125619/in/set-72057594082038974/ This is how big they were]. It's not at all implausible that something much heavier than the original estimate can fly, and then we can have had animals tall enough to look giraffes in the eye without having their interiors be blimps.

** Part of the problem was that until Mark Witton started doing images such as the one linked to, most recreations of pterosaurs didn't have them in context with anything humans could instinctively relate to. Seeing that image and one suddenly realizes the 100kg (220lb) estimate is completely absurd.

 

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[[Category:No Sense Of Mass]]

[[Category:Sci Fi Writers Have]]