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

{{quote|''"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."''|'''[[Douglas Adams]]''', ''[[The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy (Franchise)|The Hitchhiker's Guide to Thethe Galaxy]]''}}

Most people (if not, in fact, ''everyone'') can't get their minds around just how big the universe is. So it should come as little surprise that most [[Speculative Fiction]] writers can't either. This is chiefly true of creators of TV, film, and video game SF. Creators of ''written'' science fiction can be positively obsessive about accuracy (but on the other hand, [[SturgeonsSturgeon's Law|sometimes they're not]]). If your qualitative yardstick is based around an author's ability to describe distances, this may be a useful way to distinguish good print science fiction from bad print science fiction. And it's why a lot of science fiction fans don't like the movie and TV adaptations of their favorite books and stories. The usual blend of [[Adaptation Decay]] and [[Did Not Do the Research]] is a surefire way to leave the adaptation with no sense of ''scale''. On the other hand, "Space is so ridiculously huge that there is absolutely no realistic way that anyone could ever travel to anywhere even remotely interesting in the lifespan of most major civilizations", while not a total deal-breaker, does rule out an awfully broad range of plots.

For example, consider that a light year is about ten ''quadrillion'' meters or nearly ''six trillion'' miles. That's ten-to-the-power-of-sixteen meters, or 10 petameters. Let's assume your family car uses about 2 and a half gallons of fuel per 100km - about 25 mpg - and a gallon costs about US$ 4. Then one light year is roughly where you'd end up if you spent the entire national debt of the US on gas<ref>and at 60 miles per hour, it would take 11 million years to drive there</ref>. At the opposite end, an atomic nucleus is on the order of a ''quadrillionth'' of a meter. That's ten-to-the-power-of-negative-fifteen of a meter, or a femtometer. Such outrageous [[wikipedia:SI prefix|SI prefixes]] rarely appear in fiction, and that's before we get anywhere near the scales of galaxies and subatomic particles. If it sounds like [[Eleventy -Zillion|a number made up by a child]] ([[The World Ends With You|Attention all yoctograms!]], septillion seconds), the writer might have actually taken it seriously.