Engineers
and other technical types (myself included) seem to enjoy pointing out
inane and totally unrealistic special effects and dialogs in sci-fi
movies. Examples are legion, from uploading a virus to an alien computer
in Independence Day (surely aliens have Norton AV), to Day After Tomorrow
when the water freezes in NY, but no expansion effects are visible.
That's nothing compared to the early films, though. In the first science
fiction film produced, "A Trip to the Moon," in 1902, six travelers
(not even yet termed astronauts) were fired from a large cannon while
inside a protective capsule. The unsuspecting explorers are quickly
captured by lunar inhabitants. In a daring scene, an escape is made
where our heroes manage to make it back to the capsule and nudge it
off the edge of the moon so it can fall back safely to Earth, and splash
down in the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, even if a cannon could be built
that was capable of launching a projectile into space, no human could
survive the acceleration. Then there is that fact that while walking
on the moon it appeared to have gravity like the Earth's, but when it
came time to push the capsule off the edge, suddenly the gravity was
gone. The entire 14-minute epic is one bit of laughable absurdity after
another. As the general public gets more sophisticated, however, the
effects must be more believable. Who amongst us that was around for
the original Star Trek episodes thought them outrageous? Now we watch
re-runs and think differently. Sci-fi has thus transformed in a century
from being inspiring and thought-provoking, to being fodder for a good
belly laugh.
"Factoids," "Kirt's Cogitations," and
"Tech Topics Smorgasbord"
are all manifestations of my rantings on various subjects relevant (usually) to
the overall RF Cafe theme. All may be accessed on these pages:
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design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at
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