I really wish there were more space sci-fi TV shows which weren't aggressively stupid in their lack of understanding of astrophysics.
Like just starting with a basic understanding of "what is a planet, what is a star, and how far away are they generally from each other" seems like something only Space Odyssey and Star Trek ever even tried to do?
I don't get why it's 2022 and we still seem to have no science awareness in Hollywood writers.
Did 1980s high school just... not work? At all?
Eg:
* If your FTL drive is dead, you're not getting to even the next star using a rocket. Not in anyone's lifetime.
* Everything just in one solar system is months to years of travel apart, unless FTL
* If you take off your helmet on a planet, you will die instantly 99.99999% of the time.
* Aliens don't speak American English.
* Space colonies will always be more fragile than Earth cities, no matter how high the sea rises
seem like basic truths and yet... nobody knows them yet?
@natecull Well, according to astrophysics, FTL is impossible. We can't go on planets with a helmet because their atmospheres would almost all destroy us without heavy shielding. There are no aliens. We can't even live in a tin can floating in orbit of our own planet, much less plan extraplanetary or extrasolar expeditions, and no chance of space colonies. The universe will be explored only with robot and camera, very slowly without reward.
Right, FTL is a hack to allow "star colony" stories to happen at all, which assume habitable planets of some kind (maybe one per habitable system and lots of uninhabitable ones).
And radiation is a huge problem for the moons of Jupiter with their delicious water and hydrocarbons, and soil toxicity a huge problem for the Martian poo potato industry.
There's plenty of dead rock out there for robots to mine, assuming that there's an Earth market for dead rock moving very fast.
@natecull Yeah, and realistically space mining will never work out, because it's just too expensive to get out of our gravity well, but we can't survive anywhere outside of its atmosphere. So I don't mind when Star Trek fans make a show about a simple fungal organism that evolved warp technology as a survival mechanism and colonized the galaxy long before us.
