Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 13, 2024, 11:35 AMPerhaps the idea of Mars as a bug out location started as a joke, but a few people took it serious. Then the horse was out of the barn.
A generation growing up with Start Trek and Star Wars as their bible was told how wonderful they were just because the universe was graced with their presence. They succumbed to narcissism and the idea they could make reality to be anything they wanted just by thinking it so.
Basically this is true, but there is another important factor to understand, which is how powerful cinema has become in creating believable images that defy real life experience.
Early sci-fi movies looked hokey and fake. You could tell they weren't using real spaceships, just cheap sets and miniatures. Today, with CGI, completely fabricated images look as real as realty. You can't tell the difference.
The second aspect is what you do implicitly watching a film, suspension of disbelief. Even things which clearly can't be real because they violate the laws of physics you believe for the purpose of enjoying the movie. In action hero movies today, a character like Natasha Romanoff will fall from the top of a 20 story building, bounce off a few fire escapes on the way down and then walk away from the fall. In reality, by the time she hit the ground every bone in her body would be broken.
Even Iron Man wearing the metal suit wouldn't survive his standard landings, where he absorbs all the shock just bending one knee. He's travelling at 200+ mph and decelerates instantly. The G-force would flatten his brain inside his head. Heroes run through a hail of bullets from 50 guys shooting at them with uzis and never get hit. Hero pulls out a pistol and shoots a villain between the eyes while running with a shot that would be hard to make with a sniper rifle.
The speed of light is routinely exceeded in every major Space travel franchise. along with the relativity problem of time dilation. Granted most people don't understand relativity theory, but they should at least be aware of this problem even if they don't understand the math.
Anti-Gravity propulsion which allows stuff to float around without any sort of propulsion mechanism i common, along with artificial gravity in space where there is no object around big enough to create a gravitational field. The Hulk or Superman will lift a whole building off the ground, holding it by the corner. The building would collapse, all the supports are oriented wrong.
At least some violations of basic laws happen in both sci fi and action films all the time. You get used to seeing it, and you accept it as real for the purpose of watching the movie, but seen enough times it becomes more real than reality. You learn about the environment from what you see. Vhildren grow up with so much screen time behind them, this becomes reality to them.
What is really sad of course is that guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos believe this stuff is possible, at least from their actions and what they say publicly. Bezos thinks we will have apartment complexes in low earth orbit, along with Musk's Mars colonies. The energy problem of shipping so much material up in space to build stuff like that isn't even considered. The International Space Station is only about the size of 4 RVs hooked together. The rockets they used to put those parts up aren't even made any more. A big satellite is the size of a minivan. It would take hundreds of trips of the biggest rockets ever built to put up one typical apartment building in space. This is not going to happen, but Bezos predicts it. Since he runs a space rocket bizness, it pays for him to promote this, but I think he actually does believe his own press.
We have been conditioned to believe anything is possible with pluck and ingenuity. I can excuse people like Jules Verne, early writers of sci fi around when new basic discoveries like radio waves were happening regularly. This kind of pace hasn't been true for almost a century now though, and even just applying some things we understand like Fusion remain out of reach on the engineering level.
People want to believe we are capable of exploring the universe, and the movies make it seem possible. Belief is more powerful than logic though for most people. That's the power of Religion, and space travel is a religion for most people who have grown up in modern industrial civilization.
RE