by Elton Gahr

Created on: February 22, 2009   Last Updated: May 01, 2009

The universe is likely a far stranger place than even our most creative minds can imagine. Just in our own solar system we know that there are mountains bigger than anything on earth, oceans of methane, great gas planets and entire systems of moons and science fiction is the vehicle that we use to begin to prepare our minds for what is out there. In order to do that we must guess at the future and sometimes even ignore the laws of physics but it is also useful to look carefully at the possibilities and impossibilities and try to determine which is which. Here are a few of the things that are most likely impossible

1. Aliens that look Human

There is of course no way to prove what aliens look like, but what we can assume with very little risk of being wrong is that they won't look like humans. In fact it is likely that nearly anything we find on earth will look more like humans than aliens because they will at least same some small genetic connection to humans. This is primarily a issue of budget on television but it is almost as common in novels and short stories where there is no budget excuse.

2. Sound in Space

This one we can prove. If you are flying an x-wing you will not hear lasers because there is no air. Sound is vibrations in the air. This is why things sound different underwater and it's why you wouldn't hear anything in space. This is also true of firry explosions that have no oxygen to fuel them.

3. Dodging lasers

So far as I can see there are only two good reasons to use phasers, lasers or blasters. One is that many of them can be set to stun, which is useful, but the larger reason is speed. Any type of laser weapon is by definition shooting at the speed of light. You can't dodge a laser because the light you use to see it is the same light that you would use to see it.

4. Artificial Gravity

I'm not suggesting that artificial gravity won't be discovered. It seems as likely as many other scientific possibilities. What Science Fiction often gets wrong is the importance of that discovery. Letting people walk calmly around a ship is useful, both for a television budget and for the crew itself but it certainly isn't the only use. Why not use artificial gravity to move the ship, making more gravity ahead of it and less behind? Why not as a weapon pinning the enemy to the floor as soon as they step on your ship, or shooting missiles which cause huge amounts of gravitational shifts which rip the ships(built for a zero gravity environment) to shreds, and this is

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