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Ten things that science fiction got wrong

by Rena Sandou

Created on: March 04, 2009   Last Updated: March 12, 2009

Have you ever watched a science fiction movie and said "yeah, right!"? Of course you did. Science fiction movies, trying to please the audience, got so many things wrong. Fantasy has no limits; logic does.

1. Sound In Space

Do you remember the poster from "Alien"? "In Space, no one can hear you scream". That is very true as sound needs air to travel in and, as we all know, there is no air in space. Sound is, in fact, vibrations in the air. Space is a vacuum, so every sound we hear in the movies is really science fiction. Spaceships should not go "whoosh" as they appear on the screen, explosions should not go "boom" when they occur and laser guns should not go "zzzz" when they shoot at ugly aliens. Not that entertaining, right?

2. Traveling Faster Than Light

The most common thing in science fiction movies is traveling faster than the speed of light. Just remember the scenes with the crew ready to buckle up so as to get in hyperspace dimension and be boosted in another galaxy. That sounds really great, but as Einstein claimed, the law is that nothing can be faster that the speed of light in a vacuum space.

And there is another catch too. In order to even reach the speed of light you must acquire massive amount of energy. Or, I should better say, infinite amount of energy. Since we still have not figure out a way to do that, and it still remains a distant theory, traveling in such speed is something impossible.

3. Time Travel

When I was young, "Back To The Future" was one of my favorite movies. I thought it is really cool to have a machine that I would get into, press some buttons and travel to any date I wanted. But, it's not going to happen. The reason is the same as the above. Traveling close to the speed of light, time relatively moves slower (you can travel billion miles in just a few seconds) but you cannot make time go back. If you want the clock to start ticking backwards, you must travel faster than light. And that is not viable.

Some might say that you can go back in time by these, so called, "wormholes". These tunnels could probably allow you to go back breaking the connection between space and time. But, once more, to make these tunnels open and close any time you want, requires extreme energy. So, stop dreaming.

4. Flying Cars

"Fifth Element", "Minority Report", "I Robot" are only some of the science fiction movies that project the use of flying cars. Some older movies with similar theme always began with "sometime in 2005". As you can see, we are in 2009 and

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