I agree with you on almost all points. The realism of the series was what I really liked about it.
I stopped watching it though once the "protomolecule" stuff started. What is backed by science about it?
I stopped watching it though once the "protomolecule" stuff started. What is backed by science about it?
So, the first scene in the first episode? Before the opening credits?
It would be one thing if they added the crazy alien magic plot device midway through a later season to get out of some writing hole they'd gotten themselves into, but they intentionally opened the first episode of the show (and the prologue of the first book) with a fleeting glimpse of what the protomolecule is capable of to set the stakes for the rest of the series.
Its not backed up by science and thats not the point. The point is how humans react to it and how the story progresses after that is really great, one of the best series overall i've ever watched.
I've always thought that movie/series genre are just a facade for the real genre:
- Slasher movies are supposedly about the boogey man/monster killing protagonist, but it's really about how humans interact when put under stress and show their true color
- (Heroic) Fantasy movies are supposedly about wizards and knights and witches, but it's really just a huge politics playground
- Science fiction movies are supposedly about new technology/aliens/space stuff, but it's really about how something outside of our knowledge changes us, challenges our values, and reveals who we are. That's usually technology but can be anything.
It's of course not just that, there are always exceptions, and I'm probably not the first one to have this view. But I think this is the reason I like almost anything sci-fi but can barely stand watching fantasy movies: I can't find myself to care about people fighting each other for a little bit more power.
Since they are not goofing off in basic things and they've done their homework, having space magic happen is much more entertaining than in e.g. Star Trek where basically everything is driven by plot-based technobabble so you really have no distinction between "standard technology" and "unfathomable space phenomena of the week".
Some of the space magic driven by protomolecule later on is fairly thoughtfull IMO and meshes nicely with rest of the show. I would advice you to continue watching - the series gets constantly better and better.
I was also ok with the Epstein drive. It's a nice little plot enabler. "Yeah, space colonization is laughably implausible, but what if we had just this one piece of magic technology?"
Also, advanced alien tech in pretty much all science fiction follows Arthur C. Clarke's dictum about magic. Of course they're going to be able to do things humans don't understand. Do you really think we would be able to explain everything a billion+ year old civilization could do?
And I'm fine with that because of how its handled. The protomolecule is less of a technology itself and more or a narrative tool. How it works isn't important. What is important is that it is a disruptive force that changes the direction of humanity.
It makes it easier if you think of it as "proto" being short for Protogen - the corporation that discovered it.
So while protomolecule sound like something out of the Power Rangers, it's an oddly plausible term.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engines.php#id-...
Search found me this: https://web.archive.org/web/20080125030037/http://deoxy.org/...
and previous discussion! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500469
That kind of thing doesn't bother me. I don't think a dog could even comprehend a wheel. Even within the same species, major advances can look like magic to earlier generations. A top-tier scientist from the 19th century may well have pronounced just about all of today's digital devices impossible science fiction. "Billions of calculations per second in something in your pocket that runs on a battery you can recharge?" Lots of stretches there for a scientist from 1820. There are still people (who are not stupid) who don't believe we went to the moon.
Hard sci-fi just means a story that doesn't instantly fail undergrad physics and whose speculative physics are credible enough that a typical physicist won't roll their eyes.
Wormholes and warp drive, for example, have not been conclusively ruled out. Most physicists doubt you could build them in the foreseeable future (or maybe ever), but nobody's shown a reason they would "break physics."
Faster than light motion or reactionless drives that generate conventional momentum are however believed to be impossible.
It leads to some counterintuitive stuff. Giant massive ships that silently hover in the sky without blowtorching whatever is beneath them are strongly believed to be less plausible than something superficially more far fetched like the Alcubierre Drive. That's because reactionless drives that create conventional momentum "break physics," while so far we have not been able to rule out altering space-time curvature. If I were writing a hard sci-fi story with an Alcubierre Drive in it, I'd still have the astronauts going up to their warp ship in chemical rockets. I'd also have my warp ship using chemical or ion propulsion to move around when not using its warp drive, and the thing would have to have massive heat sinks that would glow red hot when warp is powering up to discharge all the power plant's waste heat (second law of thermodynamics).
Credible speculation in physics usually means that there exist mathematical solutions or models that suggest the possibility of something, but where we do not yet currently know if that math is "real" let alone "engineerable." There may also be things that are technically possible but that are so hard to do that they recede behind a kind of "probability horizon," becoming effectively impossible. An example might be a warp drive that requires so much energy and is so hard to build and control that the probability of someone doing it anywhere in the universe between now and heat death is near zero even if you assume that intelligent life is common.
Heck, actual science fiction authors in the mid-20th century got that wrong. Asimov, for example, while he had autonomous robots walking around, limited mobile computing devices (installed in anything smaller than a spaceship) to calculators and dumb terminals. Output was often limited to ALL CAPS printed on a slip or strip of paper (again, despite robots able to communicate verbally).
In his 70 year old series, everyone still uses film :)
BTW, you may enjoy Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis. Well worth reading, it adds quite a few interesting and plausible embellishments to Asimov's conceptual framework.
The two things out our world are a FTL jump drive (the Kearny-Fuchida drive only working at gravitational balance points) and the hyper pulse generators (sending FTL messages using the same physics). Everything else is well within established physics. Fusion engines? Check. Laser and direct energy weapons? Check. 12m high walking robots? Sure, why not. All beyond current engineering, but not beyond physics.
Even space travel is using reaction drives (fusion powered ones, but everything space born needs fuel to move) with acceleration well below 10g. And even the space-based tabletop uses acceleration and vectors instead of speed. A bitch to track on paper so.