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Comment by orsenthil | Hacker News Reader

Since you built it, I am curious about the scientific accuracy of the movie, book and while taking the information GAIA DR3. I wanted to assume at least the stars part is science, but I think, there is a lot of fiction in that setting. Is this map the reality of what we know as science, since it came from GAIA DR3 dataset?

And, thank you very much. This is super cool and exciting. I wish such a one exists for Asimov's foundation universe (fiction).

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The book does a significantly better job explaining the science behind the mission than the movie (which I found insulting, but I'm clearly in the minority of holding that opinion).

The book was certainly better than the movie, but I'll take every damned example of 'humans working collectively to solve an existential crisis' I can get.

As 'on the nose' as 'Don't look up' was, we clearly need more content that inspires action than pits us to despair.

This was exactly one of the reasons why I hated the movie.

Andy did a fantastic job describing how nation-states might put aside their differences and work together to solve an existential crisis. Some of the events he imagined were just as awesome as they were unlikely in today's political climate.

ALL of that was distilled away in the movie. Like, LITERALLY ALL of it.

Lord Miller reduced the book to "Hot Homer in space and telepathic rock alien thing work together to save their planets." It was a beautifully crafted movie, but SO much dumber than it had to be.

The stars featured in the movie and in this chart (and in the book) are real, and reflect their real-world locations.

The planets around the stars, aside from our own solar system (obviously), are fictional-- both Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani are stars where we're looking for exoplanets, but we don't have strong evidence for either yet.

IIRC at the time the book was written, there was some data suggesting a planet detection around 40 Eridani, but has been ruled out since then.

Not about the stars part or the map, but xenonite struck me as rather odd from a scientific standpoint. Apparently it's some organic chemical bonded--somehow--to xenon. But the mystery depended on the mass spectrometer Grace uses to analyze xenonite not being able to detect nuclei of atoms smaller than some atomic number (something like 20?). So he couldn't tell what it was made of, except for xenon. My initial assumption was that it had to do with one of the few xenon-based compounds we know about, XeF4 (xenon tetrafloride), but there must be more to it than that.

The movie makes it clear that it is both an unknown, and unexpected, xenon-based material. Plus, the scientist analyzing it has (presumably) no real background in materials science.

IOW: it's intended to seem odd.

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