I’m going to write a screenplay that involves a giant mass of fecal matter splattering the Moon. Part of the Earth’s atmosphere gets caught in it, everything starts smelling like crap, and people are starting to die from disgust. There will be a panel of scientists to back everything up, of course, and when they can’t explain something they’ll just say, “oh, that’s the way it is. Crap smells bad.” Involve the use of gigantic space elevator based vacuum cleaners to disperse the crap smell into space, and some serious looking astronauts in a capsule destined for the moon. Said astronauts will shovel the crap into lunar valleys and cover it up with chunks of Moon rock. One of them will die after sinking into a huge pile of crap. Add in a few beautiful people, a love story plus some sympathetic characters like kids and old people, get someone to play the President and you have a new miniseries! Look for my miniseries to appear on one of the networks this fall. I guarantee it.

Director: “Astroid heading for earth? Pfft, boring. Hey, let’s make it a chunk of BROWN DWARF that smashed into the moon! Yeah, and it’ll be magnetic and lift cars! Big special effects! It’ll be GREAT!”

Writer: *sobs*

What do I find there? One generic entry. How sad is that? C’mon peoples, if each one of you list just one mistake you found, at one person per minute, the full list of errors should be done by 2012. Doncha think? I think it would be a riot to see it top the records in most mistakes ever in one video event. All other movies in the future would have something to shoot for. Might even make Guinness.

However, after having read ALL of the above (no small task mind you), I started thinking about a brain-puzzler (for me at least). Let us for the sake of argument suspend all disbelief about the movie for a moment. Consider the same scenario, large chunk of neutron-star or black-dwarf embedded in the moon. A highly elliptical orbit. If you really did want the two locked bodies, dense-matter & moon, to part their merry ways as they were in a dance with earth, would you release the hunk of ultra-dense matter at perigee or apogee? (Or if you learned anything from this movie, “apogee” is now known as “axis peak”. ) Perigee is when the dense mass is at highest velocity, Apogee at slowest velocity. It seemed, from a common-sense type of thinking, that to release it as it was almost stopped and ready to draw the earth nearer again, that would be the *worst* time to make the chunk & moon part company. But if being near the earth when moving fastest, would it cause the most disturbance to the earth when released? Or doesn’t it matter and it wouldn’t go anywhere anyway? Is there an optimal position in the densest body’s elliptical orbit to fling away something from 3 orbiting bodies, to leave the two less massive bodies behind the least disturbed? Is there a limit to the differences in mass ratios of all bodies concerned where it would be feasible to fling away the one with the greater mass by using the orbits of the two lesser masses?

See? Really bad science got me thunking, probably very badly.

While I’m at it, how much less do you weigh from centripetal forces during new-moon when you are on the opposite side of the earth from the sun and the moon, when living near the equator some time during the night? I’ve so many silly questions. (The weight conscious are now booking flights to equatorial regions with scales in hand, awaiting the next new-moon.)

Yabbut, this is new science, see? So the stronger gravity can pull us toward it because we’re all made of the same electromagnetic force, hence large objects are affected more than small objects, unless they’re already fixed to the ground like trees and houses and swing sets. Got it?

Oh, and the atmosphere is perfectly safe because air molecules are the smallest objects around.

(Ducking…)

Seriously, the farce is strong with this one. It is bad on just about every level.