There’s another option, of course. Since we’re talking about a bedtime story that doesn’t appear to be illustrated, a retrograde moon could rise in the same part of the sky(wasn’t mentioned) that the sun set. It would then be a crescent and rise towards fullness in the synodic period. We haven’t had orbital or even planetary rotational periods defined either. There are lots of ways to make everything but the way the artist painted the moon with respect to the horizon work.

I have to agree with Jeremy, there is a distinction between questioning the science, and questioning the fiction, i.e. future technology. Stating that FTL is impossible, or demanding a justification for it, shows a lack of an ability to accept new ideas. Any scientist who thinks they already know the answer before they try an experiment is not a good scientist.

I disagree with you on this.

While it is true that dismissing something as impossible is, in principle, poor judgement, there are plenty of situations in science where we actually do know enough to dismiss something as impossible (such as a modern mammal species evolving into a new species of insect).

The best scientists are those that ask the right questions in such a way that they obtain a new answer.

@AliCali #28

When she asked “Why is the sky red with no atmosphere?” she was not asking “Is there something strange that we haven’t discovered yet?” she was just being pedantic.

But not wrong.

Why should we not expect fiction to exist in the same universe – with, ergo, the same laws of physics and chemistry – as we do? If there is no atmosphere, the sky should be black. If the sky is coloured, that means there is an atmosphere. A simple observation leading to a rock-solid conclusion. But (potentially) undermined by sloppy fiction.

It is okay to question, but there is a point in reading sci-fi where the answer should be “This is the fiction, so it’s okay” and the question never goes beyond the readers head.

Why? You state this as a given, but you make no attempt to justify your claim. I accept that most sci-fi must ignore basic rules of how the universe works in order to create and drive the story. However, why should not the background details be correct? Why should we not care about ignorance or carelessness?

(And just to be pedantic myself, the most time-efficient way to travel, especially interstellar travel, would be to constantly accelerate to the halfway point, and then constantly decelerate to the destination, thus arriving in the shortest amount of time.)

Actually that’s inaccurate. After accelerating half way to Alpha Centauri, you’d be traveling .9999999999 % of C. (approx.) I expect you’d never have enough fuel to decelerate (unless you’re using a Bussard ram scoop). Unless we use the magical FTL, a story gimmick I’m willing to accept for consideration of aliens, etc. Unfortunately, Einstein MAY be right. If so, then we’re probably limited to generation ships to the stars. Oh well, that’s been done too,,,

John W. Campbell(editor of ANALOG SciFi) was basically the father of 20th century SciFi, in which he required his writers to use no more than one IMPOSSIBLE idea in a story. All else had to be within the realm of what we knew to be possible(and, of course, believable characters).

But, for me, the whole story panel was just hilarious!

GAry 7

The kid’s questioning of the planet detection, however, is bang on. The vast majority of possible paths between Star A and Star B should not be intersected by any Star C. Even if such a Star C did exist, it’s presence should have been readily known and accounted for before the trip from A to B was planned. So even if Star C exists and had a previously undetected planet circling it, the crew of the spaceship should have been aware of the existence of Star C, and the detection of a planet around it should have been an expected possibility, for which contingency plans should have been made. And if the planet detected was not near the flight path of the spaceship, it strains credulity that it would have been so easy to divert the mission to go study it. The scenario in the comic suggests either a very incompetent navigator, or a very badly planned mission from the start.

Well, maybe that’s why they were running out of fuel, too. Someone at mission control asleep at the switch. . . .

Yup, and also when she tries to figure out how things work, or how they might work. You know when scientific breakthroughs don’t happen? When people curtly dismiss as impossible things they can’t immediately explain with known science.

And do you know when scientific careers go down the toilet?

When a scientist refuses to accept that his hypothesis is impossible. Cold fusion is a good example of this. Whether or not cold fusion is possible at all was irrelevant to the fact that whatever Fleischman and Pons detected was not nuclear fusion.

Most scientists, when encountering something they cannot explain, are unlikely to dismiss a hypothesis as “impossible”; but they are likely to dismiss one (or several) as “unlikely”, based on what is already known.

What you seem to have missed is that, while we have much still to learn, there is quite a lot of stuff that we do know with a high degree of confidence.

Self-evidently true. Of course, it take far more imagination to come up with a way something COULD happen that has scientific legs than it does to simply declare “that can’t happen,” which is all this kid ever seems to do.

In principle, you are correct.

However, in this example, you are wrong. The child never actually says that FTL travel is impossible, she merely questions how it works, and the storyteller is unable to reply.

However, you must also acknowledge that there are instances where we know that certain things are indeed impossible (such as a klingon transforming into a cricket). Or to contain a black hole by means of magnetic fields (as is used in the movie Event Horizon) – magnetic fields can often counteract gravity, but they cannot nullify it. In that movie, the ship should have collapsed into the black hole.

@Jeremy, some of us (I don’t know how many think like me) suspend disbelief in science fiction for unknown physics, but require accuracy for known physics. According to known physics, when the moon is near opposition, it is full, never crescent. To us it does not look like lack of imagination. It looks like lack of education.

Agreed, except it could also be a symptom of “don’t care about facts / can’t be bothered to find out”.

So warp drive is allowed because it “might could” be possible since its realization is beyond the limits of our current knowledge. An adult Klingon transforming into a giant cricket by means of a retro virus is not allowed because we know that speciation occurs in the embryo (or pupa) stage, never in adults. (Both examples are from Star Trek.)

(I don’t know much about biology, and it shows in this post. Sorry. Corrections on terminology are welcomed.)

Yeah, speciation only ever happens in one generation when two species hybridise to form a third. More commonly (overwhelmingly so), speciation is a gradual process that takes many generations. Exactly how many generations is open to debate, because the exact definition of a species is quite woolly at the edges.

However, a klingon will not turn into a bush cricket because evolution cannot go backwards. (And it would need to go backwards to the common ancestor of vertebrates and arthropods in order to change a mammal into an insect.)

. . . she can’t imagine her way around the things that aren’t (that a civilization capable of building an interstellar vessel might have figured out an FTL drive or a means of sensing distant objects).

Not so – she first quizzes the computer about how the FTL drive works.

But since the concept of an FTL drive was (in the cartoon) made up ad hoc, there is no answer. As far as we can tell, FTL travel is impossible. Even the postulated warp drive (in which a vessel uses its engines to warp spacetime so that it never exceeds the speed of light locally, but it causes space in front of itself to contract such that there is an apparent FTL travel) is completely unfeasible because of the vast energy requirements (we’re not simply talking about the output of several power stations – we’re talking in the ballpark of the output of whole stars).

It’s important, in fostering skepticism, that we not stomp out imagination, since imagination is the very thing that drives science. We skeptics have a terrible reputation in that regard, largely unearned IMO. I’m never happy to see something that fosters the stereotype.

I agree about the unearned reputation of sceptics, but I disagree that the cartoon does what you say it does.