Blogs / Bad Astronomy

It doesn’t matter if you are a gamer or not, this cinemetic trailer for the new game from EA, Star Wars: The Old Republic, will rawk you down to your midichlorians.

Wow. You kids these days (shakes fist) have no idea how good you have it. Can you imagine a trailer like this for Space Invaders?

OMG OMG OMG. I’ll be the moderator for the Mythbusters panel at Comic Con this year!

Squeeee!

Comic Con is a HUGE scifi/fantasy/comic/gaming/pop culture convention held every year in San Diego. I’ve always wanted to go, and last year, the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine sent me there to be on a panel about science in science fiction (I have several blog posts about it; start here and click through to the next ones, in particular this one with a video of our panel). They’re sending me again this year (and I’ll have more about that a little later), and I’m really excited to go.

Then last week I get a call from My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™, asking me if I’d like to moderate their panel! I said yes immediately (and then cleared it with the magazine; maybe I did that a little backwards), because despite all indications I’m not a complete idiot.

Adam will be on the panel, as well as Jamie Hyneman, Tory Belleci, and Grant Imahara. Kari can’t attend, as by then she’ll be a brand new mommy. That’s wonderful for her, of course, though a bit of a bummer for us. Adam and Jamie were on a panel at CC last year (that’s the picture shown here) and it was a riot. This year, the room is twice as big, too. Discovery Channel has more info on their press release (PDF; click that link, select your location and "Discovery Channel" for network, then click the link on the right labeled "Mythbusters Comic Con panelists").

On the panel we’ll be talking about the new season, what they have planned for the next, and how their Moon Hoax testing episode would have been an unwatchable disaster without my science advice. I’ll really try to come up with some unusual questions for them, but I could use some help from you, me droogs. If you’ve got a good question for the ‘busters, put it in the comments below… and if I use it I’ll give you a shout-out.

And may I just say once again: squeee!

P.S. This is getting picked up a bit online, like at the San Diego City Guide and Pop Culture Zoo.

I wrote about the Science and Entertainment Exchange yesterday, and now they’ve posted a video from their recent meeting. It features some notable folks giving their opinions on science in the movies, and it’s well worth a few minutes of your time.

Seth MacFarlane rocks. And so does SEE. This is a group of folks I really support. I’d love to see their influence only increase!

I’m not a big fan of doomsday nonsense (even the real stuff has a very low chance of doing us in), and so you can imagine the dim view I take of people claiming that a Mayan prophecy says we’ll all die in 2012. I have yet to see one claim about this stuff that is either a) remotely true or 2) not made-up crap.

Still, I do love disaster movies, so I’m torn about Roland Emmerich’s "2012" which comes out this summer. He did "Independence Day", a movie I love (yes, I do: it’s fun and silly and doesn’t take itself too seriously) and "The Day After Tomorrow". The latter was pretty bad; the science was awful, but it was also really overwrought.

So what of this new movie? See for yourself:

I love that it’s wrong right from the start: the Mayans were not the earliest civilization; Sumerians had them beat by four thousand years. Also, while the fireballs hitting was cool, small rocks won’t make it to the ground moving quickly enough to be burning like that.

And what’s causing that tsunami? A giant impact? A Richter 15 earthquake? Smug?

Anyway, hard to say if the movie will be any good or not. I really like John Cusack and Amanda Peet, and Oliver Platt slays me, so who knows? But I know this: it really won’t help people like me and others trying to calm folks down and keep them from panicking over doomsday crap. Sigh.

I heard rumors about this a while ago, but now a trailer is out for it: "Impact", a science fiction mini-series that’ll air on ABC next week (starting June 21). On the plus side, it stars Natasha Henstridge, who I think is pretty cool (I loved the first season of "She Spies"). On the minus side is every other single thing about this show. Here, suffer through this first.

I know, we’re all a little bit dumber for having watched that. The Bad Astronomy is strong with this one. A meteor shower that blasts the Moon is not totally implausible, but one that blows off chunks like that? I don’t think an asteroid big enough to do that would be hidden behind other smaller ones, which is fairly firmly in the "duh" category. And they’re not meteors! They’re just asteroids; meteors are when they are burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.

But then it totally goes off the rails. Brown dwarf chunks? Uh, what? A brown dwarf is a mega-planet, an object just barely too small to be a star but much more massive than Jupiter. "A chunk of brown dwarf" makes as much sense as saying a chunk of Saturn’s atmosphere.

And it takes a LOT of energy to move the Moon appreciably from its orbit. Anything massive enough to do that would vaporize or at least seriously damage the Moon upon impact. Yet we see it later in the trailer looking exactly the same as now (and with the same face pointed toward us, which is wrong too).

Don’t even get me started on the electromagnetic effects. Erf.

The verdict: if I have time, I’ll watch it, but I expect this to set a new nadir for astronomically-based TV that previously was occupied by the likes of "Doomsday Rock". But just to be safe, I’ll put my brain in a jar and bury it in the back yard first. No need to damage it any further after that trailer.

Tip o’ the air sickness bag — which I’ll need — to io9.

It’s rumor no more: FUTURAMA IS COMING BACK!!!!!

20th Century Fox Television, the animation powerhouse that brought “Family Guy” back from the dead five years ago, has done it again: Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s brilliantly subversive animated sci-fi comedy “Futurama” will return to production on 26 new half-hour episodes more than six years after the series aired its last original episode.

Oh man, oh baby, oh man oh man! I am so happy about this! Futurama is one of the greatest television shows ever, and if you disagree, you’re wrong. Written by math and science dorks, it lampoons science fiction at the same time it betrays its love for it. The Star Trek episode with Melllvar is hands-down one of the funniest things ever written, and if the one with Fry’s dog doesn’t choke you up you’re not human (not that there’s anything wrong with being from Omicron Persei 8).

Yay! So now it’s just the long, long wait until mid-2010 for the new episodes to be released. But you will wait. YOU WILL WAIT.

ALL HAIL HYPNOTOAD!

Tip o’ the cranium to BABloggee Svip.

A few months ago I attended Spacefest, a wonderful conference for space exploration enthusiasts. I had a fantastic time, as I did at the first one in 2007, and got to say hi to a bunch of astronauts — including some Moon walkers — that I had met at the first one.

Lockwood and Dullea in "2001: A Space Odyssey".

But I met a few new people as well, and two of them were Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood in "2001: A Space Odyssey". Perhaps you’ve heard of it. They were there to talk to folks and sign autographs, and they were very colorful and fun. I had the pleasure of hanging out with them for a little while at their booth, and enjoyed it immensely. They were very different men; Lockwood was blustery and rambunctious, while Dullea was more quiet and intellectual. They’re clearly friends, having traveled extensively together for events like this (at one point Keir offered to get coffee for both of them, and much to my delight they dickered over it like an old married couple).

Seth Shostak, SETI astronomer and host of the "Are We Alone" radio show, interviewed them for the program, and it’s now live on the AWA website. The whole show is great, as usual, and the interview starts about 28 minutes in.

While he talked to them, I was able to get video of it. The audio from Seth is much cleaner (oddly enough, people at SETI have access to software and equipment that filters out digital noise from a signal), but I figure you might enjoy the video, too.