By Lisa Fary
Don’t worry about the moon crashing into the Earth and vaporizing the planet. Kids and family will save us. Perhaps by forming a vortex of annoying, righteous earnestness that will devour the moon’s gravitational threat. Even that’s better science than what’s going on in Impact.
There’s a spectacular meteor shower, and all the players are watching this wondrous event in the yard with their families or impending bridezillas (yeah, sweetheart. Your wedding plans are just as magical as a meteor shower. Totally). All except for Dr. Maddie Rhodes, who’s watching in a sciency way in an observatory with only her assistant, who is wearing a crucifix (yep. We’re gonna have that discussion). I bet she’s gonna learn the importance of family. Silly single careergirl!
But, this meteor shower is different. It hides a. . . . DEADLY BROWN DWARF! BWAH BWAH! A fragment of the dwarf (which Impact says is a dead star) hits the Moon, cracking the surface. From this point forward, I can’t look at the Moon in Impact and not think about Chairface Chippendale.
Annnnnd. . . cue discussion of the famous dinosaur killing asteroid! Because we all have to be reminded of how perilous our existence is.
Then suddenly, there’s James Cromwell in the “Old Man Yells At Cloud” role, which confirms my speculation that Impact happens in a world in which Deep Impact was never made (Cromwell was in Deep Impact, too). He doesn’t want to go out. He doesn’t want to go to his grandkids’ baseball games even though they’re looking at him with coached expressions of “Why does grandpa hate me?”. I bet he’s gonna learn the importance of family, too.
But, wait. There’s more human drama before the sciency stuff kicks in (I say “sciency” because it’s not actual science, despite Natasha Henstridge’s insistence that it’s totally real science). Those kids? Their mom died and now they live with Grandpa, who’s grumpy, and Dad, who’s an astrophysicist (I can’t remember his name, so he’ll be called NASA Dad). Maddie has an stalkery ex-husband who is also a journalist trying to use her for an inside story (“Inside stories – that’s what makes us journalists,” his editor said. May as well have added, “Suck it, bloggers and tweeps”).
And the dude with Bridezilla? It’s revealed that she’s not that bad – he’s just an inconsiderate douchebag. They have a heart to heart in a church while a disapproving old couple make cranky faces. Bridezilla says she’s pregnant and Dr. Douchebag cheers. The disapproving old couple approves of his reproduction and reinforce the theme that if you don’t have kids, you’re crap.
Now that all the human drama is over (did you enjoy that, ladies? It was just for you!), Impact can get to the sciency stuff. More Moon stuff happens and Maddie is called to the White House to brief President Dead Husband from Desperate Housewives. The Department of Homeland Security woman walking Maddie to the Oval Office says that the president asked specifically for her because he likes her (which means he’s seen Species and, like the rest of the modern world, has seen Maddie naked).
Science talk. An international team is put together, featuring Maddie, Dr. Douchebag, NASA Dad and his cute TA who is doing doctoral work in exposition (her dissertation is on the history of NASA Dad and Maddie).
Then people start floating.
It’s because of the brown dwarf stuck in the Moon (which is only shown accompanied by ominous music). See, the Moon is heavier now, so it’s gravity is different, AND it’s shifted to an elliptical orbit. So, two sides of it’s orbital path are now way closer to Earth and spiraling closer. Spiraling TO OUR DOOM! BWAH BWAH!
Here are some things I noticed while watching Impact:
Grown ups are stupid. While a scout leader was vainly trying to find direction on a compass, a scout looks up and says, “The sun doesn’t set in the East!” Even Dr. NASA’s kids know about Canadian geese and the velocity of a swallow carrying a coconut.
CNN is the best source of up to date news. Or, CLN, Impact’s version of CNN (their version of Wolf Blitzer is just as annoying). Maddie watches CLN. The Oval Office watches CLN. Meanwhile, Tweeps knew about this hours ago.
You only need a 4th grade education to be Secretary of Homeland Security. The DHS secretary announced that she can’t answer the questions on Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader.
The writers of Impact don’t have the internet. Or books. Or periodicals.
Henstridge told SciFi Wire in an interview last week that this is real science behind the mini-series, and even references a nameless astrophysicist in Canada (kind of like the fake boyfriend I had in junior high. That’s why no one ever met him, he lived in Canada) who worked with her. I know she’s only saying what the network told her to say about the science. I know this. Really.
But, it’s just so bad.
A brown dwarf is not a dead star. A white dwarf is a dead star. A brown dwarf is a substellar object, somewhere in mass between a planet and a star, with a nuclear core that never had the juice to be a star.
What would happen if the Moon did spiral closer to Earth? Because our rotation is tied to the gravitational tug of war between the Earth and the Moon, our days would get a lot shorter. Tides would come in more frequently, and probably rush in stronger.
It takes the Moon about a month to orbit the Earth. It only rises and sets every night because of the Earth’s rotation. That’s what it looks like down here.The kind of gravity problems Impact is ascribing to the Moon’s new elliptical orbit would be weeks apart, not hours.
Would people and trains and such experience zero gravity? I can’t say for certain, but it seems unlikely simply because the Earth’s gravity pull is greater than the Moon’s. I imagine that the effects would be less direct and maybe bigger, like a pole shift or the planet being torn apart or something.
I think I just spent far more time thinking about and reading about the science of Impact than the writers of Impact.
Impact aires on Sunday, June 21st and Sunday, June 28th on ABC.
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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
Other thing to worry about! With out this crap. Plan on missing this show.
I actually watched parts of this and was sitting in my chair just amazed at who very BAD this was. Entertainment usually gets it's science wrong, but this isn't even entertainment. Somebody, somewhere actually said yes to this 4th rate show being made and then once it was made, allowed everyone involved to be embarrassed by actually airing it on a national television network. I know everyone invovled in this will one day put this thing on their "I'm so sorry I made this" list.
Obviously the writers of this film were not scientists. A compact object twice the mass of earth on a collusion course with the moon would have been detected by virtue of it's gravitation pull long before visual contact. It would have dislodged the earth from it regular orbit and the moon would have been ripped apart due to the tidal effects. Further more meteorite fragments wouldn't hover around it. They would either orbit it or collide into it forming a globe. The earth would suffer enormous tides due to it's gravity that would devastate the land surface, that is if the earth could still withstand a pull 160 times that of the moon.
This film is a rip off from the scientific viewpoint.
This is not science fiction, it is as much a fantasy as Harry Potter. It isn't that they made a few small errors in the math and physics, it is that they did not get one single thing right.
Evidently this was supposed to be a SyFy Channel miniseries but they got into a bidding war with ABC and ABC. I'd say that ABC lost. The only reason that this does not get the lowest rating possible is that the cast and crew did what they could with the material they had. It would take far to long to list everything that was wrong because every time they said anything or showed any computer generated images it was wrong.
Just the highlights:
1.A brown dwarf is an object that isn't quite big enough to ignite into a star – not a burnt out star.
2."Pieces" of brown dwarfs need the mass of at least ten jupiter's to retain their density. Take a small chunk of it out of the gravity field and it will expand, sublimate and fragment into the density that the matter is under a planetary gravity. If it were primarily methane, it would become one massive cloud of rapidly dissipating gas. It simply cannot retain that density unless its mass more than 3000 times that of earth.
3.We are right on the edge of detecting the gravitational effect of an earth mass object around a star system four light years away and we can't detect the effect of something twice as massive when it is light minutes away? Anything massing as much as two earths would perturb the orbit of every object in the solar system – it would wiggle the sun enough for us to detect.
4.It wouldn't travel "hidden behind" asteroid debris, it would sweep it up like a vacuum cleaner as it got close to them.
5.If this imaginary piece of brown dwarf massing two earths were to collide with the moon it would tear it apart while hardly perturbing its own trajectory- it masses twelve times as much as the moon after all.
6.If this fantasy piece of matter were to circumvent the laws of mass and momentum and get itself stuck in the moon… the earth would then orbit around the moon. Why the hell would the more massive object orbit the lighter object? Actually, they would orbit each other just like the earth and the moon do but rather than the center being deep within the earth, the center would be two thirds of the way toward the moon.
7.If this ridiculous conglomerations of math and physics errors where to actually be somehow forced into an elliptical orbit "around the earth"- ignore that this isn't possible for a second – then the tidal swell would drag the ocean up and over the continents while at the same time stripping the atmosphere from earth.
8.What it would not do is pick and choose what items to have a gravitational and "electromagnetic levitating" effect based entirely on what is easy and cheap to create with computer graphics and what serves to create painful and irrational melodramatic moments.
9.Every explosive device that has ever been built in the history of the human race, from Chinese fireworks and Greek fire on up to the last nuclear warhead to come off the assembly line… every damn one of them combined and placed perfectly would barely cause the slightest detectable wobble on the moon. Something massing twelve times as much wouldn't have its orbit changed by even a thousandth of one percent by everything we have. It would take very precise measuring devices a good deal of time to even measure the minuscule effect our arsenal would have.
10.Creating any electromagnetic pulse strong enough to budge a body massing two earths would require several trillion times the output of every energy source on the planet. If they had this imaginary infinite energy machine they could not deliver more than a tiny fraction of the needed energy down that little imaginary nanowire.
11.Delivering this nanowire to the core of the moon by way of a cruise missile that uses control surfaces that require an atmosphere does not work in a vacuum.
12.They must be pretty tough to walk around in a 2g environment when the lightest space suit on earth weighs in at 275 pounds- read that as somewhere over 550 pounds on this new moon.
13.If they somehow managed to create this electromagnetic pulse that physics does not allow them to make, then the effect would not be to "expel" the more massive chunk of brown star, it would to to fling the much less massive moon off of it. Twelve times the mass means that twelve times as much velocity would be imparted to the moon as to the chunk of brown dwarf.
They got absolutely NOTHING right in their math and physics. The following individuals should have their high school diploma revoked. They should never have made it out of middle school.
Michael Vickerman…… Writer
Greg Gugliotta ………. executive producer
Jonas Bauer …………. executive producer
Rola Bauer ………….. executive producer
Ted Bauman …………. producer
Howard Braunstein ….. executive producer
Tim Halkin ……………. executive producer
Michael Jaffe ………… executive producer
Irene Litinsky ………… co-executive producer
Jesse Prupas ………… associate producer
Michael Prupas ………. executive producer