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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. 4 Comments
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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