Dr. Rubidium, Dr. Skyskull, Stephanie Zvan and I (yes, I just linked myself, whaddaya gonna do about it?) are teaming up once again this Thursday for our next Mock The Movie event.
Rocketship X-M promises to provide plenty of bad space science as Lloyd Bridges and his — what’s the opposite of “intrepid?” — crew somehow manage miss the Moon and land on Mars. Like you do. And encounter an alien civilization on that otherwise barren ball of rust. Like you do.
The rules for Mock The Movie are simple.
- Start following @MockTM on Twitter.
- Start watching Rocketship X-M on archive.org (public domain, free for everyone) Thursday, September 22, at 9PM EST.
- Once you’ve got the movie playing, tweet your snarky comments to @MockTM. We have magical Twitter gnomes scraping the @-mentions and will have a transcript available as soon as possible over at The JAYFK. Directing our tweets to @MockTM will keep our followers from being overwhelmed with our snark!
How can you miss something by that much ? It’s like me going to the store at the corner and accidentally ending up in New Zealand..
But wouldn’t that be an entertaining adventure! “Sorry it took so long bringing the milk back from the store, honey, but the soonest flight back was on Sunday!”
The airbrakes on that ship must have failed.
Yes, missing the moon and hitting Mars is a significant error. One being roughly a thousand times the distance of the other trip. But, evidently, the spaceship is so fast, and/or provisions for food, water, air, and fuel are so generous that they make it in good shape. Just a few more choruses of ‘The Wheels on the Bus Go Round-n-Round’. Okay, a hell of a lot more choruses.
But 160,000,000 Km off course isn’t really a big thing compared to the size of the solar system. Yes, we laugh and point now, but what happens if/when we get FTL travel, or we start sending people off on ships asleep? A minor bit of dyslexia in punching in coordinates and you could end up with people slip-sliding off to all sorts of unintended destinations. It happens. It is going to happen. If there is any way for humans to screw it up we will. A certain Mars lander and confusion over units of distance comes to mind. Whoops.
The old joke was you hire the handicapped not because they get much done, but because they are fun to watch. Humans may become a pet species because of the antics we get up to. Missed the moon and hit Mars sounds like the punchline of a joke told by an alien about earthlings a few hundred years from now.
Columbus was looking for India and stumbled across an entirely different continent. Why should we expect human error to be eliminated in the future. And the faster you go, and the longer the trips you plan across empty space, the larger the error.
Some day a 160 million kilometers error may be considered insignificant. A bit less than 9 light-minutes.
Wow. I’m not sure I could watch that again without an MST3K-style voice-over. ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2819642082434586314 )
I suppose I could have a (passive) whack at it. But I cheer on all you intrepid souls regardless.
It’s a similar level of error the creationists expound about the age of the earth. Maybe they were creationists on board?