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Yes, I admit I do like the Riddick series. I just watched Pitch Black again after having not seen it since it first came out on video.
Few things. The planet has two sets of rings. My guess: improbable due to the gravity. Should've gone into one single larger ring. That and one of the rings isn't quite center.
The 3 suns thing. I understand binary stars, but the 3rd thrown in there, as in not a trinary, and the planet ... so which does it orbit?
Anyways, saw that, and thought of here.
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it's a good film though; well I enjoyed it a few years ago...not the most logical film, but I think it was earnestly, honestly made...still I don't watch that many films these days.
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I dunno, but it kind of reminds me of the book "Nightfall".Originally Posted by skyline5k
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maybe you could have 3 stars if there was one really big one, and two orbiting small ones.
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It's been years since I've seen Pitch Black, so I don't really remember any of the details...
For one to be off center is ridiculous, but there's nothing inherently strange about multiple sets of rings.
What do you mean by three stars but not a trinary? I don't remember what the deal was.The 3 suns thing. I understand binary stars, but the 3rd thrown in there, as in not a trinary, and the planet ... so which does it orbit?
If I recall correctly, the other planet was huge in the sky compared to the suns, indicating that perhaps the other planet was a huge gas giant, while the planet they were stuck on was merely a moon. But such a moon wouldn't have rings...at least not for too long.
If we assume, say, that the "planet" is a moon with (improbable) rings, then it would be bathed in sunlight and/or moonlight at all times except when all three of the suns were eclipsed. Assuming tide lock, the near side would always be brightly lit due to the suns and/or the gas giant. The far side could experience night often, but even this would be lit by reflected ringlight.
I don't recall Pitch Black well enough to figure out the relationships between those three suns.
The basic plot requirements can be satisfied if we assume a tide locked moon (no rings) of a circumbinary gas giant. The gas giant may eclipse the binary pair twice per orbit. The third star is very bright and orbits the binary with a period of 44 years. Thus, it can only lines up with the gas giant and binary pair once per 22 years.
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Two were definitely binary stars. But the 3rd with the planets, I'll have to rewatch the explanation scene and give a "play by play" here when I get a chance.
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Astronomy in "Pitch Black" was not terrible. Ecology, however, was.
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I wonder how true it is, if you apply the old magic mystery of "Unexplored Territory".
I mean, naturally, there was a HUGE amount of predators in the region the main characters were in. However, the creatures survive underground; while they feed off each other way too much for there to not be some defects occuring sooner or later, I think it might actually be plausible that there are underground prey for the predators to feed on, just unseen by the main characters as they have no reason to scuttle out. With the nice shiny... plant... things, that does indicate there are certain plants that grow; if there are plants, then it's not hard to believe that there are herbivores. Plants straight to carnivores is pretty silly.
Of course, the prey have to outnumber the predators, so this would have to imply that there are VAST caverns, and there's a reason for the predators to leave it to go for the tasty humans. One suggestion might be that they can sense the humans, are drawn to them, and find them easy meals; and when in a sufficient blood frenzy, they also grow cannibalistic, and haven't "evolved" to find a way to share meals "properly". In fact, perhaps this is how they manage a kind of "Survival of the Fittest" amongst their groups. Not entirely efficient, but if there's enough prey to go around, that's not terrible.
Of course, this is all just ad hoc explanations, but you know, if it works...
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What if they're like many insects--most of their lives are spent as underground "grubs", but they also have a short-lived above ground form for when the regular eclipse comes?
One could imagine that the "prey" bugs arise in massive swarms to mate. They aren't seen in the movie because they wait until a particular time during the eclipse to spawn all at once.
The predators arise before the "prey" bugs so they don't miss the feast. Of course, they'll snack on anything that presents itself before the mass spawning.
In this evolutionary environment, there would be an extremely strong selection effect against "early risers" among the prey bugs, but not against "early risers" among the predator bugs. Indeed, if we assume a dog-eat-dog environment, the biggest and baddest predators would be the ones to arise first.
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Are you sure? This image shows the rings around the gas giant.
http://s2.hubimg.com/u/147149_f520.jpg
It looks to me like the two rings occupy different planes. As far as I know, flat rings only form around the equators of gas giants; this planet somehow seems to have two equators.
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I seem to remember huge skeletons of gigantic animals on the surface of an obviously arid world and wondering what they could eat. Even if they were all killed and eaten during an eclipse they had to eat something to get that big. Or am I thinking of another movie?
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The eclipsing gas giant has rings? Then that's an example of bad astronomy right there. The rings would shine from sunlight during the eclipse, so the moon wouldn't be plunged into complete darkness. At the very least, the gas giant should still be visible in the sky.
(It's been so long that I couldn't remember which "planet" had rings.)
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Omg it's worse than i thought: both sets of rings are not in the plane of the equator. Still a cool flick though.
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I saw Pitch Black on TV this weekend. Funny, I never actually saw the start of this movie so I never saw the bit with the mechanical planetary model.
Basically, the twin stars and the blue star seem to orbit each other maintaining a rigid 180 degree phase around an empty center...which is okay...
But then the three planets orbit their shared empty center which makes no sense. Two of the planets seem to orbit each other, an apparent double-planet relationship. We could fudge interpretation of that and go with a planet-moon relationship. But the third planet, in a different orbit, would be too far away to produce an eclipse effect.
Oh--it's not just one eclipse. It's a double-eclipse, where the dubiously ringed planet blocks out the twin suns while the non-ringed third planet blocks out the blue sun on the opposite side.
It's all nonsense.
After the launch of the escape ship, you get to briefly see the third planet and the blue sun behind it, and then the ringed planet and the twin suns behind it. It looks like the planetary model is to scale. Okay, maybe the suns are really much further away, but the three planets are huge and stupidly close to each other.
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i actually like pitch black. it's more of a horror movie than it is a science fiction movie.Yes, I admit I do like the Riddick series. I just watched Pitch Black again after having not seen it since it first came out on video.
Few things. The planet has two sets of rings. My guess: improbable due to the gravity. Should've gone into one single larger ring. That and one of the rings isn't quite center.
The 3 suns thing. I understand binary stars, but the 3rd thrown in there, as in not a trinary, and the planet ... so which does it orbit?
Anyways, saw that, and thought of here.
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I *liked* Pitch Black.
Allow me to use my 30 odd years of refereeing D&D and role playing games to solve these seeming paradoxes.
The rings are hard to judge unless you have a time frame. What if the "out of place" ring was a moonlet of frozen very light ices that only broke up a month ago? A comet perhaps? (Oh feel free to shoot down anything out of bounds to reality. It's what we do here.
The critters.
*Obviously* an introduced species. What you are looking at is a ruined ecology.
The main evidence for this? The skeletons of the megafauna. If this was a normal regular occurance they would not have time to get that big. What with nothing to eat an all. The invading species may well have been omnivorous, at least when the prey species were all consumed.
Or, more likely to me considering their dentition, all the large sheltering vegetation really, really needed their seeds germinated in the guts of the now comsumed herbivores. Once they passed away in a couple hundred years all the understory got seared off by the blue star. Which then disassociated the surface waters.
I presume vegetation not in evidence because of the herbivores. I presume herbivory because of some of their skeleton sizes. You could mention whales but these are land creatures and plants are easier to catch. Plus these ribs were larger than whale ribs even.
To me they seem to be a nocturnal species from a planet like Alan Dean Foster's Midworld where they would be the local equivalent of sparrows, with plenty of things to keep them in control.*
Now maybe they can go into torpor when the suns are up, but their desperate cannibalism seems to indicate they aren't going to last much longer without a new input of nutrients which doesn't seem to be coming.
Since bone doesn't weather on the surface well at all, and particularly under those conditions, this disaster couldn't be more than a few decades old.
Column B or A Complete Other Scenario
Maybe this place recently, geological time-wise, under went a major extinction event due to a series of perturbed Oort bodies coming in-system as displayed by the obviously chaotic and very temporary ring debris on the surrounding gas giants. Two, three hundred Earth years earlier maybe.
The beasties survived the impact due to thier cryptic subterrainian life styles which spared them the worst of it. Like the cicadas that woke up ten years after Chixilub and went, "What the heck?" But as mentioned above, they're doomed as well, just taking a little longer to die. Three or four more generations, max. Maybe this place used to be a real hellhole and the critters where the local cicadas here.**
You have to decide which report you would pass on to Star Fleet.
*Midworld had a pole to pole, two mile high eight canopy rainforest. Humans lived on the third level. But only after forming a couple of commenseral relationship with two species. You didn't go to the highest or lowest levels and come back, unless you are a hero of course.
Most of you fine people here would find the story very interesting. Oh, the jungle hive mind came from the bigger story arc of Mr. Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series but doesn't come into play in this story.
**Similar of course to how the chupicabra survived to the present. It's my belief that the chupacabra is a species of cave dwelling vampiric dinosaurs of the order theropoda. Why not vampire theropods? Theropods filled most other niches, including termite eaters, which got me thinking down this road.
Their small nimble size and nocturnal habits let them feed on their larger brethern with ease. Creeping through herds of sleeping sauropods exactly like tiny vampire bats through a herd of cattle. When the meteor came they were sleeping in their caves, being nocturnal and all. And that part of the world is rain forest over limestone, hard to get cavier than that.
I didn't grow up in chupacabra country, but I grew up with people who's parents and grandparents did. Heard all about them before they became a tabloid favorite. Though they seem to have lost their kangaroo-like jumping abilities and dangling prehensile snouts over the years. With a lamprey-like mouth at the end.
Hey! Maybe I should wing this into ATM!
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After watching Pitch Black, I'll update my thoughts on the insect-like life cycle theory.
The large skeletons are remniscent of elephants. But aha! Elephants here on Earth regularly trek across nigh-barren deserts in their quest for water. They are able to grow big because they also get to feast during the rainy season.
This suggests that the planet of Pitch Black has such a seasonal variation; maybe the eclipse even signals the start of the rainy season. So here's my proposed cycle:
1) The eclipse brings the rains.
2) Plants soak up as much water as they can.
3) After the eclipse ends, there is a burst of plant growth until they reach the limits of their absorbed water.
4) The above-ground portion of the plants wither away to conserve water.
5) They wait things out until the next eclipse.
In the meantime, the animals live mostly underground. Their life cycle is:
1) They hatch into underground grubs, feeding on plant roots
2) They pupate to transform into flying forms
3) Some congregate in caves just before the eclipse so they can get an "early start".
4) When the eclipse arrives, they fly in order to mate/spread. One possible timing is to mate early on; the characters in Pitch Black don't witness this because they're too busy cowering.
5) The animals are all doomed to die--they can't metamorphose back into underground grubs. From an evolutionary perspective, it doesn't matter whether they just curl up and die or they go down desperately eating whatever is available. From the perspective of the Pitch Black characters, though...
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Wasn't it like landing on the termite planet[alien biology] when a real bad time as to flying as to the males to females for a biomates for a insect colony[noncognizant].
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well Jack vance has a story where theres hotels ,casinos ,space travel etc. and betting on the vaguely anthropomorphic insect colonys at war which is part of a alien breeding cycle.
Might be a rigged game or murder?
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To complicated to have a short ending.
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the Sand Kings by martin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandkings_(novelette)
is somewhat similiar, but the guy buys a alien insect colonys as pets to fight and abuses them but doesn't realize the small insects creatures can get human sized.
Is similar.
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http://www.physorg.com/news183834526.html
Maybe like The Mist of movie Stephan king]
The guy that was the movie computer alien creator did a great job and the actors but it should have had a happy ending .
Insead it was a small humans reduced in size in comparison as if in a small moss forest as if reduced in size and fighting insects, a frightening outlook from a dimensional connection and as we all know the military/politicals always messes up as science and then trying to correct the situation without being eaten, killed or being expendable for the grunts.
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jack vance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_the_Tree
but a tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Effectuator
As the insects colonys.
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Ultalviolet contact lens for a actor or a wherewolve[damaged and feeble]
I would it look like as infrared [old gogglies] not a like the night ampulifier[ nasty ] as all military uses now.
I would dead as disco.
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Random word salad?
Or is it just me being obtuse?
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...wat
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"John has a long mustache," ou, "Jean a longue mustache." It's code, be careful.
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http://www.physorg.com/news184397388.html
he researchers originally thought the tentacles were fish detectors, since the snake eats fish almost exclusively, but when they used fluorescent dye to mark the nerve fibers in tentacles of dead snakes and examined them under the microscope, they found many more embedded in the center of the tentacles than at the surface where nerve cells for touch and taste would be expected. This implies most of the nerve cells sense movement of the whole tentacles rather than sensations on their surface.
The movie was Tremors so already done 4 times as a movie plot.
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Not a code, and not mine [John has a long mustache]but my was [the monkey waves from under the waves]
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I'm not sure why folks here think that films like Pitch Black need to be savaged for "bad science"... these films aren't meant to be realistic - a heck of lot of scifi isn't realistic. You can tear apart the science in Serenity/Firefly, or Star Trek or Event Horizon too... but what's the point? They're not meant to be realistic to start with after all. You may as well complain that Flash Gordon or Dr Who is unrealistic... but by doing so you are wildly missing the point of the film or TV show. Suspension of disbelief is the key here (as it is with many works of fiction really), if you can't do that then of course you're going to complain that it makes no sense.
Films like Moon, or 2001/2010, or even Primer... those are films that set out to be "hard scifi" and are therefore have a higher standard of realism. As such, those films are perhaps more worthy of scientific criticism, but still... remember that they're stories, not educational tools.
Otherwise... could I suggest that you folks lighten up and maybe pick your targets a little more wisely?
EDIT: I like Pitch Black. And Chronicles of Riddick too. Doesn't matter a jot to me that they're not realistic. I don't think anybody watches them comes out thinking that multiple star systems really work like that. They're there to watch a scary movie, and enjoy the ride, that's all.
Last edited by EDG; 2010-Feb-06 at 08:20 AM.
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The point where a movie/TV series sets itself up as a valid target for this type of analysis is when they've tried to justify a plot point with science.
That's why Star Trek is picked to pieces and Star Wars isn't as much (except for the Kessel run oops).
If they go "this is just how things are, accept it" then the science won't get picked apart. On the other hand if they try to explain something without using techno-babble, they're fair game.
You'll note that the Riddick series also has FTL drives, telepathic FTL communication, semi-corporeal species and a concept of a soul that can be physically interacted with, these are not picked apart as they are part of the SF shift that defines the axioms of that universe.
For Pitch Black, the fundamental plot of the movie was driven by an astronomical phenomenon that was described in terms that made it clear it was supposed to be possible in this universe and that makes the astronomy of the movie fair game.
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Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails. Clarence Darrow
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