Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Search
Movie Scenes with People Exposed to Vacuum
March 16th, 2009
I’m working on my seminar about science in the movies, and one of the concepts discussed will be what happens when you chuck someone out an airlock without a space suit. We know what happens. There was a poor guy who had an accident in a high-altitude chamber in the 1960s and lived to tell the tale without exploding all over place.
There are some other nice websites that cover the topic, for example this one by science fiction writer and scientist Geoffrey Landis. It covers the topic extensively, and related topics, along with citations and links to other pages.
Movie makers, on the other hand, haven’t always gotten it right. Here’s a compilation of scenes I could find on Youtube with some comments about them.
From 2001, look at the 5:00 mark or so (and if the embedding has been disable go here).
From the Outland Trailer, look at the 1:30 mark or so, and the 2:20 mark:
From Mission to Mars, look at the 9:00 mark or so:
Total Recall, bulging eyes bit on Mars:
So, 2001 gets this right. You have up to about 15 seconds to be conscious and able to operate a little, although you need to let the air out of your lungs and feel the saliva boil out of your mouth. They don’t show much from Mission to Mars, and he’s unconscious if not completely dead in 20 seconds or so — I will give it a pass. That movie does seem to think that things instantly freeze in space, but that’s another topic. Total Recall is a bit ludicrous with the giant bulging faces. Outland is right out with exploding people, but the radiation on Io would have killed everyone anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
Some other places where they get it right, too. There’s a bit in Event Horizon when someone tries to commit suicide opening an airlock, but the scene doesn’t seem to be available on Youtube. Likewise there’s a scene in Battlestar Galactica where some people are rescued from outside requiring them to be blown out of an airlock without suits. Bruised and sick, but eventually okay.
Any more I forgot? I am sure there are more…
OK, back to work on the talk…I have a few other topics to cover!
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Funny story about BSG…. my husband (I think you know him from the IRTF, Mike? Paul Abell) has a brother in Vancouver, so we met some of the Battlestar Galactica folks. We were very excited to meet them, and amused that some of them were excited to meet a planetary scientist. Long story short, Paul got a call at NASA one day from Aaron Douglas (Chief) because there was a disagreement on the set about whether the air would slowly seep out once an airlock was opened, or whether it would, you know, explosively decompress….
Awesome story, Amy, and I love them for bothering to check with a scientist! I thought about doing that as a topic, but it seemed too subtle and there aren’t a huge number of examples out there.
That’s Hollywood’s First Rule of Cool.
Hollywood has always had a problem wrapping its head around simple concepts that can be verified in real earthly life : cars do not explose as soon as they crash, gunshot wounds do not propell people 6 feet away. When you get to a realm as fuzzy and unusual as space, you can expect some major distortions… I’m actually surprised it’s not worse than it is.
I guess the average Hollywood guy won’t stop having people explode in space until there’s a mutiny on the ISS and someone actually gets airlocked. Or unless they have Arthur C. Clark working on the set.
Well, another proof that BSG is quality scifi.
Mike, check out the movie Sunshine… there is a whole scene of people going from one ship to the other through space without suits.
the movie is quite good, although it seems the producers forced the director to take a more “Alien/Event Horizon” approach in the end, to make the teen audience happy.
Please… Sunshine is terrible.
Right, they go through space without space suits.
But they cover themselves with duct tape and cardboard or something, so as not to turn into instant icecubes for the few seconds they spend in the void…
And don’t even start me on the “psychology” of the characters, who are supposed to be the best scientists on earth, but are all 17 years old models who spend the whole movie yelling for no reason and acting without the slightest hint of rationality or common sense.
Oh, did I mention there’s a Space Freddy Krueger, too ?
I probably need to see it to keep my sf movies current, but I skipped SUNSHINE because the premise was totally ridiculous. Maybe I’ll buy it, watch it, and do a proper science review, although that must exist somewhere.
Now, there was a Friday the 13th movie in space if I recall. I should check that one out. Jason in space…someone must have gone out an airlock!
Sunshine had NASA consultants. How much they consulted I dont know. Well, they certainly didnt care about artificial gravity aspects.
I liked the movie. Imho, better than Solaris, which is a movie I just cant stand.
It has a nice pace and such. Ok, so the premise is ridiculous, specially because they plan to turn on the sun again with FISSIONABLE material. As I mentioned earlier, the ending is also idiotic, with the space freedy krueger… its like two movies.
I remember reading an article about the Sunshine people consulting scientists, but it sounded poor to me. They had their silly premise, and they went fishing for someone who could wave their hands enough to let them call it something other than fantasy. Still sounded like fantasy to me reading the article, and the idea of nuclear materials from Earth to restart the sun just seemed like a nonstarter to me, and I didn’t want to go.
Haven’t seen Solaris either yet, but it’s on the infinitely long list.
The original Solaris (not the remake) is a wonderful movie. Many people may find it incredibly slow, but hey, it’s Tarkovski, it’s meant to be metaphorical, contemplative, and sometimes weird. Same goes for Stalker. Both movies almost fall off the scifi category, since very little “science” is involved, but the premise is still science-fictionnal and the philosophical implications of science-fiction are very tangible.
Nomadz: so Tarkovski is just like Ursula K LeGuin? Not much science, more about philosofy and antropology…
about Sunshine:
I sometimes try to create my own excuses for silly science in movies. Like… sound in space… well, sometimes its needed for the movie to be cool. How to explain it? Well, just suppose those are virtual sounds created by a computer inside the ship, to help humans “locate” themselves (specially important in starfighters).
Obviously, lets not try to explain why battles in space in movies happen at such low speeds and at such close distances.
As for Sunshine… I pretend that instead of the sun dying, the sun is simply on a very low cycle of activity, creating a huge ice age on Earth (and we know, this has happened before), and for some reason, they discover that by creating a huge detonation on the sun they can make it go out of this low cycle.
Hmmm… ok… so they have this cube of fissionable material the size of manhattan (according to the movie). Maybe the “volume” of manhattan would be more propper? Whatever. The cube is NOT the size of manhattan and in fact, from outside, the ship doesnt seem to have such space!
Anyway, a cube of poor fissionable material wouldnt help much. I just pretended it was a mistranslation, and it was in fact anti-matter, somehow kept inside the cube by powerful magnetic fields.
Now, I doubt a cube of antimatter the “size of manhattan” would be enough to tickle the Sun, but at least its better than fissionable material!
Well, one is a writer, one is a filmmaker who did not only make Scifi movies, so it is a little hard to compare them. But if I had to make a comparison, I’d say Tarkovski is the russian Kubrick, in his own specific way. He’s “philosophical” in the way 2001 is.
He’s obsessed by two things : visual perfection, and the feeling of loss. In Solaris and Stalker, scifi is a pretext to explore one man’s obsession with what he lost / never had, and mankind’s eternal craving for “something more than just this world”. Both are very melancolic, borderline depressive movies.
People looking for pure scifi will probably not enjoy it, and most people will probably leave the theater with the same kind of feeling people experienced about the last 2 minutes of Kubrick’s 2001.
Rogerio, no need to have an excuse – I love scifi as much as anyone here, and even if I love to find a scifi flick that gets the science right, I can suspend disbelief if the rest of the movie is good. Just like you accept that your average action hero can take dozens of bullets with just a smirk on his face, even if you know that in real life he would be dead 12 times already.
Sound in space ? Ok for me, since it’s almost the norm in space movies since Star Wars…. that’s Rule of Cool and I have no problem with that (Real space battles following exact laws of physics would probably be boring as hell, and impossible to film. Ship 1 shoots rocket at ship 2, 2 millions miles away. Ship 2 silently disappears. End of story).
But suspension of disbelief doesn’t equal retarded science, and there are clear limits to what you can suspend. Like Armaggedon…
PS – Mike, sorry to transform your blog in a movie discussion forum !
speaking of sci-fi movies, I just decided that World of Ptavvs (Larry Niven) would make a great sci-fi movie. I just finished reading it.
[…] Humans Exposed to Vacuum in Movies […]
[…] a nice list with movie depictions of people exposed to total vacuum, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Total […]
Wow! At last I got a web site from where I know how to
truly take useful facts concerning my study and
knowledge.