NASA Names Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies of All Time 610
mvar writes "Working through the year-end best/worst movie lists can be a feat of Olympic proportions, but there's one list which is so damn cool you'll definitely want to give it a whirl. NASA and the Science and Entertainment Exchange have compiled a list of the 'least plausible science fiction movies ever made,' and they ranked the disastrous (in more ways than one) 2012 as the most 'absurd' sci-fi flick of all time."
It's Because of the Phone Calls (Score:5, Informative)
I think next we'll see NASA using it's orbital lasers to melt John Cusack's for his role in that film, at least, I can dream.
Re:How does this happen? (Score:5, Informative)
Not since Congress won't approve anything good and keeps forcing them to work on bullshit they already cancelled until the money runs out, since apparently that makes good economic sense or something. Besides, NASA probably has one of the highest concentrations of nerds anywhere in the world. They probably know a thing or two about SciFi (as opposed to SyFy).
Re:Money well spent. (Score:5, Informative)
Think if a majority of the people in this country were convinced by "2012" that the world would really end at that year. Their priorities for government spending would be dramatically different.
This part of your comment reminded me of this article [slashdot.org]; NASA actually had to post a rather lengthy FAQ [nasa.gov] about 2012 because of the sheer volume of grief that movie was causing them.
Personally, I agree that NASA should take the proactive approach on this one. It shouldn't be part of their job to educate the public like this but it has proven necessary.
Here is the list. (Score:5, Informative)
Worst Sci-Fi Movies
1. 2012 (2009)
2. The Core (2003)
3. Armageddon (1998)
4. Volcano (1997)
5. Chain Reaction (1996)
6. The 6th Day (2000)
7. What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)
Most Realistic Films
1. Gattaca (1997)
2. Contact (1997)
3. Metropolis (1927)
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
5. Woman in the Moon (1929)
6. The Thing from Another World (1951)
7. Jurassic Park (1993)
Re:Money well spent. (Score:5, Informative)
It's not only NASA vs. SciFi Movies. That problem can be seen in a lot of genres. The more and more movies and shows try to claim they are "authentic" and are seen as such, the more people start to wonder why what they see in their shows isn't done in real life.
A friend of mine is in forensics. You might be able to imagine what he thinks of shows like CSI. To quote: "If they killed the prez, we wouldn't get the money needed to do half the tests they do routinely there on a hunch". Not to mention that the tests (those that ARE actually working as they do in RL, by far not everything they do has anything to do with reality, deus ex machinas are a staple of the later CSI episodes) sometimes require machinery so expensive that you couldn't get your hands on it if you blew your annual budget on just renting it. Not to mention that petty things like constitution or human rights seem to be non existent in the world of CSI.
But people see it as genuine and start to demand that forensics can flawlessly identify every culprit. That's not the case. By far not. Having a piece of hair or a cigarette butt doesn't mean you also have a suspect to match it against.
It's very well spent money if such claims are debunked so people do not have irrational expectations based on movies and shows. What people have to learn is that their main focus is entertainment. Not education.
Re:Psst? They kinda ARE qualified in science (Score:5, Informative)
Wish it was so, actually. I've been hearing about a lot of doomsday dates between 2001 and 2012. Granted, not as high profile, but there is no shortage of idiots in the market for it, and of either other idiots or con artists filling the supply for that demand.
In fact, even a very summary googling shows that there hasn't been a single year between 2002 and present that didn't have such end-of-world prophecies. For 2002, for example, there have been at least FIVE fairly public prophecies that it's the end of the world as we know it. At least one of them, Paul Smirnov's, actually got the date updated twice when it failed to happen when prophesized. And then updated again for 2003. (Some people just don't take the hint to shut up and pretend they didn't make the claim.) 2003 saw another 4 fairly high profile prophecies. And another 4 for 2004. And so on.
And that's just counting those who made the news, not every deranged guy out there.
So, yeah, I _wish_ that people were at least sane enough to only fall for such bullshit every 11 years, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
It's even worse than that (Score:5, Informative)
It's even worse than that, really. It's not just "who cares about Mayans". It's that, really, they're trusting a calendar from back when the Mayans were as primitive as to not even figure out the length of a year (the Long Count uses 360 day years; seriously) and a culture who even at its apex only managed to count the days in the cycles of Venus (you know, the most bloody visible thing up there after the Sun and Moon) to tell them about galactic events. And they turn the end of a Mayan century into some kind of prophecy, although the Mayans never made such a prophecy. It's so fucking stupid, it's depressing.
To repeat a previous post (hey, it's Slashdot, you're used to dupes), for those who happen to still not know what that mayan thing is actually about:
Let's start from the start. The Mayans didn't count in base 10, but in base 20, presumably because they could count on their toes too. (No, really, look at their digits.) Thank goodness they didn't come up with a male-only maths, eh?
So they started with a year based on 260 day years, the so called Tzolkin calendar. If now you went "wait, that can't be right, it would skip through the actual year like crazy", congrats, you'd be smarter than the Mayans.
Then came the Long Count calendar, which was 360 days long, or 18 months of 20 days each. (Told you they were big on 20.) This is actually the calendar used in the 2012 (non)prophecy.
Yes, that's right. Those poor idiots are actually trusting a civilization to tell them about galactic alignments... who isn't even advanced enough to figure out the length of the year. Nor had the smarts to reset it to some equinoxe or such each year, like the lunisolar calendars used around here by even the most primitive ancient cultures. Yeah, that's the guy to trust with galactic calculations, right? ;)
To make it more stupid, even the Mayans eventually got a better calendar than that, the Haab calendar. Which finally padded the year to 365 days long, putting them finally on par with what the Egyptians had had, oh, only a couple of millennia before them. But anyway, a doomsday calculation based on the Long Count is already based on a calendar which is obsolete and crap even by Mayan standards.
So, anyway, a Long Count year was 18 months of 20 days each.
From there it went kinda like for us with decades, centuries and milenia, except in base 20.
So for us a decade is 10 years, for them a katun is 20 years.
For us a century is 10x10 years, for them a baktun is 20x20 years.
For us a millennium is 10x10x10 years, for them a piktun is 20x20x20 years.
All that happens in 2012 or 2013 is the end of a baktun. Yes, it's not even millennialism. The piktun (base-20 millenium) won't end for another couple thousand years or so.
That scare isn't even like Y2K, it's more like being scared of the rollover from 699 AD to 700 AD. I mean, WTF, it's not even running out of digits or anything.
And again that's _all_ there is to it, because there is no actual Mayan prophecy for that date.
But I guess that won't stop the doomsday idiots from waiting for their Rapture on that day. What else is new?
Re:Psst? They kinda ARE qualified in science (Score:4, Informative)
I think the GP was talking about home schooled idiots, but it seems you're talking about home schooled intelligent and well-adjusted people. Two totally different things.
Bypass slashdotted article (Score:4, Informative)
This has been written up in the Toronto Star [thestar.com], Wired UK [wired.co.uk], The Australian [theaustralian.com.au] and a few others [google.com].
Interesting, and saddening, that overseas media has picked this up and US media doesn't seem to be terribly interested. From one of TFAs,
But why has Nasa taken the day off from searching the galaxy to try its hand at movie criticism? Well, the agency argues that bad flicks can worry viewers. In fact, so many people wrote in to the agency, worried about potential 2012-related catastrophes, that Nasa had to publish a special website just days before the film's November 2009 release.
The myth debunking page reads "Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012."
Scientific illiteracy is becoming a big problem in the US. Kudos to NASA for tackling it.