Just saw "Mission to Mars." As a treatment of science fiction in a movie, it
isn't bad. The human drama is the thing. It seemed to be "Apollo 13" with a
massive chunk of "2001: A Space Odyssey" at he end. There's also a dash of
"Robinson Crusoe on Mars." There was a long slow start (a la "The Big
Chill") to get us to care about the characters, but they pretty much stay
cardboard characterizations.
The "Martians" are as physically impossible as most aliens. When humans
develop enormous braincases we had better develop good strong necks or
cantilevers or something (helium lift pockets maybe). Even under lighter
Martian gravity there are some designs that just don't make biological sense.
I know someone on the list will have looked at this. The Martian atmosphere
is amazingly thin right? Thinner than the air at the summit of Everest isn't
it? Thinner than the air that airliners fly through? So getting a
rip-roaring dust storm going requires the air to move pretty fast or the
particles of dust to be pretty fine (maybe both). A feather moves easily on
earth, but a feather being acted upon by near-vacuum will stay wherever
gravity puts it. So what would a Martian dust storm feel like? Weak gravity
holding very small particles, but very thin air stirring them. Would a
Martian wind be anything like a strong wind on earth?
Can you really terraform Mars? With the Martian gravity so weak, wouldn't
any atmosphere we "make" just boil off into space? Isn't that why Mars has
so little atmosphere now? Only heavy carbon dioxide lingered in the weak
gravity. I'd think we'd need to use a lot of greenhouses, or smash it
together with Venus to begin to get something like an Earth gravity.
Otherwise, it'd be like bailing a leaky boat.
There is a scene in Mission to Mars where the greenhouse is billowing in the
breeze. They walk around inside with a breathable air pressure. If there
was really a Martian air pressure outside, the greenhouse would be more like
a rigid balloon. It wouldn't billow. But maybe it isn't a flaw. Maybe it
wasn't billowing, but was a flapping-windmill-energy-gathering thingy. One
advantage to not giving the audience a good look, we can't catch a flaw.
Dan L.
