Life As We Don't Know It (Part 4)

Welcome back! When we last met we were discussing some elements of Independence Day as well as some generalizations that Hollywood makes when depicting aliens. Now, in the fourth and final installment of "Life As We Don't Know It," we'll look at a few more troubling aspects of ID4 and then wrap things up until a future date.

Life As We Don't Know It (Part 4)

PUMPING IRON

"I'm Hanz... and I'm Franz... and we're here to PUMP you up!" Perhaps you remember this popular Saturday Night Live skit from the early 1990s. Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey, dressed as weightlifters would come out and rant and rave for five minutes or so about how scrawny everyone else in the world was. Then they would tell us how powerful they were. So powerful were these two men, they could probably have crushed us without even lifting a finger.

Well, as long as we live in Newton's world, this might as well have been the theme of Independence Day . As physicist Lawrence Krauss explains in his great little book Beyond Star Trek: Physics from Alien Invasions to the End of Time, the 15-mile wide death saucers that hovered so ominously over the cities of the Earth would in reality never need to fire their death rays in order to wipe out the scrawny human race. Just the pressure exerted on the planet's surface by the saucers' presence would be enough to flatten us all.

In addition, a mother ship such as the one that was described as being 1/4 the mass of the moon could never enter orbit around the earth without wiping out civilization merely by its gravitational pull.

But this would make for a pretty boring movie. So Hollywood likes to spice it up a bit. I'm glad they do, because I don't want to spend (the yen equivalent of) $18 to sit in a theater and just watch things be flattened by an invisible force while some big saucer sits idly on the screen. Watching that saucer position itself directly above the White House and then unleash a beam that knocks Clinton and his mistress out of bed is much more exciting. Thrilling though it is, however, it's just not likely to happen in real life. Even aliens must acquiesce to the laws of nature.

Krauss, who became well-known to sci-fi fans in the mid '90s with his first book The Physics of Star Trek, points out some other physical impossibilities in ID4 and then explains the science behind them in his