January 7, 2011 by Conway

According to NASA, the following movies are the most absurd with regard to the validity of the science presented: 2012, The Core, and Armageddon. While I love a good story, I am even more impressed with a good story that also features good science.

I am reminded of the movie 2010. Now that the year 2010 is in the past, we might be tempted to laugh at everything the movie got wrong. We have not sent a manned mission to the Jovian system, and as far as I know, we have not discovered a monolith on our Moon. (Never mind what the next Transformer’s movie suggests we may have found there.) It’s easy to disregard the predictions science fiction makes after the fact.

However, a more useful exercise is to consider what the movie 2010 (for example) got right. Could manned space flight happen in a manner similar to what Arther C. Clarke postulated? What constraints does physics impose? What political and economic forces may shape a different vision of space exploration?

NASA’s list of more plausible science fiction movies includes Gattaca and Contact. While I have enjoyed both, I look forward to seeing even more movies that portray science and space exploration with an awareness of what may be possible.