Geeky TV show quiz

Howard points to the difficult, unless you love sci-fi, geeky TV show quiz. I scored 100%.

Sadly, all I have now is the realization that I have to get out more. Some questions I didn't know the answer that was correct, but I had watched the other shows and knew they weren't the answer. How well can you do?

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The Trouble with "V"

We watched the highly-anticipated "V" this past week. I must not willingly suspend my disbelief any more or have lost my senswunda because I couldn't watch the pilot episode (or most TV for that matter) without picking holes in the plot and science. I understand that science must be stretched to accommodate an ostensible science fictional show, but stretch it too far, or perhaps the character's in the show response to it and I think you start to lose your audience. My comments below contain spoilers from the pilot episode so be sure to watch it before you continue reading.

When the aliens show up in their own spaceship in orbit round your planet, you have already lost the battle. They have the high ground and they can just drop rocks on you until you submit. And that's just using the laws of physics as we know them. Interplanetary travel is hard enough, interstellar is practically impossible (takes a lot of energy) given our current understanding of physics. (Charles Stross has recently done a rift on this.) These aliens would need antigravity or something like it, which they apparently do have. I suppose the the V must get to Earth or there is no story.

Why doesn't anybody but the one newscaster comment on how much the V look like humans? He asks why they are all so attractive, I would ask why they look anything like us at all. Convergent evolution? Long lost brothers from a prehistoric human space empire? All of these explanations have important consequences, especially for the plot. If they are humans from another place why would Earth authorities ever let them set foot on the planet in these days of H1N1 swine flu, SARS, AIDS and weaponized anthrax, without wearing spacesuits to prevent them contaminating us with diseases we have never encountered before. I think history tells us what happens when two previously isolated human populations encounter each other for the first time.

Perhaps they are not human and are just wearing disguises so that we feel more comfortable around them. That opens up the question of how they developed the disguises and how long have they really been on Earth, how did they learn all of our languages, etc. When the secret V resistance meets and then gets wiped out by V infiltrators, it is not a surprise at how well they fit in give their looks. It is a surprise that anyone needs to be convinced that there are V among us. When the human survivors leave they should have taken some V bodies with them to expose the conspiracy. That would have been more important than their lives.

Perhaps the disguises are due to a really good knowledge of human physiology. Just how did they figure out how to cure human diseases anyway? That sounds like they would have had to do some experimentation to get it right. And thus we are right back to some obvious clues that the V have been on Earth long before they announced themselves and those alien abduction stories might be true.

I suppose because the show is a political allegory of the Obama administration (really) and not science fiction, that I shouldn't be surprised that none of the characters embedded in the story ask any of these important questions. At least they mentioned Independence Day when the ships show up. If aliens ever do show up in spaceships around Earth, they will have to deal with all of preconceptions formed from movie after movie exploring such a scenario. However, the current state of humanity is that it appears that we are alone in the universe, Enrico Fermi himself asked where is everybody. It is hard to explain why there appears to be only one place in the universe where intelligent life exists, even harder to explain why there would be only two. Stephen Baxter has written three novels and countless short stories just explaining away.

In spite of the implausibilities I will continue watching V to see if it improves, and because I seem to get as much fun out of picking apart television series as just watching them these days.

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Time Travel and love

This Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal comic reminded me of the classic time travel novel The Man who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. If you haven't read it go read it now(Amazon) to avoid the spoilers below.

In the comic above the man crassly uses his time machine to go to a time when the girl is in the mood, not realizing that if he in the present has a time machine and has this idea, he in the future might do the same thing and thus a crowd of eager men converge on the one time his love interest was in the mood. Extra humor comes from the fact that it appears to be only a single day from the evidence of all the guys at every age who appear.

David Gerrold's novel follows the life of a man whose mysterious uncle leaves him a time machine which he then uses to travel through history altering it to suit himself even as the newly created history becomes more and more bizarre. He even meets up with himself. David Gerrold is unafraid of exploring all of the implications of this and the man even has sex with himself. In the novel there is a never ending party at a house outside of time where various versions of himself are always there. In several incidents in the novel older versions of the man keep propositioning younger versions of the man for sex, much as in the story in the comic above.

The time travel device has ended up creating many alternate versions of history and thus create many different versions of himself. At one point he even meets an opposite sex version of himself.

Gerrold's novel is complex and bizarre and very interesting. I invite you to read the novel and count how many characters are in it.

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