Ok, so a while ago a friend asked me if I had watched the Netflix Lost in Space reboot.  I had not, and as I have not had much time to watch things, I still hadn’t.

This morning the Martian emerged from his bedroom and told me he had tried to watch it, and lasted 17 minutes, which was about ten minutes longer than he lasted with the new Inspector Gadget.

Being curious I asked what the issue was.  We don’t have a lot of the same issues with movies.  But I was curious.  And it managed to hit on one of our shared peeves.

Bad Science.

I don’t mean made up science.  You can make shit up all day and I will happily go along with you for the ride.  “Dilithium crystals, yes, of course.”  “Adamantium, sure.” “Vibranium, yeah, ok.”

But if you do something that thirty seconds of googling should have told you was wrong, I’m out of there.

And we’re not even talking about theoretical physics or anything.

Ok, so, SPOILER they crash on an uninhabited “Goldilocks” planet.  It’s enough like Earth to not need any particular adaptations to survive, and you can survive without access to your tech, if, as happens here, your crashing spaceship lands on a glacier and melts into it.

So, they’ve been referring to the liquid on the planet as ‘water.’  Not a ‘water-like’ substance, but ‘water.’  The ship sinks.  They stand around in coats, without protective gear, and decide they need a battery.  So one of them gets in her spacesuit, and dives into the water melted by the exceptionally hot spacecraft to go get one.  The water freezes and solidifies just as she’s inches from the top.

😐

Ok, ya’ll.  I know most people have never had the occasion to know how large bodies of water tend to freeze.

Hint, it’s pretty damn slowly.  If you can stand around in a coat, without protective gear and breathing masks, it is too warm for that much water to freeze that quickly.

A. Water freezes from the top the majority of the time.

B. Glaciers are not “super cooled.”  Glaciers are ice.  A lot of ice.  But still just ice.

C. Did I mention water generally freezes from the top, and you can keep poking it with a stick, to make sure you have a hole.

D. The salinity has very little do with things, except that saltwater tends to freeze more slowly.

So, even if you did say the surrounding glacier were really cold, it could not be that cold if they could stand on it without special shoes.

When I was a kid in Michigan, when we had really cold winters, the city would flood the tennis courts to make ice rinks. It was pretty fucking cold, and while you did not need special equipment, trying to breathe without breathing through a scarf was painful.  And they still had to use refrigeration coils beneath the tennis courts to freeze the 4-6 inches of water they flooded the courts with. Once it was frozen the ambient temperature could keep it that way, but it could not get there without some help.

That was only about 1000 cubic feet of water.

As opposed to a crater melted by a space ship.  That is many thousands of cubic feet of water.

Seriously, guys, if you had just said, “It’s like water, but it has this odd element in it!” I would have been all, “Ok, that works.  It’s only like water, so sure.”

But no, you had to fuck up basic easily googled science.

Ugh.

So, no, I will not be watching it.  I don’t need something else to yell at.

So, thanks, Martian, for saving me.

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