Though you only see evidence of the latter two. The Venture Star actually uses a combination of all three. Currently there are only three technologies that could allow that in a feasible way: Solar Sails, Nuclear Fusion, and Antimatter. This means we need some serious power and thrust to bring a ship close to the speed of light, or what is known in the trade as relativistic velocities. Ok then, not perfect because even light takes a while to go places it means we can’t get to Alpha Centauri any faster than ~5 years but that is a lot better than 70,000 years. I won’t go into the details of special relativity now because I think I did in a post about warp drive a while back. That means we can go no faster than the speed of light (actually slower because you can’t travel at the speed of light without being light itself). Ok, so standard modern-day propulsion is out, no FTL either. I found this very tasteful since it takes place in the 22nd century and I don’t see viable FTL by then as likely (only in my dreams). As Atomic Rockets says it “They want it, you want it, everyone is doing it.” Avatar eschews the easy way out though and decides humanity hasn’t figured that out yet, whether it is possible or not. Now not all hard sci-fi is without FTL (Faster than light) travel, as it is the sine qua non of sci-fi nowadays. You see despite human-like aliens (which I’ll probably cover in my speculative alien biology post if I ever write it) Avatar is actually a hard science fiction story, just one disguised with pretty 3D and special effects so the standard populace won’t get bored. The moral is if you want to do interstellar travel, even to the closest star in the sky, you need more than your average space ship.īut wait! Sci-fi has the answer right? Warp Drive! Wormholes! We are saved! Wait. Voyager 1 isn’t headed toward Alpha Centauri but if it was, at its current velocity (17 km/s) it would take another 77,000 years to get there. It takes months to years for our probes to make it to other planets, and Voyager 1 you’ll recall has been flying for over 30 years now and is only just about to go into interstellar space.
As you might recall from my other posts, space travel is really frakking hard and space is really frakking huge.
#Is the new avatar series done movie
In the movie humans travel to and from Pandora, a fictional Earth-like moon orbiting a gas giant (Polyphemus, also technically fictional, though not impossible) in the Alpha Centauri star system which is the closest star system to ours ranging about 4.37 light years away (1.34 parsecs for astronomy buffs or anyway that prefers that unit). Mmm… where do I start? Well let’s get some background first.
It is likely the novelization of Avatar devoted more than a page to the ship but when the rest of it is still about Na’vi, misrepresented human interests, and Jake Sully’s poor life choices I haven’t bothered to read it to find out.īeauty shot, I use this as my Google+ and Twitter header images because shiny. Why is that such a crime? Because James Cameron doesn’t half-ass the details, and therefore this ship is designed with all the intent of actually using it for an interstellar mission in reality (assuming Pandora and Unobtanium actually existed, more on that later). Such a crime to deny the ship the true time it deserved to be shown off. There are quite a few, but besides some concept renderings it is all stills from the literally 30 seconds of screen time the ship has in the movie. The header image of this blog is a concept render of the ship that appeared in Avatar, but not the only picture of it. So, as you have probably figured out by now, this is the post about the ISV Venture Star I promised a while back. As South Park put it, James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is James Cameron, now if only he could raise the bar in reality as in that episode… Part of this is Cameron doesn’t half-ass things (story aside, but the series isn’t done I suppose so I’ll wait and see what the sequels bring), and his brother is an aerospace engineer too so that helps.
It is the details that make his movies shine. I found the story of James Cameron’s Avatar to be highly derivative.
0 kommentar(er)
