NASA Names Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies of All Time

mvar writes "Working through the year-end best/worst movie lists can be a feat of Olympic proportions, but there's one list which is so damn cool you'll definitely want to give it a whirl. NASA and the Science and Entertainment Exchange have compiled a list of the 'least plausible science fiction movies ever made,' and they ranked the disastrous (in more ways than one) 2012 as the most 'absurd' sci-fi flick of all time."

Comments

It's Because of the Phone Calls

[BJ_Covert_Action]

If I recall correctly, 2012 was the disaster movie that caused hundreds (maybe thousands) of overly emotional retards to call NASA directly and ask whether the world was actually going to end. I think one caller even asked NASA if they should kill their child now, in order to save them the pain of having to deal with the 2012 apocalypse. I know if a particular movie turned my work phone into a spam pot for dipshits I would declare that movie the ultimate fuck up of all time as well.

I think next we'll see NASA using it's orbital lasers to melt John Cusack's for his role in that film, at least, I can dream.

Re:It's Because of the Phone Calls

[E IS mC(Square)]

Two things -
1. I don't even know how 2012 is considered a sci-fi at all.
2. If NASA indeed decides to use lasers, they should just go ahead and melt all of John Cusack's roles till date.

Re:How does this happen?

[bsDaemon]

Not since Congress won't approve anything good and keeps forcing them to work on bullshit they already cancelled until the money runs out, since apparently that makes good economic sense or something. Besides, NASA probably has one of the highest concentrations of nerds anywhere in the world. They probably know a thing or two about SciFi (as opposed to SyFy).

Psst? They kinda ARE qualified in science

[Moraelin]

I hate to break it to you, but (A) they didn't judge best or worst, but most absurd as science goes, and (B) they do have people qualified in several branches of science and technology. In fact, I'd expect that if anyone is qualified to judge woowoo doomsday scenarios based on stellar alignments and mysterious radiations from the galaxy, it would be NASA. That's, you know, the kinda thing they _are_ supposed to do: know what's happening up there.

Of course, don't tell that to the homeschooled idiots who'd rather wait for a "rapture" that kept being sold as any day now for 2000 years straight and never happened, than fix the real problems on Earth in the meantime. And who'll even take a non-existent Mayan prophecy as support for their Bible delusions. Or to the gang who just wants to believe any non-scientific idiocy, presumably because it makes them feel less bad about sleeping through Physics class high-school.

Here is the list.

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst Sci-Fi Movies

1. 2012 (2009)

2. The Core (2003)

3. Armageddon (1998)

4. Volcano (1997)

5. Chain Reaction (1996)

6. The 6th Day (2000)

7. What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)

Most Realistic Films

1. Gattaca (1997)

2. Contact (1997)

3. Metropolis (1927)

4. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

5. Woman in the Moon (1929)

6. The Thing from Another World (1951)

7. Jurassic Park (1993)

Newton's 4th Law

[orichter]

Apparently you're unaware of Newton's 4th Law. "Any natural disaster travels at the speed of the transportation you happen to be in at the time." Of course later Einstein showed that relativistic effects could add or subtract 10 or 20 miles per hour, but only in faster vehicles which weren't available in newton's time.

It's even worse than that

[Moraelin]

It's even worse than that, really. It's not just "who cares about Mayans". It's that, really, they're trusting a calendar from back when the Mayans were as primitive as to not even figure out the length of a year (the Long Count uses 360 day years; seriously) and a culture who even at its apex only managed to count the days in the cycles of Venus (you know, the most bloody visible thing up there after the Sun and Moon) to tell them about galactic events. And they turn the end of a Mayan century into some kind of prophecy, although the Mayans never made such a prophecy. It's so fucking stupid, it's depressing.

To repeat a previous post (hey, it's Slashdot, you're used to dupes), for those who happen to still not know what that mayan thing is actually about:

Let's start from the start. The Mayans didn't count in base 10, but in base 20, presumably because they could count on their toes too. (No, really, look at their digits.) Thank goodness they didn't come up with a male-only maths, eh?

So they started with a year based on 260 day years, the so called Tzolkin calendar. If now you went "wait, that can't be right, it would skip through the actual year like crazy", congrats, you'd be smarter than the Mayans.

Then came the Long Count calendar, which was 360 days long, or 18 months of 20 days each. (Told you they were big on 20.) This is actually the calendar used in the 2012 (non)prophecy.

Yes, that's right. Those poor idiots are actually trusting a civilization to tell them about galactic alignments... who isn't even advanced enough to figure out the length of the year. Nor had the smarts to reset it to some equinoxe or such each year, like the lunisolar calendars used around here by even the most primitive ancient cultures. Yeah, that's the guy to trust with galactic calculations, right? ;)

To make it more stupid, even the Mayans eventually got a better calendar than that, the Haab calendar. Which finally padded the year to 365 days long, putting them finally on par with what the Egyptians had had, oh, only a couple of millennia before them. But anyway, a doomsday calculation based on the Long Count is already based on a calendar which is obsolete and crap even by Mayan standards.

So, anyway, a Long Count year was 18 months of 20 days each.

From there it went kinda like for us with decades, centuries and milenia, except in base 20.

So for us a decade is 10 years, for them a katun is 20 years.

For us a century is 10x10 years, for them a baktun is 20x20 years.

For us a millennium is 10x10x10 years, for them a piktun is 20x20x20 years.

All that happens in 2012 or 2013 is the end of a baktun. Yes, it's not even millennialism. The piktun (base-20 millenium) won't end for another couple thousand years or so.

That scare isn't even like Y2K, it's more like being scared of the rollover from 699 AD to 700 AD. I mean, WTF, it's not even running out of digits or anything.

And again that's _all_ there is to it, because there is no actual Mayan prophecy for that date.

But I guess that won't stop the doomsday idiots from waiting for their Rapture on that day. What else is new?

Most realistic

[Quiet_Desperation]

Idiocracy