The USAF (of which I was a dubious member for 4 years) made an investment it wasn't able to exploit
That sounds like you're blaming the USAF for that financial error, but they were only following orders. That "investment" was Dick Nixon's way to funnel the DoD budget (which was big in the Cold War era) into prestigous space projects. The AF had already decided the Shuttle was wrong for them... but then the Commander-in-Chief told them to join the project anyhow.
Life is hard for an admiral when the President is second-guessing you just to sooth his personal envy of Kennedy's successful Apollo project.
but to get from earth to space atleast until we get the elevator, means rockets.
By "magnetic", I hope she meant "railgun". A railgun-ramp built on the equator could possibly launch things into orbit, and is no less plausible than a space elevator.
Learn to quote, and learn a little HTML. If 95% of your post is a paste from some other page, that's a signal you should just link to that page, and not waste our time and space.
Oh, and as for the criminal copyright infringement, that's because you used the New International translation, which was published in 1973. Only versions published more than 97 years ago are in public domain and legal to use here.
Your choices in the game reflect the side you eventually control; either a benevolent God who creates prosperous societies and improves the quality of life for its people, or a vengeful deity who forms armies and smites anyone who gets in the way of conquest - be it of land or civilisation.
The stylings of this game (and others, like KOTOR and Fable) are based on a false dichotomy. Just look at a popular god, like "Yahweh" in the Bible, and compare him against the above description: Yahweh was a benevolent God who created prosperous societies and improved the quality of life for its people, and also venegefully formed armies to smite anyone obstructing his conquest. Just think about Canaanites, Midianites, or especially Sodomites.
Fix the premise, please! I know that's a highly difficult request, but Molyneux is supposed to be some kind of genius, so he could give it the college try.
Re:Why not in America?
on
Gamer Nation
·
· Score: 1
I don't really see much of a problem for this to happen most parts of America.
The inalterable laws of physics make it impossible to build a network giving America the same internet performance of Korea.
It's a simple matter of the speed of light... and geography... and nerve reaction-time. Korea is under 5% of the length of the USA, meaning the ping latency stays usually under 50 ms. In the USA, it can be proportionally larger, or up to 1000 ms (with all equivalent hardware installed).
This means that every single Korean has a fast enough connection to every other that speed differences don't preclude the playing of any game. The USA can never get that way.
eating, breathing, and sleeping StarCraft, you'd think Blizzard would do more with the license
They can't, BECAUSE of that complete popularity. The Koreans don't love StarCraft because of the "license"... they enjoy the very specific product. Gameplay is the most important factor, with the artwork and setting a distant second.
If you say that Starcraft is the national game, then compare it against the USA's "national pastime" baseball. It would be crazy to release "Baseball 2" with significant changes, even if the game designer thinks they look like improvements. Fans won't like anyone who messes with their favorite thing.
The result would be millions of times worse than the "Lucas Screwed the Star Wars Prequels" rants you can find here.
Probably, "StarCraft 3-D" would be a successfull product as long as it were no more than updating the same gameplay to exploit modern 3-d accelerator hardware. That's about all they have room for, without disrupting things.
Technically, he didn't "say" all that... he just pasted in things other people have said. The big post was a massive mash of copyright-infringing plagiarism.
Paste a few clauses into google to see where they came from (although maybe the original author approved duplication for evangelical purposes, but it's still dishonest to omit attribution, especially in this context)
The horrible thing is, MS has to do this so *company name* won't come along in 6 months and do it to them.
Wrong. You evidently don't know what a "defensive patent" actually is. To prevent another company from doing the same thing, they need merely to post the patent text in some public place- there's no need to actually officially file it. Once a concept has been published, it is unpatentable by others.
So-called "defensive patents" are actually retaliatory patents, which can be used to threaten someone who threatens you with an unrelated patent, creating a standoff.
Wasn't that in a sort of twin-package with Summoner or something?
No. As I thought was obvious, the twin-packs were bargain versions of older games. What is not obvious (and borders on commercial fraud) is that the game inside that pack is cut down to fewer CDs than the original, meaning that most speech and nearly every cutscene is gone.
But no female voices and no visible female characters.
Doom3 had at least one woman. The hero wanders into her office, she says a few lines, and then a new monster introduces itself by scattering her all over the keyboards. (The flaming flying skulls)
Finally, just because I know that snipers move after shooting doesn't make me a "know it all".
It makes you a "wrong-it-all". The published examples of real snipers who have taken multiple targets from one location run into the hundreds. One single North Vietnam sniper is recorded to have taken more than 60 shots from the same place.
Don't confuse "USMC Sniper School Dogma" with how "REAL" snipers actually operate. In fact, your theory is self-contradictory: if "REAL" snipers always left their position after taking a shot, they wouldn't need to leave their position, because nobody would come looking for them, since they've obviously already left...
Each sniper must make a tough, situation-specific choice one whether to stay or go. Sometimes, moving out can actually be the choice that gets you immediately spotted and killed.
That example shows why acting is unimportant... who cares about acting quality when the script is so bad? A good writer / translator and a decent director are what's needed there. Even if they'd hired Harrison Ford, he couldn't make "You, the master of unlocking, should take it with you" sound cool.
Fact is visuals and sound are the two senses that video games have to deal with.
True, but voice acting is a tiny part of the sound experience of a game. Foley and music are much more important than speech, which many players try to skip through as rapidly as possible, even on the first play-through.
If they wanted to listen to actors go on and on, they'd have gotten a DVD, not a video game.
Yup, judging from how I get mod-slapped every time I post anything remotely critical of NASA, space exploration, space elevators, or the billions of dollars we spend on space "research".
Funny, because I'm just one of several posters who reflexivity harangue against near-term manned missions and other overly-optimistic bad investments, and my karma has never suffered at all.
I strongly suggest anyone who takes space exploration seriously give the NASA Parody about "wagonnauts" (titled, I think- "how the west wasn't won") a read. It points out just how collossally stupid the whole thing is
As an analogy, the starting assumptions of Western exploration are so completely different from space travel that the story "points out" exactly nothing. The essay doesn't mention that individual humans had been travelling back and forth to the Pacific coast for centuries before the government was even founded. Comparing two such drastically different things is no way to convince an audience... especially if it takes 10 minutes to read through, ensuring they're bored to tears before seeing anything else you might want to say.
Let's at least ATTEMPT reducing our budget deficit, feeding+sheltering the homeless, universal health care, etc.
Suggesting that NASA's funding should be stopped until the problems of poverty and healthcare are solved is short-sighted, so it's understandable why you'd be modded down for things like that. If you want to criticize NASA, do so, but don't imply that space programs are a luxury that can be put off until planetside life is perfectly safe and eglatarian.
If you look at Star Trek from a creative perspective, you can decide that the villians like Q and (at a lower scale) the Borg are actually thriving transhumanist societies, whose natures are unrecognizable to the Enterprise crew.
Yeah, seriously. Leonbrooks should think twice about attaching his sig ("Got time? Spend a little of it coding or testing.") to posts like that, because any Google search which happens to connect that URL to these opinions will appear as a disinvitation. If you're begging smart people to help your project, such broad insults to the ideas of intelligence aren't the best way to attract them.
His laughable attacks on "Materialism" reduce down to the fact that it's not optimistic enough. Sorry buddy, but sometimes the truth is harsh.
At least everything about electromagnetic waves and such.
Funny, I just insert a low-mass charged object into the electromagnetic field and observe it's acceleration. Acceleration = distance / time * time, which is physics and therefore "physical evidence".
You are prehaps conflating "physical existence" with the atomic "strong" force, when the gravitational and electroweak forces are equally important to physicality.
If religion were truely orthogonal to science, it wouldn't make claims about scientifically-testable physical effects. But that's what "miracles" are.
Religion is beyond cause and effect, beyond "logic"
No cause and effect? Tell that to all the preachers shouting about which actions will send you to hell, and what specific corrective devotions you can recite to stave off that effect.
so even if science wanted it couldn't prove gods existence,
But if a god wanted, he could prove it exists... this constitutes logical proof that gods are either nonexistent, wish to seem nonexistent, or real but too weak to send a simple email. All of those conclusions are inconsistent with the commonly claimed attributes of "God".
Replicator usage is rationed. It's used as a punishment for minor misdemenours. Money exists (latinum).
She was talking about TNG, but you are describing concepts introduced in DS9 and Voyager.
despite having its own 'black ops' people as an open secret.
More retconns from DS9, not part of the original.
The original, on the other hand, shows virtually nothing about how society functions. The Enterprise crew are described as exceptional individuals, and they portray almost nothing of normal planetside life. The occasional descriptions Starfleet characters voice about mainstream life are vague and never expanded upon.
Check the episode where the Enterprise defrosts a quartet of 1980s humans from suspended animation and wonder aloud why anyone would wish to extend his own lifespan!
Another problem with Star Trek that means it fails as science-fiction
The more important reason it's not sci-fi is that no characters attempt to follow the scientific method. Key to real science is experimental repeatability: once demonstrated, a result may be reproduced multiple times by other researchers. If the repeat fails, then the initial description of the phenomena was incomplete.
Star Trek is full of amazing new discoveries that bedevil the crew for one episode and then are forgotten forever. If it were sci-fi, then technology would propagate, and crazy effects that turn people younger, evil, into lemurs/salamanders, or forward/backwards/sideways in time would become standard parts of Starfleet's arsenal to deal with new challenges. Instead, the Enterprise's motto seems to be "Never prepare". They can't plan ahead, because then they'd have no chance to heroically improvise while the new doomsday-clock ticks down.
The fact that discoveries of one episode have no lasting influence on future episodes was parodied with "history eraser buttons" in both Galaxy Quest and Ren & Stimpy.
Space travel limited by the speed of light? Plot-deviced away by 'warp drives'.
You can just about stop the list right there. Once the characters are allowed to have FTL travel, almost any other crazy invention looks plausible by comparison. Artificial gravity is relatively easy, and "magic" replicators are so much easier, they are basically plausible in the real world. Plus, FTL would obviate many of your other entries, because they no longer need to spent much time on the ship.
On the other hand, the possession of all those impossible technologies which render spaceflight quick and easy does create a different problem, which Star Trek never addressed: once you've got such amazing capabilities, why bother flying through space? Anything you could find on another planet, you can replicate or simulate right at home.
Problems of people on the ship not getting on when kept together for years in claustrophobic conditions?
This was multiply addressed, by (a) holodeck, (b) telepathic counselors, (c) FTL allows shore leave every few weeks. However, ST:TNG did include occasional psychological distress of the human crew as a plot device (mainly with the unlucky character "Barclay")
Escaping from dangerous situations? Not too hard with teleporter.
Once again, they introduced a capability which would break their storylines if followed to it's logical conclusion. Given teleportation, why bother carrying around guns and torpedos for combat? Just transport bombs or just raw energy into the targets.
Also we have Doctor Who where every situation is resolved with some deus ex machina which gets more unbelievable every week.
Remember, it's not a "deus ex" if the characters could've reasonably expected the ending given their own worldview. If godly ascensions are normal to them, then it's simply another day at the office.
The original Star Trek, for example, was a discussion of 1960s American gender and race relations,
Um, how about geopolitics, as in both colonialism and the Cold War? That was a far bigger theme of Star Trek than diversity in the workplace.
(But even then, only a minority of episodes were what you'd call "done well". Most were just a creepy planetbound monster or random anomaly of spacetime, AI, or biology)
It's just more realistic than space operas about bumbling robots that speak English when they want to communicate with one another.
Human fear of a robot revolution is real even today, and will become more important as AI technology advances. Even without Three Laws or a Butlerian Jihad, it's plausible that stringent rules may be adopted to prevent computers from becoming excessively smarter than humans.
Chief among those laws would be limits on the size of any one computer, which can be most easily enforced if they are all freestanding mobile units. Rapid digital communications would enable Beowulf-style clustering to effectively become a larger system, so there could also be a strict rule that all AI systems must speak only in natural language, even to each other.
Even if the designers were less paranoid than that, they might still set robots to output English speech by default, even if just to make their behavior more transparent to humans who might be listening in.
Everything in there is believable apart from the part that Jerome could probably have his back
Eh, biotech advances could repair Vincent and Irene's heart defects too.
And that's only the start. There are more unbelievable things in Gattaca. In fact, it is one of a list of scifi stories suffering from the "single advancement" problem: the author takes us 20-70 years into the future to tell a cautionary tale about one specific technological development, but meanwhile everything else has stayed the same.
Specifically in Gattaca, the degree of genetic testing that went on was absurdly frequent- why in the world would NASA retest the DNA of astronauts every few weeks? In case they might mutate or something? A government that engages in that behavior clearly enjoys pervasive privacy intrusions... but if so, then why wasn't there also some more mundane forms of surveilance, like simple database mining that could pick up that two people were living in one man's home?
I was actually thinking giant mythic serpent/dragon/fish swallows the sun, rather then massive nuclear reaction.
Once swallowed, the sun is still there, still interacting gravitationally with all the planets. Plus, a serpent that large would have a major gravitational field of its own...
Prehaps the wording you want is "If the sun fell through a wormhole into another universe...". But still, what you're doing is asking for the consequences of impossibility.
No, they weren't. You are apparently using nonstandard personal definitions of both "junk science" and "hard sci-fi". "Junk science" means co-opting the jargon of science to endorse a fantastical (or at least unverifiable) idea. That is logically impossible within the scope of any work labelled as "fiction".
real science ability does not mean that you write hard science fiction.
Both Childhood's End and Foundation were hard science-fiction, meaning "true science fiction" as opposed to "fantasy with the trappings of science".
That's because the story is about science, and cannot be told or enjoyably read without taking a scientific perspective on things. Both of those stories had apparently supernatural elements, but the point is that the characters and/or narrator responded to them in a scientific, logically inquistive way. (The devil-shaped aliens? Scientists. Hari Seldon the psychohistorian? Scientist)
Superman, Star Wars, and Star Trek were not scientifically styled, because when extraordinary things happened, nobody tried to explore them with rational experimentation. (Certain episodes of Trek may have been exceptions, but as a whole it was non-scientific)
You are apparently trying to use "hard science fiction" to mean something else: stories where nothing happens in violation of our understanding of any accepted law of science. But that stuff already has a name: "realistic modern/historical fiction".
The clause "science fiction" by itself implies that the science is not wholely in accord with modern understanding, or else there'd be no reason to call it fictional.
Slashdot Mirror
The USAF (of which I was a dubious member for 4 years) made an investment it wasn't able to exploit
That sounds like you're blaming the USAF for that financial error, but they were only following orders. That "investment" was Dick Nixon's way to funnel the DoD budget (which was big in the Cold War era) into prestigous space projects. The AF had already decided the Shuttle was wrong for them... but then the Commander-in-Chief told them to join the project anyhow.
Life is hard for an admiral when the President is second-guessing you just to sooth his personal envy of Kennedy's successful Apollo project.
but to get from earth to space atleast until we get the elevator, means rockets.
By "magnetic", I hope she meant "railgun". A railgun-ramp built on the equator could possibly launch things into orbit, and is no less plausible than a space elevator.
So what exactly did I not properly attribute?
Learn to quote, and learn a little HTML. If 95% of your post is a paste from some other page, that's a signal you should just link to that page, and not waste our time and space.
Oh, and as for the criminal copyright infringement, that's because you used the New International translation, which was published in 1973. Only versions published more than 97 years ago are in public domain and legal to use here.
The stylings of this game (and others, like KOTOR and Fable) are based on a false dichotomy. Just look at a popular god, like "Yahweh" in the Bible, and compare him against the above description: Yahweh was a benevolent God who created prosperous societies and improved the quality of life for its people, and also venegefully formed armies to smite anyone obstructing his conquest. Just think about Canaanites, Midianites, or especially Sodomites.
Fix the premise, please! I know that's a highly difficult request, but Molyneux is supposed to be some kind of genius, so he could give it the college try.
I don't really see much of a problem for this to happen most parts of America.
The inalterable laws of physics make it impossible to build a network giving America the same internet performance of Korea.
It's a simple matter of the speed of light... and geography... and nerve reaction-time. Korea is under 5% of the length of the USA, meaning the ping latency stays usually under 50 ms. In the USA, it can be proportionally larger, or up to 1000 ms (with all equivalent hardware installed).
This means that every single Korean has a fast enough connection to every other that speed differences don't preclude the playing of any game. The USA can never get that way.
eating, breathing, and sleeping StarCraft, you'd think Blizzard would do more with the license
They can't, BECAUSE of that complete popularity. The Koreans don't love StarCraft because of the "license"... they enjoy the very specific product. Gameplay is the most important factor, with the artwork and setting a distant second.
If you say that Starcraft is the national game, then compare it against the USA's "national pastime" baseball. It would be crazy to release "Baseball 2" with significant changes, even if the game designer thinks they look like improvements. Fans won't like anyone who messes with their favorite thing.
The result would be millions of times worse than the "Lucas Screwed the Star Wars Prequels" rants you can find here.
Probably, "StarCraft 3-D" would be a successfull product as long as it were no more than updating the same gameplay to exploit modern 3-d accelerator hardware. That's about all they have room for, without disrupting things.
especially when it takes that long to say it.
Technically, he didn't "say" all that... he just pasted in things other people have said. The big post was a massive mash of copyright-infringing plagiarism.
Paste a few clauses into google to see where they came from (although maybe the original author approved duplication for evangelical purposes, but it's still dishonest to omit attribution, especially in this context)
The horrible thing is, MS has to do this so *company name* won't come along in 6 months and do it to them.
Wrong. You evidently don't know what a "defensive patent" actually is. To prevent another company from doing the same thing, they need merely to post the patent text in some public place- there's no need to actually officially file it. Once a concept has been published, it is unpatentable by others.
So-called "defensive patents" are actually retaliatory patents, which can be used to threaten someone who threatens you with an unrelated patent, creating a standoff.
Wasn't that in a sort of twin-package with Summoner or something?
No. As I thought was obvious, the twin-packs were bargain versions of older games. What is not obvious (and borders on commercial fraud) is that the game inside that pack is cut down to fewer CDs than the original, meaning that most speech and nearly every cutscene is gone.
But no female voices and no visible female characters.
Doom3 had at least one woman. The hero wanders into her office, she says a few lines, and then a new monster introduces itself by scattering her all over the keyboards. (The flaming flying skulls)
Finally, just because I know that snipers move after shooting doesn't make me a "know it all".
It makes you a "wrong-it-all". The published examples of real snipers who have taken multiple targets from one location run into the hundreds. One single North Vietnam sniper is recorded to have taken more than 60 shots from the same place.
Don't confuse "USMC Sniper School Dogma" with how "REAL" snipers actually operate. In fact, your theory is self-contradictory: if "REAL" snipers always left their position after taking a shot, they wouldn't need to leave their position, because nobody would come looking for them, since they've obviously already left...
Each sniper must make a tough, situation-specific choice one whether to stay or go. Sometimes, moving out can actually be the choice that gets you immediately spotted and killed.
Compare the acting in RE1 "master of unlocking"
That example shows why acting is unimportant... who cares about acting quality when the script is so bad? A good writer / translator and a decent director are what's needed there. Even if they'd hired Harrison Ford, he couldn't make "You, the master of unlocking, should take it with you" sound cool.
Fact is visuals and sound are the two senses that video games have to deal with.
True, but voice acting is a tiny part of the sound experience of a game. Foley and music are much more important than speech, which many players try to skip through as rapidly as possible, even on the first play-through.
If they wanted to listen to actors go on and on, they'd have gotten a DVD, not a video game.
Yup, judging from how I get mod-slapped every time I post anything remotely critical of NASA, space exploration, space elevators, or the billions of dollars we spend on space "research".
Funny, because I'm just one of several posters who reflexivity harangue against near-term manned missions and other overly-optimistic bad investments, and my karma has never suffered at all.
I strongly suggest anyone who takes space exploration seriously give the NASA Parody about "wagonnauts" (titled, I think- "how the west wasn't won") a read. It points out just how collossally stupid the whole thing is
As an analogy, the starting assumptions of Western exploration are so completely different from space travel that the story "points out" exactly nothing. The essay doesn't mention that individual humans had been travelling back and forth to the Pacific coast for centuries before the government was even founded. Comparing two such drastically different things is no way to convince an audience... especially if it takes 10 minutes to read through, ensuring they're bored to tears before seeing anything else you might want to say.
Let's at least ATTEMPT reducing our budget deficit, feeding+sheltering the homeless, universal health care, etc.
Suggesting that NASA's funding should be stopped until the problems of poverty and healthcare are solved is short-sighted, so it's understandable why you'd be modded down for things like that. If you want to criticize NASA, do so, but don't imply that space programs are a luxury that can be put off until planetside life is perfectly safe and eglatarian.
So, no, I don't believe in a Star Trek future
If you look at Star Trek from a creative perspective, you can decide that the villians like Q and (at a lower scale) the Borg are actually thriving transhumanist societies, whose natures are unrecognizable to the Enterprise crew.
All the really Good stories -- the ones that last for generations -- are ultimately about people
Just like "All the really Good pictures are ultimately about color"... a statement too all-inclusive to be useful.
bad science and anti-science rhetoric in one post
Yeah, seriously. Leonbrooks should think twice about attaching his sig ("Got time? Spend a little of it coding or testing.") to posts like that, because any Google search which happens to connect that URL to these opinions will appear as a disinvitation. If you're begging smart people to help your project, such broad insults to the ideas of intelligence aren't the best way to attract them.
His laughable attacks on "Materialism" reduce down to the fact that it's not optimistic enough. Sorry buddy, but sometimes the truth is harsh.
At least everything about electromagnetic waves and such.
Funny, I just insert a low-mass charged object into the electromagnetic field and observe it's acceleration. Acceleration = distance / time * time, which is physics and therefore "physical evidence".
You are prehaps conflating "physical existence" with the atomic "strong" force, when the gravitational and electroweak forces are equally important to physicality.
Nope. Because there's no science in it.
If religion were truely orthogonal to science, it wouldn't make claims about scientifically-testable physical effects. But that's what "miracles" are.
Religion is beyond cause and effect, beyond "logic"
No cause and effect? Tell that to all the preachers shouting about which actions will send you to hell, and what specific corrective devotions you can recite to stave off that effect.
so even if science wanted it couldn't prove gods existence,
But if a god wanted, he could prove it exists... this constitutes logical proof that gods are either nonexistent, wish to seem nonexistent, or real but too weak to send a simple email. All of those conclusions are inconsistent with the commonly claimed attributes of "God".
Replicator usage is rationed. It's used as a punishment for minor misdemenours. Money exists (latinum).
She was talking about TNG, but you are describing concepts introduced in DS9 and Voyager.
despite having its own 'black ops' people as an open secret.
More retconns from DS9, not part of the original.
The original, on the other hand, shows virtually nothing about how society functions. The Enterprise crew are described as exceptional individuals, and they portray almost nothing of normal planetside life. The occasional descriptions Starfleet characters voice about mainstream life are vague and never expanded upon.
Check the episode where the Enterprise defrosts a quartet of 1980s humans from suspended animation and wonder aloud why anyone would wish to extend his own lifespan!
Another problem with Star Trek that means it fails as science-fiction
The more important reason it's not sci-fi is that no characters attempt to follow the scientific method. Key to real science is experimental repeatability: once demonstrated, a result may be reproduced multiple times by other researchers. If the repeat fails, then the initial description of the phenomena was incomplete.
Star Trek is full of amazing new discoveries that bedevil the crew for one episode and then are forgotten forever. If it were sci-fi, then technology would propagate, and crazy effects that turn people younger, evil, into lemurs/salamanders, or forward/backwards/sideways in time would become standard parts of Starfleet's arsenal to deal with new challenges. Instead, the Enterprise's motto seems to be "Never prepare". They can't plan ahead, because then they'd have no chance to heroically improvise while the new doomsday-clock ticks down.
The fact that discoveries of one episode have no lasting influence on future episodes was parodied with "history eraser buttons" in both Galaxy Quest and Ren & Stimpy.
Space travel limited by the speed of light? Plot-deviced away by 'warp drives'.
You can just about stop the list right there. Once the characters are allowed to have FTL travel, almost any other crazy invention looks plausible by comparison. Artificial gravity is relatively easy, and "magic" replicators are so much easier, they are basically plausible in the real world. Plus, FTL would obviate many of your other entries, because they no longer need to spent much time on the ship.
On the other hand, the possession of all those impossible technologies which render spaceflight quick and easy does create a different problem, which Star Trek never addressed: once you've got such amazing capabilities, why bother flying through space? Anything you could find on another planet, you can replicate or simulate right at home.
Problems of people on the ship not getting on when kept together for years in claustrophobic conditions?
This was multiply addressed, by (a) holodeck, (b) telepathic counselors, (c) FTL allows shore leave every few weeks. However, ST:TNG did include occasional psychological distress of the human crew as a plot device (mainly with the unlucky character "Barclay")
Escaping from dangerous situations? Not too hard with teleporter.
Once again, they introduced a capability which would break their storylines if followed to it's logical conclusion. Given teleportation, why bother carrying around guns and torpedos for combat? Just transport bombs or just raw energy into the targets.
Also we have Doctor Who where every situation is resolved with some deus ex machina which gets more unbelievable every week.
Remember, it's not a "deus ex" if the characters could've reasonably expected the ending given their own worldview. If godly ascensions are normal to them, then it's simply another day at the office.
The original Star Trek, for example, was a discussion of 1960s American gender and race relations,
Um, how about geopolitics, as in both colonialism and the Cold War? That was a far bigger theme of Star Trek than diversity in the workplace.
(But even then, only a minority of episodes were what you'd call "done well". Most were just a creepy planetbound monster or random anomaly of spacetime, AI, or biology)
It's just more realistic than space operas about bumbling robots that speak English when they want to communicate with one another.
Human fear of a robot revolution is real even today, and will become more important as AI technology advances. Even without Three Laws or a Butlerian Jihad, it's plausible that stringent rules may be adopted to prevent computers from becoming excessively smarter than humans.
Chief among those laws would be limits on the size of any one computer, which can be most easily enforced if they are all freestanding mobile units. Rapid digital communications would enable Beowulf-style clustering to effectively become a larger system, so there could also be a strict rule that all AI systems must speak only in natural language, even to each other.
Even if the designers were less paranoid than that, they might still set robots to output English speech by default, even if just to make their behavior more transparent to humans who might be listening in.
Everything in there is believable apart from the part that Jerome could probably have his back
Eh, biotech advances could repair Vincent and Irene's heart defects too.
And that's only the start. There are more unbelievable things in Gattaca. In fact, it is one of a list of scifi stories suffering from the "single advancement" problem: the author takes us 20-70 years into the future to tell a cautionary tale about one specific technological development, but meanwhile everything else has stayed the same.
Specifically in Gattaca, the degree of genetic testing that went on was absurdly frequent- why in the world would NASA retest the DNA of astronauts every few weeks? In case they might mutate or something? A government that engages in that behavior clearly enjoys pervasive privacy intrusions... but if so, then why wasn't there also some more mundane forms of surveilance, like simple database mining that could pick up that two people were living in one man's home?
I was actually thinking giant mythic serpent/dragon/fish swallows the sun, rather then massive nuclear reaction.
Once swallowed, the sun is still there, still interacting gravitationally with all the planets. Plus, a serpent that large would have a major gravitational field of its own...
Prehaps the wording you want is "If the sun fell through a wormhole into another universe...". But still, what you're doing is asking for the consequences of impossibility.
Professor Isaac Asimov(PHd in physics)
No, chemistry.
No, wait, that was utter junk science.
No, they weren't. You are apparently using nonstandard personal definitions of both "junk science" and "hard sci-fi". "Junk science" means co-opting the jargon of science to endorse a fantastical (or at least unverifiable) idea. That is logically impossible within the scope of any work labelled as "fiction".
real science ability does not mean that you write hard science fiction.
Both Childhood's End and Foundation were hard science-fiction, meaning "true science fiction" as opposed to "fantasy with the trappings of science".
That's because the story is about science, and cannot be told or enjoyably read without taking a scientific perspective on things. Both of those stories had apparently supernatural elements, but the point is that the characters and/or narrator responded to them in a scientific, logically inquistive way. (The devil-shaped aliens? Scientists. Hari Seldon the psychohistorian? Scientist)
Superman, Star Wars, and Star Trek were not scientifically styled, because when extraordinary things happened, nobody tried to explore them with rational experimentation. (Certain episodes of Trek may have been exceptions, but as a whole it was non-scientific)
You are apparently trying to use "hard science fiction" to mean something else: stories where nothing happens in violation of our understanding of any accepted law of science. But that stuff already has a name: "realistic modern/historical fiction".
The clause "science fiction" by itself implies that the science is not wholely in accord with modern understanding, or else there'd be no reason to call it fictional.