Drama vs. Reality Round 1: Sunshine

This being my first post here, I will point out that every entry in this blog will be full of "spoilers". This blog is about storytelling, with perhaps an occasional diversion. But realize, the headline will always contain the primary subject so beware. The web is full of people who tear apart the science or common sense of a story, other people are of an attitude that all things must bend or break on the altar of drama. Here, I'm working on where exactly the line is; where, in a particular story, the best balance is achieved between realism and a compelling fiction.

Sunshine was pushed as a story of hard science fiction. This was done by having various experts on things solar being used in publicity for the movie. "Hard sci fi" is a dangerous thing to declare your work as; while most people can sit back and ignore the physics issues presented by the Force in Star Wars, parading out scientists involved in your movie is similar to painting a bullseye on it. Even considering that, issues can often be overlooked, if they serve the story. But by the description of "hard sci fi", you basically establish that the physical rules of your fictional world largely resemble those of the real world. All stories should strive to be internally consistent with whatever rules they establish, and in the case of this genre care needs to be taken that things outside known real world scientific possibility should be kept to a minimum. Points go toward drama or reality based on whether or not the overall dramatic necessity could possibly have been fulfilled without going outside known science. Reality wins if a different approach would have filled the story's needs without leaving reality behind. This isn't about nitpicking, this is about constructively considering ways to bring the needs of drama and the desire for realistic depiction together.

So the sun is on its deathbed, some 40-50 years in the future. If the sun was going to die, would we be able to see it coming? Probably; different wavelengths of energy travel out from the core of the sun at different rates, some particular wavelengths arrive on Earth from the core before others do. This isn't because they travel at different speeds, it's because the material they travel through on the way out alters the course of some more than others. But, we'll come back to this issue later. What exactly could cause the sun to burn out so near in the future? The writers were smart enough not to say. It obviously wasn't a lack of hydrogen; the only way for that to happen would be for the sun to lose a huge amount of mass, and after that well... we would have much larger problems. Even removing that much mass from the sun over the course of the next 40 years would threaten all life on earth. Any means that could do this would likely be a large astronomical body... another star, or the remnants of one. No matter which it is, so much energy would be produced by the interactions that everyone on earth would have already gotten that deep, deep tan the crew of the Icarus 1 was sporting in the process. There are potential cyclical changes to the sun's energy output, but that wouldn't be the sun dying, it would just be a relative dimming and one that life on earth has survived through many times. In that case, doing what we were trying to do in Sunshine would be a bit like risking future generations of earth for a few more watts of power now... and spending massive amounts of money and resources doing it. (My psychic powers are detecting a political tangent will pop up in the comments.) So that leaves little else but the rules of the universe itself changing out from underneath us, and in that case what they intend to do would very likely be inconsequential. It is, however, the setup for the movie which was about a heroic mission to the sun. In which case, I'll forget all this and come along for the ride. Drama wins.

So let's talk about the ship I have to travel in. Pushing a mass around that of Manhattan Island, nobody seems to have realized that for most of the trip you would have to protect the crew from the engine needed to push it, not from the sun. I haven't done any math on it nor do I need to; anything that can push that much mass from the earth to the sun, even using all the slingshot help you can, is putting out an absurd amount of power. The thermal waste energy might be enough to barbecue a continent. But we do need to get our heroes to the sun, so we'll assume some miraculous rocket technology pops up in the next 40 years that isn't so dangerous or inefficient but cannot be used to replace the energy we get from the sun. Originally this went to drama, but considering the questionable necessity of the bomb being that large at all (see below), this goes to reality.

Our ship has a computer core that absolutely must be significantly cooled to work. The problem is, I'm not certain why. It would seem that all major functions of the ship have to go through this core to get done in any reasonable way. Apparently no one at NASA thought better of sending a machine that requires major cooling to work towards the hottest object in the solar system, and also forgot that they successfully sent many people to the moon guided by less computing power than there is in my cell phone. At the very least any reasonable person would have put in more than enough lower technology and less sensitive computers to accomplish all fundamental necessities. This dramatic choice was practically insulting considering the current level of computer savvy out there. This isn't the 1960's, "Pull this chip and the entire planet will be destroyed" doesn't fly anymore. But this was required to put the crew off balance, and to lead in towards a heroic sacrifice. The litmus test here is, was there another way to fulfill the needs of the story? In this case, yes. We're heading towards the sun, we've already established that there is a lot of interference with radios. So obviously, our computers have to have nice, solid wires and fiber optic lines connecting them to the necessary parts of the ship to control them as opposed to wireless. Given the long, linear form of the ship, it's not hard to imagine a choke point here or there where someone could cut lines between many important things. The result is the same; things are out of control. Do something nasty to that junction, like cutting lines then damage the section so there's no atmosphere in that tight corner, and someone might have to make a heroic sacrifice trying to fix the problem. Reality gets a point.

The issue of freezing in space is mind boggling to me. How can a world full of people who all know a vacuum bottle is the best insulator for their coffee think that you would freeze in moments in space? The argument is that space is very cold, but the truth is that space is very nothing, that's why it's space. Heat has to transfer out of your body, and the fastest way that happens is conduction via contact. In space, there is almost nothing contacting you, no atmosphere to carry away heat. The only way you lose heat is by thermal radiation, also known as infra red, and that is very little and quite slow. You might get a bit of frost on you as you as the air from an airlock blew out around you, and some evaporation of moisture, but otherwise, speaking strictly in term of temperature, it could be comfortable. It would be a long, long time before your body finally froze. The reality is, one of the biggest problems in designing satellites is cooling them, requiring very large radiators at very low efficiency. So, was there another way? The point where this came to play was that someone was going to die, and they wanted to linger over it a bit. For the most part, it's agreed that in hard vacuum you would have around 15 seconds of useful consciousness, and considering the air flowing out away from the ship we might be generous and give an extra second or two. At any rate, having a mad scramble for the entrance accompanied by a countdown by the people waiting to open the door on the other end could have accomplished this. We establish a time limit and let the audience know it's running out without mercy. This might turn repetitive against some other events in the story, and does substitute some narrative device in place of visual in a film. Still, at this point, I'll throw this toward reality.

Green leaves in a wet environment burning to ash; this is simply silly. Oxygenation increases burn rate and intensity, but it doesn't make things burn that couldn't. This part was too far outside any sort of realism to be allowed in. This is something many people wouldn't accept from a fantasy story, much less something billed as this was. Unfortunately, it was the setup for a strong payoff in visual metaphor: Michelle Yeoh finding a sprouting seedling amongst the ashes. This was also nice in another way in that it reinforced her character as being rather maternal, and largely positive maternal characters in fiction are hard to find. So where do we land here? Do we give up one or the other? I'm stumped on this so far. Tie for now. As for realistic actions we'd expect of our hopefully quick-witted crew, knowing their own plants needed to provide oxygen were gone, we should hope they would be aware enough to grab a couple handfuls of ferns on the way out of the other ship's garden. The one who visited the garden died anyway, so it wouldn't have gained the crew anything but a demonstration that they were not completely inept. As for the unknown people who created the ship, with plants being such a necessary part of the operations, it is more than a little surprising they didn't stash some spare seeds anywhere. Also, as they were obviously able to isolate the atmosphere in the garden, it is astounding no one would consider simply venting the room's atmosphere in to space to kill the fire. But if that happened, the plants would have likely survived long enough to put things back together. We can't have that. We're balancing scientific silliness and ineptness in talented people against powerful imagery here. Undecided.

So lets get to the means of saving earth. It's a fission bomb the mass of Manhattan. The engineering that would be required to build this is mind boggling. Put simply, when you get the material necessary to make 2 or more regular fission bombs too close together, bad things happen. Putting together a fission bomb of that mass and keeping it from going off, while not as immediately obvious, is a feat nearly rivaling faster-than-light travel. It would appear that the writer heard that hydrogen bombs use the same nuclear reaction as the sun (they do) and the only thing strong enough to set them off is fission bomb (also true so far). So apparently the assumption was the only thing that could give the sun a kick in the right direction would be a fission bomb. But perhaps a mistake was made in assuming bigger would be better. When the goal would obviously be for that bomb to set off some ongoing chain reaction, does the mass of it truly matter? The problem with really big fission bombs is that you hit a wall in the reaction; beyond a certain point, only some of the bomb goes off before blowing the rest off the mass away without it going off. I'll conceded a point though, that if the bomb is being crushed at the heart of the sun at the moment, it might still explode properly. But even so, the goal doesn't seem like it would need a bigger weapon. If a more powerful weapon was desired, antimatter is always there. It does exist, we can create it, although in tiny quantities, and it could create a truly massive bang for a very small payload size. It wouldn't be too huge a leap to imagine earth creating a powerful antimatter bomb within the next 40 years, at least no greater than imagining us creating a fission bomb of the aforementioned mass, in orbit nonetheless. An antimatter bomb also has the dramatic potential of being incredibly volatile. I'm going to give this one to reality, they not only created an unnecessarily exaggerated plot device they missed dramatic possibilities by doing so.

So now we have to take this thing into the sun. Apparently we have to get it in there fast, so it won't completely burn up before reaching the core. To do this we have some really special boosters to get it there. And I mean Special, in the Special Theory of Relativity sort of way. It is stated that the boosters will push it fast enough to create time dilation effects. Wow. One wonders, with boosters that powerful, why they didn't launch the weapon from farther away since it would cross the distance in minutes; if you are wondering this, it's because the story is about a heroic journey. At this point the journey seems to be one from conventional reality into fantasy; we're pushing the mass of Manhattan fast enough to mess with time. Again, not doing the math, but it could very likely mean the boosters have more energy than the bomb. Remember, when you start playing in this arena the faster you go the more mass something has, so it's a fun and vicious cycle. A handy toy for playing around with these implications is this Special Relativity Calculator. We're also messing with the length of our ship, and as for inertia... our hero demonstrates how truly heroic he is by managing to hang on to the back by his hands alone as this Einsteinian bottle rocket lights. With a grip like that, remind me not to shake his hand. One can imagine dozens of destroyed stress toys accompanying his own profound fright of onanism. Unfortunately the time dilation effects are being harnessed to account for distracting and otherwise superfluous camera work. But this all seems to miss something. The time dilation would seem to be working in the wrong direction. In actuality, our hero would see the rest of the world speed up as he approached the speed of light. Let's say he's around 86% of the speed of light, at that speed time would be moving half as fast for him as things outside his vehicle. This would mean he would have half as much time to react and do things, not twice as much. This was driven to create an attempt at metaphysics regarding his moment of death. A better approach might have been to work in Quantum Immortality. On such a huge plot point I hate to diverge from the original concept, but I'll go with reality on this. Given the nature of the trip to the sun it wouldn't have been out of place to have characters discussing something like quantum immortality, and the visual of his death or not death could have been left exactly the same. While quantum immortality is merely a metaphysical hypothesis, exploring it in this manner wouldn't have required jumping so far outside reality for so long.


So apparently the sun sparks up again, nice and bright. Our hero did it. Too bad, in reality, we likely wouldn't see a difference for thousands of years, at least. It has to do with those photons mentioned earlier. You see, light generated in the core of the sun takes a long time to reach the surface. It bounces off of atom after atom after atom to many massive orders of magnitude. Estimates range from a couple thousand years at the least, and upwards of a couple million years at most. Any way about it, we wouldn't see a difference for a good long while. And I'm pretty sure a physicist would have known his family wouldn't see a difference a mere eight minutes later. On a warm fuzzy note, if the sun was merely at a cyclical low point, detonating a bomb and having it actually work could have a hideous consequence; the reality is the low point we'd be experiencing on earth would be from the actions of the sun's core at least a thousand years ago. If the core was at full swing when that bomb got in there, and then kicked into even higher gear, a thousand years after our mission our actions might burn everyone on earth. But I digress, this was the overall impetus of the movie, so drama gets this one.

So the point of what I'm dealing with here are issues, in this case involving science, that lead to a story feeling contrived. There are some more issues in this particular story, that I might analyze in days to come. Sunshine just barely lost the battle on this one. But I feel I should say again, as I am establishing this blog about storytelling, that this isn't about nitpicking, this is about constructively viewing stories with an eye towards consistency balanced by the needs of drama. Let it be clear, overall I personally liked the film Sunshine, which is why I chose it as a subject at all.

And I'll wrap up by saying, when you view, read, or hear a story for the first time, try to let yourself go and just enjoy it. Do studies and comparison afterwards.