De Romanicorum Physicalium 8

Science fiction.

• The replicators in Star Trek, aside from how they should totally fill the ship with antimatter and blow it up, are the mother of all "bringing far more power to bear than the problem requires" approaches. Because while food synthesizers that are essentially 3d printers, assembling foods out of simpler components, would be a good idea, replicators form it, directly, from energy, particle by particle.
  
  The same, by the bye, is true of transporters: there is not and never could be a situation where those make more sense than landing-vehicles. The slight time savings is not—and, again, never could be—worth the amount of energy necessary to convert the mass of the average human (69.3 kg, in case you wondered) to energy. Considering that the energy equivalent of 69.3 kg is 6.2 exajoules...or the energy consumption of an entire Kardashev I civilization over 17 days, 22 hours, 33 minutes, 19 seconds.
  
  It only takes 63 megajoules per kilogram (yes, "only", welcome to space-travel physics) to propel objects to escape velocity. That means that it could be cheaper to beam a four-person away-team than to send them on a landing craft, since getting it back into space might be energy intensive...provided the landing craft masses 393,650,793,651 kilograms, or 989.6 times the canonical mass of the Enterprise D.
  
  Seriously, it's like, suppose you want to make an underwater breathing device without having to carry air. The smart way is to filter dissolved oxygen from the surrounding water, i.e. gills. The silly way is to use electricity to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen. And the Star Trek way is to fuse the hydrogen atoms many times over, until they become oxygen.
• Many discussions of future linguistic change seem to be far too married to the idea that dialects are going to change to incomprehensibility in a few centuries—they claim we shouldn't be able to understand people from Star Trek's era. Now, aside from the fact you could've understood Shakespeare pretty much fine (he would've had a funny accent—since even Pope, born 72 years after Shakespeare died, thought "sea" and "say" were homophones—but you could've understood each other), there is a substantial body of research into how media have influenced dialect. Namely? The ability to record and broadcast sound is killing off dialects and causing a great deal of "smoothing" in the direction of the standard varieties. It started with radio, and it really took off with TV.
  
  It is not, and never was, a matter of simply hearing the standard variety; most of the people who claim that's what's being argued are fighting strawmen. Also they're often British, so for them, of course, dialect has a political component that is less present or wholly absent for other Anglophone societies. As at least one of them (the "Futurese" guy) actually said, regional dialects are the language of the home, what people grow up speaking, and thus are reverted to in a "home" environment. Only...television is people's home-life now, especially in Britain, where more children have televisions in their bedrooms than live with their biological fathers. And TV is in the standard dialect, so everybody's speech moves closer to that, unless they deliberately prevent it.
  
  Obviously, of course, dialects that get a lot of TV-exposure will be reinforced just as much as the standard one is; Osaka Japanese, Cockney British, and certain Southern American accents are likely to stick around for a while. But I'll bet you they change to conform much more closely to the media-presented versions, and dialects that don't get that exposure are likely to die off. Do they still use "ar" for "yes" in Sussex? I doubt it.
• The NASA AX-5 experimental hard suit—quite possibly the goofiest-looking spacesuit ever, and please consider some of the competition—masses between 77 and 86 kg, i.e. an average one is 81.5 kg (180 lbs). That sounds horrible, till you find out a "Newtsuit" deep-sea diving rig masses between 275 and 378 kg, and the US Navy's ADS 2000 diving suit masses 436 kg (MJOLNIR Mk. V and VI suits worn by Spartan-IIs mass 454 kg, only 18 more than the ADS 2000).
  
  Though the AX-5 looks ridiculous, it uses an interesting idea: constant-volume joints. Instead of having accordion-joints (called "convolutes"), like most spacesuits (and animals, look at a hairless cat, or the back of your fingers), where a pleated section of material unpleats when flexed, it uses stacks of rotating cuffs to bend without changing volume. How flexible is it? Apparently you can get into 95% of the positions you can get into stark naked, that's how flexible.
  
  I think it's made of fiberglass, certainly some of its AX-# predecessors were.
• The theme that plays under the Halo 4 main menu, and several versions of the main Halo theme, and several places in Battlestar Galactica, all raise an interesting question. Namely, when, exactly, did we decide the appropriate musical representation of "space" was wordless, vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding, female vocals?
  
  Seriously, what is that? Is there some intrinsic connection between "space" and "lady muezzin" that I just missed somewhere? Did someone hear people praising Yoko Kanno's music for shows like Bebop and Ghost in the Shell, and then mix her up with Yoko Ono? It's weird, is what it is, and that everyone started doing it at once is even weirder.
• Know what we should see in first-contact scenarios, but never do? I mean the ones that happen on Earth? We should see all the various global factions trying to use the aliens as weapons against their rivals. I mean, first contact is always basically Europeans from Space, and lets Hollywood have white people as their unhistoric Noble Savage Indians. But in real history, just about the first thing that happened to Europeans was the natives tried to make alliances with them to use them against their enemies.
  
  Why do you think Cortez had all those Indian allies? Everybody hated the Tenochca/Aztec Triple Alliance/the people you think of when you hear "Aztec" even though several of their enemies were the same ethnicity and that wasn't actually their name anyway^note. So they saw Cortez, and they said, "Dude, you freaking have wands that make fireballs appear when you point them at people, and our weapons shatter like the glass they are when they hit you. Anyway, we know these big jerks..."
  
  The same is true of India and Sub-Saharan Africa, where various chiefs and leaders tried to use Europeans against both their rival compatriots and the other colonizing influence, absent from the New World: Islam. Why does science fiction always blithely assume that the world would unite against an alien invasion, or that friendly aliens would want them united? Why does it assume that hostile aliens would manipulate humans into fighting each other? Cortez didn't want to fight the Aztecs, his Indian allies pretty much forced his hand. If they're bothering to talk at all, they can be manipulated (which would be a good justification, indeed just about the only one, for one of those "screw you, we just want you to die" alien invasions).
• It is generally true that, not having to counteract friction, spaceships' engines should only glow while they're being fired. Did you sense a "but" coming? If so, you're perceptive. Because there are exceptions. Some spaceship engines take a long time to cool down or warm up, so you wouldn't actually turn them off, you'd just turn off the propellant-flow (engines like that heat faster if you're not firing them—the whole way rockets work is that the exhaust carries energy away—so radiators are even more important than usual for ships like that). You might still see some light deep inside the nozzles of that sort of rocket.
  
  Of course, the major category of engines that don't just turn off are a thing you never see in visual-media SF, and seldom in print. Because the big one is the NERVA/ROVER nuclear thermal rocket—it cools down and heats up about as quickly (or rather as slowly) as a submarine engine, because that's basically what it is, but with a hydrogen exhaust-stream swapped in for the turbine-moving steam. They're not used in fiction because despite making our current rockets look like the toys they are, they're still boringly weak for plot purposes (they may get you to Mars three times as fast but that's still two months, and most SF settings are not assuming Age of Sail travel times). Well, that, and our flint-knapping hunter-gatherer taboo on the very concept of fission.
• So it's actually relatively common knowledge—I think Cracked writers know about it, and they generally need two tries to put sunglasses on the front of their heads—that cyborgs as portrayed in fiction would actually rip themselves apart from the strain (although a lot of fictional cyborgs actually have their whole skeletons and many tissues reinforced—like many "fiction is so inaccurate" complaints, it is itself often inaccurate). But what doesn't seem to be common knowledge is that cyborgs would be sharply limited by power requirements.
  
  It is possible to power things like Pacemakers from the body's own magnetic field, and in principle one could power things like prosthetic limbs with the same amount of energy that goes to normal ones (though I'm guessing the inefficiency of converting between the body's energy system and an electronic one would mean you'd actually have to increase your caloric intake by better than 50%, relative to the proportion of your caloric output a given limb takes up). But if your prosthetic limb has markedly greater strength than a human, you're going to need batteries.
  
  You could actually get some cool body-horror out of, say, battle-cyborgs who can no longer eat because their digestive tracts have been removed to make room for battery packs (and they get their replacement nutrients, which might include raw materials for self-repair systems, in an injection). The kind of enhancement shown in a lot of fiction, admittedly not the hardest—not therapeutic prosthetics, not even a double or even triple-strength limb (which wouldn't actually translate to doubled capabilities, thanks to the aforementioned structural issues of the rest of the body), I mean the "dozens or hundreds of times stronger" things—would require that kind of major anatomical reworking, for the remotely foreseeable future. Unless the cyborgs also carry highly-volatile batteries the size of a largish oxygen tank like an emphysema-sufferer might lug around, and that's not a liability in a battle, at all.
• It seems like, in a delicious irony, so far from space never seeing dogfighting, it might at some point become the only place it happens. We still have plane-to-plane fights, no matter how good our missiles or how fast our fighters get—it's just that nowadays "dogfights" happen at ranges of thirty kilometers. But improvements in drone tech might (along with all the other things they're ruining) finally put paid to that, because a drone can endure maneuvers that'd shred a pilot.
  
  But in space? Well, nothing on the surface of this planet is more than about .15 seconds away, for a radio signal. In space, lag kills, and anything close enough to a drone to control it is close enough to get attacked along with it (there isn't "terrain" for you to hide in, nothing on a planet's surface offers a comparison for just how exposed you are in space). There's no reason not to cut out the middleman and put the weapons that would've gone on a drone on the ship that would control the drone. Of course, the ship would still probably have a more-than-solo crew, and it wouldn't behave like a P-38 or a Sopwith Camel, but you knew that.