General > General Technical Chat
SciFi movies and pathetic misconceptions of tech failing for the story line.
RJSV:
Yes I saw that, too.
intabits:
I haven't re-watched this piece of crap since about the time that it first appeared, so my recollection may be erroneous: "Independence Day (1996)"
The Earth super-geek (Goldblum) was able to take a captured/downed alien space craft, and somehow reverse engineer it's giga-advanced alien technology (all with zero documentation of course), identify a vulnerability, design a virus to exploit it, compile/build it into alien machine code, design/build an electrically compatible interface to the alien ship, correctly interact with the alien interface protocol to upload his virus, and use it to gain operational control of the craft.
And of course, doing all this while causing no damage to the ship, having all this work on the very first attempt, with his only error being a minor bit-flip that got forward/reverse arse-about.
Then skillfully operating the craft to defeat the bad guys...
Infraviolet:
Post #91, pretty hard to believe aliens would use a computer architecture that humans could reverse engineer well enough in a matter of days to be able to write a virus to exploit it.
As for Babylon 5, I can recommend it too. Does a very good job of having a proper strong and continuous story arc.
coppice:
--- Quote from: intabits on April 07, 2023, 11:03:04 am ---I haven't re-watched this piece of crap since about the time that it first appeared, so my recollection may be erroneous: "Independence Day (1996)"
The Earth super-geek (Goldblum) was able to take a captured/downed alien space craft, and somehow reverse engineer it's giga-advanced alien technology (all with zero documentation of course), identify a vulnerability, design a virus to exploit it, compile/build it into alien machine code, design/build an electrically compatible interface to the alien ship, correctly interact with the alien interface protocol to upload his virus, and use it to gain operational control of the craft.
And of course, doing all this while causing no damage to the ship, having all this work on the very first attempt, with his only error being a minor bit-flip that got forward/reverse arse-about.
Then skillfully operating the craft to defeat the bad guys...
--- End quote ---
130 years ago someone sat down and pondered how he could construct a story where advanced aliens attack us and we still survive. "Let them be sloppy about bio-hazards. Everyone gets sloppy about bio-hazards" he thought, and wrote a story that worked well enough people still want to make new versions of it.
In the 1990s someone sat down and pondered how they could construct a story where advanced aliens could attack us and we still survive. "Lets have people who can barely reach orbit be able to defeat the most critically important technologies of a race that can roam among the stars. We'll give them a few hours. That'll work.". Only a small percentage of the public thought "hey, wait a minute".
As a society, I think we may be going backwards.
David Hess:
--- Quote from: intabits on April 07, 2023, 11:03:04 am ---The Earth super-geek (Goldblum) was able to take a captured/downed alien space craft, and somehow reverse engineer it's giga-advanced alien technology (all with zero documentation of course), identify a vulnerability, design a virus to exploit it, compile/build it into alien machine code, design/build an electrically compatible interface to the alien ship, correctly interact with the alien interface protocol to upload his virus, and use it to gain operational control of the craft.
--- End quote ---
My counter arguments are that the aliens had already done the work of interfacing human computer systems to theirs when they used the human satellite networks to coordinate worldwide, (1) and that as scavengers, the alien systems were only as good as what they scavenged, so they had poor understanding of their own technology.
Of course the movie neglected to explain or refer to any of this and really should not be taken that seriously.
An example of the same plot point can be found in A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge where the aliens counterhack the human systems without the humans realizing who had actually hacked them until it was too late.
(1) Why was this even necessary? Did the aliens lack their own satellite technology?
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