Thread: Research for a sci-fi short film

Hello everyone, my name is Ryan.
I'm a film student, and im currently in pre-production for a short film. I'd like to first say that I know practically nothing when it comes to science. So any help here is greatly appreciated.

I have many questions i need to ask here, and I know many of them will seem quite ridiculous... but hey... its film. But I do really want a solid understanding of how this could work.

So, to get straight to the point here is my first question (and the most important)

Is it possible... for an entire planet to teleport, or warp, or travel to a distant place almost instantaneously?

even if the odds are like 1 in 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.

if not, is it possible for a planet to duplicate be cloned? thats probably even less likely lol. i seem to recall something about matter not able to be created.


anyways. the main thing i need to know here is. If a new planet suddenly appeared in our solar system. what are the possible scientific explanations to that.

this is the most important question, and its something that needs to occur in the film. So if it is not scientifically possible then it will have to be a supernatural event.

I'll ask my other questions after I get a solid answer for this one. Thank you very much for your time.

Theoretically, it's possible for random quantum fluctuations to teleport an entire planet anywhere. There are two main problems though. First, the chances are such that you'd only expect it to happen once within the lifetime of many, many universes. Second, the chances of part of a planet teleporting, or the planet ending up as a pile of dust, etc, is much, much higher (still would only expect it to happen once in the lifetime of several universes).

Duplicating, no. There's basically no way for that to happen.

For a sci-fi novel, a rogue wormhole might be a better option than teleportation, but that'd raise other questions.

hi MagiMaster
thanks a lot for the reply, I appreciate it.
First of all I have no clue whatsoever what a quantum fluctuation is, if its not too much trouble could u give a really basic explanation?
more importantly though, if I used the rogue wormhole, what exactly are these questions it would raise?

Neither do I know what a quantum fluctuation is, but I can see the problem of how a whole planet should move though such a technique. Firstly all atoms of eart would have to move at the same time and secondly the would have to move to the same place relative to the center. the propability is 1 to the amount of atoms of earth to the power of 2, and then that has to happen at the same TIME, and time is very very very long.
Comparing it, a worm whole looks like something that happenes verey day, like brushing you teeth. The problem with wormwhoes is that we don't exactly know if they exist, how to move thoug them and where they would lead to.

ok so, it looks like i'm gonna either go with the wormhole explanation or a supernatural cause.
thank you both for the help.
I looked up a bunch of stuff elsewhere which answered my other questions already.

so right now thats all i really need to know.
if i need more help i'll post here.
so thank you very much
:-D

Well, quantum fluctuations (and I'm probably using the phrase incorrectly) just means that at the quantum level, things aren't exactly here or there, but sometimes both and sometimes somewhere else all together. Anyway, it's not just that each atom would have to move together, but that each part of each atom would. Every electron would most likely end up somewhere else.

Anyway, as for wormholes, I would say that this particular piece of advice applies: introduce as few miracles as possible and work out all the consequences.

For wormholes, the ends can move around both in space and in time (in the sense that anything else can move around in time). For a rogue wormhole to deposit a planet into the solar system, it'd have to be passing through just as its other end collides with a planet somewhere else. (Alternately, it could be a wormhole caused by some piece of superscience gadgetry located on the other planet.) Either way, the existance of macroscale wormholes (planet sized even) would imply that interstellar travel could be pretty easy. Scientists would be just as interested in the wormhole as the new planet. They probably would have seen the wormhole coming, more or less.

It also raises such questions as whether or not gravity can travel through a wormhole (probably, but that's just a wild guess). If so, then the approaching wormhole wouldn't create any instantaneous changes in gravity by dumping a planet into the system. If not, it would, which could cause trouble.

It seems entirely possible that a "rouge planet" could drift into the solar system after being ejected from some other star system, especially if it was a relatively small planet.

Originally Posted by Scifor Refugee

It seems entirely possible that a "rouge planet" could drift into the solar system after being ejected from some other star system, especially if it was a relatively small planet.

Yeah, maybe the planet is covered by a material with very low albedo (its dark) in common telescope frequencies (visible light, radio, gamma, infra red), so we simply never detected it.

Originally Posted by KALSTER

Originally Posted by Scifor Refugee

It seems entirely possible that a "rouge planet" could drift into the solar system after being ejected from some other star system, especially if it was a relatively small planet.

Yeah, maybe the planet is covered by a material with very low albedo (its dark) in common telescope frequencies (visible light, radio, gamma, infra red), so we simply never detected it.

I really like this explanation the best. It just sounds like something that would come out of a movie. You could set the whole thing up with a couple of lines from a astronomer who just built a more powerful telescope that is capable of seeing these abnormally low frequency radiations.


Have fun with the movie, maybe you could post it up on the internet after your done so we can see the final project. I'm sure we would all enjoy it, it would probably spark tons of debate too. :-D

The Puppeteers moved several planets into a Klemperer formation in Larry Niven's Ringworld, although I don't recall that Niven ever explained how they did it.

Originally Posted by mirror

Hello everyone, my name is Ryan.
I'm a film student, and im currently in pre-production for a short film. I'd like to first say that I know practically nothing when it comes to science. So any help here is greatly appreciated.

I have many questions i need to ask here, and I know many of them will seem quite ridiculous... but hey... its film. But I do really want a solid understanding of how this could work.

So, to get straight to the point here is my first question (and the most important)

Is it possible... for an entire planet to teleport, or warp, or travel to a distant place almost instantaneously?

even if the odds are like 1 in 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.

if not, is it possible for a planet to duplicate be cloned? thats probably even less likely lol. i seem to recall something about matter not able to be created.


anyways. the main thing i need to know here is. If a new planet suddenly appeared in our solar system. what are the possible scientific explanations to that.

this is the most important question, and its something that needs to occur in the film. So if it is not scientifically possible then it will have to be a supernatural event.

I'll ask my other questions after I get a solid answer for this one. Thank you very much for your time.

There is no chance of that happening. There has never been any scientific proof of such a thing. Not even a scrap of evidence.

But if you are doing science fiction, magimaster is the guy to talk to. And if it is science fiction why do you need reality?


Why not a very large spherical ship? Have it race in at very high velocity.



Sincerely,


William McCormick

Ignoring William's blunt wit, a rouge planet suffers one particular problem. If you were planning on putting anything interesting on it, it would have had to suffer through several million to several billion years of near absolute zero temperatures and next to no light.

A giant spherical space ship is not a particularly bad idea if it fits the rest of the story, which it doesn't really sound like it would. Typically sci-fi ships of that size would be generation ships, that is ships designed to carry multiple generations of beings. There's one big question for a generation ship though: why would they want to leave? The ship obviously has everything they need. Of course, you can posit other reasons why the ship is so big.

And yes, I do enjoy sci-fi and plan to write a book or two myself eventually (but you know how that goes). And no William, me liking sci-fi has absolutely nothing to do with my knowledge of science. I'd probably enjoy sci-fi more if I didn't know where they were getting it wrong.

A rouge planet sounds kind of campy. A rogue planet on the other hand does sound cold.

You know, I don't know of very many instances of rogue planets in sci-fi.

Originally Posted by KALSTER

Yeah, maybe the planet is covered by a material with very low albedo (its dark) in common telescope frequencies (visible light, radio, gamma, infra red), so we simply never detected it.

It wouldn't even have to be that dark. Sedna is at least 1200 km in diameter and has an albedo of .16-.3, and we just noticed it lurking around out on the edge of the solar system 5 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90377_Sedna

Originally Posted by MagiMaster

Ignoring William's blunt wit, a rouge planet suffers one particular problem. If you were planning on putting anything interesting on it, it would have had to suffer through several million to several billion years of near absolute zero temperatures and next to no light.

It it was ejected from its home system at 10 km/sec it would "only" take about thirty thousand years for it to drift ten light years. A long time, but you could imagine a technologically-advanced species surviving if they had good fusion or fission reactors and plenty of nuclear fuel, and they saw it coming far enough in advance that they were able to make preparations. You could imagine them lurking out there in the dark for millennia, eagerly awaiting their chance to get off their icecube of a planet and settle somewhere more comfortable...

You also might be able to do something with heating from tidal effects if your rogue planet was a combination gas giant+moon, and the aliens were living on the moon. Although it would probably be harder to explain why a gas giant was ejected since it's so much bigger. In that scenario the life could have evolved on the moon as it drifted through space for a bajillion years.

I'm not entirely sure what would eject a planet from its orbit like that, but perhaps some sort of close pass by some other stray object? Maybe a wandering black hole, a rogue gas giant that was ejected from some other system after a supernova, etc? Or is there conceivably some freakish chain of events that could occur in a seemingly-stable planetary system that would cause a planet to be ejected? I would be curious to heard from anybody here who knows more about astronomy.