Brimmley Nielsen

April 3, 2017

PHYS 1040

Prof Barnes

Waking Up Science Fiction:

An Analysis on the Accuracy of Passengers

Passengers came out in 2016 and was a very entertaining film. Here is the movie in a nut shell.

5,000 people hop on a star ship to immigrate to a new planet, which takes 120+ years. To survive the long

trip all the passengers and crew are sleeping and the autopilot is flying the ship. The ship flies through an

asteroid field and its force field failed, and the ship had a few programming hiccups some resulting in

Chris Pratt waking up 90 years too early. Living alone for a year he goes stir-crazy and woke up a girl,

Jennifer Lawrence. They end up nearly dying trying to fix the ship which is falling apart since the asteroid

hit. Being a science fiction movie, they take many liberties with the way space and space travel would

work. Some of the many, many imperfections in the science include, but certainly are not limited to,

artificial gravity, asteroid fields, and flying very close to a red giant.

The movie opens to a starship flying through space, entering a large asteroid field as the small

asteroids hurtle towards the ship a force field destroys the asteroids to protect the ship. When out of

nowhere a huge asteroid, close to the same size as the ship, approaches. The force field is not strong

enough to block all of the huge asteroid and some debris manages to get in and hit the ship, causing all

the malfunctions that we see throughout the movie. This is the beginning of the movie, the moment that

gave us a movie. However, this is not scientifically accurate at all. In fact, most asteroid fields are spaced

very far apart, causing it to be very unlikely for a space ship to even encounter one asteroid. In any case,

most of the particles are very small, seeing an asteroid that is as large as their ship is next to impossible.

In our asteroid belt, if you added up the mass of all known particles, the mass would only be about 4% of

the mass of the moon. While we cannot account for every asteroid field in the universe, it is likely that
most asteroid fields are much like the one in our solar system. Because of the evidence we have, it is easy

to see that this scene would be scientifically incorrect.

Following the asteroid field is the artificial gravity on their ship. Of course, the movie takes place

in the future, so science could possibly develop to create artificial gravity. The closest scientists get today

is having spinning chambers that cause a sort of gravitational force on the ships. As far as Hollywood is

concerned having some fake machine create gravity makes movie making easier. There is one major

problem with it however. At a point in the movie, the gravity malfunctions causing everything on the

spacecraft to fly up in the air causing some serious injuries. While it is true that gravity would stop

holding the people and objects to the ground, it would not be quite as dramatic as the movie depicts. Once

the gravity fails the whole, ship goes into free fall. One man who was sleeping is suddenly flying up into

the air, another man, also sleeping, simply has his arms fly up. A woman is swimming and suddenly all

the water in the pool flies into the air and creates a huge ball of water. While it is true that in space things

fall, it is also true that they need to have momentum to make them move still. If a pot is sitting on the

ground and suddenly there is no gravity pulling it towards the earth it makes sense that it would fly up,

however unless someone were to push it, the pot would stay still. Although this is hard to really pin down

as an absolute inaccuracy because it is hard to account for what effect the moving spacecraft would have

on the objects.

The final inaccuracy is the worst one yet, an encounter with a red giant. On the ship, there is a big

observation deck, where the passengers can look out at space through a large window. The scene begins

with the two main characters running as fast as they can to the observation deck. When they arrive there is

a huge star taking up most of the window and they watch as the star passes. At this time the woman states,

Wow, a red giant. To which all people in the audience who know anything about red giants cringe. Red

giants are very large, very bright, and cool. With how close they were to the star they would be blind, no

questions about it, they would go blind. Even looking at the sun in our everyday sky can cause a person to

go blind, and we are a whole light year away. It feels like they were too close to the star and that despite

the cool nature, for a star the word cool still is hot, the ship could not have handled the heat at such a
close range. These facts are too obvious for Hollywood to get away with, they were inaccurate in this

sense.

As a conclusion, most of this movie is not scientifically accurate. None of the incorrect things

were too terrible; the movie was still entertaining enough and well done. However, the facts were

misguided. Most of the things might have been fixed by simple research. Though the gravity can be

justified as being a normal effect seen in most space movies and the asteroid field is another common

mistake in space movies, the closeness to the red giant is not so easy to dismiss. Therefore, just like every

sci-fi movie, Passengers is full of inaccuracies. Though this is noteworthy, it should not stop anyone from

seeing such a great movie, unless accuracy is what he or she looks for in movies.
 Work Cited

Feltman, Rachel. "Why Don't We Have Artificial Gravity?" Popular Mechanics. Popular Mechanics, 03
Feb. 2015. Web. 06 Apr. 2017.

Hiskey, Daven. "An Asteroid Field Would Actually Be Quite Safe to Fly Through." Today I Found Out.
Today I Found Out, 05 May 2014. Web. 05 Apr. 2017.

Redd, Nola Taylor. "Red Giant Stars: Facts, Definition & the Future of the Sun." Space. Space, 21 Aug.
2013. Web. 05 Apr. 2017