Prometheus and Humans

The internets have been ablaze with white-hot nerd rage over Ridley Scott’s movie,’Prometheus.’ “Absurd and unrealistic,” the masses cry. “Geologists getting lost?  Never going to happen!  People taking their helmets off on another planet when the risks are obvious? Nobody could be that stupid! Completely destroyed of my suspension of disbelief!”  And etc., etc., etc. and so forth.

As far as “people being stupid” is unrealistic, well, given the evidence that surrounds us — constant, non stop stupidity, I’m surprised that we expect fictional people to be smarter than actual people. In the real world you see people crowding around those concrete ashtrays with cigarettes outside of hospitals.  I wonder how many of those smokers are going to go take care of cancer patients after their smoke break?  If you didn’t think the eidence was clear that humanity is a pretty self deluding species, consider this: Burger King thinks a bacon sundae is a good idea. And then there are those three words that prove that humanity is just smart enough to get itself into all kinds of complicated messes but not smart enough to get out of those same messes: sub-prime mortgage crisis.

And as far as geologists getting lost in tunnels, well, I can completely buy that.  NASA spent 125 million dollars on a Mars probe in 1999 that failed because one team was doing calculations in metric while the other was doing calculations in miles and quarts and pounds. I would have thought someone at NASA would have asked, “What does this ‘km’ after this number mean?” or something similar before they sent 125 million up into space, but apparently not.

And a helmet isn’t going to help you anyway:

Fred Phelp’s nightmare.