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Grossly increasing the factor of safety is a subtle way that science fiction stories connote a feeling of very advanced technology. For example in the JJ Abram

Grossly increasing the factor of safety is a subtle way that science fiction stories connote a feeling of very advanced technology. For example in the JJ Abrams movie Star Trek Into Darkness we see the Enterprise operating at depth in an ocean, then dramatically zooming away into space. Then later another ship falls from orbital height and plows through San Francisco without losing its hull shape. In Star Wars the Millenium Falcon is constantly doing things that would seem to be outside a normal design for a spacecraft, and it survives (aside from the radar dish). Even as far back as the movie 2001, the monolith is made out of a material that humans can’t dent or cut. Why so strong? It’s basically just an automated radio. The idea is: this advanced civilization has such command over physical technology, that they can effortlessly engineer unnecessary strength without losing any of their designed performance.

UncleMeat 5y ago
I don’t think this is science fiction doing this to connote the future in many of these cases. The cars in the “fast” franchise also survive ludicrous damage. The bodies of action heroes survive falls from ridiculous heights and blows and stab wounds that would kill somebody with ease. This is more a property of action movies (and adventure movies, to a lesser degree).
- proggy 5y ago
  The loose industry term for this is “plot armor” [1]. There is no explicitly stated reason for the hero(es) being nigh invincible (be it person, spaceship, car, etc.). The only reason why the character survives is that it has a reason to continue existing for sake of the plot. So yes, I suppose you can rationalize in your head that most ships are made out of super strong materials in science fiction, but unless that’s clearly laid out, you may just be rationalizing writer’s convenience. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor
- glitchc 5y ago
  Seems disingenuous to lump a science fiction movie where the focus is future technologies to an action movie with exaggerated physics and lack of real damage. In action movies, bad guys die with one bullet while the hero finds his way to safety (and survives!) despite having 10 or more lethal bullet wounds. For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. It's very much an action adventure set in space.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    > For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. FWIW this is literally the first time I’ve encountered someone claiming that it isn’t science fiction. (Soft SciFi, to be sure, but still: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...)
    - gourlaysama 5y ago
      > FWIW this is literally the first time I’ve encountered someone claiming that it isn’t science fiction. Well, there's Science Fantasy [1]: Jedi and the Force are very much Wizards and Magic. I've heard it called Space Fantasy, too. [1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceFantasy https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceFantasy
      - snowwrestler 5y ago
        A bunch of classic “golden era” science fiction novels feature characters with unexplained mental powers, like Asimov’s Foundation series, Dune, Niven’s Known Space series, etc. Those seem like obvious fantasy now, but from about the 1950s through the 1970s, a lot of serious people believed that there were undiscovered powers of the human mind that science was on the verge of discovering or confirming. Mental powers are therefore a common anachronism of sci fi from that era. Most science fiction stories are going to feature some elements that are essentially unexplained and therefore act like magic in the story. I think most folks would consider 2001 to be science fiction but the powers of the monolith are at least as crazy and unexplained as what the Jedi can do.
codeflo 5y ago
About the Abrams movie: Too bad the same factor of safety wasn't applied to the buildings, where that should have been even cheaper. Your point is good though. Just like we're now starting to put wi-fi chips into absolutely anything just in case, why wouldn't an advanced civilization simply use their super strength nanoparticles for everything? Why go out of your way to use worse materials?
- ben_w 5y ago
  In fairness, a building-sized battleship was crashed into the buildings in Into Darkness. What would happen if someone catapulted the (CVN-80) USS Enterprise through a bunch of skyscrapers?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  We use super-strength thousand year plastic for one time uses. It's a big problem.
  - manquer 5y ago
    It is only a problem for single planet species. Advanced multi planet or multi system civilizations may worry less about that than we do. Also if the bio diversity dropped, and people are used to living in closed ecosystems to limit damages from such harmful chemicals, over long enough period everyone will forget what was there before , further making bad things will not impact their quality of life anyway.
    - candiodari 5y ago
      It's also very unlikely that nature won't adapt to plastics. They have great amounts of chemical energy, and they're everywhere. Already you can see great decreases in plastic lifetimes, and they're decreasing faster and faster. The lifetime advantage plastics provide won't last. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis Without microbes breaking it down (which can be achieved in a number of ways, and generally it is at least slowed down) wood can last a millenium.
05 5y ago
> For example in the JJ Abrams movie Star Trek Into Darkness we see the Enterprise operating at depth in an ocean, then dramatically zooming away into space. Subverted in Futurama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GDthiBGMz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GDthiBGMz8
- cardiffspaceman 5y ago
  What about a craft like the space shuttle? You have it powered through the atmosphere by a set of powerful rocket engines. The forces on its hull while it is accelerated through the Atmosphere by rocket engines or gravity would seem to be analyzable as atmospheres of pressure. So the Enterprise and Bessie both need to be designed for more atmospheres than 1.0, due to the fact that both ships encounter gaseous environments while under acceleration.
  - vladTheInhaler 5y ago
    What your're talking about is called the max q condition[1]. It's definitely a significant design consideration, but I believe that the loading would very different when the rocket is plowing through the air in a particular direction, compared to an "equivalent" hydrostatic stress applied uniformly over the surface, so even though the structure might be fine with the first, it wouldn't survive the second. For instance, think about corrugated or honeycomb materials - they often have a "strong" orientation and a "weak" orientation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_q https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_q
im3w1l 5y ago
I think we need to distinguish between must-have and nice-to-have safety. To give an example, a car must not sponaneously disintegrate during normal high-way driving. That's what safety factor covers. If you floor it during heavy rain, and start skidding, crash into a tree, then that's kind of on you. Nevertheless the car will try to save you with abs breaks, crumple zones and airbags and what not. So the future you speak of is already kind of a reality with cars. But maybe expressing it as a pure factor is the wrong way to think about it.
djoldman 5y ago
I wonder if the strength of the monolith isn't targeting durability on the order of eons?
hef19898 5y ago
Back in the old Star Wars RPG from Westend Games, hull integrity was amplified by ballistic shields that were always on. Reason being, that hull had to withstand debris hits at the rediculous speeds in space. Given the speed and energy, I would assume kinetic impact would matter much. Pressure is different so, as even the hardest space ship only has to hold 2 bar, give or take, of pressure in.
tzs 5y ago
> Even as far back as the movie 2001, the monolith is made out of a material that humans can’t dent or cut. Why so strong? It’s basically just an automated radio. It's an automated radio that is supposed to operate unattended for millions of years. You want a strong case for that.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Things JJ Abrams touches tend to border on the absurd, but the principle is true in pre-Abrams Star Trek too. O'Brien sheds a little light on one of the aspects of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaPkSU8DNfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaPkSU8DNfY. GILORA: Starfleet code requires a second backup? O'BRIEN: In case the first backup fails. GILORA: What are the chances that both a primary system and its backup would fail at the same time? O'BRIEN: It's very unlikely, but in a crunch I wouldn't like to be caught without a second backup. From a different franchise, I keep thinking about the Ancients of StarGate universe, known for their technology, which could remain fully operational for millions of years. That's the true over-engineering. (But then I'm thinking, a species that mastered "stasis technology", commonly present in many sci-fi franchises, should eventually be able to make artifacts that can survive indefinitely, at least when not in operation.)
spease 5y ago
I can sort of buy this. In Gravity things are probably a lot more robust than they actually should be, but collisions with debris or other objects tend to be immediately fatal for the vehicles involved. Debris at high velocity goes straight through stuff. Similarly, in For All Mankind, most stuff is pretty fragile and volatile, as you’d expect for Apollo-era tech. It’s only the later stuff that the show makes up which starts to show much resilience. In the Expanse, technology is considerably more advanced, but still vastly inferior to any Star Trek or Star Wars vehicle. And in the Expanse we see the hulls of ships routinely get punctured, and a single torpedo or rail gun hit is often fairly decisive. Even the Donnager is forced to shut down its reactor due to a torpedo hit. And even in non-Abrams Trek, in an alternate timeline Voyager still survives a hard crash on a planet reasonably intact, even if it was fatal to everybody on board. Possibly only because the inertial dampeners were offline.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > in an alternate timeline Voyager still survives a hard crash on a planet reasonably intact, even if it was fatal to everybody on board Similarly, in the prime timeline, Enterprise-D ends its life with is engine section exploding, and the saucer section crash-landing into a forest. Externally, it looked pretty salvageable, but the insides were completely smashed. The crew survived, possibly because inertial dampeners still worked somewhat (I don't remember now), or maybe just because it flew on almost flat trajectory and used the aforementioned forest to slow itself down.
antonvs 5y ago
> the monolith is made out of a material that humans can’t dent or cut. Why so strong? It’s basically just an automated radio. The monoliths were supposed to be able to assess and monitor the activity and level of development of local species, possibly telepathically, catalyze evolution to develop intelligence, and encourage technology use. A monolith also transformed David Bowman into the Star Child. And of course, they had to maintain themselves over evolutionary timescales. So they were much more than just radios. In sequels (which perhaps don't count), they became ridiculously overpowered (spoiler alert), replicating exponentially to perform Kardashev level II feats of solar system engineering, and hosting multiple uploaded intelligences like Bowman and HAL.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> The idea is: this advanced civilization has such command over physical technology, that they can effortlessly engineer unnecessary strength without losing any of their designed performance. Are you sure the idea isn't just "we never thought about it"? Old cars are sturdy and robust while new cars are extremely fragile and will total themselves at the drop of a hat. That's not because the 50s possessed ancient technology lost to the modern day. We put a lot of effort into designing our cars to destroy themselves under stress. We do that so that more of the energy of a crash, should it happen, will go into deforming the car (since that's easy now!) and less of it will go into deforming the passengers.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Old cars were not sturdier or more robust than new cars. That’s a myth. You can Google “crash test old car vs new” or something like that to see examples.
  - andi999 5y ago
    True. Old cars has real bumpers though.
  - tcoff91 5y ago
    90s volvos were absolute tanks . My friend had one and it got rear ended while parked and both the car that rear ended it and the car in front of the Volvo got totaled. The Volvo was pretty much fine and just needed a new bumper (which was easily done as the bumpers were distinct from the body work).
  - svick 5y ago
    I believe it's at least partially true, because new cars are designed to be damaged in crashes, to better protect the people inside them.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Are you sure the idea isn't just "we never thought about it"? There are two sides to it. On the one hand, the new cars are "fragile" on purpose, because they're literally a big, single-use inertial dampener, with wheels and an engine. On the other hand, there are great many appliance categories where you can clearly tell the old models, made in 70s and earlier, are indeed sturdy and robust, and new models are just flimsy. Appliances that don't experience the kind of forces like cars have to account for. It's hard to give any other explanation here than the obvious one: the old models were made before the market optimized the quality away.
makapuf 5y ago
And we're also guilty of this when we use multiple ghz/GB computers with advanced GPU firing excel to make simple computations, or a multi-ton car to drive one person half a mile.

UncleMeat 5y ago

I don’t think this is science fiction doing this to connote the future in many of these cases. The cars in the “fast” franchise also survive ludicrous damage. The bodies of action heroes survive falls from ridiculous heights and blows and stab wounds that would kill somebody with ease. This is more a property of action movies (and adventure movies, to a lesser degree).

proggy 5y ago
The loose industry term for this is “plot armor” [1]. There is no explicitly stated reason for the hero(es) being nigh invincible (be it person, spaceship, car, etc.). The only reason why the character survives is that it has a reason to continue existing for sake of the plot. So yes, I suppose you can rationalize in your head that most ships are made out of super strong materials in science fiction, but unless that’s clearly laid out, you may just be rationalizing writer’s convenience. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor
glitchc 5y ago
Seems disingenuous to lump a science fiction movie where the focus is future technologies to an action movie with exaggerated physics and lack of real damage. In action movies, bad guys die with one bullet while the hero finds his way to safety (and survives!) despite having 10 or more lethal bullet wounds. For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. It's very much an action adventure set in space.
- ben_w 5y ago
  > For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. FWIW this is literally the first time I’ve encountered someone claiming that it isn’t science fiction. (Soft SciFi, to be sure, but still: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...)
  - gourlaysama 5y ago
    > FWIW this is literally the first time I’ve encountered someone claiming that it isn’t science fiction. Well, there's Science Fantasy [1]: Jedi and the Force are very much Wizards and Magic. I've heard it called Space Fantasy, too. [1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceFantasy https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceFantasy
    - snowwrestler 5y ago
      A bunch of classic “golden era” science fiction novels feature characters with unexplained mental powers, like Asimov’s Foundation series, Dune, Niven’s Known Space series, etc. Those seem like obvious fantasy now, but from about the 1950s through the 1970s, a lot of serious people believed that there were undiscovered powers of the human mind that science was on the verge of discovering or confirming. Mental powers are therefore a common anachronism of sci fi from that era. Most science fiction stories are going to feature some elements that are essentially unexplained and therefore act like magic in the story. I think most folks would consider 2001 to be science fiction but the powers of the monolith are at least as crazy and unexplained as what the Jedi can do.

codeflo 5y ago

About the Abrams movie: Too bad the same factor of safety wasn't applied to the buildings, where that should have been even cheaper. Your point is good though. Just like we're now starting to put wi-fi chips into absolutely anything just in case, why wouldn't an advanced civilization simply use their super strength nanoparticles for everything? Why go out of your way to use worse materials?

ben_w 5y ago
In fairness, a building-sized battleship was crashed into the buildings in Into Darkness. What would happen if someone catapulted the (CVN-80) USS Enterprise through a bunch of skyscrapers?
WalterBright 5y ago
We use super-strength thousand year plastic for one time uses. It's a big problem.
- manquer 5y ago
  It is only a problem for single planet species. Advanced multi planet or multi system civilizations may worry less about that than we do. Also if the bio diversity dropped, and people are used to living in closed ecosystems to limit damages from such harmful chemicals, over long enough period everyone will forget what was there before , further making bad things will not impact their quality of life anyway.
  - candiodari 5y ago
    It's also very unlikely that nature won't adapt to plastics. They have great amounts of chemical energy, and they're everywhere. Already you can see great decreases in plastic lifetimes, and they're decreasing faster and faster. The lifetime advantage plastics provide won't last. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis Without microbes breaking it down (which can be achieved in a number of ways, and generally it is at least slowed down) wood can last a millenium.

05 5y ago

> For example in the JJ Abrams movie Star Trek Into Darkness we see the Enterprise operating at depth in an ocean, then dramatically zooming away into space. Subverted in Futurama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GDthiBGMz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GDthiBGMz8

cardiffspaceman 5y ago
What about a craft like the space shuttle? You have it powered through the atmosphere by a set of powerful rocket engines. The forces on its hull while it is accelerated through the Atmosphere by rocket engines or gravity would seem to be analyzable as atmospheres of pressure. So the Enterprise and Bessie both need to be designed for more atmospheres than 1.0, due to the fact that both ships encounter gaseous environments while under acceleration.
- vladTheInhaler 5y ago
  What your're talking about is called the max q condition[1]. It's definitely a significant design consideration, but I believe that the loading would very different when the rocket is plowing through the air in a particular direction, compared to an "equivalent" hydrostatic stress applied uniformly over the surface, so even though the structure might be fine with the first, it wouldn't survive the second. For instance, think about corrugated or honeycomb materials - they often have a "strong" orientation and a "weak" orientation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_q https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_q

im3w1l 5y ago

I think we need to distinguish between must-have and nice-to-have safety. To give an example, a car must not sponaneously disintegrate during normal high-way driving. That's what safety factor covers. If you floor it during heavy rain, and start skidding, crash into a tree, then that's kind of on you. Nevertheless the car will try to save you with abs breaks, crumple zones and airbags and what not. So the future you speak of is already kind of a reality with cars. But maybe expressing it as a pure factor is the wrong way to think about it.

djoldman 5y ago

I wonder if the strength of the monolith isn't targeting durability on the order of eons?

hef19898 5y ago

Back in the old Star Wars RPG from Westend Games, hull integrity was amplified by ballistic shields that were always on. Reason being, that hull had to withstand debris hits at the rediculous speeds in space. Given the speed and energy, I would assume kinetic impact would matter much. Pressure is different so, as even the hardest space ship only has to hold 2 bar, give or take, of pressure in.

tzs 5y ago

> Even as far back as the movie 2001, the monolith is made out of a material that humans can’t dent or cut. Why so strong? It’s basically just an automated radio. It's an automated radio that is supposed to operate unattended for millions of years. You want a strong case for that.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Things JJ Abrams touches tend to border on the absurd, but the principle is true in pre-Abrams Star Trek too. O'Brien sheds a little light on one of the aspects of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaPkSU8DNfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaPkSU8DNfY. GILORA: Starfleet code requires a second backup? O'BRIEN: In case the first backup fails. GILORA: What are the chances that both a primary system and its backup would fail at the same time? O'BRIEN: It's very unlikely, but in a crunch I wouldn't like to be caught without a second backup. From a different franchise, I keep thinking about the Ancients of StarGate universe, known for their technology, which could remain fully operational for millions of years. That's the true over-engineering. (But then I'm thinking, a species that mastered "stasis technology", commonly present in many sci-fi franchises, should eventually be able to make artifacts that can survive indefinitely, at least when not in operation.)

spease 5y ago

I can sort of buy this. In Gravity things are probably a lot more robust than they actually should be, but collisions with debris or other objects tend to be immediately fatal for the vehicles involved. Debris at high velocity goes straight through stuff. Similarly, in For All Mankind, most stuff is pretty fragile and volatile, as you’d expect for Apollo-era tech. It’s only the later stuff that the show makes up which starts to show much resilience. In the Expanse, technology is considerably more advanced, but still vastly inferior to any Star Trek or Star Wars vehicle. And in the Expanse we see the hulls of ships routinely get punctured, and a single torpedo or rail gun hit is often fairly decisive. Even the Donnager is forced to shut down its reactor due to a torpedo hit. And even in non-Abrams Trek, in an alternate timeline Voyager still survives a hard crash on a planet reasonably intact, even if it was fatal to everybody on board. Possibly only because the inertial dampeners were offline.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> in an alternate timeline Voyager still survives a hard crash on a planet reasonably intact, even if it was fatal to everybody on board Similarly, in the prime timeline, Enterprise-D ends its life with is engine section exploding, and the saucer section crash-landing into a forest. Externally, it looked pretty salvageable, but the insides were completely smashed. The crew survived, possibly because inertial dampeners still worked somewhat (I don't remember now), or maybe just because it flew on almost flat trajectory and used the aforementioned forest to slow itself down.

antonvs 5y ago

> the monolith is made out of a material that humans can’t dent or cut. Why so strong? It’s basically just an automated radio. The monoliths were supposed to be able to assess and monitor the activity and level of development of local species, possibly telepathically, catalyze evolution to develop intelligence, and encourage technology use. A monolith also transformed David Bowman into the Star Child. And of course, they had to maintain themselves over evolutionary timescales. So they were much more than just radios. In sequels (which perhaps don't count), they became ridiculously overpowered (spoiler alert), replicating exponentially to perform Kardashev level II feats of solar system engineering, and hosting multiple uploaded intelligences like Bowman and HAL.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> The idea is: this advanced civilization has such command over physical technology, that they can effortlessly engineer unnecessary strength without losing any of their designed performance. Are you sure the idea isn't just "we never thought about it"? Old cars are sturdy and robust while new cars are extremely fragile and will total themselves at the drop of a hat. That's not because the 50s possessed ancient technology lost to the modern day. We put a lot of effort into designing our cars to destroy themselves under stress. We do that so that more of the energy of a crash, should it happen, will go into deforming the car (since that's easy now!) and less of it will go into deforming the passengers.

snowwrestler 5y ago
Old cars were not sturdier or more robust than new cars. That’s a myth. You can Google “crash test old car vs new” or something like that to see examples.
- andi999 5y ago
  True. Old cars has real bumpers though.
- tcoff91 5y ago
  90s volvos were absolute tanks . My friend had one and it got rear ended while parked and both the car that rear ended it and the car in front of the Volvo got totaled. The Volvo was pretty much fine and just needed a new bumper (which was easily done as the bumpers were distinct from the body work).
- svick 5y ago
  I believe it's at least partially true, because new cars are designed to be damaged in crashes, to better protect the people inside them.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Are you sure the idea isn't just "we never thought about it"? There are two sides to it. On the one hand, the new cars are "fragile" on purpose, because they're literally a big, single-use inertial dampener, with wheels and an engine. On the other hand, there are great many appliance categories where you can clearly tell the old models, made in 70s and earlier, are indeed sturdy and robust, and new models are just flimsy. Appliances that don't experience the kind of forces like cars have to account for. It's hard to give any other explanation here than the obvious one: the old models were made before the market optimized the quality away.

makapuf 5y ago

And we're also guilty of this when we use multiple ghz/GB computers with advanced GPU firing excel to make simple computations, or a multi-ton car to drive one person half a mile.