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1. It was a largely uniformly flat planet. It was only 2ft deep due to the tidal wave borrowing water ahead of it. See videos of Tsunamis doing the same thing

• calvin_c 12y ago
  The ball scene at the end happened because the ball hit the 'escape velocity' of the spherical habitat, which allowed it to break the gravitation pull of centrifugal force and get caught by the other side. I don't see how this references the fact that being sent near and even into the black hole didn't cause some massive time differences between the two scientists as it did earlier in the film.
  • justifier 12y ago
    my understanding was the station at the end had true localised gravitation, thanks to the 'quantum data' TARS collected, rather than psuedo gravity induced by centrifugal force with the baseball the ball left the gravitation of the field's surface and entered the gravity on the other side of the column station's interior surface that held the house
    • calvin_c 12y ago
      Interesting, it certainly gives an explanation to the not very clear "Why do we need this equation to get people off the planet" question, but then why build the ship as a cylinder (which by design takes advantage of centrifugal force) if they're going to use localized gravity to keep things on the ground? I assumed they had taken advantage of gravity manipulation to save on immense fuel costs of getting the giant payload out of Earth's gravity well, and used centrifugal force while en route.
      • justifier 12y ago
        though unable to answer explicitly a hypothetical of a hypothetical of a fiction.. it is a fun, and arguably healthy'productive exercise to dream on it.. from the perspective of the film makers it seemed like a shout out to the colony art nasa published a while back(i), similar to the shout out to event horizon: 'your explanation opened my mind, bending space time like a piece of paper and passing through it like a pencil.. i'll take it to the next level, what is a hole in three dimensions? open the paper and look at the hole as a circle forming a sphere' fun stuff if we want to examine the practicality of a cylindrical colony i think we could come up with something.. maybe as a safety measure from space debris? maybe as an engineering consideration: it was easier to build an accommodatingly sized colony like this? easier to maintain a controlled climate? maybe as a lighting'photosynthesis consideration? perhaps it's a 'so preoccupied with whether they could' punchline? perhaps the other side of the column is also utilised space: imagine almost doubling the surface area of the planet by colonising both the surface and the interior of the planet with an inverted zenith; and the film only showed us inside the column, again, as a wink at the audience (i) http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArt/art.html http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArt/art.html
    • metaphorm 12y ago
      if it had artificial "true" gravity then why was it shaped like a cylinder? typically the cylinder shape is used to take advantage of rotation for centrifugal force "fake" gravity.
      • justifier 12y ago
        i tried to address this concern in the reply above, but i wanted to mention i like your use of ""s, i felt dirty, and considered and reconsidered multiple times the verbage, saying 'psuedo gravity' i like the idea of gravity perhaps being an effect of inertia due to centrifugal forces, caused by the spinning and orbiting and expanding and mass of objects in space, stead it being it's own agnostic 'force' in which case setting centrifugal force and gravity as separates would be incorrect, and the ""s wholly necessary