Dr. James Van Allen
was once asked by a reporter to 'define space'. He replied, "Space is the hole that we are in."
Most people can't get their minds around just how vast the universe is in distance or time. Nevermind the fact that, according to Albert Einstein, they are two sides of the same coin. So it should come as little surprise that most Speculative Fiction writers can't either.
This is chiefly true of creators of TV, film, and video game SF. Creators of written science fiction can be positively obsessive about accuracy (mostly). If your qualitative yardstick is based around an author's ability to describe distances, this may be a useful way to distinguish good print science fiction from bad print science fiction.
On the other hand, "Space is so ridiculously huge that there is absolutely no realistic way that anyone could ever travel to anywhere even remotely interesting in the lifespan of most major civilizations", while not a total deal-breaker, does rule out an awfully broad range of plots.
For example, consider that a lightyear is on the order of 10 quadrillion metres or nearly six trillion miles. Let's assume your family car uses about 2 and a half gallons (11.37 litres) of fuel per 100km - about 25 mpg - and a gallon (2.55 litres) costs about $4 USD (i.e. 1.6 USD/1 Euro per litre) to traverse it. This means that one lightyear is roughly where you'd end up if you spent the entire national debt of the US on petroleum fuel, or nearly 4 times the cost of the entire Apollo program. At 60 miles per hour, it would take 11 million years to drive there. At the opposite end, an atomic nucleus is on the order of a quadrillionth of a meter. That's ten-to-the-power-of-negative-fifteen of a meter, or a femtometer. Such outrageous SI prefixes rarely appear in fiction, and that's before we get anywhere near the scales of galaxies and subatomic particles. This is because most writers aren't that good at or are too lazy to implement mathematics. If it sounds like a number made up by a child (Attention all yoctograms!, septillion seconds), the writer might have actually taken it seriously.
Writers fare no better with time, and this aspect of the trope spills over into fantasy writing as well. Many popular fantasy shared worlds are medieval in character and hundreds or even thousands of years old, yet the medieval period overall lasted at most around 800 years and the technology and armors in use in most fantasy settings were only around for a century or so. Many writers also completely ignore the effects of entropy - that is the speed at which objects decay if not actively maintained. Exposed skeletons rarely last a year before being torn apart and scattered by scavengers - and even if protected from that they will decay and turn to dust within a decade unless buried. Exposed metal will corrode, concrete will crumble, the speed at which cleared areas will reforest if humans leave can be dramatic as can be seen in the vicinity of Chernobyl.
A way of explaining the scale of the universe is to use Fermi style estimation to the nearest powers of ten. The solar system is about a million times the width of the Earth while the Milky Way galaxy is 100 million times the width of the solar system, and the observable universe is a million times the width of the Milky Way. The size of the universe beyond that is speculation, though the observable universe may be but a speck in the larger universe, assuming it's not infinite.
Another example that often comes up is the idea of beings coming to our galaxy from another galaxy. While there's no reason why a writer can't introduce beings from the nearest galaxy intent on contacting/conquering the Milky Way, there would have to be a pretty dang good reason to travel the incredibly vast distances separating galaxies — distances which make traveling between stars seem like a little hop. Even in a billion years (assuming a sentient Earth species still exists by then - given that the sun will have grown bright and hot enough to make living on Earth a real pain, it's likely we'll have already jumped planets or found a way to move the Earth to a safer distance) when Andromeda begins its final approach to the Milky Way, it would still theoretically take an Andromedan civilisation a considerable amount of time to reach the arm of the Milky Way where the Solar System resides.
A common problem is also just grasping the sheer population of galaxy-spanning civilisations, which could easily be in the trillions with even relatively small area of a galaxy inhabited. And likewise, interstellar navies often only consist of a few hundred ships at maximum, or supposedly massive interstellar multi-planetary ground wars are said to be fought with troops in the low millions or hundreds of thousands - as a comparison, World War 2 on Earth alone had an estimated total of 100-127 million combatants.
Some would consider this one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality. If the characters didn't travel through space at thousands of times the speed of light, it wouldn't be very interesting unless the focus was just the spaceship itself. Either you'd have to make the ship incredibly powerful to max out Time Dilation and shorten the time spent from the characters' perspective, put the characters into some kind of suspended animation (and just fast forward through their journeys), or even have entire generations of characters that would live and die on the ship before they even reached a known extrasolar planet (meaning the audience would say They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character or treat the new generations as a Replacement Scrappy), and so on... If Star Trek, for example, was realistically scaled, it'd be a lot less interesting.
When adding examples, it may be wise to consider the capabilities of the faction in question. What is "unrealistic" for a low-tech harder-SF group may not be so for a high-Kardashev Higher-Tech Species; after all, what we can do now would be outlandish to our medieval ancestors, so who's to say a society centuries if not millennia more advanced than us can't invent a "unrealistically" light yet superstrong material? On the other hand, some things are laws of physics, not limits of technology, and the difference is an important one (any ship that expels an exhaust to propel itself, for example, functions by the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, which is basically a special case of the Second Law of Motion—regardless of what the exhaust is or how it imparts the energy to expel it).
Related tropes include:
- Artistic License – Space: The Super-Trope in cases where writers fail to understand how far apart, how big, or how energetic stellar objects are.
- Conveniently Close Planet: A Contrived Coincidence wherein there always seems to be a safe planet available when space travelers get into trouble.
- Everything in Space Is a Galaxy: Calling things galaxies that are not.
- Evolutionary Stasis: The life forms in ecosystems do not further evolve or change from one time period to another.
- Hollywood Density: Writers neglecting the density of objects.
- Medieval Stasis: Society stays locked in a pre-industrial state for a very long time.
- Modern Stasis: Society stays looking like the modern-day Western world for a very long time.
- Planetville: Space Opera settings treating entire planets like the Adventure Towns trope, or otherwise failing to grasp how big they are.
- Space Age Stasis: Future societies stay the same for a very long time.
- Square-Cube Law: When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier and its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier. In other words, volume, and therefore usually mass, increases much faster than external size does. This is often neglected in fiction.
- Unit Confusion: Fiction writers misusing units of measurement.
- What Other Galaxies?: Treating the terms "galaxy" and "universe" as if they were interchangeable.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Math errors in fiction, which may overlap.
Examples:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Tabletop Games
- Toys
- Video Games
- Western Animation
- Antipodes: 10,000 years have passed since the cataclysm that ended Equestria. This is a span of time over twice as long as the entirety of written history. It would be long enough for languages to evolve beyond recognizability, for societies to develop into distinctly new cultures, for ponies to be well on the way to developing into a distinctly new species, for the old world's ruins to have all been eroded down to long-buried foundations, and for almost every piece of Lost Technology to become eroded into nothingness. Despite this, all old-world tech simply needs some tune-ups to work, and the ruins of ancient buildings are only about as worn down as they would be after a few decades to a few centuries of abandonment.
- Avatars II: When Qwaritch Takes Revenge has the titular Miles Qwaritch leaving Earth and returning to Pandora in the 4 minutes 35 seconds that the song Welcome to the Jungle lasts. Pandora is a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and the ships in the source material take six years to make the journey.
- In Boys und Sensha-dō!, Miho Nishizumi, a Japanese girl whos 5'2" and appears to be of average weight, is once described as weighing 80 kg, which is overly heavy for a girl like her.
- Child of the Storm generally tries to avert this when it comes up (which it usually doesn't, thanks to portal technology and hyperspace travel), with the author pointing out just how vast galaxies are, especially as compared to individual solar systems (this usually in respect to people who assume that the scale goes 'planet' to 'star' to 'solar system' to 'galaxy').
- In Christian Humber Reloaded, Season-Bringer is a dragon that is 22 miles long, yet somehow weighs as much as the United States (including the continent it's built on!), making him unrealistically heavy even for his absurd size.
- The Conversion Bureau: The Chatoverse: In ''Ten Minutes: Aftermath", the planet busting nuke was found to have a mass of 43.6 teragrams (36e+10 kilograms) or about 119 times the mass of the Empire State Building. It's specifically stated to be made of cesium and promethium. The picture drawn of the device shows it to be approximately the same size as the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which weighed a mere 4,400 kg. Even assuming the entire planet buster was filled with promethium at 7.26 grams/cubic cm, that still only comes out to a weight of 8639.4 kg. And for the bomb to weigh that much with the given dimensions, the filling of the bomb would have to have a density of 302,521 kg/cubic cm...which is about the same density as a white dwarf.
- Desperately Seeking Ranma has the team visit one in chapter 85. The setting involves high technology AND lots of magic, with the sphere’s inhabitants being effectively a precursor race. Minor aversion, though: even they don’t know where the thing came from, nor where all the mass could have come from either.
- In Exitium Eternal, the Council is horrified that ten million people dying of causes other than accidents and old age in a single day is nearly a record low for the Exalted Exitium. However, at the most conservative estimates, the Exitium contains a quadrillion sentient membersnote . By the current standards of Earth's human population, that's less than one hundred deaths per day.
- Kyon: Big Damn Hero: Tsuruya will be the 108th family head when she eventually assumes that position. A single generation lasts approximately twenty-five years, so this implies that Tsuruya's family has been around for 2700 years — the ancestors of the Japanese did not even exist in Japan at that time. Even if we are charitable and assume that the position of family head has sometimes passed from sibling to sibling, or that some heads have resigned the position while still alive, and estimate the time between the 1st and 108th heads to be a quarter of that, then the family would have originated in the Muromachi period (c. 14th century). However, as a Yakuza family, it could not have existed before the Yakuza originated, at some time in the Edo period (c. 17th century).
- Pokémon Tabletop Utopus Region: In one episode, Lavi intercepts a Donphan and soccer kicks into the air to stop it stampeding Jade. The GM says that he gets it about ten metres into the air. Given that Donphan weigh 120kg, a kick with that kind of strength would be packing 25,400-29,500 Newtons of force, depending on the angle he kicked it at. Which is over ten times the amount required to crush a human skull. The more likely prospect is that the GM was exaggerating.
- In Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer Spectra is this really big diamond thing that emits light that makes it possible for life to exist. Unfortunately, The Dark Princess wants to claim it for herself, even though this will kill all life, including her. Spectra is implied to be the size of a real planet or star, yet the Princesse's Slave Mooks have managed to cover a significant percentage of its surface area in cable. Also, at the end The Dark Princess tries to ram Spectra and shatter it as a final act of defeated spite. assuming Spectra is only as big as Earth, you'd need about 100 zettatons worth of energy to destroy it, and her starship is only about as big as a schoolbus.
- Voices of a Distant Star: The talking computer (or whatever it is) does this a few times, saying that enemy units are "at twenty thousand" or similar things. It isn't even all that clear what type of a unit this is; it's probably a distance, but it could be the number of uneaten sandwiches they have in storage, for all we know.
- A scientist was lecturing about the eventual death of the Sun in about 5 billion years, however a man in the audience watching the lecture started worrying and got up. "What did you say?", said the man. "How long do we have left before the Sun finally dies?" "5 billion years", replied the scientist. The man in the audience scoffed, "5 billion years?! What a relief. I thought you said 5 million years!"
- The short narrations that precede the lyrics of Ayreon's album The Universal Migrator 2 - Flight of the Migrator have a goof putting the quasar 3C 273 in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. While 3C 273 is in the direction of the Virgo constellation, that quasar it's at nearly 2.5 billion light-years and that galaxy cluster at just around 50 million light-years, being unrelated to the latter.
- The music video for "The Ghost Inside" by Broken Bells features a toll booth in space.
- "Genie in a Bottle," recorded by Christina Aguilera, features the line "Hormones racing at the speed of light." In reality, hormones travel much slower in the bloodstream—about 0.3 to 0.4 meters per second—compared to the speed of light, which is 299,792,458 meters per second. While the song captures the intensity of emotions, hormones don't actually move at light speed but rather take seconds to minutes or hours to affect the body.
- Doctor Steel has a song called "12,000 Miles Through Space," which is about aliens crash-landing on Earth and jump-starting humanity. These aliens apparently didn't come from very far, as the Moon orbits just under 240,000 miles from Earth. The song samples a recording about satellite transmission, and that's far more reasonable, as some satellites cruise at about that altitude.
- Dune's 1997 song "Million Miles from Home" claims that the narrator is "floating through the galaxy" with the task "to find another happy place." Because the distance from Earth to the Sun already is approximately 90 million miles, he couldn't have gotten very far yet.
- "The Final Countdown" by Swedish band Europe. "We're heading for Venus, and still we stand tall [...] With so many light years to go and things to be found." Admittedly, light seconds don't sound nearly as good.
- Katie Melua's "Nine Million Bicycle In Beijing" featured the lines "We are 12 billion light-years from the edge. That's a guess — no one can ever say it's true," until a writer/scientist corrected her. She recorded an alternate version, changing the line to "We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars."
- The Mechanisms have a filk version of Tony Goodenough's "Pump Shanty," where the spaceship crew is pumping manually to keep the damaged life-support system functioning for three days until they can reach "the Periphery." The original lyric is "We're just a thousand miles from home" - about twenty-fifth of Earth's circumference and a long way to go on a sailing ship that predates engine-powered bilge pumps. The Mechanisms' lyric is "a million miles from home." Assuming they're heading for the periphery of their solar system (and not, say, their galaxy) and theirs is roughly the same size as ours - well, the minimum distance between Earth and Pluto is 2.66 billion miles. Either they've already been on this ship for at least twenty years, or they should be able to cover a million miles pretty quickly, which takes some of the bite out of the sarcasm of the original lyric. Or they're just being figurative when they say a million.
- In "Written In The Stars" by Tinie Tempah, he sings, "Written in the stars, a million miles away..." A million miles wouldn't even get to the closest planet, let alone stars. The nearest star from Earth that we know of (after the sun), Proxima Centauri, is about a quarter of a billion times farther than one million miles.
- Scientology:
- Founder L. Ron Hubbard said that a lot of things happened to the Thetans trillions of years ago — gorilla-themed mental-implant carnivals, bear-themed mental-implant explosions, "little orange-colored bombs that could talk", a brass dog that sucked people through it with electricity, etc. despite the Big Bang happening around 13.8 billion years ago. Of course, Hubbard's answer will be that the scientists are wrong and he's right, the Big Bang did not happen 13.8 billion years ago and whoever contradicts it is too blind or brainwashed to understand the truth. This is actually presented in a scene in The Master (2012).
- One popular anti-Scientology website had an evolutionary biologist explain everything wrong with this account, and sums up the article as “Scientology: Just as wrong as creationism, but in the opposite direction.”
- Journey into Space: In Journey to the Moon/Operation Luna, while under the control of the Time Travellers, Mitch claims that their ship is from hundreds of lightyears away: the other side of the universe.
- Planet Man referred to the Astro Drive, enabling the hero to travel the "millions of light-years to Alpha Centauri." Alpha Centauri is just 4.37 light-years away — in fact, it's the closest star system to our own. Traveling "millions of light-years" would be a lot more impressive.
- In Orson Welles's Radio Drama adaptation of The War of the Worlds, rocket-launch explosions on the surface of Mars precede the Martian invaders' arrival by only a few minutes, as allowing any more time for their multimillion-mile journey would've run too long for the broadcast.
- Darths & Droids elaborately parodies the destruction of the Hosnian system in The Force Awakens, where the explosion could be seen right away from light-years away (fifty in the comic), by revealing that the Peace Moon's beam travelled backwards in time to explode the system fifty years ago so that the explosion could be seen now. Heck, they weren't even aiming at the Hosnian system in this version; they just assumed they could shoot right through that area because there hadn't been anything there for fifty years. (The odds of aiming at one system and happening to have another in the way, given how space is almost entirely empty, is probably a straight example of this trope.) This was all because the designer of the beam had known his ignorant superiors would want to see a big explosion right away.
- Girl Genius:
- The Heterodyne dynasty is either a really bad example or a really good aversion, depending on perspective. They have apparently been in power for upwards of a thousand years, ever since Ghengis Ht'rok-din claimed the sacred spring at the center of what would become the Heterodyne Valley. The problem is that it's basically unheard of for a single dynasty to last that long in real life. The quirk is that this is such a Crapsack World ruled by Mad Scientists that the vast majority of other empires average out at about ten years. Compared to that, it's no wonder the Heterodynes have been the boogeyman of the continent for as long as anyone can remember. Entire rings of fortresses have been built to contain them, only to themselves fall into dynastic infighting while the Heterodynes survive.
- Things start getting ridiculous with the god-queens and their eras. Albia is approximately eight thousand years old, and was one of the younger members of the sisterhood of god-queens. They communicated through the use of the "queen's mirrors," a Portal Network that was ancient to them. Later, the Polar Lords claim to be "older than the Queens, older than the gate-builders, older than the bronze men."
- Lampshaded in Grrl Power, where Math claims to be the 999th in a line of martial artists. Assuming 20 years per generation, said line should be twice as old as agriculture and have started in the Stone Age. The comic cast page calls Math's claim "ridiculous unless you assume both parents of every generation in his tree were martial artists", implying that the "999 generations" thing is a Tall Tale.
- In Homestuck, the Green Sun is stated to be nearly twice the mass of the universe, totaling 2*1053 kg (which gives a Schwarzschild radiusnote of 2.97*1023 kilometers, or 31.39 billion lightyears), yet it visibly has little to no gravitational pull. Until Act 7, that is, when Alternate!Calliope causes it to collapse into a black hole — which, having remembered the consequences of being an unimaginably massive object, proceeds to start sucking in the fabric of spacetime as opposed to just warping it. Then again, it's located in the Void Between the Worlds, where time and space are explicitly mentioned to flow differently from ours
- In Nip and Tuck, the Show Within a Show Rebel Cry features a Royal Brat who doesn't get it. Even the writer obviously does.
- Receives a lampshade in Schlock Mercenary, where aliens who habitually make Dyson spheres of a canvas-like material kept inflated by light pressure from the enclosed star (still pretty significant work structurally, but not beyond that universe's tech base) have a nickname for it that translates as "This was expensive to build." Or more literally translated, "Expensive, expensive, expensive *BLEEP* we built."
- Sagan 4:
- In the Alpha timeline, plate tectonics didn't match the actual timescale and new kingdoms of animals would evolve from scratch in just a few million years. The latter is also seen in the Beta timeline, but was quickly snuffed out by the addition of a specific rule against doing so.
- In both Alpha and Beta, it can take tens of millions of years for a group of organisms to spread across an entire continent due to the timescale system being disconnected from the per-species habitat rules, when in real life a continent can be covered in less than one million years. However, this is somewhat mitigated in Beta with the addition of wildcard species, which can be in as many habitats as can be justified.
- The inverse also occurs with things happening too slowly. In Alpha, the rules about size increases were so restrictive that plants would take too long to grow large and only reach the size of large shrubs before the next extinction event, sometimes as much as 100 million years later, would kill them off—resulting in there never being any realistically large flora. In Beta, this is addressed and averted with new rules allowing flora to grow large much faster than fauna, and when Alpha was revived these rules were added there as well.
- An In-Universe example happens in the SCP Foundation entry SCP-1958, a microbus that, through means unknown, was able to achieve spaceflight, with the occupants' goal of reaching Alpha Centauri. They thought they would get there in maybe four weeks at most, despite the van only being able to reach 130 km/h. For reference, Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away. After two months, they were not even past the moon; the journal detailing the tragic journey points out that one of the crew "fucked up the math", which they did big time; at their current pace, they would've taken another 37 million years to reach their destination. By the time the Foundation discovers the ghost vessel, it was near Mars at best.
- The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy: Discussed in regards to space history. The universe has been around for a staggeringly long time, but the Standard Sci-Fi History rarely delves into anything much older than human space exploration. This makes some sense, since actually tackling the whole lot is very difficult. Even if the very oldest aliens only appeared five percent of universal history ahead of us, that'd still leave 500 million years of history to write, which at a rate of a paragraph per million years would require something like a hundred pages or so of space, even before considering how advanced an even tens-of-millions-years-old civilization would be. Most writers deal with this problem by just avoiding it.
- During Barack Obama's presidency, a petition to build the Death Star was submitted to a form the administration added on WhiteHouse.gov. It reached 25,000 signatures, which means the government has to respond. So they did, outlining why they won't: namely, it'll increase the size of the budget defecit a thousandfold, the government doesn't support blowing up planets, and also they're not going to build a weapon that can be destroyed by one guy in a spaceship.
