The Geek That Is Me

[aadler]

So last week I watched Passengers, a sci-fi flick involving two people on an interstellar colony transport waking from hibernation 90 years prematurely (i.e., long before the liner arrives and anyone else is scheduled to awake). And, of course …

Looking at the situation they faced at the end — there was capacity for one of them, but only one, to go back into cold sleep and awaken along with everyone else — I immediately started thinking, “But wait: couldn’t there be some way for them to take turns — she’s in for five months, then they spend a month together, then he’s in for five months — so that they don’t age out and die before all the others, and arrive more or less together?”

Well, naturally, I had to set up a spreadsheet to see if it could be done. And, yes: on that basis, each of them would age six months for every year that passed, so that at the end of 88 years (the time remaining at the end), each of them would be 44 years older. It would work.

So why am I smarter than the people who write movies, yet nobody pays me millions to make their stuff better?

(Later) Okay, yeah, the overlap would mean that one full cycle — one ‘sleeping’, then both awake, then the other sleeping — would only cover eleven months out of the year. Stretched out, it would average to each of them aging seven months over the course of a year, so that over 88 years they would each age a bit over 51 years. It’s still doable, especially with future medical tech to keep them healthy.

Comments

[snogged.livejournal.com]

That's a smart idea.

[aadler]

It isn’t necessarily something that needed to be done, but the fact that it was possible should at least have been addressed. Just talking about things, even if the decision is to go another way, adds layers. At least, that’s the experience I’ve had in my own writing.