Phil Plait, creator of the favored astronomy weblog Bad Astronomy, credit his curiosity in outer area partly to his childhood love of science fiction motion pictures corresponding to Angry Red Planet and Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

“I’m a huge science fiction dork,” Plait says in Episode 541 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I’ve watched every TV show, just about, and movies and everything, read tons of books. I love science fiction.”

In his new ebook, Under Alien Skies, Plait explores what numerous cosmic vistas would appear like for an individual who was bodily current, finding out them with extraordinary human eyesight. “I open each chapter with a short vignette, basically a fictional tale,” he says. “Most of the time it’s in second person. So I say ‘You are at this planet,’ ‘You are standing on the bridge of your starship,’ ‘You are standing there watching a dust storm approach you on Mars.’ And that way hopefully it’s even more of an immersive experience for the reader.”

Plait hopes that the ebook will function a useful useful resource for filmmakers and science fiction authors seeking to inject an additional dose of actuality into their speculative visions. “I’ve actually done some consulting for movies and TV shows, and even a couple of video games,” he says. “So I kind of know that process of advising writers, or other folks who are involved in the entertainment business, of what the real science is.”

As a lot as Plait enjoys seeing science fiction that comes with actual science, he acknowledges that the last word goal of any ebook or film is to inform a great story. “Even if they don’t get the science correct, it’s OK, because you’re still inspiring people,” he says. “And if they get the science right? Hey, bonus.”

Listen to the entire interview with Philip Plait in Episode 541 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And try some highlights from the dialogue under.

Phil Plait on Mars:

On Earth, the sky is blue throughout the day, after which when the solar units, across the solar you may get pink sky, due to haze and junk that’s floating within the air, which tends to soak up or scatter away blue and inexperienced mild. The finish course of is that that mild doesn’t get to your eye, simply the redder stuff does, and so the solar seems to be pink and the sky seems to be pink across the solar. But on Mars it’s the other. There’s all this mud within the air, and that mud is iron oxide, it’s rust, and it floats within the ambiance and tints the sky pink. But at sundown, it tends to scatter the blue mild towards you. So throughout the day the sky is pink, however at sundown—and dawn in fact, as properly—the sky is type of blue.

Phil Plait on science consulting:

I bought an e-mail from one of many digital results folks [on The Expanse] saying, “Hey, we’ve got a shot coming up where we’re going close to Jupiter. What would that look like?” So I wrote a couple of paragraphs after which despatched it away, after which when that episode aired it was like, “Oh look! They did all that.” That was actually cool. … I did some consulting for the film Arrival, and once more that was an entire, weird circumstance the place I used to be consulting with a manufacturing firm on one thing utterly totally different, and so they mentioned, “Hey, we’ve got this script for this movie coming out, if you want to take a look at it and check the science of it.” And I did, and made a couple of notes and despatched it again and forgot about it. And then years later the film comes out, and I’m watching it and I’m like, “Hey wait a minute! I remember this scene.” So it was actually cool. It’s enjoyable how that stuff works out typically.

Phil Plait on asteroids:

Plenty of small asteroids are literally what we name “rubble piles.” They are enormous collections of rock, from tiny ones smaller than pebbles as much as boulders that could possibly be as huge as a home or extra. But they’re not one stable object. It’s not a big rock in area. … If you have been on a spaceship approaching an asteroid a mile throughout, it has negligible gravity. So you’re in your spaceship and also you’re hanging off the aspect of this factor, and also you bounce out of your spaceship to the asteroid, it may not have a stable floor so that you can land on. You may simply sink as much as and previous the highest of your spacesuit, simply to have the ability to stand on this. So I assumed that was type of a humorous method to open that chapter, with an astronaut mainly caught inside an asteroid, a couple of meters down, and his compatriot has to return and get him.

Phil Plait on globular clusters:

There’s one other type of cluster referred to as a globular cluster, and these are roughly spherical clusters of a whole bunch of hundreds and even one million stars. … When you go outdoors at night time, from the darkest website on Earth you’ll see a couple of thousand stars within the sky, and it seems to be just like the sky is simply coated in stars. But in a globular cluster you could possibly have 50 occasions that many stars within the sky, and a variety of them could be so vibrant—as a result of these are pink large stars, or different stars which are very luminous and really vibrant, and fairly near this planet, as a result of these clusters aren’t that huge—that you could possibly learn by them. They would forged shadows on the bottom. And so you could possibly have hundreds of stars like that in your sky.

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