‘Prometheus’ Screenwriter: Humans Will Never Reach Another Star

Source: @Forbes @parmy

#screenwriter #film #screenplay

“If you’ve seen the trailer for “Prometheus,” the dark, hotly-anticipated prequel to Ridley Scott’s “Alien” franchise, you probably got a healthy dose of some of the best that sci-fi filmmaking can offer: shrieking astronauts in spherical-glass helmets, ships that travel at light-speed to craggy, blue-tinted planets and spinning holographic star charts.

All the stuff that tickles our imagination and makes us ponder humanity’s space-faring future. It may be a surprise then, that the man who wrote the original screenplay for “Prometheus” doesn’t see our reality planning out that way, rather neatly knocking on the head the notion that much of what we see and read in science fiction, is a hoped-for precursor to real technology.

Jon Spaihts, known as the “go-to guy” for Hollywood sci-fi screenplays, says that for decades, science-fiction writers have overestimated our civilization’s future technological progression; it makes him a story teller by trade, but a pragmatist at heart.

“Science fiction has taught us to see the universe as vastly smaller and less energetic than it is,” Spaihts said during a phone interview on Monday. “Space travel involves such mind-boggling distances and high energies that I think most people have no idea how difficult it is.” He paused for a moment. “My personal belief is that as much as I love science fiction, human beings will never reach another star.”

The reason for this is simple. Traveling at light speed, which is something most space-faring science fiction tales suppose, is impossible. It’s “not just something we don’t have a theoretical underpinning for, but theoretically prohibited,” Spaihts says. Even at rapid speeds, a journey to another star a would take generations, and require rockets to expend a tremendous amount of energy, “throwing something in the other direction – rocket exhaust.” The farther you go the more propellant you have to carry. “The energy you spend getting out on that fantastic clip, you have to spend that at either end stopping.”

All very rational. Fortunately, Spaihts can reconcile the logical reality of our future with his story-telling, by remembering where the mythology of space exploration comes from: a “nautical model,” and one that sees innovation constantly speeding up. “It’s a recapitulation of our story of the last generations as we have, as a species, expanded our understanding by orders of magnitude every century, and at an accelerating rate,” says Spaihts.

It is easy to expect that this “ramp” will continue ever upwards and that the expansion of human power and ingenuity will continue to ever-dazzling heights. How could that not take us to over planets? Spaihts points out we already see limits to some of these “ramps” on earth — to fossil fuels, to Moore’s Law, and to the speed at which one can travel through space. “These limits are non-negotiable,” he says. We may sometimes find alternatives, in making micro-processors cheaper and more energy efficient, for……..”