TechStuff Classic: There's a Halloween Event on the Horizon

What's the premise of the horror film Event Horizon? What is an event horizon? How do black holes work?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heeart Radio
and allow of all things tech, and it is time
for a classic episode of tech Stuff. This one originally
published on October two thousand thirteen, and that would be

(00:28):
Halloween Ean or Halloween Eve, which is already an eve. Yeah,
it's titled There's a Halloween Event on the Horizon. I
remember this. It's where I got to talk about the
movie Event Horizon and the wonderfully terrible technologies in that film.
I hope you guys enjoy it. We thought we'd take

(00:49):
a horror movie and look at the science and technology
in that horror movie as well, just kind of discussed
what that horror movie is all about, sort of the
same way we did Independence Day back for the fourth
of July. Now, there aren't that many horror movies that
we could think of that have a heavy tech angle.
There are some, and there are plenty, and we also,
I mean, you know, we we wanted to do something

(01:10):
that isn't um as completely offensive as it could be.
I mean, you know, it's the movie that we chose
is rated are and um, I think both of us
enjoy it, uh for yeah from a kind of tongue
in cheek way sometimes you I I genuinely enjoy this film,
but it is not what I would call a good movie.
It is Event Horizon. Yes, it is a space movie.

(01:32):
It's a movie set in space. It's all about space.
Let's go ahead and give you an overview of what
the basic plot is in case you haven't seen it, right,
although I will say that that this this discussion is
going to involve lots of spoilers, and and like I said,
we do enjoy this movie. I want you to see
it and to not be spoiled when you go into it.
So if you have not ever seen the film, and

(01:53):
you are of an appropriate agent constitution to watch a
thing with with kind of gory violand and uh mild
new occasional cursing, then maybe maybe just turn this podcast
off and wait until you can watch the movie. Right now,
I will say, since the film came out in all
bets are off. So here we go. Basic plot. All right,
You've got a ship, it's called the Event Horizon and

(02:16):
it's supposedly a research ship that's meant to explore the
further reaches of our solar system, and on its maiden
voyage it disappeared somewhere just beyond Neptune. Now that happens
in the year seven years later, a research alright, rescue
ship rather sent out, sent out with a particular engineer,

(02:38):
a scientist who had worked on the event Horizons propulsion
system actually designed the entire ship. Yeah, so he's he's
going along with them. They don't know what their mission
is when they first leave, but they are to go
out to Neptune and try and find the origin of
a mysterious transmission that apparently came from it's coming from
the horizon, and and rescue the ship the crew if

(03:00):
it all possible, Right, So they go out there, and
bad stuff happens, y'all. First of all, it turns out
that the event Horizons secret propulsion system is something that
is called a gravity drive in the movie, and the
ideas that it kind of incusses with space, right, it
creates a black hole essentially, and we'll get into that
a little bit more later on. That's yeah, Well, we'll

(03:22):
discuss the entire black hole thing at length because it's
interesting It's what's really interesting is how much of the
science the movie at least attempted to get right. Yeah. Yeah,
I want to give it a lot of kudos. I do.
I do think that it really tried, Like gold Star,
you tried. It didn't just use black hole as some
sort of magic, magic placeholder, right. They tried to find

(03:44):
a way of explaining this, and there there is some
scientific basis for some other stuff they talk about anyway.
But because it's a horror movie, Um, when it tried
to create this whole in space time to travel through, instead,
it accidentally ended up in a hell dimension. Yea, brought
a bunch of Hell back with it, and so that's haunted.
The ship is haunted by Hell and or is Hell itself. Yeah,

(04:06):
it could actually be possessed. It's a little weird. Yeah.
So the idea of being that that when the gravity
drive is is activated, the ship travels through a dimension,
in this case a hellish dimension of pure chaos and evil,
as what character says, and uh, and that yeah, it
brings something back and the crew is deader than dead,

(04:29):
super dead. Yeah, they are so dead. You see lots
of really really dead people and uh, and then the
rescue mission comes aboard and tries to do what they're
supposed to do, and then hilarity ensues. We won't spoil everything,
but essentially, obviously you have to dismantle the rescue ship
or else they could just leave, so that gets taken
care of. Then you have to separate out the crew

(04:51):
members for various reasons, and then have terrible things happened
to them. And all this happens at great gore and
uh and detail and entertaining. It's not at all not Shakespeare,
but it's fun. I I really appreciate that the film
and and this was this was directed by Paul Anderson.
A Paul Anderson. He has some initials in there somewhere

(05:12):
that I'm completely missing, and I did not write them down.
But he's the same guy who directed the Mortal Kombat movie. Yes,
he said that he wanted to have a turn at
directing something a little more eyebrow. No, he was talking
about gory. He wanted to make. He wanted a chance
to make an R rated picture after That's right, because
Mortal Kombat was PG thirteen. Um and and I and

(05:32):
I do, like I said, I want to give the
film a lot of kudos, you know. Okay, so it
starts out with this brief timeline, and I'd say that
it was a hopeful but not completely ridiculous timeline. They
were saying that the first permanent moon colony in this
in this science fiction setting was in uh and that
commercial mining on Mars began in two considering that, you know,

(05:54):
we've got some some outfits here on Earth that are
trying to get to Mars around that's time period, all right, Yeah,
and the lunar colony in is way too ambitious, but well,
but back in there was no way of knowing that
the space program was going to going to have so
many financial hits. Um so, yeah, getting into it. One

(06:17):
thing that confused me was the idea of even having
a ship. Now the cover the event Horizons Outer Solar
System Exploration, which a cover story, yeah it was to
say code black, but the real reason, that's the actual
thing that they said in the film. And I'm still
not sure what that means. It sounds really nifty, right,
I guess it just means super duper secret, y'all. You
have to know the secret handshake in order to get

(06:37):
access to it. But the thing that made me confused
was just the idea of even building a ship for
that sort of thing we've built so that people can
get out onto the surface if Neptune and walk around
and on gas giants. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Um,
you know, really hot gas giants where the winds are
two point one thousand kilometers per rights has the most

(06:59):
high worse winds in the entire Solar System. Not a
not a very nice place to go visit, yea. So
it's and lots of methane in the atmosphere too, not
great hydrogen and helium also in the atmosphere. It's not
a very great planet to to go visit if you
don't have some massive protection around you. It just seems
weird because we could do robotic probes that kind of

(07:20):
stuff for that sort of thing, but whatever, so uh,
they'll also just get all the way. This is one
of those space movies where we do hear sounds in
space and the initial sequence turns out to be a
dream sequence. So you can't entirely blame the fact that
you're hearing a thunderstorm on Neptune from space on on
the fact that it's Yeah, it's some sort of hallucination,

(07:41):
hallucination or dream or something. But assuming the rest of
the movie is not a hallucination or dream, which as
far as I can tell, that's not the intention. Point.
There's plenty of examples of hearing sound in space, absolutely
not necessarily that the characters hear it, but the audience.
Here's it also a good point from from this general
area of the film. They're um, they're showing spaceships as

(08:04):
being three dimensional and spaces being three dimensional and things
coming at each other from different angles, which I absolutely
approve it. Right, it's not all in the same plane
like it would be in most Star Trek. Not all
Star Trek, but most start certain points. Star Trek really
only discovered that space is multidimensional, I think, like in
the game. Yeah, and so there's also some other interesting

(08:25):
things that they do have artificial gravity in this in
this universe. We don't know how they generated, although they
appear to have some other means of controlling gravity with
the gravity drive. They talk about using electro magnets to
control the flow of gravitons. Uh, gravitons right now are
a hypothetical particle. We think they exist based upon the math,

(08:45):
but we have not identified or observed gravitons. But but
I'm cool with this science fiction film positing that we're
going to discover the graviton particle within the next forty years. Okay,
cool with thirty years. Yeah right, that's right. Sorry, I'm old.
That's cool. So so it's it's yeah, it's it's one
of those things where maybe if they discovered gravitons, they

(09:05):
also figured out how to create artificial gravity, because what
they are not doing is creating it through rotating a
spaceship or space station in order to use the centripetal
force to kind of fake gravity, right, so you know,
we're well, we'll give him that too. I won't. I
don't understand ever, shaving with a straight razor. I don't

(09:28):
have to shave my face, so I just don't think
that's a wise idea to do in space. But then
I mean, if you've got artificial gravity, you're pretty This
is this is Sam Neil's character, Samuel playing the the
physicist who, as it turns out, designed this event horizonship
and um and he's got some problems that the film
goes into pretty extensively, and so the straight razor, as

(09:48):
it turns out is symbolic, right, You find out that
his wife committed suicide with a straight which makes me
even more concerned for him that he's using that to
shave with. Yeah, y'all, this is a bad This is
going bad places. The psychologist would probably have a few
things to say about it. Uh. I thought that the
space station that Sam Neel's character is on at the

(10:10):
beginning of the film was a little odd in that
it's think of a massive grid made out of like
scaffolding or if you've ever worked on a theater set
where you've got the grid that you hang the lights
off of that looks like the skeleton of this space
station and just looks like a massive grid of this stuff,
like the set to Stomp or something. Yeah, and occasionally
you have these habitats that are you know, you can

(10:33):
tell that they're these these things that are connected to
the gritting grid structure that are where everyone lives, but
they don't seem to be connected to each other, Like
they're on different parts of the grid and this thing
isn't informed to be connected. Yeah, you wouldn't really want
to spacewalk in between them. Spacewalking is pretty dangerous and
lower orbit, which a little okay title comes up that

(10:56):
says lower. I didn't pay attention at that point, and
I took notes, and I could not remember where if
the space station was an orbit around Earth or Mars,
because there were comments that made me think, well, maybe
they were in orbit of Mars. So that makes some
of the rest of this discussion much easier for me.
But I did think it was neat that it looked modular,
which meant, you know, that makes sense. You would want

(11:16):
to be able to build onto any sort of permanent
space station, uh in a way that would allow you
to not have to reinmit the wheel every time. So
if it's modular, you just add a new module on.
That makes sense, So all right, I'm giving it that too.
The rescue ship is called the Lewis and Clark, named
after the explorers who quote unquote discovered lots of stuff

(11:39):
in America if you can consider people who had been
living there for hundreds and hundreds of years to be
not important enough to say they discovered it, but they um.
I thought the design of this was a little weird,
particularly the bridge. I wrote down that their seating structure
that main cappens tear drives me crazy. It's so, this

(12:00):
is a bridge in which all of the you know,
crew member chairs are normal kind of chairs. They can
roll around a little bit, but they basically a fixed
so the ground, kind of like office chairs chairs, ish um.
And this captain's chair is suspended from this kind of
track in the ceiling like a like a roller coaster seat.
And it looks really goofy and I'm not share what

(12:25):
they were going. Lawrence Fishburn, who plays the captain, sits
in this chair. It means that his feet are actually
dangling off the ground. He's not. He doesn't have contact
with the ground. It allows him to turn degrees and
move along this track, but so would a chair with
wheels on it and or standing up. Yeah, so I
don't understand this because if you were to argue, well
this way, if there were some sort of problem, his

(12:46):
chair wouldn't go sliding all over the room. But then
everyone else's chairs seemed to have that ability. There's one
guy who pushes back from his workstation and rolls halfway
across the bridge. So if you're not going to do
it for everybody, don't do it for anyone. That's what
I say. Let's make this fair. Gosh, darn't it um?
But yeah, I just thought that was a weird thing. Yeah, No,
I I did want to say that, I that I
do actually like the design aesthetic of the Lewis and

(13:09):
Clark because it's more functional than pretty most of the time,
and I feel like it's very much based in the
general aesthetic of today's NASA ships. Right, it looks it
looks like it's functional. It doesn't look like it's made
out of you know, it's not. It's not some sort
of Star Wars type thing where everything is pristine and
beautiful as long as you're working for the Empire. It's

(13:29):
it's definitely it's more on the firefly range where this
this looks like this is something that does work. It
doesn't look like it's a set necessarily, right. You know,
it's a little bit roomier than perhaps a real spaceship
would be in order to have those those good cameras,
but better than that, I'm willing to give them that.
It reminded me a little bit of like an expanded submarine,

(13:50):
which is kind of what you would expect down the
propulsion system. I thought was really interesting. They talk this
is kind of just mentioned offhand and dialogue. That's an
ion drive, which those really existing. Yeah, yeah, so an
ion drive uses thrusters and ionized particles. Those are charged
particles in order to accelerate, and they can generate these
charged particles and excite them in two major ways right now.

(14:13):
We have the electrostatic force, which involves usually bombarding particles
with electron beams so that you build up a negative charge.
And there's also the electro magnetic approach, where you use
electromagnets to excite these ions at any rate. Either way
you're using this, you can output these ions and create thrust.
But the thing about this is that it builds acceleration

(14:33):
and the accelerating force is very low, so it reaches
very fast acceleration at the end of this process, but
it takes a minute to get it takes a long time. Yeah,
you're talking about like it's it's continuously accelerating, so it's
not like it accelerates and then just stops, but at
the rate of acceleration is very low. So I'm a

(14:54):
little concerned that they wouldn't be able to get from
Earth to Neptune and any reasonable amount of time using
an eye on drive. I mean I guess you could
do it, but I think it would take longer than
fifty six days, which is how long it takes within
the film. Actually did do the math, and the current
ion fusters that we've got can reach speeds of some

(15:16):
ninety kilometers per second, which is over two hundred thousand
miles per hour in space, which is pretty screaming compared
with like the Space Shuttle, which is about eighteen thousand
kilometers per second UM. But even if the vehicle could
go at that speed, the entire distance from Earth to Neptune,
which it could not see above ree, it takes a
long time to warm up UM, it would still take

(15:36):
five dred and fifty three days unless I did the
math wrong, which I don't. I don't think it sounds
about right because the distance between Earth and Neptune is
about four point four billion kilometers, and granted, we're talking
about forty years in the future, and forty years can
bring a lot of technological changes. I think it's a possibility,
but it's a stretch, yeah, cutting it down. I mean,
you're just talking about such huge distances, and keep in
mind four point four billion kilometers that's the average distance

(15:59):
between Neptuno an Earth change. So I calculated that um
from the closest point at which it's about four point
three billion miles, right, Yeah, And and even then you
have to plan it, like just as we had to
plan the Curiosity or over to land on Mars months
in advance, because you know the orbits as the their
you know, the plants continue to move across their orbital

(16:20):
past even after you launch the ship, because they do
not just hold in place. Yeah, so you can't. You
can't just launch when they're closest, because they'll be moving
apart from each other from that moment moving on. So
it's complicated. You'll um. But at any rate, in order
to not be bored for some fifty days on this ship,
that die or die I guess the crew goes into stasis. Right.

(16:42):
They do give the excuse of of of at the
speeds that we're going, your skull would liquefy, which is
not true. That is super inaccurate. Okay, yeah, they're talking
about they would endure forces of excess of thirty g
s or around thirty g s. That's thirty times the
gravitational force you feel here on Earth. All right, here's
some other issues. First of all, going into stasis. That's

(17:02):
always a problem, right as far as we understand it today,
because anything that is going to slow down your bodily
functions is not really that good for you and montion
the time movies portray it as freezing or in this case,
it's being in this giant s. Yeah, it's it's more
liquid than goo. I would say it comes on like water,
but it's um. That's just not good for your body. No, No,

(17:24):
your skin will absorb liquid, especially once the oils begin
to wash off. That's why if you spend too long
in the bath or the pool, your fingers start to
prune up. Your epidermis is absorbing water. And wherever the
epidermis and dermis meat it's anchored, that's where you have
those those valley parts, the crevices that are in the
pruny skin, and then the bulgy bits that's where all

(17:46):
the liquid has been absorbed. So imagine that all over
your body. It's not great. It gives rise to potential
for bacterial infections. It's bad stuff. Also, your muscles would
atrophy after you had been spending that much time we're
talking about, you know, two months in in non you know, motionless,
you would be in bad shape by the end of that.

(18:06):
They don't appear to be at all affected in that way.
They cough a bit and that's it. Yeah, Sam Neil's character,
who is not used to it, kind of stumbles a
little bit and like isn't sure if he wants coffee,
And that's that's about the that's the worst problem he has.
But the other side of it, the whole thirty G issue. So,
first of all, the the record for enduring gravitational forces

(18:29):
goes to UH, to John Stapp who for a very
very short moment experienced a force of forty six point
two gs. He was doing UH acceleration tests. You know,
this was part of the whole like how much can
a person endure um turns out, you know, anything above
say twenty geez or so you're talking eyeballs out gravitational forces.

(18:54):
That's what they refer to it as. By the way, guys,
so at four six point two his eyeball stayed in
his head. They didn't pop out. That's a relief, but
he did suffer permanent eye damage. He had vision problems
for the rest of his life. He did live a
good long while after that. It wasn't like he you know,
suffered serious health issues that led to his death. But
he did have serious health issues, they just were chronic

(19:16):
and lasted, you know, for the rest of his life.
So uh, but at for the six point two g's
even at that incredible amount of force supply to you,
your skull will not liquefy. Your brains and eyeballs might
if if you're exposed to it for long enough period
of time, you know, so a certain fifty two days,
like a couple of months, Yeah, you might have some issues,

(19:37):
uh at that point. So yes, it would be deadly. However,
I'm pretty sure that submerging someone in liquid would not
mean that you had to get out of jail free
card for enduring that amount of force, especially not water.
I don't think that's how it works. No, if you
if you were suddenly put under the ocean at a
depth where the pressure would be enough to crush you, you

(19:59):
you still get rushed, even if you know the whole
thing in the abyss where they have to breathe in
the liquid oxygen is meant to say that if you
have yeah, if you have air inside your lungs, then
that's going to pop your lungs. But by putting liquid
you can endure more pressure, you still are not able
to endure endless amounts of pressure, So I'm not sure

(20:20):
that that would necessarily help. But then that brings us
to the kind of computer devices they use, which are tablets. Yeah,
and I think that it's a pretty Again, it's a
pretty good estimation of what they were going to have.
And you know, no one working on this movie clearly
had talked to Steve Jobs, and I knew that the

(20:41):
iPad was going to come out. Yeah, we U seven.
That might have been a little premature. Yeah, yeah, I
mean it's they use tablet computers. I think by twenty
four you will probably have moved beyond your basic tablet.
But again, you're extrapolating from now as opposed to from
That's another thing that I'm willing to give them a
pass on due to the fact that all of the
tech on their ship, which I think is purposefully clunky,

(21:03):
and I think it's for purely aesthetic reasons. But um,
but I can excuse it by the fact that all
of the tech on their ship needs to withstand the
same forces, these incredible skull liquefying forces. Um and so
that therefore, if it's a little bit clunky, maybe that's
why just butting in here to say where It'll be
right back to talk more about event horizon in just

(21:23):
a moment, But first let's take a quick break. Now,
let's get back to event horizon, and let's finally talk
about this gravity drive thing. Yes, it's it's bizarre. Well okay,
so so we hear the scientific explanation of it before
we ever see the thing, Yes, we do. He says

(21:45):
that the gravity drive will create an infinite curvature of space,
resulting in a singularity. And uh, here's the thing, guys,
that's a real thing. Singularity infinite, well real in the
sense of this is how we understand black holes right now,
according to general relativity, right, yeah, this is absolutely a

(22:06):
concept that is based in reality. Now, super proud of
the way that they described it. The scientist character goes
into this kind of long spiel and and all of
the other guy so like go like in English please, yeah,
And I kind of wish that they had let him
go for another half hour because I could have listened
to this hilarious because first he says, well in layman's terms,
and it's really pretty simple. I mean, it's the simplest

(22:27):
description of a black hole you can get to without
super dumbing it down, which he ultimately does do. Yeah,
but but it's he's he describes a retaining magnetic field
focusing a narrow beam of gravitans to fold space time. Yeah,
and then this creates a wormhole through which a ship
can travel. And the idea of being that you can

(22:47):
fold space time so that the two points that you
are interested in, your beginning and your destination are adjacent
to one another, even if in reality they are across
the universe from each other. So let's use an example.
Let's say that you get an old style roadmap. I'm
talking about a paper roadmap. Okay, you've got a paper roadmap,
and you are you want to travel between New York

(23:09):
City and Los Angeles, California. And normally you would have
to trace a pathway that would go along highways, and
you would travel thousands of miles. But what if you
could just fold the roadmap so that New York City
and Los Angeles were touching one another on the two sides,
and then you were able to magically jump between New
York City and Los Angeles. Then unfold the map so

(23:31):
it's back to its regular space. Suddenly it looks like
you've traveled faster than light. You have crossed thousands of
miles in an instant, apparently violating Einstein's theory of relativity,
except for the part where Einstein and Rosen and the
nineteen thirties I believe came up with a concept of
wormholes that allows for this, which says that if you
have um a mass on that little New York blip

(23:53):
and a mass on the l A blip that are
that are both massive enough to push spacetime towards itself
in in the way that spacetime is hypothetically a folded
moving sheet of spacetime because matter curves space time, and
spacetime determines how matter moves. And then eventually you're going
to get these two points touching. And then if they

(24:15):
were touching enough that they could break through, essentially you're
talking of them. You're removing you're removing distance. Right, You're
you're no longer traveling because you're not traveling faster than
light at that moment. At that moment, those two distances
are touching. So are those two points are touching, So
there isn't a distance between them. If there were distance
between the men, you move faster than light. That's what
Ninstein says, Hey, stop breaking the law. All right, So

(24:39):
let's talk about how is this related to actual real
world physics. So from what we understand what black holes,
here's the deal. You gotta you got a star that's
at least eight solar masses are larger, and as that
star dies, it loses energy, the it begins to collapse
in on itself, and so it starts to collapse in

(25:01):
gravitational forces get stronger. You get this tiny point that
gathers all the mass. We usually refer to it in
math as being a point that has zero volume, but
because there is mass within that zero volume and as
infinite density. So you've got this point of infinite density
that's creating this incredible gravitational pull in a large region

(25:26):
around it. Now we define the region around it where
let's say there's a let's say there's an imaginary boundary
that you can see around a black hole, which you
which there would not be. Yeah, but let's let's imagine
that you can see this boundary, and you know that
boundary represents the the section of space where if you
were to pass beyond that boundary, you would no longer

(25:48):
be able to escape the gravitational pull of that black hole.
This is the point of no return. Yeah, this is
this is the point where even light itself cannot escape
the black hole. It just will go right towards the singularity,
depending upon what the singularity, how the singularity is formed,
will get into. Then a second yeah, um, so that
point that that that area, that region is called the

(26:09):
event horizon. And I would like to stay for the
record right now. The terrible idea it is to name
your ship after the point of no return. Yeah, it's
like it's like calling calling your your boat the Iceberg magnet.
You know, you don't want to call your boat Iceberg
magnet or perhaps akin to naming your undersea paradise after
something out of the Book of Revelation. It's just a

(26:29):
terrible or even atlantis. Yeah, you don't, you know, you
don't want to necessarily go with that connotation if you
think about it for too long. But yes, so the
event horizon is named after this region of space where
if you pass through it, you are pretty much guaranteed
to go into the Singularity. You want to say pretty
much guaranteed. There are some caveats, all right. So because
there are different types of black holes, we quantify and

(26:50):
we classify black holes based on three basic features. These
are pretty much the only features black holes have according
to our theory of relativity, because they're weird things. They
have mass, they may or may not have spin, and
they may or may not have a charge. So the
basic black hole that is probably the simplest version, although

(27:12):
not the most commonly found in the universe, is the
Swortz Child black hole, which has no spin. It does
have an event horizon, and essentially this this black hole,
you can just think of it as a single point
in space of that infinite density that is pulling you
toward it if you get beyond that event horizon. So
it's just everything goes towards the center of that point.

(27:34):
You don't have any rotation there. You know, you can
try to use thrust to keep you from accelerating into
the point, but it's just after a point, it's there's
no point in doing that anymore either. Um you're done.
Spaghetification is on the way, which is where that's the
the idea that as you get closer to the black
holes gravity, things elongate and become noodle like, thus the spaghetification.

(28:00):
It is probably not terribly pleasant, although I'm guessing you
would not be alive at that point anything. I'm thinking
not um, but I think more frequently theoretical physicists say
that this probably happens more frequently, and also certainly more
frequently in films. Is predicted the the care black hole. Yes,
the Care k e r R. So the Care black

(28:22):
hole is formed from solar masses. Uh. And because stars
usually are rotating, there's a rotational force that has to
conserve the angular momentum. This is this is another law
that you have to follow. It has to conserve that
angular momentum. So the black hole itself is spinning, right,
which is where you get those pretty graphics with with
that kind of rotational cloud of stuff falling into a

(28:44):
black The black hole at the center of the Milky
Way is rotating. Therefore, it's dragging space as it rotates,
which causes this rotational force that ends up affecting the
entire galaxy. It's pretty remarkable stuff, right. Well. The other
interesting thing about this is that that spinning means the
singularity at the center of a care hole is not

(29:05):
a single point like it is in schwartz Child. Instead,
it's an infinitely thin ring that is also spinning, and
they are a little more complicated. They don't have just
the event horizon. They also have something called the ergosphere.
This is the region of space that is distorted because
of the rotational force of this black hole. So this

(29:28):
is an overly simple model that I'm going to give you.
It does not directly relate to how we see this
happening in in the universe. But imagine putting your hand
in a container of tranquil water and then moving your
hand around and seeing how it disturbs the water. The
ergosphere is kind of like that. It's this region where

(29:48):
that rotational force is dragging the space time and distorting
it as a result, which is kind of funky. Um.
There's also another little region that's the static limit, that's
the boundary between the ergosphere and normal space time that
is not being directly dragged and distorted by this black hole. Well,
the interesting thing about this theory is that one interesting

(30:12):
thing is that some people have proposed the hypothesis that
if you were to encounter one of these black holes
and you were able to enter the event horizon in
a particular way where you could sling shot around that
thin rotating singularity. You might not fall into the singularity.
You might get shot out again, but you get shot
out at a different point in space time. Thus you

(30:33):
would have this wormhole theory. I don't know that you
can necessarily control exactly where you would end up or
when you would end up, because spacetime. And there's also
the possibility this could allow for time travel, so that
increases the Grandfather paradox, and there's other issues that we'd
have to get into. That's an entirely different podcast. I
don't recommend trying that without about time. I tried doing it,

(30:54):
but then I went back in time and stopped myself,
so I'm like, I just can't guys. I mean, I'll
just do it again. And the way back machine is
still in Mongolia, so we're kind of stuck. But so
this is a hypothetical possibility, yes, I mean, and and
all of this, we should say is based upon theoretical astrophysics,
which if you couldn't tell from the name, I mean,
we've never gone out in a ship and checked out

(31:15):
a black hole and been like, oh, that's how it works.
It's you know, this is all based on the way
that we observe electromagnetic radiation behaving in spaces around what
we have called black holes. Yeah, and and it's also
based on a lot of math that we've tried to
make work out. But things like infinite density and zero volume.
It's really hard to deal with that, so it's impossible

(31:37):
for us to truly conceive of it. It's beyond our
our ability to do so. And in fact, some people
have gone so far and I don't think it's that
far really, but to say that singularity is really more
of a placeholder. Like the terms we're using our placeholders
that are good enough for now, but we need better
clarification and some integration of the quantum model of physics.

(31:59):
My end up clarifying these terms so that we we
don't just have these vague placeholders. Right there is speaking
of quantum stuff there. Scientists start theorizing that this is
happening at the quantum level, like a like at the
plunk kind of level of particles. Wormholes are being created,
uh a lot. Yeah, Well, that was one of the

(32:20):
things that they talked about with the large hadron colliders,
that these collisions could result in tiny little black holes
that are on the you know, atomic or smaller scale
and last less than a you know, like a like
a nanosecond long. That's how long they last. But it
may of course that knowing that they were going to
make some black holes, that made some media outlets go, oh,

(32:41):
we're all gonna get sucked into a black hole and die.
And thus we had things like, you know, has the
world been destroyed by the large Hadron collider and you
go to the u r L and it would say no. Um.
But one interesting thing, there's a paper published in the
Physical Review Letters recently by Rodolfo Gambini and Jorge Pool,
and it was about a quantum black hole model in

(33:04):
which the black hole doesn't have a singularity, but rather
is a gateway. So this gateway would put you into
possibly another universe, not necessarily another dimension, but another universe. Uh,
there's some issues with this that we'd have to explore.
It may very well be true, and it may be
that this is the beginning of replacing those placeholders like

(33:24):
singularity with more specific terms. But some of the problems
involved things like, well, you probably still wouldn't survive any
kind of trip through a black hole, the tidal forces
you would undergo as you would go through this intense
gravity would still squish you and kill you if you
did somehow find a way to survive. There's no guarantee
that what universe you would UH end up in would

(33:46):
have the same laws of physics that our universe has,
and thus you end up dying anyway because physics don't
work um. And then there's the problem of, well, if
there are black holes in various universes, they're connecting each
other together, where are the outputs, because we don't see
any in our universe. Where are the white holes? These
these holes where matter from the black hole on the
other end is being spewed out into the universe. Because

(34:09):
if the black hole end is pulling everything in, the
white hole end must be pushing everything back out. And
if we don't see evidence of that in our universe,
either that means that we only have exits, no entrances,
or there's some other problems with this UH this UH theory,
or it may just be that we haven't found a
way to observe it yet. I don't know. Maybe it
turns out the white holes are the source of all

(34:32):
dark dark matter, which represents more mass than anything else
we can observe. We don't know what dark matter is.
Maybe that's it. If it turns out to be that,
you can mail my Nobel Prize our addresses on the website.
So at any rate, we're going to assume that in
the movie they want to open up a care black
hole k E er R, not c A r E,

(34:55):
and they're going to use that to zip over to
some other part of the universe, and that things went wrong.
So I think you think it's safe to say that
that's more or less what they meant based upon what's
said in the film. I feel like that's extrapolating, but
a fair extrapolation. I mean, you know, I think that
he was talking about a pretty straight wormhole kind of situation. Yeah,
but I'm just trying to justify it anyway. Again. I mean,

(35:17):
it could be that that the science and event horizon
back in was ahead of its time, and that the
quantum research that we're talking about right now ends up
being exactly what or more or less what they were
saying in that movie, which would be kind of cool
because then you're like, well, the science was wrong, but
then it was right. Again based upon our understanding. Well,
we've got a lot more to say now that we've

(35:38):
got the black hole stuff out of the way. But
before we do, let's take another quick break to thank
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shows and movies as you want, wherever you want. Right now,
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(36:41):
Plus is getting access to old shows that I did
you know, I I remember loving when they were on,
but hadn't really revisited in a long time. One of those,
of course, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Uh. Josh Sweden
really made his name with this series, and it was
really it changed television. There's so many shows now that

(37:03):
obviously follow in that same kind of model. So if
you never actually seen that series, I highly recommend it
go check that out. All right, so let's get back
to the movie. Now. We've talked about the gravity drive,
we talked about that iron propulsion, we talked about whether
or not your skull would liquefy. Surely we've gotten through
all the problems, right, We were actually still pretty early

(37:24):
in the movie. This only takes us up through before
they're even on the titular event horizons. We've got a
lot of ground, We've got a lot of space to cover. Yeah, okay, alright,
So alright. There's a good side and a bad side
to this, Lauren. The good side is that pretty soon
we're gonna be talking about supernatural stuff which has nothing
to do with technology, and then we're okay, right, right,

(37:45):
because when you start talking about hell dimensions invading, I'm like, well,
I'll give that a pass because I don't know. I
don't have any data how that would work. It doesn't
involve technology or any science that we understand at this moment,
so therefore we cannot comment on it. However, there some
science stuff we can talk about. Yeah, okay. So so
when our search and rescue crew of Lewis and Clark

(38:06):
arrived at the event horizon, it is I guess it's
supposed to be an orbit of Neptune. That's that was
what I felt it was supposed to be. It's in
the orbit around Neptune, but it's it's kind of within
Neptune's atmosphere because there are all of these big storms
going on, and it is accurate that there would be
big storms on Neptune. Um. It is much much like Jupiter.

(38:27):
It has these very giant, very violent, um slightly quicker storms.
The storms on Jupiter are much longer lasting. Right. But
here's the problem is that if that ship were in
fact in within the atmosphere, the atmosphere would slow the
ship's pathway down so much that would have just the
orbit would have decayed much more rapidly. The ship would
be crashing into Neptune. So the clouds there are a

(38:50):
problem because it would suggest that it's too late the
If it's truly an orbit, it would be above the atmosphere.
But since it's in the atmosphere, I think that you
have to say this is for the spooky effect, because
how can you have a haunted house movie in space
without a thunderstorm going on outside? Right, I'd say pretty easily. Um,
you can totally. I mean I've seen Alien and that

(39:12):
basically work, which isn't a haunted house situation, but still close.
It's close. I mean, you know, you fall, we're playing
upon the same primal fears obviously. Um, I'm just amazed
there weren't space wolves howling outside the windows of the ship.
But actually there there were enough characters having hallucinations that
I am I am, I am actually shocked that space bowlves. Yeah, well,

(39:34):
maybe we missed it because some of those were like
montages of really fast clips of you know, this just
looks like a Clive Barker nightmare scenario smashed into half
a second. So maybe there were some space wolves in there,
we don't know, but there definitely was a storm. Um.
If anyone, by the way, wants to photoshops and spacewolves
into some footage from from the Horizon, I would look

(39:56):
in at you, Aaron Cooper, and I'm absolutely willing to
read your name on air. Yeah. So, um, all right,
what about the way that they before they get onto
event horizon, they decide to take a look and see
if there's anything alive on it. They do a life scan, right, Well,
there's a bunch of life scanning related technology that happens
in this middle portion of the film. And uh and yes,

(40:18):
one is from the Lewis and Clark. And then once
they get onto the ship, they've got these little shiny
laser related hand devices. Mostly looks like a laser that's
put through a splitter of some sort, And I'm not
sure how that would work. Maybe it's uh, I'm thinking thermal,
that's the closest it was. Something that is warmer than

(40:39):
the than the surrounding environment would suggest a life form
or if you've got extremely sensitive audio technology, I suppose
that you could scan for heartbeats or something like that, right,
you know. Now we know that in other science fiction
shows and movies, things like Star Trek, they have life
form scanning technology that can even identify things like uh, creatures,

(41:00):
blood type if they have a right or a brain
wave or something like. Yeah. But there's no explanation here,
not not that we necessarily expect it. I mean, clearly,
if this movie were to explain every single piece of
science and something really long, and I would watch it forever, actually,
that would be I would love that movie. It would
be called Arthur C. Clark's Tooth in than One is
what it would be called. And there'll probably be fewer,

(41:22):
fewer hell demons, but maybe more space wolves. I'm honestly
more confused about that that visual of the of the
split laser thing on board, because if you're using I mean,
if if it's just a method to let the operator
know where he's pointing the beam, where she is pointing
the beam, then then I guess that counts. But otherwise,

(41:43):
if it's if it's a visual light spectrum analysis, it's
not going to penetrate anything, and they're clearly trying to
sweep rooms with it would make it pretty easy, which
means that you could do something else like use your eyes, right,
you know those things that each of the characters had
no well full a while anyway, some of the characters
don't end up with eyes because spoiler alert, spoiler alert,

(42:06):
where we're going, we don't need that's That's exactly what
he says. Uh, So I have here in my notes.
This is a says, not so much a note as
an observation. This is just one of those things that
I picked up on while I was watching the movie.
The docking bay, that the event horizon, well, that the
Lewis and Clark uses to access the event horizon is

(42:27):
for reasons that are never explained. Docking Bay thirteen. It's
X I I I in Roman numerals, so it's thirteen. Uh.
The Doctor Weir Sam Neil's character. We didn't name him
earlier in the podcast, but Lauren reminded me that the
character does affect have a name. Is not just Sam
names the character. Um. Dr Weir says that it's the

(42:47):
main docking bay. So I don't know why your main
docking bay would be thirteen. I guess this is just
one of those little you know, winks of the to
the audience, or you could explain it as being, um
a representation shin of of how much doctor we are
need psychiatric help. Yeah, that will get a lot more
indication of that in a very short while. When they

(43:08):
get aboard the Event Horizon. So they do the scan.
It does not come back with any anything that would
suggest a life form. But then they say, well, we're
gonna have to do this the old fashioned way, room
by room. Well, they say that there's these weird like
kind of amorphous sort of sort of blobs of life
forms kind of everywhere, and that they're not seeing any

(43:30):
individual human people, which is what they're looking for. So
they decided to go onto the ship exactly. So, a
couple of the guys they create an umbilicus, a pathway
that will connect the two ships. This is something else
that confused me, all right, So the Lewis and Clark
has artificial gravity. The Event Horizon normally would have artificial gravity,
but that system is down. Exactly, they connect an umbilicus

(43:51):
between the Lewis and Clark and the Event Horizon. As
soon as the characters get into the Umbilicus, they're in
a zero G environment. Back aboard the Lewis and Clark,
you still have artificial gravity. I'm wondering where you cut
that off, Like, how does the artificial gravity know literally
the artificial gravity the gravitons get into your air supply,

(44:13):
and so if you're not sharing air supplies, then you're
not sharing. Almost certain air supply did not supply any
of the music in this movie. I'd have to go
back and watch it again to see if air supply
is in this film, but I don't think it is
all right. So anyway, that was another little goofy bit.
So they do a quick tour of the ship. You
have some characters going towards the front of the ship,

(44:33):
which is where the bridge is, in the living quarters,
the medical center, all of that is on the front end.
And this is before they get all of these systems
back up. So everyone is in uh, you know, low
gravity um and and it's very everything is still extremely cold.
They don't have temperature online right. They have magnetic boots
which allow them to stick to the floor. I appreciated

(44:55):
that they at least said like, hey, we've got magnetic boots,
and they even showed a little like this is it
engaging kind of kind of sequence from I thought that
was a nice knot too maybe this could be like
reality science. Ish. I did have a problem in that
they talk about how the temperature is below freezing and
you see frozen droplets of water floating through the event horizon.

(45:15):
But there's also this water bottle. I assume it's a
water bottle, looks very much like a water bottle, and
it is clearly full of liquid and liquid forming noises.
So how did that not freeze? Unless, of course it's
not water in that water bottle. It could be another
liquid that has a lower freezing point. Um, I can
only assume that it is the viscera of hell. Yeah,

(45:36):
I was thinking vodka. But anyway, all right, so uh,
you know, honestly, I'm pretty sure that vodka is the vista.
So it's probably fairly act both of our Okay, we're
both right. That's I'm cool with that. So some of
the people go towards the forward part of the ship,
where by the way that the forward part of the
ship where the bridge and living cores and everything, all

(45:58):
of that is separated by an incredible long hallway from
the gravity drive engineering section. Actually specifically, the gravity drives
really the only thing we ever see on that other
side of the ship, right, even though it's the largest
part of the ship. We really just see the gravity
drive and in the the the labyrinthian hallways that surround
the gravity drive for no apparent reason because we're needs help. Yeah. Um,

(46:24):
this long neck I thought was pretty odd when I
first saw the design of the ship. I was like,
why would you want a neck that long? And the
only thing that I could come up with is if
within the world they talk about, you know, the gravity fluctuations,
maybe those fluctuations could adversely affect the crew, and by
creating this distance, by creating this long neck like corridor,

(46:44):
you minimize that. Maybe that's the reason, so I can
justify I'm willing to give them that way, ye so,
But otherwise you're just thinking, like, why is the ship?
It's basically a plot device. It looks cool, and it
looks cool, and you get that good dramatic tension of
needing to have people run up and down it, and
an important fly up and down it when the gravity
is not you know, but or float I guess would
be the more accurate, right, speaking of so they do,

(47:07):
they do turn on the ship's interior gravity, so no
one has to have spent expensive effects anymore for for
a while, for a while until we get to the end,
and so we see lots of water splashing down onto
the floor and things like that. It was neat, neat
little effect. We'll have a little bit more to say
about the tech in event horizon after this short break.

(47:34):
Did you notice the ship's log that it's on. It's
on an optical disc DVD or CD. Yeah, so this
was made so we have to give it that allowance.
But it was so funny to me that there's a
disc and it's caught inside the computer system, right. Yeah.
My specific note I think was like, oh yes, optical disc, yes, right,
you know why go back? Yeah, we're just lucky it's

(47:55):
on a track. Uh yeah. So the ship's log is
stored in an to cold disk, which we thought was adorable.
And this is about when the crew discovers this gravity drive.
The doctor Weir has created um and it looks like
something out of Hell Razor. Yeah, I said, it looks
like the same designer who made the limit configuration, which
is the puzzle box and hell razor. In this case,

(48:18):
it's Dr Weir must have seen that, because that's what
the interior of his gravity drive room looks like. I
am so I'm so worried for him. I honestly, I
don't think that he was doing well when he was
creating this. The entire esthetic design of this ship is
very much in contrast to the design of the Lewis
and Clark, which is kind of rough and tumble and
and has been lit in a utilitarian and the interior

(48:41):
of this ship reminds me of nothing more than like
a nineteenth century insane asylum. You've got this this very
these very brick like metal panels in various places, and
we've got all of this weird Victorian style detailing and
crazy machinery. So it's kind of a combination of that
asylum and like, imagine that you've been shrunk down and

(49:02):
then thrown into the home Depot power tools section, so
you've got these enormous like drill like things that are
turning around you for no apparent reason. Um I And
there's there's a corridor in the end of the film
that has shaped like a coffin, And I'm just like
you guys. Seriously, you guys, this is amazing. No One
no one said like, hey, Dr Weir, do you want

(49:23):
to take a vacation and go to Disney World. I
will also say this is going back to the the
inspiration for the film I have read. I assume this
is true. It seems like it's true that the idea was,
what if we had the Shining but said it in space,
in which case, if you're talking about the film version
of The Shining, you know Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson's character

(49:44):
is already pretty freaking crazy before he shows up at
the Overlook Hotel. Totally. Dr Weir kind of falls that model. Yeah, yeah,
And I did want to say that it's actually clever
that the that drive itself is built like a giant gyroscope,
like a giant hellish gyroscope, because um, because real spaceships do.
In fact, you use gyroscopes in their inertial navigation systems,

(50:06):
albeit not giant puzzle box looking ones. Right, Yeah, the
one that you're talking about in the movie. It's imagine
a globe that's inside of a ring, that's inside of
another ring, and all of these can can rotate independently
of each other. Yeah, and when it lines up, it
flashes light at you and bad things happen. Um dr.
We're assures the crew that the gravity drive is not on,

(50:30):
totally on, and it's totally not safe. Yeah, but that's
because the ship, as it turns out, is alive. Uh
I said that. Another thing that was kind of interesting.
I thought it was a little weird. The characters are
forced aboard the Event Horizon because the Lewis and Clark
is compromised. All right, there's a whole breach and their

(50:51):
air supply. UM starts going, I'm not gonna make another joke. Yeah,
So the everyone, everyone aside from a repair crew, goes
aboard the Horizon. The repair crew tries to repair the
damage to the Lewis and Clark. So they discovered that
the oxygen, to be more specific, the carbon dioxide levels
are rising and are going to hit because the scrubbers

(51:12):
are something something I don't know, The CEO two scrubbers
are not not functioning properly, and even if they brought
the ones aboard from the Lewis and Clark, it would
only give them a little extra time. They only have
twenty hours of breathable air on the event Horizon, which
is enormous, is a huge ship. It's very large. I
cannot believe that they only had twenty hours of breathable air.
That's maybe maybe the gravity drive eats oxygen. Maybe maybe

(51:34):
the hell demons that are in that are living in
heavy breathers. That could be. I mean, I mean, statistically,
I think most hell demons are and they've been on
that ship for seven years, so it's possible. Um. I
also say that the another fun little fact. This is
another not so technical thing, but just one of those
things that if you've watched a lot of movies you appreciate.

(51:57):
So they have the Sick Sick Bay, a medical center
which supposedly has never been used. Well on a counter.
In this medical bay, they have an array of medical tools,
most of which are most are made just for films.
They're not actual analogs to real medical tools, although there
I mean, and a lot of them are our corners
tools more than medical tools. Really, it's the kind of

(52:19):
thing that you're not going to see in actual medical
practice outside of the Victorian era. So, but if you
had ever watched a movie like the Tim Burton's Batman
or Little Shop of Horrors, you will recognize some of these.
They're the same medical devices that have shown up in
movie after movie whenever there's some form of medical horror
element to the film. So I thought I appreciated that, like, oh,

(52:42):
especially amongst all of these incredibly are not incredibly high
tech looking, but but more fancy, shiny, inexplicable bits of
medical tech that they've got floating around. Right. Well, moving forward,
you know, things go wrong, demons are unleashed, people are hallucinating,
and then that's when you start to see characters try
and take action. Dr Weir wants to go and activate

(53:05):
the failsafe circuit to turn off the gravity track. Right.
What's weird is how inconveniently placed the failsafe circuit is. Furthermore,
and it's in this tunnel that, as far as I
can tell, is composed of circuit board, which I think
is probably a categorically bad idea for I mean, first,
it's sharp, like, it's delicate, you don't really want to
be crawling around on top of it. It reminded me

(53:27):
of those scenes and Star Trek the Next Generation whenever
anything was seriously wrong with the ten miles away, Like
maybe we should start putting that stuff closer to where
we work, guys. Furthermore, it's a it's an entire tunnel
made of circuit board, and he has to go to
this one very specific panel, as far as I can tell,
the only panel within this tunnel of circuit board, and
pull out another piece of circuit board and do something too. Yeah. Yeah,

(53:51):
the expansion slot for the event horizon is in an
inconvenient location. Go buy a different ship, guys. Uh So. Also,
I have a little plot note here. The commanding officer
of the Lewis and Clark comes to a conclusion, right
right she She says to the captain that she thinks,
based upon I don't believe zero evidence whatsoever, that the

(54:11):
ship is alive. Now, first of all, she's right, but
this turns out to be the fantastical element of the film. Yes,
but how she I made the same note. I was
just like, I'm not sure where she got that, And
it was very convenient, like the audience is picking up
on it, but the characters shouldn't. Necessarily I did. I
did read that um, nearly half an hour of footage
was taken out of the film before it went to theaters, possible,

(54:35):
and and that a lot of that was was more
along the gore end. And I think that the film
benefited from not having that in there, because I thought
that the subtle flashes of gore were very effective here.
But maybe that was part of maybe that, maybe that
gave her some of the feelings she had. Maybe not,
we don't know. The Captain describes what fire and zero
G is like and gets it almost exactly wrong, super wrong.

(54:57):
He says that it's like liquid, which Laurence fishburn. So
he's very dramatic about it. Yeah, not like me. I
can't I can't manage drama. Well, I can't manage drama,
but I'm not dramatic. Uh. Yeah, he says it's like liquid.
I I interpreted that to mean that he thought it
was like liquid on a surface that has gravity, like

(55:17):
it behaves like liquid wood on Earth. Um, even if
you meant liquid and zero G, it's not exactly true.
If you were to say, light a match in a
zero G environment or a micro gravity environment, it would
the flame would form a little globe around the match head,
and it would probably burn in a very very uh

(55:38):
faint but very hot flame like you would usually get
a little blue flame around the head of the match
sticks upposedly elongated yellow yellow exactly, So fire does behave
in an interesting way in zero G, but not really
like liquid um. I have a little bit about Cooper.
We gotta talk about Cooper. Yeah, yeah, So so this

(56:00):
is moving. As the plot moves forward, like we said,
it becomes a little bit more fantastical, and therefore we
don't have quite as many things to complain about. Are
lovingly complain about. But yes, so so during one of
these spacewalks wherein one of the crew members, Cooper is
trying to repair the Claris and Clark, uh, there's an explosion,

(56:21):
massive catastrophic explosion that destroys the Lewis and Clark and
and shuttles this little bit of ship that he was
standing on, spinning wildly off into space. Right, so Cooper
is on He's tethered to this piece of the ship
and the ship is hurtling off into space with Cooper
on it. Cooper has no real means of he has

(56:42):
no means of getting He doesn't have like a jet
packet pack, which is terrible because I mean NASA and
has jet packs and standard and every space suit and
I guess standards just slipped anyway standards. First thing he
does is he matches himself from the rotating UH stuff,

(57:03):
which is problematic too, and that if you were on
a rotating piece of equipment and then you let go somehow,
and considering that you weigh less than the rotating piece
of equipment, you're going to start moving at a slightly
different rate of speed, and your your mass is different.
You're still conserving the angular momentum, so but your mass
is different. So you're gonna speak, You're gonna turn faster.

(57:25):
So we can see this on earth if you are
on say ice skates, and you start spinning and then
you pull your arms in, or you can try this
in your office if you like, sit on a chair
that can spin around and around, have someone start spinning.
You have your arms out and then start pulling your
arms in. You will start to spin faster if you're
do If you're listening to this in an office right now,
I recommend doing this and just seeing just to see

(57:45):
what reaction your code until everybody when they ask you
why you're doing that that Josh and Chuck told you to,
because we don't want to heat anyway. So if you
were to actually detach yourself. You would start spinning even faster.
This is also a problem I have with the film,
uh Gravity, which I don't think it's a spoiler because
it happens within the trailer. So anyway, Um. He then

(58:07):
ends up designed to use his oxygen supply as a
means of propelling himself back to the event Horizon, and
he vents his oxygen and rockets back to the ship.
I have a couple of problems with the way this
was depicted. Yeah, and just the fact that it would
be physically impossible, the fact that he would Yeah, he
would have no way of really directing your flight in

(58:29):
a meaningful way, and nor would you necessarily be flying
without going into an even crazier tailspin. Yeah, it's kind
of It's problematic, but you know, dramatic, it's fun Cooper.
So Cooper becomes a superspaceman and flies back to the
event Horizon. Um, and then I've got uh, I only

(58:49):
have one other real note, and I'll and Lauren, I'll
ask you what else you have to say about this.
But the last bit is the event Horizon has a
whole breach in the bridge area, and that this point
the possessed doctor were spoiler alert, is is attacking Laurence Fishburne,
not the not the character. It's Lawrence fish They've they've

(59:10):
gone so meta. No, it's Lawrence Fishburn's captain character. So
doctor were possessed is attacking the captain and the breach
the hall has breached. Dr were gets flung out into
space technically blown out into space, not sucked out because
the air pressure. So the captain ends up trying to
crawl up or crawled past where the the hallway ends

(59:34):
at the bridge, so they can seal it off and
thus repressurize part of the event horizon and not get
blown out into space. I'm not sure that you'd be
able to do that, Like I don't considering how much
was flying past him, I don't know that you would
have the strength to hold on, but or that the
materials they was holding onto it when you're just right, Yeah,

(59:55):
that's I felt very much the same way. I think
that if um, I think that would be hard enough
in the end of pressure differentiation that you've got in
an airplane, let alone in in the vacuum of space. Right,
So it's he has herculean strength and he manages to
make it Laurence Fishburn. He manages to make it into
the hallway, and not only does he make it into
the hallway, he's also able to rescue a fellow crew

(01:00:15):
member and pull her to safety before closing the doors
and sealing it off. UM. I also thought that this
would probably make their problem of very little breathable air
somewhat exacerbated. Right. And also also I was confused that
within this very same movie, a little bit earlier on
one of the other crew members, um head Head, in
a hallucination driven fit, locked himself an air lock and

(01:00:39):
was going to blow himself out into space. And as
that cabin depressurized, UM, it gave you a lot of
really great practical gore effects of his of his veins
starting to pop, and his eyes bleeding, and all of
these all of these terrible, terrific horror elements. Um And
and none of that happens to these main characters. He's

(01:01:00):
build higher with higher billing, You don't you don't get
those easily palpable eyeballs. Oh, I see, I see, that's
that's cool, all right, benefit of the job. When you
raise a rank, you just get better eyeball. Yeah. Uh,
at any rate, that is. That's kind of silly. Do
you have any other notes that you would like to share? Um,
I guess. Also, speaking of that airlock situation, it's one

(01:01:20):
of my favorite goofy movie tropes, wearing UM, something terrible
is about to happen in an airlock and you have
to hack the door. You always have to hack the door,
and the hacking of the airlock door is always accompanied
by um pulling the panel out and mussing about with wires,
and it always takes approximately four seconds longer to do
than you actually have. I just I just love that

(01:01:43):
that one little silly Well, it's also fun that he
curls up into a ball, flies out of the airlock,
is caught by the captain who's in a spacewalk, who
jumps back into the airlock and manages to get him
back into the ship. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, as a
Superman rescue you and it is a Superman rescue that
that is. I think later on there's a certain point

(01:02:04):
at which people out run some space flames. Yeah, there's
some space flame out running there's an explosion, right, Yeah,
there's also you know, we didn't really mention it. The
pathway to get to the gravity drive. The hallway that
goes through to the gravity drive itself is lined with
explosives just in case. Yeah, there's there's explosives to separate

(01:02:26):
the bridge from the gravity driving case of case failure.
Everyone who has watched Star Trek nows sometimes it's really
important to separate the dish from here exactly. You can
use it as a life I don't think you would
necessarily need a neck that long to be able to
do this, but that's okay. Now, the thing I was
going to talk about is that really short hallway where
you've got the spinning saw blades of death all around you, right,
what was that for effect? Yeah? It was creepy. I

(01:02:50):
know that Dr Weir said something in passing as they
were walking down the hallway, but it literally made no
sense to me. Yeah, me, me neither. I didn't I
didn't catch what he said. I I kind of like
I was sort of watching a going like, I'm not
going to rewind for that one, because I'm going to
explain in any satisfying way what this this hallway of
saw teeth is doing here. It kind of makes me
think of all the parodies of Star Wars and other

(01:03:12):
movies where the characters are standing right at the edge
of a really sharp drop in the middle of like
The Death Star, and like, why don't we put up
a railing? You know, it's kind of that same sort
of why did we put all these jagged saw blades
around this corridor? For? My favorite part about that corridor though,
is the dramatic tension involved in it, because it is
one of the few places on the ship that something

(01:03:33):
bodily horrible does not happen to anybody, and it so
sharp it looks like a tumbler specifically for killing people.
It looks it looks like welcome to the abattoir corridor.
This is where we will grind you into teeny tiny bits,
but it never happens. It is pretty interesting. Um but
but you know, I so so overall, I'm going to
give this film a um a gold star for trying.

(01:03:56):
I enjoyed it for what it was. It's a funge
lucky in a horror movie. There's some great bad acting
in it. Yeah, I think that. I think that Sam
Neil did uh did did a good job as a
really overblown dramatic villain. Yeah. I hope you guys enjoyed

(01:04:16):
that classic episode. It was so much fun to talk
about the technology of a specific film. I should do
more of those. Maybe I should do one about the
Matrix series, because that would be a lot of fun,
I think. But if you guys have any suggestions for
future topics, whether it's about a specific film, technology, or
just a tech topic in general, send me a message
on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff hsw not taught

(01:04:39):
to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
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