Hi-Fi Sci-Fi: Submit your questions for Battlestar science advisor!
Jul7
CALLING ALL BATTLESTAR FANS!
A week from this Tuesday, ScriptPhD.com is very fortunate to have the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Kevin Grazier, NASA physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and science and technical advisor to hit sci-fi shows Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, and the recent television pilot Virtuality. We will be discussing cylons, space, and the upcoming Discovery Channel panel at Comic-Con (which ScriptPhd.com will bring you coverage of), and oh so much more.
As a way to give fans the opportunity to interact with the brains of the science behind some of the best sci-fi television has to offer, I will be selecting several questions to ask Dr. Grazier from you. Just leave a comment on this post with your question and come back next week to read the full transcript of our sit-down.
So say we all!
~*ScriptPhD*~
6:14 pm on July 6th, 2009
My question is: how could just eight nukes have pushed the gigantic Cylon Colony into the singularity? It seems way too big for that…
6:25 pm on July 6th, 2009
Where the members of the cast very close? How hard was it to create the centurions?
7:19 pm on July 6th, 2009
Yo, Kev, I’ve been wondering — how come there were no birds or other animals on any of the botanically-inhabited planets visited by the Fleet? Did the mysterious and God-like forces wipe out animal life on all planets except for Earth, just to keep the plot focused? Seems kinda cruel, man.
7:21 pm on July 6th, 2009
Also, I’ve been wondering — how come NASA doesn’t come clean on just how crowded and intensely dangerous it is in asteroid belts? I’m sure you wouldn’t let them get away with any false nonsense about high space density in an asteroid belt or an accretion disc unless it were well supported. Right? Right?
1:09 am on July 7th, 2009
This has probably been asked before -and it probably will be asked again! there are two obvious ‘impossibilities’ that jump at you but are nevertheless necessary for the plot of one such show: FTL, of course, and also artificial gravity on the ships (even on a ship like Galactica, people would be floating around, not walking with their feet firmly on the ‘ground’, etc). Was there any conceptualisation, esp. on the latter, on how it could be achieved, or was it just left open and unexplained since it was necessary and inevitable?
11:15 pm on July 7th, 2009
How hard do you tend to push for accuracy when the writers want to go for flashy effects? What can you tell all the hardcore science nerds who find it difficult to engage in willful suspension of disbelief during sci-fi shows?
12:17 am on July 11th, 2009
As the series progressed, I noticed that it fared better when the underlying science was not exposed (such as how the FTL, artificial gravity, or food/waste reprocessing works) rather than when it was (such as the ridiculously wrong neurology). Did you work those “unspoken” aspects out, but intentionally keep them hidden because they obviously weren’t important to the plot? If so, mind spilling the beans on the theories behind how the Galactica works?