The Science of Doctor Who: s01e02, “The End of the World”

Of course, I say “every day or two” and immediately, life keeps me from paying much attention to any writing for a while. That, and I needed to find my archive copy of the episode to check out a few details.

This go-round, the main science-fiction idea is that the Doctor has taken Rose forward five billion years or thereabouts to watch the Sun engulf Earth. (It’s a little morbid, but then the death of homeworlds is weighing on the Doctor’s mind these days.)

The timing’s about right, and Rose shows off some basic science knowledge when she points out that a) this should be a slow event over epochs, not an afternoon’s happening, and b) the Earth’s continents should be wholly unrecognizable now due to plate tectonics. Good for Rose! The Doctor glibly responds that gravity satellites have been holding back the sun today, and –

Wait. Wow. The technological civilizations of five billion years from now have the ability to keep dead stars from expanding. I mean, sure, no problem, five billion years; but an understanding of physics at that level implies they can do almost anything with energy and matter that they want, to the point where the space station and shuttles displayed would have to be utterly rustic and quaint. Maybe the whole ceremony is a bit of a LARP, like visiting Colonial Williamsburg is for today’s Americans.

– and that the “Trust” put the continents back as they were five billion years ago, for some sort of aesthetic reasons. Again, I guess since those are basically the continental shapes upon which Humanity evolved and reached the stars, perhaps it’s some kind of nostalgia thing. On the other hand, Earth’s continents aren’t a sliding tile puzzle. Much of the familiar coastlines, mountain ranges, and other geographic features would have been erased by time, and the Trust would have had to reconstruct them from scratch. (But hey, they can keep dead stars from expanding, they can do that too.)

This is not really a scientific observation, but comments of the Doctor’s and Cassandra’s later imply that the economy of the galaxy is still capitalist. I can hardly say that’s impossible, but with the galaxy’s suns pumping out free energy to anyone with a solar collector, and uncounted myriads of lumps of ice and rock and mineral wealth scattered throughout the arms for the taking, and the aforementioned technology levels: well, their version of capitalism must be fairly interesting.

Back to the science. Lady Cassandra. Yeah.

It’s kind of interesting how Cassandra moves her eyes and lips without any muscle tissue. Also, it’s interesting how her eyes pass information to her brain with no detectable optic nerve. (Our optic nerves are thick, obvious things not unlike organic coaxial cable.) Also, her mouth would be useless as a speaking device, since there is no jaw, tongue or vocal cords for making sounds, and there are no lungs to move air through her mouth so those sounds would be audible. Also… also… also… yeah. Lady Cassandra is, at best, a Disney robot puppet being manipulated by the brain tissue beneath. Too bad no one thought to put an automatic misting system on the frame from which the puppet’s hung. Oh, I guess it’s possible that she has nanotech implants for all this – again, the tech levels of this episode are rightly the tech of miracles – but it wouldn’t do anything for her already shaky claim of being ‘pure human’.

That’s a pretty ridiculous claim, anyway. The episode never says how old Cassandra is and the later “New Earth” doesn’t help, but we know from “The Empty Child” that humans began eagerly copulating with the rest of the galaxy’s sentients at least by the year 5,000. From the genetic viewpoint of the year 5,000,000,000, it’s a moot difference. She’d have be ‘pure human’ by some overly-specific and arbitrary definition she made up for the purpose.

Side note: it’s mentioned in one of her two appearances that she transitioned from male to female. By the year 5,000,000,000, one would expect that procedure to be so effortless and routine that people could change bodies like designer clothes if that was their thing. In fact, you’d really expect Cassandra in this episode to look completely like a prime specimen of 21st-century humanity; such a body could be re-spun from her DNA pattern (with desired tweaks) whenever the old one wore out… or just got boring.

So, the upshot is that I find the artificial compression of a star more convincing than Lady Cassandra. In science fiction and fantasy, sometimes the high concepts work far better than the baser ones.

Next time: an episode with, really, not a lot of science in it.

Tags: , , ,

16 Comments

  • stori_lundi says:

    LOL!! I watched Clash of the Titans and was able to excuse all of the historical inaccuracies and what not but not Zeus’ bald eagle. True, the eagle was the symbol of Zeus but bald eagles are strictly an American thing. That bugged me to no end.

  • stori_lundi says:

    LOL!! I watched Clash of the Titans and was able to excuse all of the historical inaccuracies and what not but not Zeus’ bald eagle. True, the eagle was the symbol of Zeus but bald eagles are strictly an American thing. That bugged me to no end.

  • stori_lundi says:

    LOL!! I watched Clash of the Titans and was able to excuse all of the historical inaccuracies and what not but not Zeus’ bald eagle. True, the eagle was the symbol of Zeus but bald eagles are strictly an American thing. That bugged me to no end.

  • stori_lundi says:

    LOL!! I watched Clash of the Titans and was able to excuse all of the historical inaccuracies and what not but not Zeus’ bald eagle. True, the eagle was the symbol of Zeus but bald eagles are strictly an American thing. That bugged me to no end.

  • stori_lundi says:

    LOL!! I watched Clash of the Titans and was able to excuse all of the historical inaccuracies and what not but not Zeus’ bald eagle. True, the eagle was the symbol of Zeus but bald eagles are strictly an American thing. That bugged me to no end.

  • stori_lundi says:

    LOL!! I watched Clash of the Titans and was able to excuse all of the historical inaccuracies and what not but not Zeus’ bald eagle. True, the eagle was the symbol of Zeus but bald eagles are strictly an American thing. That bugged me to no end.

  • stori_lundi says:

    LOL!! I watched Clash of the Titans and was able to excuse all of the historical inaccuracies and what not but not Zeus’ bald eagle. True, the eagle was the symbol of Zeus but bald eagles are strictly an American thing. That bugged me to no end.

  • stori_lundi says:

    LOL!! I watched Clash of the Titans and was able to excuse all of the historical inaccuracies and what not but not Zeus’ bald eagle. True, the eagle was the symbol of Zeus but bald eagles are strictly an American thing. That bugged me to no end.

  • nviiibrown says:

    Even better, she does all that talking without a face next we see her.

  • nviiibrown says:

    Even better, she does all that talking without a face next we see her.

  • nviiibrown says:

    Even better, she does all that talking without a face next we see her.

  • nviiibrown says:

    Even better, she does all that talking without a face next we see her.

  • nviiibrown says:

    Even better, she does all that talking without a face next we see her.

  • nviiibrown says:

    Even better, she does all that talking without a face next we see her.

  • nviiibrown says:

    Even better, she does all that talking without a face next we see her.

  • nviiibrown says:

    Even better, she does all that talking without a face next we see her.

Leave a Reply to nviiibrown

XHTML: You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>