I have to admit that I do not read much science fiction and I do not anxiously await the next great science fiction film about Star Wars or ETs. I agree with Carl Sagan that most of it is bad science and bad fiction. Unfortunately, many people grow up learning their science from cartoons and science fiction movies. "Flintstone Science" leads some people to believe that humans and dinosaurs co-existed or that mice or humans with capes can fly, etc.[note] "SciFi Science" leads people to believe that ice sinks rather than floats in oceans (icebergs come crashing down on submarines in movies!) or that when spacecraft fire endless missiles at one another in deep space there are loud sounds from their engines, firings and explosions (actually without air to vibrate there would be silence). In the movies, comics and books, Superman can catch Lois Lane as she is freefalling from the tall building he has leapt over earlier in a single bound. Ask yourself what would happen to a human body travelling at the rate of 32 ft. per second per second for four or five seconds which was then stopped completely from further downward motion. I don't care how soft Superman's hands are, Lois Lane should be in pieces under those conditions.
In the movies, comics and books, six-shooters can have six hundred shots and still not be empty, the dead can rise from their graves and haunt the living, and humans and their ships can travel at `warp speed' (beyond the speed of light) with no noticeable effects.
One might say, where's the harm? or where's your sense of humor? This is entertainment; it's not supposed to be factual. Cartoons are not documentaries! Lighten up! What about Coleridge's advice to suspend disbelief? If this stuff came in small doses, regularly counterbalanced by accurate science presented by the mass media for the entertainment and education of young people, I wouldn't be so concerned. But because of the preponderance of junk science and an entertainment industry that panders and caters to the occult because it sells, there is a communal reinforcement of non-sense which leads many people to not only believe in absurdities but to take them for granted and to think that their beliefs are part of a social belief system that also includes belief in such things as immortal spirits and power lawn mowers, the Trinity and satellite photography, and ghosts and the two-party system. Because occult or bogus scientific ideas are communally reinforced, they are not differentiated from other, less controversial, kinds of beliefs. I realize that intelligent people should have little problem with scientific absurdities, or split infinitives for that matter. But the lack of counterbalance and the general tendency in mass media to cater to the occult and supernatural, the moronic and deranged, or the titillating and scandalous, is what concerns me. The issue is really a matter of balance more than anything else. Well, that and the preponderance of scientific illiteracy.
If there is nothing else of value that anthropology has taught us it is that if a child were taken from its parents at birth and raised in another culture with a completely alien value and belief system, the child would only be recognizable as belonging to its parents' culture by trivial physical features, if at all. If the Pope had been abducted at birth and raised by Jehova's Witnesses, is there anyone who really thinks that such a person would be a Catholic today, much less the leader of that religion? Communal reinforcement of beliefs makes certain beliefs real options and other beliefs not real options. Breaking the bonds of communal reinforcement so that one can think for oneself and be a free person is a most difficult thing to do. It is difficult and it is honorable. But to create non-sense, knowing it is non-sense and that it will manipulate the feelings and thoughts of millions of people, and to do so only because you know it will make you money, is both easy and dishonorable. This holds for fictional history, too, of the Oliver Stone variety.
Of course there are some wonderful works of science and historical fiction, many with interesting philosophical themes which elevate rather than degrade the human spirit. I only wish there were an easy way to separate the chaff from the wheat.
See related article on communal reinforcement.
further reading
Krauss, Lawrence. The Physics of Star Trek, (Basic Books, 1995).
Sagan, Carl. Broca's Brain (New York: Random House, 1979), ch. 9, "Science Fiction--A Personal View"
I remember a news story of a boy who had broken his neck attempting to fly. He'd put on a Superman cape he'd gotten as a gift, got a ladder and climbed up to the garage roof and leapt onto the driveway. Most children, of course, will realize that they'd best keep their flying to pretend flying or they'll get hurt. And it would be a very dim child who believed that if you get run over by a car all you have to do is puff yourself up like the Roadrunner and you'll be as good as new. You would think that natural selection would take care of such children before they reached adulthood, yet just yesterday I watched a TV news report about a woman who had burnt her house down after replacing christmas lights on her christmas tree with fourth of July sparklers.