Comet ISON, Niburu and the SyFy Channel

Gentle readers, I apologize for my delay in posting.  I had a lot of e-mail to go through since my vacation and one of the things that's taken my attention is a letter that I received from a young man.  He wrote a screenplay – he sent me his treatment, which is about 28 pages long, I wrote back asking him if he would like me to forward this to a few friends of mine who write screenplays who have had them options and picked up and everything else.  He said now he wanted me to look it over because while I'm not a scientist, I do a lot of research for my stories. 

 And that's what he wanted.  He wanted me to look over the science and while it doesn't need to be perfect or exacting needs to be reasonable.  Little back story, essay young man but he's roughly my age, maybe you're too younger, he's writing a screenplay which is auctioning to an indie studio and hopes to get it on the SyFy network.  Well, the first thing I wrote back to him was with the advent of Sharknado and the in production Sharknado II, was that science really doesn't play a big part in a lot of the movies on SyFy.

Well, John, and I did get his permission to talk about this in the blog, wants to write a B-movie, he actually wants it to be better than some of the cheesy movies that are on SyFY now.  I respect that.  Therefore, I read the treatment, which he based on the comet ISON and the hype about the tenth planet, or Niburu.  A lot of the information that he used regarding Niburu/ISON is faulty and is based mostly on of the writings of the conspiracy and new-age spiritualist people and not science.

As I said John gave me permission to talk about his treatment, so the story is that ISON/Niburu enters the inner solar system after 3600 years, and the inhabitants of the planet make contact with humans, they want to reestablish their kingdom and harvest gold for their atmosphere.

That's the basic premise of the movie.  Where do I start?  If you follow my blog you know that I write my science fiction with a great deal of logical and extrapolated science from the current trends that I see.  One of things that bothered me is that he is basing his planet on the concepts that people who really don't know astronomy or science have put forth. Niburu is supposed to be 5 to 8 times Earth's mass.  That makes it a super terrestrial planet, which is fine because we have found such planets in the galaxy.  

One of things that I really had an issue with John about was the alien race that lived on this planet. A according to John, the Anunnaki are tall winged beings that apparently resemble human beings, who are coming back to Earth to harvest the rest of the gold on the planet to see their atmosphere and enslave humans and take them back to their planet.

Where do I begin?  All right, this planet orbits Earth every 3600 years and it's clearly a trillion miles or more away from the sun, somewhere on the edge of the Oort cloud.  A planet that far away from the sun doesn’t get sunlight as we do on Earth. In fact, the sun looks like a bright star in their continually star-filled skies.  I wrote back to John.  I asked him, do they have spaceships, he said yes they do they have technology that is far beyond anything that we have on earth.  All right is there a technological civilization, why would they come to earth to mine gold and how would they survive in our atmosphere?

John said that they breathe air.  All right, I'll buy that, if the planet did have an atmosphere because of the size of the planet and its distance from the sun, it is conceivable that it could retain its atmosphere.  The mass of the planet and the cold would allow the atmosphere to be retained much more than, if it were closer to the sun.  An example this is Titan, it is the only natural satellite known to have a dense atmosphere, and the only object other than Earth for which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid have been discovered.

The next issue of course is if they are an advanced technological race, why not just mine asteroids for gold, why come here? And why do they look like humans with wings? What do they subsist on? If their planet is frozen, as it most certainly should be, how did they rise to the top of the food chain on the planet? And why do they need gold for their atmosphere. According to John, they need gold to offset the greenhouse effect on their world. Um what?

As I said SyFy is very loosey-goosey with their movies, the science is speculative at best. I told John if he wants to write a solid science-fiction story he needs to actually do research to make the story something worthwhile. That being said, I told him as far as the story goes, it was passable, but reminded me of the horrible movie Battlefield Earth with John Travolta. I did send him a list of things I found wonky and suggestions to tighten them up so that at least they made some logical sense.

I won’t tell you the ending, other than you probably will see it coming a mile away. I wish him luck and if it does make it on the SyFy channel I will be blaring about it here.