plausible? in what reality?
According to Benjamin Radford’s article for Newsarama, a comic book site owned by Imaginova, two of the five most scientifically plausible sci-fi flicks out there are Iron Man and Jurassic Park. Huh? Really? No disrespect to the now late Michael Crichton or the fine people at Marvel, but there’s just no way these concepts are even remotely workable in the real world.
First, Iron Man. It was a fun movie, but I kept wondering where exactly Tony Stark stores the thousands of gallons of fuel he’d need to fly at supersonic speeds between the US and Central Asia. And how his suit can withstand speeds in excess of 800 mph if it has one of the worst possible shapes for flight. And just how he can use the thrusters in his hands as weapons while totally ignoring Newton’s Third Law. Sure, an eccentric billionaire with enough expertise can build himself a suit of high tech armor. But actually using it in any capacity would be pretty much impossible since many of the key weapons that make Iron Man a force to be reckoned with, only work in the fictional world.
How Radford could consider Jurassic Park plausible is also a mystery. The freshest dino DNA we have available to us is 65 million years old. The half-life of the DNA molecule is 1.1 million years. Whatever shreds of genetic data we can extract from their fossilized bones are so badly degraded, it’s a Herculean task to study them, much less use them to create a living being. Of course, there is a way to resurrect the dinosaurs by reversing the evolutionary processes in birds. By switching off and changing certain chemical signals when an emu or an ostrich fetus is starting to develop, scientists could create something that would technically be classified as a dinosaur. But would T. rex ever stalk the Earth again? No. If we really wanted a Jurassic Park, we should’ve started working on it right after the end of the Cretaceous.
