Celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson posted a series of tweets last night taking issue with the science of Gravity:
Mysteries of #Gravity: How Hubble (350mi up) ISS (230mi up) & a Chinese Space Station are all in sight lines of one another.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
The film #Gravity should be renamed "Angular Momentum"
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: When Clooney releases Bullock's tether, he drifts away. In zero-G a single tug brings them together.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Et cetera. I'll be honest: Unless a movie is truly incoherent I find nitpickers to be pretty annoying.* That goes doubly for the science scolds.** Oh, this fictional thing I just watched on a giant screen isn't real? Please, tell me more.
All of which is to say that I'm not terribly impressed with Neil deGrasse Tyson's know-it-allism. But I do pity the guy. And I pity him because of this tweet:
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why we enjoy a SciFi film set in make-believe space more than we enjoy actual people set in real space
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
There's actually a decent amount of pathos in those 125 characters. Because here's what Tyson is really saying: Why don't you care about the things I have dedicated my whole life to making you care about?***
The lesson of Gravity is simple: Space is terrifying and totally inhospitable to life and a really, really terrible place to visit. You could die at any moment. You don't want to go there. And the last shot of the film affirms the idea that man is meant to be on Earth, feet firmly planted on the ground. Gravity doesn't make you want to travel to the stars. It makes you long for home.
That's why Tyson, who said in a later tweet that he "enjoyed Gravity very much," is not-so-secretly kind of bitter about the film and the attention it is receiving. It is an explicit rejection of everything Tyson wants humanity to achieve.
*That being said, I did find this point on China and Gravity to be interesting. Did the filmmakers change the nature of the threat in space to appease the Chinese market? I tend to think not—the Russian market is pretty huge too—but you never know.
**There is an interesting essay to be written on the similarity of the anti-Gravity set and the anti-Zero Dark Thirty set.
***The short answer to Tyson's question is that we care about make-believe space more than actual people set in real space because we haven't really done anything interesting in space in a long time. The pretty pictures from the Hubble are great, but they can't compare to the grandeur of putting the American flag on the moon. That's especially true when you consider the context—the Cold War, the Space Race, the Soviets, etc.—that helped make it a unifying moment in American history. Colonizing Mars sounds neat but pointless. Ditto the moon. Let's deal with our earthbound problems first.