The Cooper Station is able to sustain a healthy atmosphere and crops.   The fundamental motivation to get humanity out of Earth in Interstellar is the blight induced hunger. Moreover, in the movie they show a NASA lab where the corn is being infected with blight and they seem to have no way to stop it. It seems to me that whatever technology they used to achieve this result in Cooper Station would effectively resolve the plot.  Do we know how they achieved a healthy atmosphere and crops and why this couldn't be done on Earth?
121925
In Interstellar, there is a Blight destroying all the world's crops.  If Plan A involves launching a space colony, presumably full of crops, etc., how could they avoid bringing the Blight with them?     At the end of the film we see that they've actually created space colonies.  How did they manage to launch and populate them without bringing the Blight with them?
55474
This poor creature is taken aboard the spaceship and the humans do not know that it is intelligent.  The alien can repeat what it hears, e,g, "pass the sugar".  It is able to escape at night and it communicates messages to its fellow aliens.  It directs that they turn up the heat of the atmosphere (somehow they can do this) so as to force the humans to leave.  The alien protagonist states that it will die w/ the humans or leave with them.
21869
In the movie, After Earth:      Humans have been away from Earth for over a thousand years living on other planets outside of our solar system. It is mentioned Humanity was under attack by an alien race, but it did not mention terraforming or any particular change of the Earth's ecosystem.    Why did Humans who were not native to Earth appear to be unable to breathe on Earth without technology? I don't remember anyone explaining why humans couldn't breathe there. Was there something I missed or is this a plot hole we were expected to hand-wave away?
14274
In the movies  and , what do the aliens eat? You would think they first feed from the body host, but then when the human host awakens he doesn't have anything visibly wrong, so the human host was used only to incubate the young alien. When they get out of the body they keep growing but when they encounter humans, they don't eat them, they just kill them or use them as new hosts.  So, what do they eat? How can they grow that tall?
94719
I just saw Ridley Scott's “Prometheus” and I’m still confused about how the black liquid works.  Can anyone elaborate on what its function was and the mechanism by which it operated?  I surmise that it was meant as a biological weapon (something they mention in the movie at various points), that was released prematurely and infected the developers (the “Engineers”, so named by the characters in the movie), but I still don’t understand the exact mechanism by which it functioned.  From what I can tell, it infects a host, whereby it either:   kills them mutates them into a killing zombie, or uses the host to gestate another more complex organism in the host or anyone that the host comes in contact with.   Can anyone elaborate under which conditions these symptoms arise or whether they’re even correct in the first place?  Some examples of the black liquid’s various effects are:   When the scientists find the pile of dead engineers.  Presumably they were infected and died from their infection (but perhaps this was not the case and they were killed from a quarantine protocol?). When trying to revive the head of the decapitated engineer, it burst In the opening scene, an engineer is seen drinking the black liquid which then proceeds to destroy his body (though this may be a different black liquid, not meant as a weapon but meant as a life-seeding operation?  See ). Fifield (the geologist played by Sean Harris) came back to terrorize the crew of Prometheus after he had his face doused in acid and had presumably been exposed to the black liquid (i.e. he became a “killing zombie”). Dr. Charlie Halloway (played by Logan Marshall-Green) “impregnated” Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace) with a squid-like alien after being infected himself and having intercourse with Dr. Shaw (i.e. the black liquid giving rise to a more complex organism).   In addition, there is some evidence that the black liquid alters the organism it infects to produce a more complex “seeding” organism.  For example, when the chamber with the giant statue of the Engineer head is (where they find the head of the decapitated Engineer), we see earth worms writhing in the soil.  Later, in the same room, we see a snake-like alien come out of the pools the black liquid that kills Millburn (the biologist, played by Rafe Spall) by going down his throat and presumably planting another organism for gestation.  In the same vein, we see a small writhing worm-like organism coming out of Dr. Charlie Halloway’s eye when he was inspecting himself in the mirror and when he first noticed his infection.  From the original Alien canon (both from the movies and comic) it’s been clear that the face hugger is meant as a “bootstrap” organism whereby it implants a seed organism into the host which then uses the host’s DNA to better adapt to its environment.  This can be seen in Prometheus as well after an alien bursts from the revived Engineer’s chest in the final scene.  Though the facility to create more eggs (or face huggers) was never explicitly mentioned (to my knowledge), from the fact that there was a queen alien in the “Aliens” movie I took the aliens to be more ant-like, where, given the need, an alien could differentiate itself and become a “queen” alien to then lay eggs.  I’m unclear as to how this fits into the information from “Prometheus”.  I am tempted to think that it is sloppy story-telling meant more for effect without regard to consistency, but out of respect for Mr. Scott I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt and see if there is a consistent set of rules by which all the evidence above makes sense.
106179
So in Episode 1 they reveal that force sensitivity can be measured scientifically by counting midi-chlorian in your cells. Does anyone know the midi-chlorian counts of any of the main characters? The amount of detail in back stories in Star Wars is often so in depth that I wouldn't be surprised if the data were available somewhere.
21508
Is it stated in any expanded universe what Skynet's plans were after wiping out the Human race (assuming that was its plan)?  Maybe space travel to colonise different planets or something else entirely?
81291
I recall a book I read back in middle school (ca. 1981), where humanity had sent an astronaut to check out signs of an intelligent race or something like that, but he disappeared.  Earth then sends his younger brother to see what happened, but using an older spacecraft because the first mission used the only up-to-date one Earth had.  Also they refuse to let him take any weapons, to avoid any possible provocation.  On the way something impacts his windshield, punching a hole through it.  He thinks either it was a meteoroid, or a laser beam--but no Earth laser beam could punch a hole that small from more than 1000 miles away.  He later finds the aliens, who are blobs with tentacles or something like that (my memory's hazy), and he's out in his space suit.  He doesn't have a laser to defend himself with, so he uses his communicator (or something like that), setting it to CODE, its most intense setting.  That seems somehow to disable the alien, and soon it's in trouble.  He comes out to it and tries to pull it away from danger, but of course with nothing to push/pull against, his efforts are in vain--but it turns out that convinces the aliens that humanity really means them no harm, so he returns to Earth a hero.  That's as best I can remember the story.  Does it ring any bells for anyone?
96446
At the end of District 9, it transpires that      all the alien mothership needs is some of that black juice, and then it starts working again.   Given that all the alien technology came from the mothership in the first place, why didn't they just do that right at the start? Why did they even stop at Earth?
118566
When the good ship Serenity is traveling in deep space, the crew experiences what looks like an Earth-normal (or Earth That Was-normal) level of gravity. Is it ever explained how the ship is able to generate artificial gravity? The ship doesn't spin, so  is out.  is a possibility, but I think the gravity in the ship pulls in a direction that is perpendicular to the direction the ship is usually traveling in, not opposite, like this method would require.   So: how does she pull it off?   Extra credit: how does she pull it off in the episode ? Serenity's engine is totally dead, to the extent where not even life support systems are online. Yet Mal still has to valiantly haul himself around on the floor to replace the compression coil, so whatever creates the artificial gravity on Serenity is clearly still going. How?
38905
In Interstellar, what do Murph and NASA do to save humanity after solving Brand's equation? Do they get the entire human race on giant space ships and transport them to a habitable planet? (How exactly do they do  this?)  If yes, is this habitable planet Edmunds' (the one that Amelia lands on)?
77946
I read this years ago. A scout in spherical advanced ship lands on a planet. Natives are friendly, but the shaman perceives competition, and sneaks into the craft and scatters potions on the controls, their acid eating into plastics and metals. He can be rescued at the other side of planet, but he has a deadline. Eventually all make airship and he makes it.
70474
I recently re-watched Contact for the first time since my childhood, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, I realized that there was something I'd never understood: why couldn't they corroborate Ellie's account of her journey?  As far as I could tell, the pod fell harmlessly through the machine.  That is, it didn't break anything, and the machine wasn't destroyed.  I don't recall any dialogue about circuits being fried or the system shutting down, so presumably it wouldn't be hard to simply hoist the pod up and go again.  I imagine the energy draw was substantial on the local Japanese power grid, but given the amount of effort and money already invested in the machine, surely "Round 2" wasn't out of the question?  I mean, they almost certainly expected that this machine would get more than one good use out of it, anyway!  So given Ellie's vehement insistence that the machine had worked, the public nature of the controversy surrounding her testimony, and the government's (secret) findings that her device had recorded 18 hours of static, why wasn't it the obvious choice to have someone else suiting up the next day, ready to drop through the machine and corroborate her story?
96903
Coruscant is entirely covered by a city, thus there isn't any land for farms (or if there are some farms, there wouldn't be much space for them). How does this planet with a population of billions get enough food to feed its sizable population? Do they import it all from offworld (something that would take a lot of ships)?
95208
I read a novel where several enemy alien species were stranded together on an interdicted planet.  They had to recycle everything and keep hidden. By "keep hidden" I mean make sure there is no evidence of their presence visible from space. They recycled everything and lived in camouflaged dwellings.  The younger generation was building a mixed culture community until the older home species showed up.  One of the alien races had a body made of rings or donuts of gases that mixed to express itself. Members of this species could be taken over and controlled by rings transferred from another member of the species.  The book may be 20 years old or more.
74719
The sun creates this heliosphere by sending a constant flow of particles and a magnetic field out into space at over 670,000 miles per hour, which is also known as solar wind. If the speed of the wind is that great, why doesn't it disrupt the planets in our solar system? Does it just prevent foreign particles from interstellar space entering the heliosphere?
119181
In  (2014), the crew members visited the second planet and found Mann. Soon after finding Mann, they discover that he has lied about the data. And then he tried to kill Cooper as he decides to leave to Earth.   Why did Mann try to kill Cooper?