Total Recall
Or, "How to make an Arnold Action Flick with so many plot twists that if you go peepee, you'll have no idea what's happening!"
Synopsis? Arnold is a regular construction worker. Starts getting strange memories of a life on Mars. Becomes embroiled in an interplanetary conspiracy. Turns out to be a bad guy. Ignores the "bad" and saves the day and the planet Mars. Makes an entire atmosphere all by him little self...
Well, a few errors were noticed along the way;
- This whole thing about melting the polar ice caps to make a viable atmosphere isn't only far fetched, it's Bad Fizzix! This idea has been around in the literary world since Edgar Rice Borroughs John Carter on Mars series of SciFi books. There were mysterious machines that produced a viable atmoshere on John Carter's Mars. So, what's wrong with turning the Mars polar ice caps into air?
- Well, first and probably most importantly, the polar caps on Mars are frozen CO2, carbon dioxide. SO, even if this alien machine could melt all the ice and turn it into "air", it wouldn't do any of the human occupants of Mars any good.
- The volume of air necessary to achieve an atmosphere is staggering. Let's do some number crunching, shall we?
- Mars has a radius of . Assuming a viable atmosphere of only 5 km, that means you need m3 of air.
- Using a basic ratio of volumes of solid to gaseous oxygen, a relatively important component of human air, to acheive m3, you need m3 of solid oxygen. That's the volume of
- Even if this cap is regulation water, all you'd have is oxygen and hydrogen! Not a viable human sustaining atmosphere...
- This is GOOD! When Arnold turns on the alien machine, before the atmoshere actually gets cranking, the bad guy and later Arnold and the girl go flying out into the sparse Martian atmosphere. The scene gets a little ugly with their tongues hanging out all swollen, eyes bugging way out from their skulls, ICK! However, it's pretty close to being true. Our bodies have evolved here on earth. Therefore, we have exactly one atmosphere of pressure to fight back all the time or we'd collapse. Thus, if we were dropped onto the surface of Jupiter, we would actually be crushed by the external pressure. Mars has much less atmosheric pressure than earth. Thus, our own internal pressure would want to come out! Yuck! This is the argument against the common belief that a human body would explode if thrown into the emptiness of space. Not. Unlike a balloon which would explode, we have holes where the pressure can be alleviated. It would simply mean that everything inside would come outside. A mess, but no body explosions.