Travel Time


So the Lima Project was sheduled for 29 years and dissapeared after 16 years near neptune. did they take 16 years to get there or were they on their way back? Also How could they establish from neptune that there was no intelligent life whatsoever in the whole universe?

Then Pitt's Character travels there in just about 80 days? This doesn't make sense at all...

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As I understand it, it takes about 80 days for a one way trip, The project was meant to last for 29 years and then return. As for the SETI part, we are meant to assume they have some science fiction hoodoo that can image distant interstellar objects. Which would actually mean that there STILL might be intelligent life elsewhere, but that an insufficient amount of time has passed for evidence of it to reach us due to the limits of the speed of light (and radio waves).

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But it still makes no sense at all. TLJ character is a half-blind grandpa just after half of the sheduled time while the travel time back to earth is just 80 days? Why not replace the personel at least every 5 years or just send an unmanned drone.

And why did he have to send his message to mars? I mean ok its a plot device but was it explained that otherwise someone could intercept the message of doom?

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But it still makes no sense at all. TLJ character is a half-blind grandpa just after half of the sheduled time while the travel time back to earth is just 80 days? Why not replace the personel at least every 5 years or just send an unmanned drone.


Maybe less expensive to leave a self-sufficient crew in place and not constantly have to rotate the personnel in and out.

SpaceCom was probably reluctant to risk further personnel to rescue the Lima Project after it went radio-dark, at least until it became clear that the malfunctioning station was causing the dangerous surges.

An unmanned drone would have been unable to recover from a surge the way human crews could, seeing as people would be able to take manual control over the ship in the event of damage to the computers.

And why did he have to send his message to mars? I mean ok its a plot device but was it explained that otherwise someone could intercept the message of doom?


I believe it was explained during the debrief on earth that Mars had the last functioning secure-communication terminal that could contact Lima, the messages had to be sent from there.

There are a lot of things that were only vaguely explained in the movie, it was probably a conscious decision to keep the film focussed on the theme of "overcoming despair", and not get bogged down in hard sci-fi jargon that would probably still not be able to adequately explain away all the inconsistencies. The film is basically an elaborate metaphor for a "journey into the heart of darkness" a la Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Fountain, or Sorcerer (1977). You have to make a choice as to whether you can get over the ambivalent aspects or not; it's something that's up to personal taste.

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Because he was the project. As in, the project was alive only because this superfamous astronaut was pushing for it. It would have been canned without him, thus it was his last chance to do it, no replacements.

As far as why not sending a drone instead? Human pride always results in bad decisions.

"And why did he have to send his message to mars? I mean ok its a plot device but was it explained that otherwise someone could intercept the message of doom? "

The surge has destroyed all long range communication equipment on earth. Mars was unaffected (probably due to orbit differences) and therefore still had long range communication equipment functioning.

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Yeah, there's no way that you could ever prove that there's no life anywhere.

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We are still finding new life forms on earth (mostly in the deep ocean), so confirming that in a planet just from some surface pictures is a ridiculous claim. But the goal there was to find life more advanced than humans "to learn from their progress". And that would likely mean noticable surface activity.

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