But I do agree that many games don’t even nearly approach a good sense of the scale of distance of space and Mass Effect is no exclusion. The only game I know of that does it borderline decent is EVE Online. Yes sure, it’s the same misleading vision over there that you could travel between worlds very quickly but at least they did a good job of how to portray it. In EVE traveling from one side of the ‘galaxy’ to the other is quite a bit of work as far as I remember from the few times I trialed EVE Online.

As for the Jesus comment – that doesn’t really have anything to do with spaceflight either, does it?

1. There might be intelligent life in the Solar System. For example in the hidden oceans of Europa. It’s highly unlikely but that rarely stops Sci-Fi writers.

2. Going to other stars doesn’t actually change that. So far there is no evidence for ANY intelligent life forms to exist even in the Milky Way. There are no radio transmissions or other giveaways. If there was life out there we SHOULD have picked up something by now. This problem is called the Fermi Paradox.

3. Sci-Fi works without aliens just as well: Firefly is a good example.

It’s a reference to the mass-dilation effect of relativity, and how element zero (anyone who knows what atomic numbers actually represent is likely to have a stroke upon reading that term, however, so in the very act of lending itself relativistic plausibility, the game sacrifices basic chemical plausibility!) can increase or decrease the apparent mass of an object without moving it at relativistic speed by having a current passed through it in a certain direction (and here, electrical engineers will also balk – it is meaningless under most conceivable circumstances to refer to currents and their direction when referring to individual particles). The reasoning, if such it may be called, is that since moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light causes an apparent change in mass, then inducing an apparent change in mass by other means (element zero) can accelerate you to relativistic speed. Asimov, this ain’t (to see “realistic” sci-fi done masterfully, read his “The Gods Themselves.” “Nemesis” also has a slightly more realistic seeming development of FTL, in that it doesn’t jump straight from Saturn-Vs to fully functional super-lightspeed cruisers without at least some intervening transitionary stages that only sort-of work), but it’s probably still better than the science found in the average hollywood space movie, and this is why: bad movie science will simple declare something unknown to exist that outright breaks a particular, fundamental scientific principle for the convenience of plot, and leave it at that. Much better movie science will do the same thing, but make some effort to explore the other implications this might have on the rest of the universe. Better movies still will try at least to create the MacGuffin in such a way that you can just, barely, persuade yourself that it might merely be an extension of the law via an unusual set of circumstances, not a complete violation of it.

There may be real science behind all this. It may even, for all I know with my schoolboy physics, be conceivable for such a mass-effect to exist; according to wikipedia, the game director has referenced element zero to the real life theory of dark matter, which certainly might exist. However, my points above are based only on the information available in-game, which is how I feel it should really be judged; if they wanted to claim validity by referring to anything else, they should have at least stuck it in the codex.

Mass Effect 2, of course, negates all such high-level discussions of bad science by simply disregarding elementary astrophysics altogether, since the modified map screen lets you fly anywhere you like in a stellar system, including *right through a sun* if you want with no ill effects, without even a passing reference to the likes of angular momentum or energy conservation, reaction mass, transfer orbits, etc. In the first game, where you simply told the map where you wanted to go and the computer did the rest, you could at least imagine that it was working out all that jazz properly. Oh, and would it really have hurt to have elliptical orbits? That’s one case where realism actually looks better.

My guess is because it gives a bigger sense of the unknown.

That’s my point. It’s a misunderstanding brought by Space Opera itself. The Solar System is big and unknown. Everything outside of it is ridiculous.

Fantasy stories with dragons and witches and wizards and stuff, shouldn’t exist either, right?

No, I didn’t suggest that. But calling them “Historical Novels” would be wrong.

And if sci-fi would be realistic, it would be pretty lame. You wouldn’t even be able to hear ships flying by and exploding and all that.

There is plenty of exciting things to happen in a plausible scenario. It’s the author’s fault if a story is lame.

Fantasy stories with dragons and witches and wizards and stuff, shouldn’t exist either, right? There was never any of that.

And if sci-fi would be realistic, it would be pretty lame. You wouldn’t even be able to hear ships flying by and exploding and all that.

But keep in mind that aliens in most Sci-Fi are just weird-looking humanoids. Their bodies and minds rarely differ significantly from humans. As Stanislaw Lem said in Solaris: “we don’t need other worlds, we need mirrors”. You can get that level of diversity within our human race, there is no need for aliens if this is the kind of Sci-Fi you are looking for.

And finally, there are a couple of places where there could be life in our very own Solar System. It wouldn’t be intelligent – probably just bacteria. But that’s the power of Sci-Fi – exploring plausible future scenarios. How would the discovery of alien bacteria affect our society?