The sun is going to explode. You know, if you don’t want to say the words “global warming,” there are easier ways to avoid it while still acknowledging the mountains to climb. Oh, I forgot; global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese. Well, if you can buy into random crap Trump says, maybe you can buy the premise that with the sun about to explode, we have but one choice: move the Earth.
And wouldn’t ya know it? Propel The Wandering Earth out of orbit for seventeen years or so and it runs smack-dab into Jupiter. Hey! Who’s driving this thing, anyway?
Caution, math ahead.
Moving the Earth aside, which would create its own issues – at some point the planet has to stop rotating, yes? And you do realize it spins at 1,000 miles an hour, yes? Do you know how much energy it takes to stop something the size of the Earth from rotating so you can make it into a space ship? Do you have any idea what that would do to the Earth itself? Ok, forget that. For now, I just want to concentrate on how ridiculous it is to hit Jupiter, because I worked the numbers last night:
Jupiter is large, I grant you. The planet has a radius of 43,441 miles (more than ten times that of Earth). For the sake of argument, let’s assume it can successfully attract and capture by pure gravitational force anything passing within twice that distance, or 90,000 miles from the planet’s core. That means that within a 2D plane extending the planet outwards, Jupiter will collect anything within a zone of roughly 25.4 million square miles. That’s huge. Much bigger than the Earth. However, Jupiter is also 438.8 million miles from the sun, which means that the surface are of the sphere it lies on as you approach covers an area of 2.5 quintillion square miles. That’s a lot bigger.
“How much bigger?” you might ask. Well, let me scale it for my American readers: Jupiter’s zone of influence is the size of a quarter while the sphere of space is lies on is the size of an entire football field. So, to imagine this happening by random chance, picture the following: you’re standing in the parking lot of AT&T stadium. You launch a pub dart over the walls and onto the field where it nails a coin commemorating Super Bowl X where the Cowboys lost to the Steelers 21-17 -but beat the spread- carefully placed in the middle of the star logo at midfield. That’s how ridiculous this is.
The fact that the trip took 17 years and even a change of one-tenth of a degree in any direction would miss Jupiter by literally millions of miles combined with the idea that Jupiter’s orbit lies on one plane – seriously, it’s not like the thing randomly hops all over space which means to hit it, you had to aim for it. For 17 years. You had seventeen full years in which to change direction, any direction, any fraction of any direction would be OK, and you did not. You have the scientific ability to make the Earth into a spaceship and steered it directly into something it would have missed if you’d put any random infant, farm animal, or even a MAGA idiot at the controls. Well done.
OK, never mind. Let’s just address the idiocy at hand where we’ve attached giant rockets at the equator to move the Earth out of orbit and spaceship Earth has cheerfully gone about its way frozen above but toasty warm underneath, like giant microwave burrito in reverse.
Liu Peiqiang (Jing Wu) left his family years ago to help run the space station guiding the Earth’s path directly into Jupiter. Good job, LP. Right as the two are about to collide, his two kids Liu Qi (Chuxiao Qu) and Han Duoduo (Jin Mai Jaho) have escaped their subterranean Beijing prison “never to return.” They don’t seem to have a goal or a plan of any kind; but if they don’t go, they don’t end up in the movie. After stealing some space suits and surfacing, the pair hijack some sort of futuristic dumptruck so sophisticated it uses a globe-sized tracking ball instead of a steering wheel. Yeah, that’s a good idea; thanks future.
You can see how this Armageddon-like idiocy plays out – the two kids turn from rebels to instrumental tools of world survival while space-station dad plays hero on his own. And dad spaceskypes again and again and again just in case the audience somehow forgot his familial connection in the past thirty seconds.
It’s a shame most American audiences will never see this film because it is truly one of the great potential “Mystery Science Theater 3000” inventions of this century. You think you’ve seen bad science before? You have no idea. None. All while playing to straight-faced drama. I respect the film on that count. There are so many potential laughs here jettisoned for the sake of acting that one cannot help but tip one’s tiny commemorative coin sized hat to the cast and crew who could play this without bursting at the seams constantly from unstifled giggles. Bless you, The Wandering Earth, for reminding me once again how wonderful a thing movies can be.
The dying sun has left all with dread
So we decided to move the planet instead
You’d think the way
Would be clear as day
Careful Earth, there are plotholes ahead
Not Rated, 125 Minutes
Director: Frant Gwo
Writer: Gong Geer, Junce Ye, Yan Dongxu, Frant Gwo, Yang Zhixue
Genre: Our screwed future
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who have never seen MST3K
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Scientists
Editor’s note: further research tells me the two-times-radius sphere of Jupiter tractor-beam influence is a poor one and perhaps off by a figure of ten or so. Ok, so the target is a dart board instead of a commemorative coin. It’s still ridiculous to hit it by random chance … and even more ridiculous to hit it because you were aiming for it.
