11 Wildly Inaccurate Movie Science Tropes

According to filmmakers, if you put your foot down in space then the stars will go streaking past you, possibly blurring into bright white lines.

All very exciting, but about as realistic as the plot of Made In Chelsea.

This effect is generally put in by directors to indicate movement such as we earthlings are used to on our tiny little planet, seeing as what you would really see is a big fat nothing.

As Douglas Adams so concisely put it, space is big. Really big. So big that you could travel a million miles in a straight line and feel as though you haven't moved at all. With everything literally billions of miles away from everything else, there would be nothing to produce a parallax effect, meaning that the stars will not appear to move in relation to you.

A good way to think about it is to imagine you're driving through a desert at high speed. The features at the roadside will appear to fly past you very quickly, but the mountains in the far distance will barely seem to move at all.

This is you in space, but instead of a roadside, there is a vast and empty void, and instead of distant mountains there's just the ancient light from impossibly remote galaxies that may or may not even still exist. Cheery thought, isn't it?