14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek Generations
5. Would You Trilithium?
In a movie full of nonsense science (ahem, Nexus, ahem), Soran’s trilithium missile and its effects take the cake. When launched it shoots off into the sky for about 9 movie seconds, and from there apparently gets to the star Veridian in five seconds. The star immediately flares and then is seen fading out for about 12 seconds.
But here’s the problem: stars are incredibly huge and dense. It apparently takes the average photon something more than one hundred thousand years to get from the core of our Sun to its surface. Yet, a few kilograms of this movie’s equivalent of much-ridiculed Red Matter (from Star Trek 2009) manages to kill an entire star virtually instantaneously, which means the effects of this stuff chain-reacts through its entire vast mass at light speed or greater. That’s not science, that’s thick-sliced baloney.
Even buying the preposterous notion that the star is magically insta-killed, the dying light from it still travels at light-speed. Mind you, the light from our Sun takes over 8 minutes to get from its surface to the Earth. For Veridian’s light to get to Veridian III in seconds that planet would have to be over 100 times closer to its parent star than we are from ours. How does a habitable Class-M planet exist that close to a star?
Mmm mmm mmm, toasty.