The Sci-Fi Story That Forced an Innocent Girl to Die | The Cold Equations

Comments · 53

• AN

  @animationai9109 · 2 months ago

  Wow I’m more surprised at how good this stories are. Helps that you are a great story teller. Feels very 40k space terror

  7

• JA

  @JaneNX01 · 4 months ago

  I read this 40+ years ago and I’ve never forgotten the bump against the ship at the end. :(

  7

• TI

  @Timbeon · 3 months ago

  A key part of the Trolley Problem, and I guess also this story, that gets lost in a lot of discussions is that you're in a situation where all the possible upstream controls that could have prevented it have already failed. You can investigate why they failed and how to prevent future failures, but it won't change the situation you're in right here and right now. There is no secret "if you just did this" answer because things are already past that point, and you're running out of time. Yes, it's horrendously unfair, no, things never should have gotten to this point, but they did, here we are, now what?

  9

• SA

  @SageofStars · 4 months ago

  If your mission has less of an error margin than 2,000 lbs, then someone is trying to make your mission fail on the face of it, as that's less than the weight of the ICE that might form as you launch, which would be completely random depending on weather than launch conditions.

  12

• TH

  @thygrrr · 4 months ago (edited)

  She's 18, in a sci-fi spacefaring universe, she should know this much like an 18-year-old on earth would know that a car needs fuel to drive. That said, since they are on a brachistochrone trajectory, they can just not accelerate as much and conserve a near-arbitrary amount of fuel, coming maybe a few hours or a day later to the colony.

  5

• WH

  @whatakuriosgirl · 5 months ago

  I read the story in high school, but don&apos;t remember my feelings about it or what was said in the class discussion. It wasn&apos;t until after college that I thought about it again when chatting with my friend about our earliest-read sci-fi books/stories and I brought this one up. It made for a great conversation and a fun, shared mutual frustration with the premise and all the reasons the math and science doesn&apos;t make sense.<br><br>Listening to you reading it, I quickly realized something I hadn&apos;t thought of before when discussing the story:<br><br>The rule is that if a stowaway is caught, they are to be jettisoned immediately.<br><br>However, if the entire premise is predicated on there not being any sort of contingency plan for a single variable change in weight and the exact amount of fuel being calculated, <i>that means</i> that by the time a stowaway is found, no matter how soon after launch, it is already too late and there will not be enough fuel to reach the destination. Because it has already burnt more fuel to account for the additional weight, and as there isn&apos;t a single drop of extra fuel, there is no way to reach the destination.<br><br>And a stowaway isn&apos;t some small change, it&apos;s not like the pilot had a large meal or a mouse came onboard. We&apos;re not talking a few grams, but multiple pounds. So 100% of the time, if there is a stowaway, the mission is a complete failure, and no one is making it out alive.<br><br><br>And then later on in the video/story, I realized it&apos;s not just the math and science that doesn&apos;t work, but also that we the audience are supposed to accept that a [young] adult living on the interstellar cruiser, from where the shuttle was launched, didn&apos;t know the actual consequences of what happens to stowaways? The pilot thinks to himself about how they&apos;re in the &quot;wild frontier of space&quot; where every moment is spent fighting for one&apos;s life, and we&apos;re expected to believe that expectation of danger and having to be alert and work together for shared survival wasn&apos;t hammered into the mind of every original occupant and their children onboard? She wasn&apos;t taught that &quot;Every regulation is written in blood&quot;? This is now a huge oversight of the administration of the interstellar cruiser.

  17

• KA

  @kathryndizon5553 · 6 months ago

  I am loving the narrative style in this video Todd! Keep it up 🎉

  9

• BI

  @billbadson7598 · 4 months ago

  System exists to check the temperature of every compartment on the ship for stowaways, but not to run this test before the ship takes off.

  12

• FU

  @futurecorpse_170 · 2 months ago

  Happy to find your channel. I just started delving into sci-fi and this is exactly what I was looking for.

  2

• MA

  @matthewjohnson320 · 2 months ago

  I never had difficulty accepting the original story, because I grew up watching the inevitable death of Skylab. &nbsp;Nobody thought to explain that the astronauts had returned to Earth. &nbsp;Stoicism was forced upon me at an early age.

  1

• HG

  @hgr.7857 · 3 months ago

  SO happy I found this channel ❤️

• NV

  @NVSpartan · 4 months ago

  I&apos;ve always wondered how the cruiser&apos;s security could be so lax that this would happen.

  3