as if movies are real

well, isn't it what you're doing here ? It's not called documentary right ? It's far worse to make a so called documentary that is actually full of inaccuracies and untold extrapolation for sensationalism (I know a bunch of them). Here you may say people are deceived. But if they can't make the difference between a movie and a lesson, well that's there problem and the education system's problem I guess, not the fracking movie.. What about people following random youtubers advice ? should we judge them too ?

Same as Rhysy, I work in radioastronomy and loved the movie, I didn't judge it like it was a scientific article, because it wasn't. There are some things I found not credible or not coherent, but it didn't ruin the overall pleasure of being told a story. Anyway, it's a fracking movie ! Go read the book, a very nice piece of scientific extrapolation, the description of a completely different alien life form is particularly well made.

Now some movies you like, some you don't, nothing new here. I also loved contact, which is full of bullshit too by the way. If you ask my parents, the very subject of alien encounter is ridiculous, we all have a different level and different ways of suspending disbelief. I tend to think this does not automatically make us all retards..

Well the martian also got a bunch of harsh critics on the scientific credibility. I hear your pain on increased silliness, I tend to share it but more on the story telling side, movies are just poorly made on average, because a high budget means lots of spectators needed so everything is made "average" which is artistically a catastrophy. That said, I found hail mary was rather a breath of fresh(er) air in a sea of mediocre spectacles. I mean for once it was a novel story, not a n-th episode of the mary-verse, but still based on existing and solid book material, that counts a lot, and they did not do a bad work at adaptation, which is a very hard exercise.

Anyway, there is no sense in convincing you it is actually good, but the funniest part of the movie is always the intense discussion when exiting the theater :P

Yeah I must say the goofballs style annoyed me at the beginning, then I played along. Also I can certify labs are full of goofballs, and worse (especially the not funny ones). On the alien part, read the book or just take a look at the wikipedia page, the description of the life form is really fascinating I find. Unfortunately they didn't took time to develop that in the movie, but that would have been quite complicated given the story line I guess, so emotion was prioritized.

To conclude and definitely disqualify my judgement : I just loved Armageddon :P
For frack sake I even loved independence day, that tells you how bad I like aliens..
And despite my liking, something that goes your way : I saw it in a cinema, the marketing campaign had been much intense. At the end of the movie, I thought "yay, they're doing alien invasion films again, I like it". And then I heard the audience applauding the stuff, like it was a great piece of art or something. That really punched me in the face, like all you need is bombarding people with propaganda... But as said, we were craving for SF movies at the time, that may explain part of it maybe.

Mmm, depends what you mean by "core of our global society" I guess.

Most people are always going to want to concentrate on things of immediate relevance. I mean, yes, cells and galaxies are wonderful and all, but how does that change anything you can do in your day to day life ? For most people, unless you're a doctor or an astronomer, it doesn't.

On the other hand... a lot less people are involved in manual labour today than they were even 40 years ago, let alone 400. How many people even earned a living from website design 40 years ago ? In some ways the changes have been profound even at the practical level, let alone the subtler realm of world views (which have changed beyond recognition).

In Stephen Baxter's novels he refers to all the accessories needed for manned spaceflight collectively as plumbing : we need to bring along a hell of a lot of stuff just to keep us going. Likewise, what have we learned that prevents the need for sex, trade and beer (not necessarily in that order) ? Nothing, really. We still need to do all that stuff. It's just that now our conversations are about different things and proceed from different assumptions. The shift is subtler than changing our gross behaviours - except where technology or other developments make this unavoidable - but no less powerful for that. You don't find people worrying about miasma anymore, but actually disinfecting things properly.

The other factor is that frequent consideration of our place in the Universe on scales both large and small is likely a quick route to insanity. :)

Yes, but most scientists also want to buy stuff, get married, etc. We don't spend the whole time pontificating on the nature of reality because, as I said, it would drive us mad.

I think the general mindset of the modern world has changed, substantially, from where it was centuries ago. Social attitudes have changed radically from where they were even a few decades ago : compare the role of women in the workplace in the 1950s, or how homosexuals were treated in the 1980s. There isn't full equality yet, but good lord there's been a colossal shift in that direction (interestingly of course, if you go back further through history, you often find shifts in both positive as well as negative directions compared to the modern era, e.g. homosexuality in ancient Greece).

Yes, lots of people use gadgets and whatnot for watching stupid TV shows and the like. But they also use them for watching educational stuff.

I dunno, I just think there's no one right way to live one's life. I'm an astronomer, but I'd no more want to force astronomy on those unwilling to do it than I'd appreciate being forced to, say, play basketball. I honestly haven't got a clue what people get out of playing sports but if that's what they like, so be it.

I do wish we could stop the utterly vacuous stuff though : Keeping Up With the Kardaashians, endless celebrity gossip and the like. But I'm not sure it's possible. We seem hard wired to be very interested in judging each other, and no amount of cosmic mystiwisdom seems able to change that.

Well I do agree that we aren't hardwired for anything very much. In large part, I think, we are society; we are our own environment. Yet there are behaviours like family bonds which, if not truly constant, don't seem to vary nearly as strongly. Hence I interpret some attitudes and behaviours, at least, to be hard-wired, maybe not fully so but much more than others.

I'm fascinated by how other cultures have interpreted reality in very different ways. The modern scientific world view is really very recent indeed and nowhere near complete, or even wholly accurate. I would agree that this hasn't really changed any of the basics like the need for family, trade, socialising, but on the other hand, why would it ? The big ideas don't filter down to that level much except as nth-order effects. There is a deep-seated need to talk to other people, to have friends, to have material goods... whether reality is the atomic waste of stellar explosions or we're actually all living inside the eye of a giant duck wouldn't make any difference to that. In a way, all conceptions of reality are equally astonishing (Pratchett, as often, said it best).

On the other hand... nobody goes to the local Wise Woman for medicine anymore (well, with some unfortunate exceptions...), or sacrifices a bull to bring the rain. Some basics haven't varied much but differences of detail are huge. The things that don't vary, I think, are the fundamental "plumbing" and likely will never alter very much at all.

And the thing is, discoveries filter through slowly. We have time to adapt; there isn't much "shock value" in most findings. Even when there is, what seemed revolutionary yesterday becomes normal very quickly indeed. We are extremely flexible. Possibly there's a state of maximum excitation beyond which things are so radically different that they just can't be understood at all, but below which pretty nearly everything becomes normal.

I suppose it might be "scary" in the sense that maybe we aren't as humbled as we should be. On the other hand, being in a state of permanent astonishment and surprise would be debilitating. Flexibility has its advantages.