Hollywood Gets Science Wrong — And That's Actually Useful

© Warner Bros.

a) Violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics

The entire premise of the trilogy is based on the use of in-vitro grown humans as power sources for machines. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that the amount of energy that can be extracted from a human body can only equal the amount of energy supplied. Since the machines are cultivating humans, they need to provide energy in the form of heat, food and equipment power. The law of conservation of energy tells us that energy cannot be created out of thin air — human bodies convert energy from one form to another, they cannot magically create new energy.

b) Violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

To make things worse, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the maximum efficiency of any thermal process cannot be 100%. This means the machines would actually be getting less energy than what they are supplying to keep the humans alive. Using humans as a power source is not just ethically questionable in the film — it's thermodynamically impossible.

Photo reference: George Poinar, Jr.

a) DNA Reconstruction

The dinosaurs are created from a prehistoric mosquito preserved in amber. The dinosaur DNA was supposedly extracted from blood inside the mosquito. However, DNA strands disintegrate within a few centuries even under the best-preserved conditions — let alone tens of millions of years. Even if the DNA were somehow preserved, the task of reverse-engineering multiple species from a single blood sample is extraordinarily far-fetched. It is akin to a puzzle with billions of pieces and no picture on the box — and no computer or algorithm remotely capable of solving it.

b) The Lysine Contingency

To prevent escaped dinosaurs from surviving in the wild, the film claims they were genetically modified to be dependent on supplemental lysine — provided in special food prepared for them. The problem: lysine is one of the most common amino acids in nature, found in virtually all foods — meat, fish, milk, eggs, grains. Any escaped dinosaur would find lysine everywhere it looked.

CRISPR Doesn't Work Like Shown

CRISPR is a real and genuinely revolutionary technique in genetic engineering — DNA sequences from different species can be spliced together to modify an organism's characteristics. It is possible (in theory) to create organisms with unusual traits. But here's the crucial point: genetically modified organisms must be grown from a single modified cell. There is no substance that can be introduced into a fully-grown, mature organism and spontaneously modify its DNA to cause dramatic physical transformation. That's not how CRISPR works. That's not how biology works.

© EuropaCorp

Average Humans Use Their Entire Brain

The film is built on the myth that the average human uses only about 10% of their brain — and that unlocking the remaining 90% would grant superhuman abilities. Brain scans (fMRI and PET) show that almost the entire human brain is active even under normal, everyday conditions. Different regions are active at different times, but virtually every part of the brain is used. There is no mysterious 90% lying dormant, and there is certainly no drug that can "unlock" it. If humans genuinely only used 10% of their brains, brain injuries would be far less serious than they are — because damage to the "unused" 90% wouldn't matter.

Not Enough Ice to Flood the World

This dystopian film imagines a future where uncontrolled global warming has melted all the ice caps, submerging every landmass on Earth. It's a dramatic premise — but the numbers don't work. All the ice on Earth (including Antarctica and Greenland) contains enough water to raise sea levels by approximately 65–70 metres. That would certainly be catastrophic and would flood all coastal cities and low-lying regions. But Mount Everest stands 8,849 metres above sea level. There is simply nowhere near enough water locked in ice to submerge all of the world's land surface.

The Physics Problems Are Everywhere

Setting aside the Force (which is at least presented as a fictional mystical concept), the Star Wars universe contains several physics violations worth noting:

• →Visible laser beams in space. Laser beams would be completely invisible in the vacuum of space. On Earth, we see laser beams because light scatters off particles suspended in the air. In a vacuum, there are no particles to scatter — the beam is invisible until it hits something.
• →Sound in space. The dramatic sounds of X-wings, TIE fighters and explosions are iconic — but sound requires a medium to travel through. Space is a near-perfect vacuum. Space battles would be completely silent.
• →Deflecting laser pulses. Jedi deflect blaster shots with lightsabers. Blasters fire pulses of light (laser or plasma) travelling at or near the speed of light. No human reaction time — even with Force-enhanced reflexes — could track and deflect something moving at 300,000 km/s.