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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
1986 · Film · 118 min
Part of Star Trek: The Original Series Collection
Directed by Leonard Nimoy
When a huge alien probe enters the galaxy and begins to vaporize Earth's oceans, Kirk and his crew must travel back in time in order to bring back whales and save the planet.
4 positive5 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
I’ve never quite appreciated the peak hippie bizarreness of a space probe checking in to see if the whales are still home Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Great San Francisco based movie tho.
It’s even noted as a problem in the beloved, acclaimed piece of cinema - Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home.
Sideways
Back To The Future
Cinema Paradiso
Spaceballs
Up In Smoke (Cheech & Chong)
The Incredibles
Indiana Jones 1-3
Indiana Jones: Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (Rifftrax only)
Falling Down
Office Space
Man Bites Dog
Nothing To Lose
Idiocracy
Space Mutiny (MST3k)
Goodfellas
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Groundhog Day
Barbie
Full Metal Jacket
Mallrats
Flight Of The Navigator
The Founder
One Hour Photo
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I'm pretty certain I've rewatched Sideways more than any other film.
I just finished reading Tau Zero after hearing about it here and also recommend it!
I expected relativity to play a role, but the time dilation the crew experienced was on a _far_ grander scale than I imagined. The book also left me thinking of favorite time travel/relativity classics like Interstellar and, going back, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (my favorite Star Trek movie).
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home. That I can tell you off the top of my head because I remember the scene you are talking about.
But the rest of the story requires reading: https://legendsrevealed.com/entertainment/2016/02/25/did-a-woman-accidentally-get-a-speaking-role-in-a-star-trek-movie/
> "Logic" has nothing to do with it.
I guess the GP post is simply a direct quote from "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (where IIRC Spock says something along those lines while he and Kirk visit a 20th century museum).
Whales, their extinction and communicating with them was central to the plot of that film.
EDIT: Ok, I looked it up. This exact quote is in the movie, verbatim, in the scene I mentioned. At around 00:47:39
>"Aluminium oxynitride (marketed under the name ALON by Surmet Corporation[3]) is a transparent ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen.
ALON is optically transparent (≥ 80%) in the near-ultraviolet, visible and midwave-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
(PDS: I'm thinking waveguide -- for that EM frequency range...)
>"It is four times as hard as fused silica glass, 85% as hard as sapphire, and nearly 115% as hard as magnesium aluminate spinel. Since it has a cubic spinel structure, it can be fabricated to transparent windows, plates, domes, rods, tubes and other forms using conventional ceramic powder processing techniques.
ALON is the hardest polycrystalline transparent ceramic available commercially.[2]"
[...]
>"ALON also appears to be radiation-resistant and resistant to damage from various acids, bases, and water.[8]"
[...]
>"It can withstand temperatures of about 2100 °C in inert atmospheres."
[...]
>"'Transparent aluminum' became a popular term after its use in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. [15] [16]"
PDS: I found this while searching for the most recent research in Optical ALU's... Would it make a good Optical ALU? Well, we don't (as of yet!) know, but according to Wikipedia:
>"In addition to being used as a transparent armor material, ALON is used as infrared-optical windows. As such it has applications as a sensor component, speciality IR domes, windows for laser communications, and in some semiconductor-related applications.[9][10]"
PDS: Also, it might make a good material for some parts or components of future spaceships -- as alluded to in the Star Trek IV reference, above...
> I can't remember a single alien movie with sea creatures or intelligent birds. But if anyone knows some, please let me know
The little-known Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home centers its plot around the idea that Earth whales are themselves aliens. A crisis occurs when a whale probe comes to check on the Earth whales.
The title is a reference to a line in the movie "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" where Scotty trades the formula for "transparent aluminum" (from the future) in a barter transaction for plexiglass sheets (in the present) that the cast need to achieve their goal in the movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_IV:_The_Voyage_Home
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_aluminum#Transparent_aluminum