Welcome to the future. Whether you think this is the 21st century or not (I don't), it's still the future. When I was a kid, the year 2000 had an almost magical ring to it. We'd have air-cars, colonies on the moon, computers in our houses.

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The entertainment industry bombards audiences with junk astronomy, writes astronomer Phil Plait. Total scientific accuracy is not needed, he asserts, but that's no excuse for inanity.

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So I was off a bit.

Don't believe me? I loved Space:1999 and never missed Lost in Space, even in reruns. Case closed. My expectations of the future were cultured by the media like a bacterial strain in a dish of agar. Even as the future approached and the promised riches receded, I never lost faith. The movies kept providing me a future with rockets and alien planets -- and I was happy.

Those movies and TV shows I watched performed two pretty important functions: They got me excited about space, and they kept me excited about space. In the meantime though, they filled my head with a lot of nonsense.

You can't blast the moon out of Earth's orbit without vaporizing it (or at least killing everyone on Moonbase Alpha), and aliens almost certainly won't have two arms, two legs and speak textbook English.

I don't think movies and TV need to be 100 percent accurate. On the other hand, it's not necessary to take things to the other extreme and have nothing accurate at all.

As a quick example, I'll mention the sheer size of the asteroid: The NASA officials in the movie claim it's the size of Texas. That would make it easily the largest asteroid in the solar system. I'll note that the actual largest asteroid, Ceres, is almost visible to the naked eye at its normal distance of roughly 300 million miles (500 million kilometers) away.

Armageddon had so many mistakes that there is literally no way to make the movie more accurate and have anything like the original plot left.
     

It would take our fastest rockets years to get there, yet, in the movie, something that big is able to get within 18 days away before being noticed. Bzzzzt! Sorry! It would have been seen decades in advance.

Armageddon had so many mistakes that there is literally no way to make the movie more accurate and have anything like the original plot left. Yet it is possible to make such a movie and still be dramatic, if you have scientists as consultants early on.

Deep Impact is one such movie. The producers hired real live astronomers to help them with the script, and the amazing thing is they took the advice. A comet, for example, has almost no gravity, so the scientists suggested the rocket moor itself to the surface. That was used in the movie, along with many other suggestions.

Sometimes the filmmakers sacrificed accuracy for plot. For example, blowing up the comet moments before impact doesn't help at all, since the fragments still contain all the energy of the original body; there would be a billion atomic bomb-sized explosions instead of a single explosion the size of a billion atomic bombs. But I am more forgiving because the producers made the effort. The movie was still dramatic and in my opinion simply better than Armageddon.

In the end, I don't expect, or even necessarily want, completely accurate movies. But before long the real year 2001 will be here, and the legacy of A Space Odyssey will be upon us. Unfortunately, we won't have computers like HAL or a piloted mission to Jupiter, but it would be nice if we at least had more movies that portrayed them as accurately as 2001 did.