Then there's the possibility that the clash of two lightsabers could explode in your goddamn face killing your opponent, also you, and possibly everyone else in the room. If the lightsabers are made of hot plasma contained by magnetic fields, Dr. Martin Archer argues that when two lightsabers collide, huge amounts of hot plasma would be ejected, doing all sorts of vaporization to hands, legs, and faces. This means Han Solo's preference for blasters isn't ignorant -- it's just plain sensible.

Also, because water is denser than air, mermaids would have to have "incredibly powerful voice boxes" in order to speak underwater. Meaning that were Ariel to ever arrive on land, she wouldn't sound sweet and innocent, she would sound like an all-whale version of the Star Wars Cantina Band.

So what prehistoric animals could we resurrect and stuff inside a theme park? Well, scientists are apparently close to being able to clone a woolly mammoth. And if a hirsute elephant doesn't sound too exciting, ancient DNA expert Beth Shapiro has also suggested the prehistoric short-faced bear could be feasibly cloned. So that's ... rad?

But what about dinosaurs dammit?! Well, the closest we can get might involve mutating chicken DNA. Since we now know that Dr. Alan Grant was right when he discussed how similar birds and dinosaurs are, it's been suggested that scientists could tinker with the genetic traits of a chicken to remake a dinosaur. Suppressing their feathers, giving them back claws, reducing their viciousness a bit, that kind of thing. Meaning that our real-life Jurassic Park wouldn't be full of dinosaurs so much as mutant chickens.

Universal Pictures, KFC
And that we've been picturing the wrong kindly, bearded man as its architect.

The latest entry in the franchise, Fury Road, portrays this post-apocalyptic world as a vast, sun-drenched desert where people have to fight for a taste of whatever water gets vomited out of Mount Skullface each day.

Warner Bros.
"SIP UPON MY BILE, SHITHEADS!"

But this vision of what the earth would look like after a nuclear holocaust is way off. For one thing, the soot released in the stratosphere by a nuclear war would turn the goddamned skies black. Less Mad Max movie, more Evanescence music video. Eventually, the sky would clear, but even that process would take "around 30 years." But in Fury Road, Max is still as fresh-faced as ever.

Even if we say that it has been 30 years since the bombs dropped (and between movies Max visited one of the future wasteland's best plastic surgeons) the world wouldn't be the desert craphole we see in the movie. Water wouldn't be particularly scarce, in fact, nor the world a desert. The nuclear winter would have cooled the planet, if anything. And with all those people dead, groundwater aquifers would have begun replenishing. So a real-life Max would probably be kicking back with a nice glass of well water instead of battling the goth division of Cirque du Soleil.

But how could Spider-Man keep canisters of a such an amazingly strong material coiled around his wrist like one of Johnny Depp's dumb bracelets? What would that look like in real life? Even the toy version appears to be about as convenient as strapping a mag light to your wrist.

Marvel Toys
Giving these things to teen boys stirs up all sorts of troubling imagery.

Worse is the problem of ammo. Wired did some math and figured out how big Spidey's web-shooters would have to be if he had about 50 uses of his web-shooters. It turned out to be about the equivalent of strapping eight or nine soft drink cans to your wrist. So not exactly the sleek, skin-tight devices of the comic.

Rhett Allain/Wired
Wrist ejaculate seems so much tidier now.

A paper by a physicist at Michigan Technological University theorized that if a spaceship left earth, traveled at five times the speed of light to a planet around ten light-years away and then returned, a whole bunch of ghost images of that ship would appear, even years apart. Now, this isn't entirely outside of the Trek canon -- Captain Picard once used a sudden burst of warp speed to create just such a ghost ship to confuse his enemies. This, of course, became known as the "Picard Maneuver."

CBS Television Distribution
Another, less heralded "Picard Maneuver" was done entirely in the bedroom.

According to The Physics Of Star Trek, this phenomenon would make the universe an "interesting and barely navigable one, full of ghost images of objects that long ago arrived where they were going." Somehow the writers never got around to explaining which crystal the Federation used to stop that problem.

But for the rest of us sweaty, wand-clutching Potter fans, it turns out we may have been idealizing a world which would really be gross as hell. Why? Owls.

Warner Bros.
Yes, you, you swivel-necked fucks.

For some reason, the wizard community's primary form of correspondence isn't by phone or email, it's by owl. Now, one of the less-celebrated aspects of phone calls and emails is that they don't s**t all over the place. Owls do, and now you see the issue. And it's not just poop. Owls also occasionally throw up pellets of fur and bone. And worse, once a day they empty their "ceca" intestinal sacs, yielding a foul smelling substance that's a bit like the devil's own chocolate pudding. Oh, and researchers have also found that some owls use their feces to mark their territory.

Dude.

Basically, owls are gross as crap. And the majestic, awe-inspiring turrets of Hogwarts would, in reality, be encrusted in a thick layer of well-scented crap. Probably a good thing books are a scent-free medium then, huh?

JM is now on Twitter, and co-hosts the podcast Rewatchability.

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Imagine being trapped aboard the doomed Titanic on an icy Atlantic. . . with the walking dead. Check out Chris Pauls and Matt Solomon's Deck Z: The Titanic.