Sunshine

A new movie is coming out this fall called Sunshine which may have the stupidest premise in the respective histories of movies, premises, and stupidity. From the film's website:

The Sun is dying, and mankind is dying with it. Our last hope: a spaceship and a crew of eight men and women. They carry a device which will breathe new life into the star. But deep into their voyage, out of radio contact with Earth, their mission is starting to unravel. Soon the crew are fighting not only for their lives, but their sanity.

I should also point out that this film takes place fifty years from now. I know what you're thinking: The sun will die in fifty years? But bear in mind that the sun continually loses mass, albeit at a relatively infinitesimal rate, and as a result, the planets revolving around the sun drift farther and farther away, and their orbits therefore lengthen. Since the sun's birth, then, the earth's orbital cycle - we call it a "year" - has lengthened by about eight hours. And since the sun is about halfway through its life, it can be assumed that earth years will be even longer than they are now when the sun finally dies. So don't think of it as fifty years; think of it as fifty years and a week or two. When you put it like that, it sounds less flabbergastingly unreasonable, doesn't it?

Oh, it should also be pointed out that today, at the midpoint of its life, the sun is about 4.57 billion years old. So solar death will begin in another four or five billion years, and will probably engulf the earth in the process. Basically, if the sun were really going to die fifty years from now, that would mean that I could ask my parents to tell me all sorts of stories about the, you know, birth of the solar system.

I'm not even going to bother with the part where eight intrepid astronauts (or oil drillers, who knows?) are on a mission to fly to the sun. It seems moot. I also don't know exactly what is involved in jump-starting the sun. Probably you have to connect the red clip to a solar flare and the black clip to the moon or something. Obviously, since the sun is dying, it's much cooler. You can probably just land on it, go to the control station, find some usb ports, hook your laptop up to it and run Norton or something. I'm not exactly sure, though. I don't know too much about science, but I don't doubt that the filmmakers will explain it all to me.