When you walk into a big budget science fiction film you don’t always expect everything to be real. I mean, when a movie has crazy aliens and intergalactic space ships and cryo-sleep you’re not going to expect everything to line up. Most people are fine as long as everything makes sense in the world that is presented.

Of course, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, world-renowned astrophysicist, movie-science critiquer and space nut Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a problem with a movie’s science he’s going to let the world know about it. After all, he badgered James Cameron for years to change the sky in Titanic so that it matched the sky on the actual night the Titanic sank.

And now he has a critique for Prometheus. Damon Lindelof, pay attention:

Prometheus goes 35 light yrs into space, but CharlizeTheron gaffes “We’re a half billion miles from Earth”- just past Jupiter

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 8, 2012

A single light year equals 5.88 trillion miles, which would put spaceship Prometheus 205.8 trillion miles away from Earth after 35 light years, not half a billion. Hopefully they get it right for the inevitable sequel. [Gizmodo via Movies.com]

movie science, prometheus, science