12 Problems You’re About to Have If You’re in A Sci-Fi Movie

Ya blew it! You accidentally plugged the “self-consciousness” chip into the robots that welded your cars together, and now your civilization is in shambles. They’re the perfect, emotionless, logical being, and you know how logic works: All roads lead to “exterminate humans.”

How did the most outwardly craven villain on the spaceship, the guy who always looks like he walked into a barber with an illustration of the devil, somehow become one breath away from chancellor? You’d think the colony would be like, “Hey, that guy steeples his fingers a lot. We should watch how much power we give him.” 

Nevertheless, he and his dangerous ideas are now only one untimely death away from implementation, and I regret to inform you that the current leader will be assassinated in the next 20 minutes.

Oh no! The space library didn’t keep enough books about the Holocaust around, and everyone’s forgotten the power of fascism! Bummer, because half the space station is about to get badges slapped on them so they can learn this lesson all over again.

Whoa, a limited, nonrenewable resource that powers all of your future industry? Don’t tell me you’re running out! Well, I’ll tell you where you can find more — on the most fucked-up place you can spot on your star map. Turns out Tentaculor, the cannibal squid planet, is absolutely riddled with reserves of Gasolium. Down we go!

As soon as you see someone in a helmet, it’s a solid bet that we nuked ourselves at some point. You know what that means, Earth’s uninhabitable… or is it? The only way to find out is to go wrestle with a bunch of two-headed Komodo dragons. Also, “Surface” is definitely a proper noun in this world.

Air, water, root beer, whatever you’re filtering to survive, that shit’s about to fail. I’d put every space-buck I own on it. The only positive here is that it’s going to fail in a very specific way that provides you with one to three months to fix it. Also, weirdly, you’re going to find out that constructing, from scratch, a drop-ship capable of interplanetary travel is easier than fixing the colony’s space Dyson.

Even worse news about your air system: Something’s in the vents. What is it? You’ll only find out when it snatches whoever’s sent to investigate a sensor that failed. I can guarantee you it’s not interstellar Santa Claus, however — unless it’s one of those weird Scandinavian Santa Clauses that eats children.

If you ever see someone in space slowly spreading the fingers of their gloves, which are coated with a mysterious goo? Call dibs on the escape pod, posthaste.

Here we enter the Child Trifecta, three offspring-related problems that are going to require some horrifying restrictions. First is the classic “too many kids” problem. You don’t have the resources, and you know what that means! Time to fire a couple of them out into the vacuum, which, no duh, is going to inspire rebellion.

The second porridge in the childbearing Goldilocks story that is the future human population — suddenly everyone’s sterile. Now, the future of the human race is at stake, at least until you can track down the one person whose gonads mysteriously still function as designed. Making them actually have sex, though? That’s going to be nearly impossible, for whatever reason.

Finally, we’ve got a reasonable amount of children, only for a new problem to rear its ugly head: one of them has powers. Uh-oh. Timmy’s doing palm blasts in the space nursery, and now the balance of power in the universe is all topsy-turvy. Hopefully your population has a disgraced military hero to keep them safe, or you’re plum fucked.

Some milky-eyed soothsayer saved a holo-scroll outlining when the sun is going to blow up, and unfortunately for you, it’s this Tuesday. Bummer! Time to reconnect with your estranged wife and stop it!