A wonderful part of my childhood.

My wife and I have recently been trying out Netflix and, so far, are really liking it. Among the new releases and recent movies they have available, there are also a wide variety of older and, indeed, quite crappy movies. One of these is the classic movie The Ice Pirates which- I am slightly ashamed to admit- I absolutely love. I mean, how could you not love this:



And you know what amuses me the most about this movie? The underlying concept. See, the story rests on the idea that all the planets with abundant water- but one- were destroyed during the "galactic space war."* So, as a result, water has become an incredibly valuable substance, indeed, taking over the role of specie. Why is this funny? Well, simply because water is incredibly f-ing abundant in the universe. Comets, for example, are basically dirty snowballs, meaning that they are composed largely of water ice with some rock, dust, and other volatile gasses thrown in. So, really, destroying every planet like Earth in the galaxy wouldn't appreciably reduce the amount of water ice available to a galaxy-spanning civilization. Hell, considering how much energy it takes to get mass out of a gravity well, comets would be the preferred source for water in the first place.

As a result, "The Ice Pirates" is a little like a post-apocalyptic movie set in the American southwest where every hardware and gardening store has been destroyed. And so bands of roving outlaws attempt to steal the most valuable remaining commodity: dirt. I can see it now, the heroic "Dirt Pirates" kicking up enormous rooster tails of dust and rocks as they pursue convoys carrying dirt from the last remaining Home Depot.

Priceless.


* Keeping in mind that the galaxy is a huge place, so a war would have to be mighty big to count as "galactic."