Trigger Happy
whose early apotheosis was defined by the beautifully chaotic red and green laser bolt choreography in the film Star Wars (1977)—that’s wrong too. A laser is a very tightly concentrated ray of photons that have been lined up so they are all traveling in exactly the same direction (unlike a normal light source, which scatters all over the place). Like any sort of light, a laser is only visible if it reflects off something. At a club, for instance, the low-powered circling laser beams are visible because they are reflecting off small particles in the intermingled clouds of dry ice and cigarette smoke. However, anyone who tried to smoke a cigarette in the interstellar void would have his brains sucked out through his face (in fact, he wouldn’t be able to light the cigarette in the first place, owing to the lack of oxygen). There is no dry ice, either—space is, more or less, a vacuum. Which means there is nothing that light can reflect off on its way to the target. Hence, lasers are invisible, unless they are coming straight at you, in which case you are dead.
One corollary of this, of course, is that if the cunning enemy aliens were to build their craft with perfectly mirrored hulls, they would be impervious to laser attack, because the light would just bounce off them. You’d have thought they’d have worked that one
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