Preguntas Frecuentes

The flashing images were of the Icarus I crew members. While searching Icarus I, Searle comes across the photo of the crew members wearing Hawaiian shirts (similar to the photo of the Icarus II crew members, who were wearing Santa hats).

In the DVD's featurettes and science commentary, respectively, Cliff Curtis and science consultant Brian Cox opine that Searle exposes himself to the sun in order to understand what had happened to the Icarus I crew. He wants to go through the same experience they had. According to Curtis, Searle becomes fascinated with the sun and comes to see the face of God in it. In the end, he believes the sun is trying to communicate something to him; in fact, this is similar to what Pinbacker was saying, and drove him mad in the end. Moreover, if you remember earlier, he was watching one of the last video messages sent from Icarus I, one of the crew was speaking about how beautiful it was to face the sun, and shortly before Captain Kaneda dies from direct sun exposure, he asks Kaneda what he sees.

Dr. Brian Cox (a particle physicist) explains in his commentary track for the DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film that there is a theoretical possibility of a "Q ball": a mass of super-stable particles which (in the fictional context of the film) may be interfering with the natural fusion process that occurs within the sun and provides our planet with the light, heat and energy that sustain life. The intent of both Icarus missions was to deliver an immense payload of nuclear material to the sun and detonate it in the hopes that the Q ball would either break apart or be destroyed and return the sun to its natural processes.

In the original screenplay by Alex Garland, it is mentioned that the bomb is the size of a football stadium and is equal in mass to the island of Manhattan. Manhattan weighs 125,208,467 tons and fissile material has a yield of ~5.2 Megatons/ton, which comes to ~650 Teratons of TNT equivalent or about 650,000,000 Megatons. The cube in the movie would be 0.594 cubic kilometers in volume with a side length of 840 meters.

The sun itself gives off an almost incomprehensible amount of radiation, heat and energy, enough to span the 93,000,000 mile (149,668,992 km) distance between it and the Earth, which receives all of its heat, light and energy over that tremendous distance. As the ship approached the sun, the radiation became much more intense, enough to disrupt (or perhaps absorb) all radio signals being sent back to Earth. Icarus II entered the dead zone a week earlier than the crew had calculated. The Icarus I also encountered the dead zone during its mission seven years prior, which is why the crew of Icarus II receives their distress call so late & no one detected it on Earth.