Lessons learned from the movie

Rating: 10/10 (24 December 2016)

When my mom, who usually go to the movie theater for the sake of being in the environment instead of watching the movie, was deeply attracted by the movie, you know it is going to be good.
Many other reviews have talked about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the movie, so I just want to share a few things I learned from watching the movie. It contains small spoilers.
Without any flamboyant introduction, let's dig into it:
1. Autopilot of any kind, just like Tesla's autopilot, definitely should never be trusted as being able to left operating on their own, no matter how many experiments proved they could. No technology can be promised as fail-safe because the universe is too big for us mere human beings to claim 100% failure free.
2. If you have hibernation chambers, you better have re-hibernation chambers on-board. When things go wrong, someone gotta wake up to fix things, and that person gotta go back to hibernation because there is another century to go.
3. Biggest problems often fail at places designer never thought would be a problem. The Avalon's shield is supposed to prevent all meteoroids from hitting the ship, and meteoroids were probably one of the less worried obstacles due to the powerful shield, yet that was the whole problem. Just like how icebergs were never thought to be a problem for the Titanic.
4. Sometimes just one backup plan may not be enough. You need to have backups of backups, especially when the lives of 5258 people are on the line. Perhaps a whole crew should have been wakened up and given temporary full access to the ship. One of the issues in the movie was that the main guy did not have sufficient access and the on-board AI have no clue that he wasn't supposed to be awake this early -- a complete lack of a backup plan.
5. The movie served as a good warning, but I believe with the way our technology is being developed, the people of future shouldn't be so short-sighted like the designers of the starship Avalon.