2. Wouldn’t the crew hate each other?

Yes – unless they were hand-picked first

This question presupposes that the company that sent the Covenant spaceship didn’t handpick its crew – which they probably did – but the math is still interesting, so let’s take a look.

If you’ve got a group of 20 randomly selected people, chances are there are going to be some major personality clashes, especially over a long trip through space. This is simply because of how probability works: imagine there’s a 5% chance that you really don’t get on with someone – if it’s just you and someone else, the scientists at The Conversation say the probability you get on with them is something like this: ‘chance you like them x chance they like you’. This would be (1 – 0.05) × (1 – 0.05), which is equal to 0.9025, or 90.25%. So 9 times out of 10, you and a random other person will get on great.

That chance rapidly decreases the more people you add to the equation. “Grab any random group of 20 people with those individual characteristics, and there’s only a tiny chance there won’t be some significant conflict potential there”. The figure they come up with is about 0.00000034%. “That’s why there’s so much psychological profiling for missions to Mars,” they say.