Underseer
Contributor
In other words, it's kind of a neat idea for a fun piece of escapist fiction, as long as you don't look too closely at the details.
Most Sci Fi is like that.
I blame Bradbury and Lucas.
It used to be that sci-fi writers carefully interviewed scientists while they were working out the plot and the tech details of the story in order to be as realistic as possible. Now, any sci-fi writers who still do this are considered to be part of the "hard sci-fi" subgenre. All the rest of sci-fi writers seem to regard "sci-fi" as merely a setting in which stories can take place.