Right on, Gary…you put your finger squarely on my problems w/this show – well said!

And comparing it to video games is even more unfair since the typical game is in production for years.

(sorry for the late comment. getting caught up in my RSS feeds)

Bottom line is best expressed with a Discworld quote “Whatever happens, stays happened.”

no society will have a monetary system when surrounded by abundance. the cop character even points this out when he asks “why would anyone steal ?” everyone gets a house and all the food they want. luxuries can be traded for, like a hat for the guitar.

that doctor didnt ask for currency to finance research for some disease. she just did it. her daughter didnt have to pay for training to become a physician. the commander didnt have to pay for fruit. yet we’re supposed to believe they need a monetary system

for a utopia attempt at starting over, they failed badly.

That being said, Terra Nova is absolutely beautiful and despite, or possibly because everything I said above, very enjoyable.

Our intrepid TerraNovan time travelers would have to be ballooned up a bit size-wise to travel to 85 million BP (not to mention as one earlier poster did that they would have to be pinpointed in space and time thousands of light years away relative to other matter).

*****

Girl genius enters the room later sheepishly and says; “Mom, Dad? Y’know how I said the Moon was bigger here than in our world. I made a mistake, I’ve just calculated it and it’s not enough to make any noticeable difference after all. I’m sorry.”

And the parents go “That’s okay, we still love you anyhow and everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Even the greatest scientists have get some things wrong.”

*****
It would add a bit more to the characterisation and correct the science but not advance the plot much. Guess we’ll have to wait till its out on DVD release for someone to tell us if there’s such a deleted scene (not)present or not.

But then I thought of my own childhood.

I absolutely *loved* science, especially astronomy, in elementary school, and probably knew more random and trivial facts than my teachers or parents. But I didn’t quite know how to put them all together just yet. So, knowing the universe was expanding (and thinking how super-cool that was!) but maybe not knowing about galactic rotation, I might have used that to try to explain to the adults why the stars looked different. Same for the moon issue.

I wonder if the writers know how kids and teenagers think, especially science nerds, and are actually playing into that. If we see the young lady learn some new fact and put 2+2 together about a previous explanation, that would confirm it. Or they may just be playing into what most adults still think are believable enough, if not very accurate, explanations for astronomical changes over the past 85 millions year.

I have the same problem with the Survivor series. At first it showed much more of the ingenuity of surviving, but now it is 99% interpersonal relationships. The show has survived a long time, so I’m probably in the minority feeling this way.

My idea was a group of people who became stranded in the past with dinosaurs (65 million years ago instead of 85 million, and, as it turns out, about 430 years before the asteroid impact), and they have to survive and end up building a human civilization in the Cretaceous.

Of course, mine was a bit more realistic. In fact the whole Moon thing was in my story too, but because it is about the same apparent size at today, the characters don’t initially think they’re in the distant past. They also use the length of the day (they have wristwatches and after a few days realize the Sun in setting about 20 minutes earlier each day), to calculate how far back in time they really are.

Also, the main conflict was not over being chased by dinosaurs (Jurassic Park has been done, guys!), but over the issue of survival and over possible temporal paradoxes. Over the centuries, the issue of temporal paradox divides the civilization between those who think that they need to be careful or else they might inadvertently wipe out future human civilization (and thus their subjective past), and those who think they don’t need to be because it’s really a parallel universe or maybe predestination timeline where everything they do only fulfills the past.

Eventually they discover the asteroid is heading towards Earth and have to decide what to do about it (no spoilers).

So yeah, a bit miffed.

geez! it’s called “fiction” for a reason.
Can’t we just be entertained by a new show that isn’t CSI or Law and Order.

You obviously don’t get it.

Where they use fiction, then fine, whatever.

Where they attempt to tie their fiction to known facts, they could at least make an effort to get those facts right. It is quite obvious that they didn’t even try to get the explanation for why the stars are different right.

I wonder if any of these folks that go back in time are at all concerned that a giant, cosmic, splat is coming down on them? Granted they have about 15-20 million years, but their descendants are going to be bummed out if they don’t have some sort of asteroid defense system in place by then.

But everyone knows that the mammals survived the K-T event, right . . . ?

OK. That doesn’t really go against anything I said, but, fine.

——-

Haven’t watched it, and won’t till it is all out on DVD (hate waiting week to week

I watch everything on DVD or streaming now for that reason, and also to not waste my time with series that don’t survive one season.

Movies and games have much longer production schedules for VFX. For example, there was one 16-second VFX shot for Kevin Costner’s THE GUARDIAN that took nine months and over 20 people to create.

In contrast, broadcast production schedules give their crews mere days to add VFX to a shot. In that context, I think the TERRA NOVA set extensions, matte paintings, CG environments and creature FX are pretty amazing for a weekly broadcast TV show.

Coincidentally, last night I read that the moon was receding from us at 4 cm/yr in Brian Cox’s book Why Does E=mc^2? I thought that was a bit much so I did the math, and realized even if that rate had remained constant, it wouldn’t have made a big difference in how the moon looked a few million years ago (which I knew because Phil’s recent post on the apogee perigee mentioned how much the orbit differed). I love it when new knowledge comes together. [/chomps cigar]

,,,though if I wrote it, I’d place it about 10,000 years before the “big Impact”, just to put a bit of pressure on the humans to build a civilization capable of getting the frak OFF the planet.

Gary 7

Actually it was the Koch bros financed (and headed by Dick Army) “Freedom Works” that funded the Tea Party. Going so far as to bus them in for protests. The Koch brothers are seriously nutty John Birch Society, fluoride in the water is sapping our precious bodily fluids, level crazy. They have a lot of power and money but the GOP is not monolithic. There are many who are disturbed by what they want to do.

I remember back in the 60′s, from a course in solar system astrophysics, that certain corals (I think) showed daily ‘growth rings’ and annual cycles, so that it was possible to conclude that in that era the year had somewhat over 400 days. I’m guessing that would have been over 300 MA ago.

But still a detail worth mentioning in the context of lunar orbit change for the same reason