The Glade 4.0

"Terra Nova" Producers: Don't Use the Time Machine to View the Future of Your Ratings:

"Terra Nova," promoted by Fox as the most expensive television program ever made, based on the pilot may be the most expensive television program ever canceled by Christmas. Supposedly $20 million was sunk into the first episode. "Sunk" seems the word. Did even 1 percent of that amount go to writing?

In the year 2149, Earth is choked with smog-like pollution. On the plus side, everyone's really good-looking. The notion that choking pollution will destroy our world has become a Hollywood standby, central even to the cartoon movie "Wall-E." Hollywood thinks this, though all forms of air pollution except greenhouse gases -- a big exception, but unrelated to smog -- are in steady decline, even in most of the developing world. Air pollution in the United States has declined 57 percent in the past 20 years, despite population growth. China has acid rain and bad smog, but its air pollution levels are notably lower than 10 years ago, while smog is down in Mexico City. Smog has dropped dramatically in Los Angeles. Hollywood types don't seem aware of what is happening right outside their own windows. Regardless, how could a future society possess the ultra-sophisticated knowledge necessary to build a gigantic time machine, yet not be able to control smog? That's the scenario in "Terra Nova."


In the despoiled environment of the year 2149 on "Terra Nova," people wear masks to protect themselves from bad dialogue.

Some plucky adventurers use the time machine to travel 85 million years into the past to "restart civilization." Why they would go so very far back is never explained. The producers wanted the show to be about fighting dinosaurs, so our heroes travel 85 million years into the past. Having the most expensive television series ever be based on a nonsense premise is not promising.

In the past we see an old, beat-up automated probe, described as the first object sent through the time machine. We are told the arrival of the probe "created a new timestream," so the past that the adventurers now occupy precedes a future different from the one from which they came. This seems to eliminate time paradoxes -- otherwise the travelers might do something that prevented the society of 2149 from happening, thus causing the time machine to cease to exist, thus preventing themselves from arriving, etc. But to swallow the "new timestream" explanation, you are asked to believe the arrival of a small probe, which appears to be made from tin foil and duct tape, created an entire new universe -- with an entire new Earth, a new Milky Way and 100 billion new galaxies. That's some ball of tin foil.

It turns out that in the year 2149, one guy still can easily overcome a group of huge, muscular security guards by knocking them out in seconds with a single punch. It turns out 85 million years in the past, teenagers are still played by adults: 26-year-old actress Allison Miller portrays a rebellious 17-year-old. Teen girls still say "whatever" while adults still say "y'all." It turns out the technology of 2149 builds flimsy, unreliable vehicles that appear to have been manufactured in Soviet tractor factories of the 1930s. And it turns out that machine-gun bullets from the year 2149 bounce off dinosaurs. My bet is that a World War II-era 50-caliber machine gun would cut even the largest dinosaur in half.


Fortunately for Godzilla, they're shooting 22nd-century bullets, which, on "Terra Nova," bounce off everything.

Reader Mike Wohl of Palo Alto, Calif., notes, "In the final scene of the 'Terra Nova' pilot, the family is staring at the seemingly vast full moon and the stereotypical cute little daughter asks if the moon was always so big. The stereotypical nerd daughter says the moon is moving away from the Earth at half a centimeter per year, so 85 million years in the past, it was far closer and thus took up more of the sky. Do the math; 85 million years ago, the moon was 264 miles closer to Earth, about one-tenth of one percent closer than its current position. The difference wouldn't be noticeable. During the time depicted in the series the moon would have appeared almost exactly as today, except perhaps for fewer craters."

According to this Hollywood insider sheet, Terra Nova 13 has "executive producers." Nearly as many as the "Spiderman" musical! Many of the "executive producers" are Hollywood grandees receiving fees and vanity credits for little or no useful work. This industry insider sheet contains a wonderful Freudian slip about a veteran television figure named Brannon Braga, "After meeting with the coterie of producers, Braga went about flushing it into a series."

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

here are complaints to be made about the writing on this show.

Only one of that reviewer's complaints are valid. Let's examine:

1) Steady human growth will destroy the ecosystem. YES. It will. We need to cut our current population by at least 50% for long term viability of our current standards of living, but we're still growing at a rate that will see the earth hit 14 billion by 2100, without levelling off. That is entirely realistic. People need habitat. Do we even have physical room for doubling our population again? Then there's the environmentally damaging farming required to support them? This isn't about global warming or greenhouse gases. This is about the fact that we are using up all the available wilderness, and the ecosystem needs to be mostly wilderness. You really think a city-planet like "Coruscant" in Star Wars would be ecologically viable?

2) 85 billion years was explained. The time rift was preexisting. They did not create it, they did not choose it.

3) Many worlds theorem. Every "decision" is a fork in time creates a new universe, and there are an infinite number of these universes. Every single possibility exists in at least one of these universes.

4) Bullets do not bounce of dinos in Terra Nova, they just don't penetrate deeply enough through all that flesh to do much. Is that realistic for small arms vs. giant prehistoric lizards? I don't know. Neither does he, he didn't look it up.

5) It's 4 centimeters a year. That's 3400 kilometers in 85 million years. however, he's still right. With a perigee of about 360,000 km, this is slightly less than a 1% decrease in the orbital distance of the moon. Would that be visible? Maybe. You'd have to be quite observant to notice.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

5) It's 4 centimeters a year. That's 3400 kilometers in 85 million years. however, he's still right. With a perigee of about 360,000 km, this is slightly less than a 1% decrease in the orbital distance of the moon. Would that be visible? Maybe. You'd have to be quite observant to notice.

There is an error here. The rate at which the moon moves away from the Earth is also decreasing each year. It is not constant. Furthermore, the mean distance between the Earth and the moon appears to be approaching a finite limit.

If you reverse time, the moon gets closer to the Earth each year, and the rate at which it gets closer increases with each successive year. Over a time span of 85 million years, you can not use a linear relationship to determine a distance based off of 4cm/yr * 85x10^6 year = change in mean distance.

I rather hope no one was too attached to this show...Terra Nova just went extinct.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.