Fox has released a full length trailer for the Steven Spielberg-produced science fiction series Terra Nova, which is set to premiere on Mondays this Fall. The new television show “follows an ordinary family on an incredible journey back in time to prehistoric Earth as a small part of a daring experiment to save the human race.”
Terra Nova is another attempt at a time travel story without time travel. In their future of 2149, the world is in terrible shape. Filter masks are worn by everyone and they are huddled together using broken technology, basically waiting to die in their overcrowded hovels. Until a group of scientists discover a portal through time, into a cross-dimensional rift to another Earth, 85 million years ago.
They are entertaining the idea once flirted with by Julian May in her much better novels called the Saga of the Pliocene Exiles. In May's novels, humanity had not quite destroyed itself but it had fallen on hard times as creativity and self determination had all but been destroyed in their future world. A team of scientists find a hole in space-time that leads them back to the Pliocene era.
In Terra Nova, a similar space-time anomaly exists, a one-way ticket back to a cross-time past Earth. Scientifically speaking, there is nothing these people could do on this Other Earth that will affect their compatriots in the future. Nothing.
That future already exists and cannot be disrupted by any event from the past because those events prompted someone to look for the portal into the past in the first place. So they cannot undo what allowed them to exist in the first place. So science speculates they have instead moved to another Earth, a similar one in every respect except they are far enough in the past to potentially create a different future.
To be fair, 85 million years is a long time and it is unlikely anything these people could do or create would likely survive into any possible future. For the record, 85 million years would be the Cretaceous Period from 145 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. During this time, dinosaurs did walk the Earth, there was clean air and water, and likely piles of dino dung, you would have to drive around, Timberlands would not be enough.
I doubt anything these people could do 85 million years ago would have any potential effect on the future. The scale of time is too vast and they lack a primary component of the industrial age, easily obtainable fossil fuels. Without those, they have no real chance at industrialization, nor of developing modern levels of technology.
I will not mention asteroids which will hit the Earth several times between then and now, super-volcanoes and likely equally enthusiastic earthquakes, and epic ice ages which will completely cover the globe in sheets of hundred foot tall glaciers from pole to pole, destroying almost all life on Earth.
I suspect our intrepid adventurers will have a great time with whatever is being done secretly to:
a) get back to the future and stage a coup of the government with sleeper agents who possess a means of opening the gate.
b) discover and alter the potential future of the human race so humanity may develop differently
c) meet our previous extraterrestrial masters who rule the Earth for twenty million years before leaving when the "plholdgorg" (alien stuff they came to Earth for) ran out
d) Inexplicably find a source of fossil fuels and create an industrial age society which resembles primitive Earth, Europe in every way and soon make way for Chivalry Terra Nova style.
I hope it will be none of these singly. I hope the truth will be far more complex, far more satisfying and far more stimulating. Knowing FOX, they will kill it right as it is getting interesting.
Thaddeus Howze
@ebonstorm
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