Or we’ll eventually find out it’s the far future!
While we’re at it…
Why did the Earth look yellow instead of blue in the opening shot?
Why did the dad have grey hair in one scene and then curly black hair in another and then back to regular dark hair?
How did the dad escape from prison given only a medical laser scalpel smuggled in his rebreather which he clearly tested on his food tray on camera?
Howcome the giant time-travel portal only goes to 85 million BC and takes a huge amount of technological equipment and energy and isn’t optimized into a flying portable AMC Delorean instead?
Why can’t everybody on earth jump the turnstiles like Dad and skip merrily along into paradise? It’s not like Dad+1 took someone else’s spots and there’s a couple of poor shlubs left back in 2149 with invites but insufficient energy to send. You should already have billions of people on Terra Nova chewing away on every last dinosaur carcass by now.
Why did Nathaniel Taylor use Tango November as a callsign? How do they know it’s November and who was dancing the Tango? I flipped to Dancing With the Stars for 90% of the broadcast, was he referring to the Tango on that show?
(Sorry… since we seem to be asking inane, easily answered questions in this thread, I figured it’s easier to join in)
In our present time, the moon’s orbit is not a perfect circle, and it is about 50,000 km farther from earth at apogee than at perigee. So no, a 425km difference would not be noticeable, let alone dramatic.
Also, the girl’s number is much less (a factor of 6 or so) than current estimates of the moon’s recession, but even our numbers wouldn’t make a noticeable difference.
She was also wrong about the stars looking different due to the expansion of the universe. That would not be noticeable, either. The proper motions of the stars, however, would probably distort the constellations quite a bit.
Carnotaurus wasn’t around 85 million years ago, either, as far as we know. It’s actually one of the last (non-avian) dinosaurs, and has thus far only known from the late Cretaceous, around 70 mya.
Don’t look at me. I assume they went through a book of dinosaurs and picked out all the ones that looked interesting.
As far as people’s questions about the portal and why they picked 85 Million years etc. I got the impression, the rip was a natural phenomenon they were taking advantage of, not something they invented and can control.
Look up N & T in the NATO phonetic alphabet
[QUOTE=Quimby]
As far as people’s questions about the portal and why they picked 85 Million years etc. I got the impression, the rip was a natural phenomenon they were taking advantage of, not something they invented and can control.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, it was. They discussed this at one point in the show. As I said, I didn’t have a specific problem with this part…it’s magical, and leads to an alternative universe that just happens to be 85 million years in the past. No worries…I can buy that, since this IS a SciFi show and it’s at least marginally plausible (if there are infinite alternative universes then at least one of them could be set 85 million years ago with dinosaurs from over a 100 million years and less than 70 million years…and it COULD be accessible by some sort of natural frozen wormhole thingy).
-XT
So you wanna start right off with people commuting to and from the suburbs? Don’t you know that what destroyed future Earth in the first place? 
Maybe she’s supposed to be the Cliff Clavin of the show, passing herself off as an authority on everything but pretty much getting everything wrong or garbled. 
Sadly, this isn’t true. She’s supposed to be the Lisa Simpson of the show.
Yes, especially considering that most of the brightest stars in our night sky only appear bright because of their relative proximity. Here’s a movie showing what just 200,000 years of proper motion does to the Big Dipper.
I wasn’t accusing you of anything! Just implying that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of science involved in this particular bit of fiction. The producers (or whomever) picked the timeframe, but pretty mch ignore it in favor of the “all dinosaurs lived at the same time” misconception. Apparently the 85 mya conceit is treated like much any other technobabble…
You know, it occurs to me that they have NO IDEA what’s on the compound side of the portal. They said they can’t leave messages to teh future - it’s an alternate timeline. They said there’s no going back. I think when they implied was that they’re sending ppl though with no idea what’s on the other side. Did I get that right?
If that’s the case, then lots of ppl on an overpopulated planet are lining up and walking into a mysterious portal, never to be heard from again. Kinda sounds suspicious if you ask me, and I’m not sure I’d sign up for that.
But the postcards Aunt Martha sent back say its so nice and the weather is beautiful
My WAG is that the wife accidently got pregnant (despite 150 yrs worth of advances in contraceptive technology) and refused to abort. I doubt the 3rd kid was planned; especially since they alread had both a son and a daughter. What’s odd is that apparently the punishment for having an extra kid is only a fine. Judging by how terrified they were of the Population Control Police I thought the little girl was going to be put down or one of the parents executed. And if the good doctor really did have the earning potential and/or family & political connections to live the good life “in one of the domes” you’d think she could manage to pay the fine.
I think they must have some way of sending data back to the future. Maybe sending data-only requires a much, much, smaller facility than sending matter and the colony can comunicate upstream some how. The Commander even came out & said he wasn’t going to inform anyone in 2149 about the Sixers until he knew why there were sent. I’m curious to know how one would go about contructing a probe that supposed to remain intact & findable after going through 85 million years of shifting geography.
To be fair we’ve only seen the inside of one fancy house, that was meant for the family have a high-value member of the medical staff who was specially recruited (in spite of being married to a convicted felon). It’s possible not everyone has such spacious homes and/or that multiple families are crammed into one. Then again it’s also possible that they have nano-fabricators somewhere & making things like pre-fab housing units is a piece of cake.
Don’t forget the probe that ummm…with the beacon…and the alternate, errr, uh, timeline…transtemporal…ical… LOOK, man, I’ve got certain information, all right? Certain things have come to light. And, you know, has it ever occurred to you, that, instead of, uh, you know, running around, uh, uh, blaming the portal, you know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, I-I-I-I… this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it’s not just, it might not be just such a simple… uh, you know?</dude>
Now who can argue with that? I think we’re all indebted to Billy Baroo for clearly stating what needed to be said. I am particularly glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic new frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.
/The Face abides.
The Carnosaur movies were better than this trash.
RE: Making up/mixing dinosaurs together, this was always a meh to me. The fossil record is by its nature fragmentary and incomplete. We only know a thin slice of all dinosaurs that ever existed. Coelacanth, etc.
I worry that the colonists were interested enough to deal for such a piddly amount of iron. One relatively small box, what, maybe a few hundred pounds?
And it’s not like there’s anyway the Future Earth has possibly got an iron shortage. It’s not like organic compounds or whatever that could be destroyed/broken down. So if they need iron, why not have each of the colonists schlepp in a few ingots? They could just dump them at the arrival point to be brough in by vehicle as convenient.
Did anyone else think the pterosaur didn’t look anything like what a pterosaur should look like? It was only on the screen for a few seconds, but it’s wings looked more like those of a dragon than a pterosaur.
Guys, you HAVE to keep watching.
Remember when teen girl showed teen “fresh” those writings on the wall?
You know what that means?
We get Sleestaks!!