Not really. The future they are getting things from could be an alternate timeline. Possibly a different one every eight months.
Could you elaborate? In the carboniferous period, which is the “giant insect” age (thinking of the sloppy giant bug again), oxygen concentrations are thought to have been 30-35% versus 21% today. Given that “Oxygen toxicity is caused by exposure to oxygen at partial pressures greater than those to which the body is normally exposed” (cite) I would imagine that such a substantial difference would, over long periods of time (the days, weeks, months and years the colonists have been on Terra Nova) result in toxicity.
When the kids went through the fence on their little adventure, the jungle was right up against the perimeter fence.
I know they said the vegetation/vines grew quickly (dad was hacking them), but wouldn’t a couple hundred feet of “no man’s land” between the jungle and the compound fence be appropriate?
Aren’t there quite a few Cretaceous dinosaur/big-ass bug species who would readily fit through those gaps in the perimeter fence?
From that same page:
30-35% is less than 50%.
Plus, Cretaceous oxygen levels were around 26-28%.
The changes they are making just have to render the future wildly different, don’t they? Or maybe the Ice Age renders a few thousand humans mostly irrelevant.
Research? On Terra nova? Speaking as somebody who knows a little about dinosaurs… BWAHAHAHAHA! Watching this you would think the science of paleontology had actually regressed in the 20 years since Jurassic Park.
More right than you know. The “we obviously don’t listen to our” scientific consultant, Jack Horner, said in an interview a few months back that he tried to convince the producers to set the show in the Paleogene, a few Ma after the dino extinction. Makes more sense in terms of a new beginning, plus a lot of crazy mammal and bird species people aren’t over-saturated with. They nixed it of course.
for better or worse, they specifically set the show 85 Ma ago, a time period with few known dino-bearing fossil localities, to give themselves license to make stuff up whole cloth, like the utterly ridiculous-looking “slashers”.
Too bad. At least it could have been a good dinosaur show if not a good drama.
To be fair, until the last decade the formation Carnotaurus fossils were found in had been dated to around 85 or 80 Ma ago. Maybe they DID do their research but used a 15 year old book.
Thin, loose, leathery wings flapping the breeze, rahther than taught, muscular, shape-shifting membranes. Dinosaurs got “revised” in the popular media after JP. Ptersaurs are still waiting for their renaissance to reach the public. The media’s portrayal of pteorsaurs is stuck in 1910.
Ten bucks says they pick something up with their feet. :smack:
Not that I noticed.
That wasn’t the issue - they sent the probe back 85 million years, and then expected it to turn up in someone’s basement or something. Then declared it an alternate timeline when it didn’t.
Here’s one: the first guy sent showed up some 6 months before the rest of the team, so why the hell do they NOT have the pilgrimage landing point secured?
Sadly, it looks like angsty teenager is going to be a central character who drives the plot. From the same interview I linked above:
I’ve learned from my husband in the safety business that any fall over 10 feet has a 50% chance of killing you, and he fell further than 10 feet. Even though he landed on his back, your internal organs don’t care for a jarring shock like that - he probably would have died a couple of hours later from massive internal bleeding. Since this was by no means the most glaring of the problems with the show, I chose to overlook this. 
Sorry, I should have said any fall OF 10 feet, and he fell more than 10 feet.
*Is that the Moon?!
Yeah, it gets about half a centimeter further away every year, so now that we’re 85 million years in the past, do the math! it’s A LOT bigger!" *
LOL at the snotty little ‘do the math’ line. What math? Divide 85 by 2? :smack:
That one also tilted me. The universe started expanding 13.7 billion years ago. 85 million is less than one percent of that.
The larger problem is that people don’t care. When I complain, they roll their eyes and tell me it’s science fiction. Well, I grew up reading science fiction (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc.) and I think that science fiction should have some science in it. Or at the very least, not screw up simple math.
It’s not the time frame that’s the problem there. The stars we see at night are in our own galaxy; they would not be moving away from each other because of expansion, the way galaxies themselves are! The positions of stars would be different, as noted previously, just not for the reason she claimed.
Yes, that would be like saying that the trees are look different in my town than they did a hundred years ago because of continental drift.
The goal of a TV show is to entertain, not fight ignorance.
That’s true, I was just observing that even if the apparent motion of the stars was due to expansion (her theory), there still isn’t enough time. Eighty-five million seems like a large number until you compare it to fourteen billion. Wrong on many levels. As I said up-thread, maybe she’s the Cliff Clavin of the show.
But what I was asking is whether it would be safe to breathe a high oxygen mix such as that of the Carboniferous in the long term (short term affords far more flexibility). I had a look around and stumbled on an experiment that discusses the issue:
Exposure time is clearly a relevant factor and the colonists have been there for months and/or years. The experiment concludes:
They talk about 40% in the conclusion not because it is a safe threshold but because that is one of the three concentrations of oxygen they experimented with (21%, 40%, 90%).
But the time of the giant insects - when oxygen level was high enough to support their existence - was much earlier, in the Carboniferous. I just noticed that DrDeth made a similar point to my question in post 106 (an atmosphere in which giant insects can thrive would not allow humans to do the same). It seems reasonable to expect some effect on the colonists beyond the “you’re not used to the air and the brightness” warning they get when they first arrive to Terra Nova.
Well, an atmosphere in which giant insects can survive probably wouldn’t be too healthy for allegedly Cretaceous Era dinosaurs, either. There is no time during which giant bugs, dinosaurs, and humans would have all been equally at home. But, given that the stated setting is the Cretaceous, there’s no reason humans couldn’t acclimate to the higher-than-present, but still less-than-Carboniferous, oxygen levels.
Because the producers are liberal Democrats that support massive subsidies to bankrupt “green energy” boondoggles, and they are propagandizing you!
Dagget (I mean Dangit), they were saving that for next week. Now you have spoiled the surprise.
Because that proves GLOBAL WARMING! Remember, AGW deniers are like holocaust deniers!
Would be an improvement. And you are probably right. Look for some long forgotten intelligent civilization to make an appearance.
Didn’t catch that. Were the bills denominated in trillions, Zimbabwe style? I guess that is why he needed a backpack full to bribe a guard!
THIS.
THIS.
Have you ever thought about coming up with an SF television series? You sound like you have the scientific and technical knowledge to do the job!
Yep. That would have actually been good. But that would be way to heavy for this show, which is targeted at the young and young of heart. Dreary looking production design is as far as they really want to go with their dystopian future.
Commentary on the brutal mass murder of that exists TODAY of any fetus or newborn that has the poor luck to be a female in one-child China is beyond the scope of this dreck.
You read books? What the fuck is the matter with you? Four-eyes like you need a good punch in the throat. I am now off to reproduce with this cheerleader. Don’t you have my homework to finish? Now get lost!
LOOK, four eyes, I wasn’t fucking kidding. Now bug off while a real man like me scores some primo trim!
Because, DUH, they need someone to reproduce! Nerds like you never get laid. Now get cracking on that homework!
Not seeing that. The more likely twist is that they are the anti-heroes, escaping the authoritarian colony. ALWAYS LOOK FOR THE TWIST. There always is one, and once you look for it, it is pretty easy to spot.
Just awful. But it is a Spielburger, so get used to it.
I understand there was a huge backlog, and they had trouble finding a house that would do it on the schedule and budged proposed. The dinos look like they got the absolute minimum of keyframing, the motions look simplistic and jerky. Don’t get me started on the cityscapes. No imagination going on there.
Captain Kirk syndrome. Can’t do much about it. Even badass Commander Ryker couldn’t fix that. Still gotta get the protagonist into the fisticuffs. It is just the way things are. No harm, no foul.
Stay tuned! I am sure that there will be very satisfying exposition in future episodes that explains all this in a way that both makes perfect sense and adds to the drama!
I’ve got that one. It is a lot easier to work with globs of pure iron than to extract it from thousands of tons of ore. But why do they need it at all if you can send dozens of badass vehicles the size of an Escalade back through time…
Yep. This is it. You need to convince the proles that they have a chance, so you can tax the crap out of them to pay for the huge infrastructure that they showed surrounding the time portal.
They were flat out crap. The dinos, as I mentioned had very poor motion, and the cityscapes were not very imaginative. I HOPE were paying homage to Blade Runner, but I suspect they were merely ripping it off.
I am very disappointed in you, Mr. Spielberg. I am sure you are very sorry and ashamed to have let down your geek VFX fans, from your seat on top of that huge pile of money!
Hey, you need a damn good janitor to clean up dino poop. The best in fact. That dude is critical to the whole operation!
Falling Skies isn’t half as bad as this one. And probably cost a lot less to churn out. What bugs me is the fantastic waste of money on this show. For that kind of coin, we could have had moties! MOTIES!!! (one of whom was actually a good guy and saved everyone and made peace, and they all lived happily ever after with no need to blockade the Mote system because it was all just a big misunderstanding, and the Ewoks were there and they all sang a happy song. The End)
Yah, sorry to say, it is. I actually enjoyed it. It will be like catnip to my girlfriend…
Yeah, the feds can’t be going after ET with GUNS :eek::eek::eek: Better to CGI in some flashlights. Think of the children.
Mr. Spielberg, you used to be cool. Remember when you had that shark bite Quint in half? I remember that…
So all they could really manage is a basic grocery list, scrawled on the back of an envelope. They must have lost memory stick technology in the next 100 years… 
A wizard did it.
This is actually the most believable thing in the whole piece.
He landed on some of the branches he was cutting, and they were kind of springy. I guess. If that was the least of the problems, I would choose to overlook it as well.
Of all the clinkers, was the one where the kid says, “You left us to fend for ourselves!” Um, yeah, your damn mother is some kind of world renowned medical type person to the point where she is selected for the most important mission in history, but you can’t get by without your Dad’s cop salary? MMKay.
But yeah, this is in the “Falling Skies” category. Fun to watch, like a train wreck in slow motion. It is horrible, but somehow you can’t take your eyes away…
/will be torrenting it again next week
//my friend told me it had a lot of long commercial breaks
Fixing Captain Kirk syndrome is easy - just find a character who can get into all the fisticuffs you want, and make him the protagonist. In other words: Jack O’Neill, not General Hammond.