GENESIS I & II--Terra Nova #1 & 2/Season I 2011

[Dannyalcatraz]

You're not thinking like a gov't official. I could totally see them doing this if they thought that somehow, they could reverse the process so that travel into the alternative past could be reversible.

Then they would have 2 things:

1) A place they could send people they chose to, and retrieve them. Scientists, colonists, tourists...convicts.

2) A whole Earth's worth of resources to plunder.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

They apparantly have a way to communicate back to our Earth.

Well, it's TV logic, not real physics, but I have to wonder:
How can you send radio signals back, but not anything else, when it works fine for both in the other direction?

If they are in the same timestream, they might be using something like that probe to communicate. That means the message is waiting around for million of years. Of course, this poses all kinds of questions on how they avoid paradoxes. Maybe that is some kind of Quantum-Mechanical thing - the message cannot be physically retrieved before the target date is reached, meaning that the timestream has to be internally consistent. Still doesn't explain how the colonists themselves manage to avoid any parodoxes. (And they colony would have to break down before they reach anywhere close to human history.)
Of course, time paradoxes are also not a problem if there is no free-will.

If they are not in the same timestream - it appears there is a way they can send signals back, and there might be a way to use this connection for more. They might just not use it, or they might not be able to use it yet, e.g. they have to create some kind of apparatus to faciliate the process of matter transportation through the space-time rift. They couldn't build that part on the other side yet.

 

[Fast Learner]

If it's the same timestream they could likely send messages to the future by carving messages into protected rocks or leaving them in certain places or what have you. 85 million years is a really long time but not insurmountably long.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

If it's the same timestream they could likely send messages to the future by carving messages into protected rocks or leaving them in certain places or what have you. 85 million years is a really long time but not insurmountably long.

The pilot actually had a different method suggested - they showed the probe that they were using. It was apparantly somehow designed to not be destroyed and sending a signal that they could detect anywhere on Earth - and they never picked up its signal, which lead to the conclusion of a different timestream.
So that could be a way to communicate. (nd it could also be the way to imply how they went wrong - maybe the probe was destroyed after all, maybe after some nasty asteroid hit. Or it was actually detected and they decided to use it as communication device with the past, but tell everyone it was never found.
(They don't need to worry about time paradoxes. They are a philosophical thing, mostly. If paradoxes exist, they won't destroy the universe. If they don't exist, well, either we can't time travel in the first place, or we have to stop believing in free will.)

I think one question I have is:
How did they manage to screw up Earth so entirely if they apparantly have developed highly efficient solar powered technology that they can use to make that Terra Nova camp work?

 

[MarkB]

The pilot actually had a different method suggested - they showed the probe that they were using. It was apparantly somehow designed to not be destroyed and sending a signal that they could detect anywhere on Earth - and they never picked up its signal, which lead to the conclusion of a different timestream.
So that could be a way to communicate. (nd it could also be the way to imply how they went wrong - maybe the probe was destroyed after all, maybe after some nasty asteroid hit. Or it was actually detected and they decided to use it as communication device with the past, but tell everyone it was never found.
(They don't need to worry about time paradoxes. They are a philosophical thing, mostly. If paradoxes exist, they won't destroy the universe. If they don't exist, well, either we can't time travel in the first place, or we have to stop believing in free will.)

I can see some possible ways to set up communications. For instance, if you could somehow pinpoint the location at which a paleontological dig is in progress, with an 85-million-year-old stratum of perfectly-preserved rock in the process of being unearthed, and tie it in to the location of that rock face back in prehistoric times, then you really could scrawl messages on that rock - perhaps in radioactive isotopes that can leave a detectable trace even after millions of years - and pre-arrange for the modern-day diggers to uncover new areas of rock on a specific schedule, allowing messages to be revealed at a pace synchronised to the timeline of the colony.

The idea of an actual probe or black-box surviving all that time and being locatable and identifiable at the end of it seems somewhat less likely, though again if you're working with an established location that's known to be relatively geologically stable and use some form of passive data storage with extreme longevity, packed in something very, very tough and inert, it might possibly survive that duration.

I think one question I have is:
How did they manage to screw up Earth so entirely if they apparantly have developed highly efficient solar powered technology that they can use to make that Terra Nova camp work?

I haven't seen beyond the first two episodes yet, so I don't know if they've shown anything particularly astonishing in that regard, but I don't think the power requirements for the fairly low-impact energy consumption we see in those episodes would be that great. Sustaining a colony that size wouldn't even come close to comparing to the energy requirements of an overpopulated, under-resourced future society. And given the apparent 100% cloud cover of the future Earth, solar power would appear to be an ill-suited technology to its needs.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think one question I have is:
How did they manage to screw up Earth so entirely if they apparantly have developed highly efficient solar powered technology that they can use to make that Terra Nova camp work?

Too little, too late.

With the kind of smog they had, how effective do you think solar panels would be? And who knows, perhaps that smog would be more corrosive to the panels' structure than to humans?

 

[Crothian]

With the smog I was kind of suprised they still had a population problem.

 

[delericho]

I thought the first episode was pretty decent. I thought the second episode pretty much sucked.

It's interesting enough for me to give it half a dozen episodes to improve (and if there are only ever going to be thirteen, I guess I'll stick that out). It helps that I seem to have a shortage of shows to watch at the moment, though.