(*–”exploitive capitalists bulldozing paradise” is formulaic because it’s true, and thus sadly not entertaining. But your mileage may differ. And I digress)

With hindsight, the fact that Terra Nova didn’t generate some kind of environmental thread is a reflection on the show. It should have; it’s the basic premise, but we took it for unremarkable and focused on the show’s production values. Damning.

Either way, life on Earth goes on, and humans are a lot more adaptable than species that have to physically evolve.

Human can live, with minimal technology, everywhere from the great ergs of the Sahara to the Arctic ice shelf.

With higher technology we’ve been everywhere on the planet.

I really don’t know where I fall on the scale of belief.

I certainly believe we are in a period of global warming and I believe humans are contributing to the problem.

I tend to believe of contribution is in the 5-10 percent range. This is as nuch based on over-population as anything. If we do everything environmentalists want we would only reduce our effect by half.

I also believe that humans are a part of nature and we are subject to the same natural rules that apply to rain forest growth and cutting.

If we become or have become a big problem nature will deal with us by plague or natural disaster. The why of that is no more mysterious than increased forest growth on one side of the world to compensate for loss on the other side.

In the end we will persist as a species and eventually solve the problem by getting off the rock.

The Earth’s biosphere has weathered a hell of a lot worse than humanity, and will again. In the Devonian Period, the “Age of Fish,” CO2 levels were twenty times what they are now. The Permian mass extinction after this killed 95 percent of the species on Earth. Gaia got better. Where were the polar bears swimming during the Ice Age?

Even the current global warming issue mostly revolves around how damage will be done to human living areas, and a few noticable species. If the Earth got five degrees warmer, nature would just move some borders around like it always has. Will this be convenient for human farmers and coastal dwellers? Nature doesn’t give a shit.

If Terra Nova were meatier, we who take it way too seriously would have something worth talking about.

“It takes a human mind to believe it’s not worthy to live.” Profound. We have a rich heritage of finding reasons not to live. Guilt the majority by weight, but concepts of honor/shame and irredeemable sin rank right up there.

In the case of allowing humanity to succumb to self-inflicted ecological disaster, I think that the moral question can be judged somewhat objectively by asking how much else of the Earth’s biosphere are we destroying along with ourselves? In other words, is it a victimless crime? Or is there a real victim to be made whole, or future victims to be protected?

Maybe there’s a less negative way to rephrase your sentence: It takes a human mind to conceive of a moral framework so broad that it can weigh the rights of one species against the needs of all of a planet’s life.

Of course, the jury’s still out as to whether the human mind is actually capable of such large-scale thinking. In any case, nature/evolution/Gaia will judge us whether or not we want to be judged.

Roddenberry was pretty relentlessly upbeat, and I think that that limited his scope for drama. If humanity was good and successful and expanding and assimiliting species into the Federation faster than the Borg, then dramatic tension had to come from opposition to the Federation. Opposing the Federation had to be inherently evil, and with humanity already cast in the good role, aliens we assimilated were good, and aliens outside the Federation were simply evil.

The Greeks are said to have defined tragedy not as good versus evil, but good versus good. Roddenberry’s premise allowed only good v. evil, but the second-chance scenario has a lot of good v. good potential. Especially when we’re fleeing a disaster of our own making, as in the ecological collapse scenarios like TN. Then the writers can play with the moral issue of whether we deserve a second chance, and the factions can be philosophical rather than commercial.

Is it gooder to build the colony to ensure humanity’s survival, or gooder to let evolution play out and let humanity pay the ultimate price for its sins?

Meat. Give me more meat.

It got me thinking about this thread and how this promising series has gone South.

Roddenbury achieved his success by making St about the nobility of humanity and hope for the future.

What better scenario could there be than a second chance for humanity in a pristine world.

Surely, there are lots of story lines about the challenges they would face. without the dumbed down soap opera they have given us.

Digressing somewhat, There was a recent BBC series called “Outcasts” with a very similar plot. It was canceled after the first 8 episodes

The series was about establishing a colony on a rare earthlike planet to escape a depleted Earth.

No dinos but they had the same rag-tag rebel band that had split off. It was a complete bore in spite of the Brit’s attempt to make it intelligent.

Take away the dinos and put it in a dreary Euro setting and you have Terra Nova/Big Brother