Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Enterprise my thoughts

How about something a little closer to home?
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Something showing life in space and on Earth in the near future. Asteroid mining, lunar colonies, space colonies, that sort of thing. The problem with the Star Trek universe is that after a war-torn Earth launched its first warpship, the Vulcans came and that was pretty much it for Earth-based space travel.

Babylon 5 had some very realistic notions of near-Earth space (a good treatment of Mars for example), but most of the action took place on an interstellar level, with aliens and the like.

The major Mars exploration movies could barely get on the Red Planet before most of them dived into the Alien Zone again.

I have a special affection for a British show called "Star Cops," which seemed to me to be a pretty good shot at this, although it was a crime show, and had an effects budget of about thirty dollars a show. Writing quality was damn good. Only on British DVD at this point.

I have purchased a set of DVDs of an anime show called "Cowboy Bebop." The premise of the story is that in the process of developing dimensional "gates," something bad happened to the Moon and the Earth became largely uninhabitable. The gate technology, which permits travel around the Solar System in very short times (no interstellar travel seems to be available), allowed the terraforming to one degree or other of almost every solid planetary body in the Solar System. The extent of this terraforming, considering only about fifty years is supposed to have passed, is almost ludicrous. Cities and landscapes, completely indistinguishable from Earth, and that have all the appearance of being hundreds of years old, cover the surface of places like Ganymede and Titan. You wouldn't know you weren't in Kansas if there wasn't a gas giant in the sky. Also well-written.

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