SG: Universe and the post AGW paradigm switch

While doing some crochet the other night, I decided to see if there was anything in the 500 channels we now get that's worth watching.  The premiere of Stargate: Universe was pretty much the only thing on worth watching.  I'd already missed the first 20 minutes or so, but I decided to watch the rest, anyway.  I started right in the evacuation scene, just before the planet blows up, so that made for some confused watching for a while. *L*

After this point, the show follows the surviving evacuees that ended up on an abandoned alien space ship for some reason I never quite caught onto.  The ship is damaged and leaking air - hence the title of the premier, Air, I suppose.

Now, I like sci fi, though I don't really watch a lot of it anymore. TV series like Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica and Buck Rogers were things I enjoyed as a kid.  The Star Wars movies, Enemy Mine, The Last Starfighter were some of the movies.  More recently, we've discovered the Firefly series (it came out at a time when we had no tv, so we never saw it when it first came out), etc.

Most sci fi movies set in space will, at some point, deal with that greatest of dangers in space: lack of air.  So it's no surprise that SGU dealt with it right from the start.  What was different was how it was protrayed.

Picture this for a moment.  Imagine yourself as a character in a sci fi story.  You're on a ship, lost in space.  The ship is damaged and leaking air.  So what is your greatest concern?

Well, always before, the concern was lack of breathable oxygen.  If your ship is leaking its internal atmosphere, not having any oxygen left to breath would seem to be the paramount concern.

Not so in the world of SGU.  Throughout the show, their greatest concern was...

The build up of CO2.

Now, this can be a legitimate concern.  If you're in an enclosed area where the air in the room is all you've got, you will eventually have more CO2 than oxygen.  At which point, yeah, you're gonna die. Not from the CO2, necessarly, but from the lack of oxygen.  It takes a bit of twisted logic, but sure, you could say that, at this point, a build up of CO2 can be deadly.

That's not, however, the scenerio on SGU.  Here, the ship is actually leaking air.  There wouldn't be a build up of CO2 because the CO2 would be draining along with the oxygen and other gases in their air.  CO2 couldn't have built up to dangerous levels.

But in the post AGW world, CO2 surmounts lack of oxygen in deadliness.  It seems that, just as AGW alarmists tell us that increased CO2 will only increase the growth of things we don't like (like weeds) but kill the things we want (like food plants), apparently a space ship leaking air will only leak the air they want (oxygen) and leave behind the air they don't want (CO2).

Well, since both theories are firmly routed in fantasy, I guess it can work. :-P