Planet of the Apes (1968 original) question

As fantastic as the original movie is, there's one element of the plot that's always bothered me a little. Right at the beginning, several hundred years have already passed outside the ANSA spacecraft carrying Taylor and his crew, so if they returned to Earth, they'd be well over a thousand years out of their own time. How would they cope with such a thing? Some people have suggested their mission was to found a colony on some distant world, but if it would take so many centuries for them to reach an inhabitable world, wouldn't it be more sensible for the authorities on Earth to wait until they had developed a more efficient system that would get them across space much faster in both ship-time and Earth-time? Was it not expected that the human race would survive much longer when Taylor's crew set off?

 

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

But it's likely the creators of the original didn't consider this little gap in logic.

(The "Rise" movie retcons this idea a bit by implying the Icarus craft got lost on a mission to Mars.)

 

Taylor's dialog about the woman crew member that died in hibernation seems to support this theory.

 

yep, he refered to her as their 'Eve'. because of that i always assumed they would set up a colony on another world.

 

One woman and three blokes?

That's a bloody good idea.

Unless she was genetically modified to rapidly produce children with non related dna, or she's carrying a huge sample of eggs from thousands of different women, so that as the 3 guys keep banging "Eve" there's no problem on a genetic level when all the brothers and sisters start pairing off as lovers.

According to the book.

It takes them a year to to get to light speed and then a year to slow down, but 99.999999 percent of their journey at Light speed which they do not notice because of time dialation and the hybernation pods.

But all they have to do is build a radio antenna. And send information back to earth to say if it's wise to send other ships.

FTL may be impossible.

How many centuries are they going to not colonize the universe thinking that it's not impossible to build an ftl engine? And they should just hold out for an other decade when surely the boffins will deliver on their spurious assumptions.

 

An opposite ratio would have made more sense.

 

Yeah they never really said what the purpose of the mission was. And was the girl really expected to sleep with and have babies by her crewmates when they got where they were going?

Propogating the species is one thing, but you'd think they'd at least find a married couple or something for that. Lol

 

This sounds cold, but....with that small a gene pool, they'd have to kill the obvious deformed babies for quite a few generations. And that still doesn't eliminate recessives quickly, with that tiny gene pool. Plus, if a child is killed, the woman's physical resources were used for a year with no product.

I know, sounds cold-blooded, but this was discussion only. I certainly don't think this idea is viable, for these very reasons.

 

Seen 300?

There would be no perfect babies after three generations.

Unless they could hump the natives, or more poeple were coming.

Actually considering, sending off fertile people into space for a suicide mission is just mean, considering what happens if the astronauts don't die. Generations of incest, and then there's a question of slavery, or if the aliens decide that humans taste so good that the arms and legs are harvested early on and what's left over just breeds more food until "it" dies decades later.

 

You know, maybe there's a story there (one that's probably been done already somewhere). The colonists keep killing off babies with "obvious deformities," but it turns out they've doomed themselves because the "deformities" were actually evolutionary adaptations to the new environment. Just the sort of story that (Planet of the Apes screenwriter) Rod Serling would've gone for.

 

You must have genetic diversity to build a viable colony. Also, the cold hard truth is you need women in their 20s. At least several dozen. Women are most fertile before the age of 27. A 30ish astronaut could produce maybe 3 or 4 children if they had proper spacing of 2 years or so for her body to recover. Not enough for a colony, methinks. What if she had all girls? They'd have to fuck their daddies for life to continue.

 

Ewwww..

 

Monogamy would need to go out the window.

Monogamy would be bloody outlawed.

Maybe Homosexuality too?

Yup.

Every sperm is sacred.

Maximum diversity.

A sex rotor wouldn't be out of the question to insure an even spreads of babies. Which would have to be adjusted that the more fertile blokes would be used less so that there's less incest down the line.

Oh, Christopher, you might want to look into the classic Dr Who story "The Mutants" and without getting into details, that's just about what the ITV series Primeval turns out to all be about come the final minutes.

 

Sex rotor? Is that one of those devices you see in porn videos?

 

^What???? Primeval's finale has nothing to do with any thing remotely resembling the subject of this thread.

 

Homosexuality would not be outlawd, homosexuality would be encouraged! It would make things much easier, the homosexual couples could live in monogamous relationships and make babies at state run baby centers. The parents don't even have to like or meet each other. The guy gets a cup, the woman gets the cup and a turkey baster and you're done. If it's a girl it's raised by the mom, if it's a boy by the dad (not ideal, but there has to be a rule), the government keeps track of the relationships. The straight people would probably be much more uncomfortable at the baby centers and start screaming and crying that they don't want to make babies with someone else than their preferred partner.
If I were in charge of populating a world with a limited gene pool I'd love to have as many gay people as possible.

 

You're assuming a greater degree of technology than Taylor and his crew could put together in the first years of their colony, it would take them decades to even approximate the medieval times or dark ages.

Exclusive homosexuality, would deprive the group of genectic variance, but I suppose as long as the men and women keep trying to make babies according to the sex rotor, fulfilling all their social obligations, that when it comes to their spare time, that they can have as much gay sex as they wont to.

I suppose even if you are forced to have sex with every member of the opposite sex in the village you live in within child bearing years a couple times a month, homosexuality is about what's in your heart and mind and not where you put your penis or your yahoo.

Conversely.

It's a waste of sperm to have sex with a pregnant woman, so in these conditions, the only sex that a pregnant women would be able to get would be lesbian sex with other pregnant women.

It's just a question of being a good neighbour.

 

It doesn't really make sense. On the one hand, the sequel showed us that more ships were coming (as did the TV series for that matter), but the second sequel showed us that the ship could fly back in time to the present. Evidently there was some kind of two-way time warp involved. But at the time of the original movie, it was intended as a standalone, so I doubt if they really thought it through-- or if they did, didn't feel it was necessary to elaborate.

 

Sounds just like what they did to the Borg.

Anyways, Taylor and his crew should have at least realized that the planet in question was Earth due to all the orbital debris cluttered around Earth's orbit such as 100's of non-working man-made satellites up there plus miles and miles of metallic space debris.

 

^ It has been years since I saw the movie, but didn't Taylor's capsule crash before the crew had time to wake up from suspended animation properly and check things out while in orbit?