A bit ago I thought of an idea that could perhaps support a sci-fi series or a novel. The setting spans a long stretch of the humanity's future and juxtaposes space colonies and a depopulating Earth. The story opens on a young boy or girl in a space colony at L5 (a Lagrange point). It's a fairly new colony where people live on "floors" with 120 foot ceilings lit by directional, tightly focused LEDs that emulate the changing color and angle of sunlight throughout a normal Earth day. We see things from a kids perspective, and to them, the colony is the normal world. As we go through the events of the day, we see his interactions with his parents, and his innocent questions fill us in on the state of the world, along with various news reports playing on displays in various parts of his house. We follow him to school where a teacher in front of a wall size interactive display is teaching them lessons. She discusses how their parents and grandparents built the colony they're on, along with the other colonies, to get away from pollution, war, and disease. We see him as he gets older, with different teachers reinforcing the lesson that the Earth, mankind's cradle, is also home to bloodsucking insects, virulent plagues, poisonous spiders, brain eating bacteria, and that animals there suffer and die as a matter of course. But mankind has created a bright new future, one free of diseases and nasty insects. One where crops don't have to be sprayed with pesticides and herbicides because there are no bugs or weeds. The colonies' food is grown in almost laboratory conditions, and closely monitored for health and fitness. The only danger is horrible plant pathogens stowing away on a shipment coming from Earth, which is why all shipment of food products from Earth are banned. Back home, as he breezes through the living room, his mom is listening to the newscast and the big story is that a flea was found in a storage room on Unitas Colony, and several sections of it have been put under lock down, awaiting full biological decontamination to destroy any possible flea eggs. Everything in those sections will die to make sure fleas don't escape into the other colonies. Later he finds out that his dad, while on a species sample mission to Earth, has contracted an untreatable but harmless infection that may have him quarantined for life. He talks to his father on a video feed and his dad says that with future breakthroughs, perhaps the rhinovirus can be cleansed from his body, but until then he's stuck on a low-orbiting quarantine colony. The colonies are all too serious about "no pathogens". Fast forward again, and he's in college with students angrily debating the status of the Earth. Some argue that the Earth represents a giant cesspool of decay and death that might one day spread a plague throughout the colonies, either killing all of humanity directly or killing the crops humanity depends on. Other environmentalists argue that the Earth, the birthplace of life, will be great once we evacuate sufficient samples to repopulate the planet after we sterilize it to kill off all the pathogens, harmful fungi, and parasites. One lone voice says "The Earth is fine just as it is." And so the stage is set, a moral, social, and environmental conflict over the natural state of the planet. One plan gaining traction is to pull out the last remaining inhabitants, any plants and animals we want to keep, and wipe the slate clean. But many people on Earth refuse to leave, and will have to be forcibly removed. They view the Earth's next great mass extinction event as the greatest evil ever contemplated and intend to fight. Other's regard these people as Luddite tree-huggers who assume "natural" means "good", and point out how much better repopulated forests will be without all the nasty pathogens. As part of his field studies, he and his classmates get to make a surface visit. They're wearing full NBC bio-suits and his first views of a real planet - a place with a sky instead of a ceiling, take his breath away. The forests go on forever. From their base, they make multiple outings, taking all the precautions we might exploring Mars or Europa. On one of these trips he runs into a girl. A native girl wearing no bio suit. Not even a mask. Just a T-shirt, shorts, and flip flops. He talks to her, alarmed at the risks she's taking, the pathogens she could contract, and she laughs at him. She says billions of people used to roam all over the planet without a care in the world. He points out that millions of them died of diseases. She says yes, millions out of billions - and mostly in poor countries. It makes him doubt the accepted talking points circulating up in space. Who is right? Cut to scenes of suited Chinese PLA patrols clearing out an encampment of European "natives" who were tending some crops. The Chinese scream that the people are violating Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Europeans reply that China isn't China once all the Chinese have left. It's just a hunk of open land in Asia. They are subdued with stun guns and flown up to a quarantined holding ship. And so the stage is set for a bitter conflict over the future of the Earth. Should it be wiped clean and reseeded, or left as is and placed under permanent quarantine? Should humans who wish to live on the planet even be allowed to return, as each would became a potential vector for some horrible plague? Should the Earth be freed of its technological spawn? With wildlife allowed to redevelop naturally, finally freed of a thousand diseases that co-evolved to exploit weaknesses? Passions run high, and mankind has a whole lot of weapons if it comes to a fight. And then one of the colonies is decimated in a biological attack, another explodes in fiery retaliation, and the war is on.
The war could start in season 3 or 4, if at all. The twist to this story is that tons of science fiction stories center on defending Earth from some crazy thing that threatens to wipe out the planet, whether natural like an asteroid or aliens bent on destruction. It's been done thousands of times. With this story, destroying the Earth is actually a rational goal supported by most of the movers and shakers, and having broad public support. It has pros and cons, and emotional appeal on both sides. No more ringworm, hook worm, trichinosis, brain eating amoeba, anthrax, malaria, river blindness, yellow fever, canine distemper, colds, or flue. No more blights, boring insects, locusts, roaches, poisonous spiders, tick, lice, or mosquitoes. The downside is the death of everything still running loose and living in the wild, from otters to seals to sand cats. And it can explore quite a few themes. Off the top of my head: 1) Mankind's divorce from nature, made more obvious by following the child who only knows life on a space colony. Even the plants and animals he encounters are in a very artificial environment. He's never seen a real insect, just videos of what a plague they are, emphasizing how ugly they are and how they can infest everything. All the parks he's been too are carefully engineered and managed, with helper bots keeping them pristine. All the food he eats is raised in sealed crop units, and even the potassium-40 has been removed as a source of radiation. Blight and fungus are unknown. 2) Cleanliness as a borderline obsessive compulsive disorder. Humans often obsess over purity, whether religious or physical. It can be taken to extremes, such as with the current obsession with germicidal soaps and cleaning products that are causing antibiotic resistance, or houses that are so airtight that children lack exposure to nature and develop all sorts of severe allergies. The Nazi obsession was racial "hygiene", arguing that just as a body must be kept clean and pure, so must a race. During dinnertime discussions with his parents, they talk about earlier times in the colonies when people hadn't realized how important cleanliness and sterility is. They talk about whole crop units being wiped out by a few introduced spores. They talk about the periodic travel restrictions that finally eliminated the common cold (a dreadful, dreadful malady) and seasonal flu which would kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. The more obsessive the colonists got about eliminating such things, the more obsessed they became with it. That's what led to the widespread belief that they'll never be truly safe from plague and disease until the Earth itself is sterilized, as the planet is one giant petri dish that's been cooking up evil parasites, bacteria, viruses, and blood sucking insects for a billion years. The school teachers drum it into the kids heads. 3) The obsession with cleanliness creates a natural distinction between the clean and the unclean. The colonists are pure and good. The remaining Earthers are primitive and dirty. 4) The Earthers still defend land as if there can't be any more of it, whereas the colonists just build more space as they need it. The Earthers insist on observing their old borders, whereas in space borders are meaningless. 5) Building a future versus maintaining the past. All of mankind's deep history, all the historical sites, are on Earth. The spacers moved some of them lock, stock, and barrel up to colonies, much in the way the European colonial powers looted Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Iraq for nifty displays to show their wisdom, knowledge, and power. Some sites, of course, will be maintained throughout the great dying, such as Mecca, which will be domed over and sealed so Muslims can drop in from space while remaining hermetically sealed away from Earth's environment. 6) Families, factions, and parties will split over such a fundamental issue. Nobody's going to agree on everything, and many groups will pursue their own agendas. For example, a sizable number of Muslim clerics will view it as the perfect opportunity to purge the Earth of all non-Muslims, since almost all of the people are off the planet anyway. Their goal is to use operatives to cause non-Muslim colonies to catastrophically fail or be somehow lost to space, or to simply hold the Earth tightly enough to forbid their return. It's all part of fulfilling Allah's plan whereby the Earth ends up entirely populated by Muslims. Meanwhile the Chinese just keep taking over colony after colony by shuffling millions of Chinese through them during elections, turning their numbers into electoral dominance and then getting all the non-Chinese used to Chinese rule before shuffling the ethnic Chinese to another colony. So the story could go in all kinds of different directions without ever getting as dumb as Terra Nova. And it wouldn't be very expensive to shoot, since almost all the Earth scenes will be forests (outside of Vancouver, as always) and the space scenes will mostly be building interiors juxtaposed with some CGI shots of space station exteriors.
Bonus if you start two series on different networks, same timeslot, following two different kids, and not reveal that they are in any way connected. Then at the end of Season 1, BAM: Earth kid and space kid meet.
Having the two childrens' stories like that would be excellent, either as a series or in book form. You could also introduce an element where some of the quarantine ships murder those being quarantined, hiding most of the deaths and blaming the rests on Earth diseases to reinforce how dangerous the home planet was. Then one of the children (or some other space colonist) has some accident on Earth, which is how he meets the Earth child, and knows that if he returns to the planet side habitat where he'd been operating from, he'd be put in lock down and sent to one of the "hospice ships", where he'll probably be killed along with others who are just put in a room that gets vented to space. So he goes native and learns the truth about the home planet and its amazing wildlife. That would be sort of a Dances with Wolves aspect.
