Review: Virtuality

Virtuality premiered to an apparent lack of viewers as Tor.com pointed out.

Basically, you have a crew aboard a spaceship headed for Epsilon Eridani and the journey will apparently take 10 years. According to wikipedia, it is 10.5 light years away, so apparently they are traveling at relativistic speeds. In addition to this sojourn, a reality TV show is being based upon the occupants (a pretty damned smart idea actually and a wonderful way to offset some of the costs associated with a mission like this) with the producer and host also being crew members (as well as a psychologist and computer scientist, respectively). Oh yeah, they also all have advanced personal VR units, presumably so that they don’t go batshit nuts and kill each other.

The reality show within the show presents a couple of problems:
1. Theoretically, the crew would experience time dilation effects, as traveling at relativistic speeds would make the journey seem much longer to those on Earth, than it would on the occupants.
2. Beaming the show back would also be problematic, due to the aforementioned relativistic effects. When they are passing Neptune, they mention it will take 2 hours for their transmission to get back to Earth and then another 2 hours for a response.
3. Earth appears to be undergoing severe climate issues, which provides additional stimulus for the crew to get to their destination.
4. Say they get to the planet, then what? Phone home and say it’s a great planet, come on down! We’ll stay here and seed the planet, etc, etc. Or, hey, planet is a bust, hope y’all got a better idea, see you when we get back! And then another 10 year trip?
5. Storage media – they have cameras everywhere (see also: it’s a reality TV show aboard a space ship), inside and out. They must either have a ton of hard drives or end up recycling them along the way, but they have be selling at least some of the data back to scientists back home.
6. Jon’s main complaint: “G forces”. Since they are detonating nukes or something to push themselves forward. His recollection was 147, which should accelerate them from “a few thousand KPH (maybe 20,000) to just shy of 300,000 KPS? That kinda acceleration, I’m fairly sure… would liquefy you.” While I general presume Jon’s mathing skills are lacking, he makes a fair point; there would need to be fairly substantial inertial dampener to help with that.

The 90 minute pilot was amusing, but given the low numbers, I would be surprised if it got much more than a dozen episode first season, if it gets that far.