Has Hollywood 'discovered' O'Neill Habitats?

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Combs, Mike"
> From: danj_caslaw [mailto:danj_caslaw@y...]
>
> > How could a movie/TV series make the best use of,
> > and do justice to, an O'Neillian habitat setting?
> > What would the movie/program makers need to do to
> > portray space colony life as it would be?
>
> The biggest problem as I see it is that O'Neill habitats are about
> settling in a new frontier, and Hollywood has gotten far too PC to
> present any positive image of frontier settlement. The settlement
of
> the New World can only be referenced in the context of the harm
done to
> indigenous people, and never in terms of the many extraordinary
positive
> things that came out of it.

I think perhaps an O'Neill habitat mileau lends itself more
to 'space politics' than it does to 'settling the frontier', as the
point of building a habitat is to create an environment that's as
Earthlike as possible. This is not what most people would think of
as 'frontier settling', and it's probably going to be difficult to
get an audience to accept it as such, unless you tie in lunar
colonies and such. In fact:-

Let's say there was a show in which a billionaire space entrepeneur,
who had made his fortune from mining asteroids, sets about
constructing a Stanford Torus from his latest find(he's that rich).
The US government 'requests' that he collaborate with scientists who
live and work in a lunar colony. As the show progresses, the
structure of the Torus takes shape, until it's fully airtight and
the time comes to fill it with air. We're good for one season, as
far as a show exclusively devoted to 'settling the space frontier'
goes.

The second season sees the operation focus on the inside, as
botanists and landscape architects come in to make the inside look
Earthlike. They clash with the real estate developers, who are
there to build homes for the colonists who've booked their place
aboard the Torus. The season concludes with the first of these
colonists coming aboard to begin their new life in space.

It's at this point that it effectively ceases to be a
pure 'colonization of the frontier' show, because we've seen how it
proceeds and it might be difficult to make the construction of
another habitat seem engaging (I think that a show based around the
building of the first Martian colony would face the same issues).
The third season sees it becoming more of a 'space politics' show,
perhaps concerned with exploring how the colonists adapt to colony
life(as VictoriaTangoman suggested), which would be a natural
progression and not a complete change of emphasis. No need to bring
in aliens, weird space anomolies, totalitarian Earth governments, or
massive environmental disasters to sustain seasons four, five, and
six - I hope ;)