If you know me or have been reading my work then you probably know that I’m a fan of the 1960’s Irwin Allen produced sci fi series, Lost in Space. Even though they mostly played for laughs after the first season, and may have even made a willful effort to ignore anything like scientific laws or facts, I have tried to occasionally give them the benefit of the doubt and judge how well they approached certain scientific topics. Generally speaking, they were early adopters of some interesting concepts while not feeling constrained by the details. For instance, they introduced non-humanoid extraterrestrial intelligent life before Star Trek did. Around the same time as Star Trek, they made their own attempt to interpret parallel anti-matter based Universes. For the run of the series they showed the evolution of the Robot from a functional semi-intelligent machine to basically a human in computerized corporeal form. Yet, they also misquoted the distance to Alpha Centauri, the amount of miles in a light year, and often seemed to confuse “solar system” with “Galaxy.”

I am now eagerly awaiting the April 13th debut on Netflix of the new Lost in Space series (with an appropriately huge Jupiter 2 that can probably fit ten “power cores!). Will it try to bring it new scientific concepts and new sci fi tropes? Will it be loyal to the facts or, like its predecessor, not be bothered much by logic? And lets not ignore the fun stuff: Will there be cameos from the surviving original cast (Guy Williams,Jonathan Harris, Bobby May and Dick Teufeld are no longer with us) as there were in the (pretty bad) 1990’s film?

I’ll keep my eye out for some interesting science, and we can discuss it.