Which version of the Noah’s Ark story do you prefer? Do you want the Biblical version, in which Noah builds a giant wooden ship and brings aboard two of each kind of animal to survive the coming flood? Or do you want the one in which fourth-millennium humans build a spaceship, fill it with DNA samples, and send it off to the universe as "life insurance" in case something bad happens to earth?

These questions -- opposing ancient lore and future speculation -- delineate a great contemporary rivalry: between two animated movies, two sets of animators, two companies and two worldviews. And the answers illustrate an even more important point about the future of our species: are we content with fantasy, or do we have the "right stuff" actually to create a new reality?

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Not surprisingly, Disney takes a dim view of these renegades. The Los Angeles Times reports that Disney, which released Fantasia 2000 to Imax theaters in January, timed the regular-theater re-release for June 16 so as to steal thunder away from the premiere of Titan A.E.

As Titan co-director Bluth put it, "Disney would like to monopolize the animation business."

No doubt Disney’s main goal is to squelch a business rival. But if Fantasia does clobber Titan A.E., it will be more than just a defeat for cine-diversity; it will be yet another loss for the scientific worldview and, by extension, prospects for serious space exploration.

Put simply, if fantasy continues to crowd out science in the popular imagination, then we’ll be stuck on this planet for a long, long time.

As the late Carl Sagan observed in his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, people who are quite willing to believe in Atlantis or Nostradamus or alien abductions are simultaneously skeptical of the real-world science that actually solves problems and goes places.

"A kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture," as Sagan put it, "in which bad science drives out good."

Five years later, the problem seems as bad as ever; indeed, non-science threatens to displace science on what should be science’s own cultural turf.

Just the other day I cybersurfed to Amazon.com’s book page and clicked on "Science Fiction." That took me to a page entitled "Science Fiction & Fantasy"; the three titles on prominent display -- King Kelson's Bride, by Katherine Kurtz ("the powers of political might and adept magic meet in an unforgettable union"), The Gate of Fire, by Thomas Harlan, and Brightly Burning, by Mercedes Lackey -- were all science-free fantasy.

To be sure, Fantasia 2000 has many charms among its eight musical sequences. There’s Donald Duck helping Noah do the Lord’s work and a visually stunning reverie of whales going to heaven, as well as a lushly realized tale of the birth, death and rebirth of a forest at the behest of a foxy wood-sprite.

And so, as Disney intended, Fantasia 2000 might well eclipse Titan A.E. Which would be a shame, because Titan ultimately has more to offer.

That is, it’s reasonable to assume that by the year 3028, humanity would have built a spaceship that could seed the rest of the universe with all of Earth’s flora and fauna. Moreover, the film argues that such a galactic ark is vitally necessary.

This is a significant slowdown from the ambitious timetable of, for example, the original Star Trek, which postulated that we would be warp-driving around the cosmos well before Captain Kirk’s first mission at the helm of Enterprise in 2265.

Given all the perils Spaceship Earth faces, from nuclear weapons to global warming to whatever new techie nightmares Internet visionary Bill Joy can conjure up, we might not have the luxury of remaining terrestrially bound for a couple more centuries, let alone ten.

If so, then the retro sword-and-sorcery tales and New Age navel-gazing so popular today are not only a delusion, but also a snare -- a snare that will keep us trapped in our vulnerably thin biosphere until we wake up and realize that the best fantasies are those that science and reason can make come true.

James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday and a contributor to the Fox News Channel.