The system works fine if you assume it's a big star cluster like the Pleiades with hundreds of stars, or a globular cluster.
Does anyone know if this is possible? Habitable planets orbiting stars in clusters like the Pleiades or the Hyades?
It's kind of strange there's never been any documented action on a low-grav world in Firefly. Imagine a gun battle or heist with 0.4 Earth gravity: Mal punches someone and he goes flying out the window and lands in a puddle fifty feet away ("They say never hit a man with a closed fist, but it is on occasion hilarious.").
The problem with that is, it gets expensive filming your fistfights in the Vomit Comet.
That's never been a problem for me; I can excuse every planet being 1G, and looking awfully like the wilderness outside L.A., on the grounds it makes the show cheap enough to film.
"So you want to live on a planet?"
"No. I think I'd find it a bit small and wierd."
"Aren't they dangerous? Don't they get hit by stuff?"
Bilbo wrote:
The quote at the beginning of the move was: "Earth that was could no longer support our numbers."
I believe the one at the start of the series is "earth got used up", implying that it was stripped of natural resources. Terraforming could probably make Earth that was into a tourist trap.
That assumes you CAN re-terraform a planet stripped of natural resources. Other than it SOMEHOW making celestial bodies mostly Earthlike we have no clue how Firefly Terraforming WORKS, so it's entirely possible Earth That Was was too far gone for the process to work. And that presumes they already had the technology when they left Earth That Was when it is entirely possible it was developed after they reached the Verse, and/or they still know where Earth That Was actually IS (and it being actually within reasonable range).
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Ashka Boda wrote:Does anyone know if this is possible? Habitable planets orbiting stars in clusters like the Pleiades or the Hyades?
I don't see why not. Of course, most open and globular clusters don't really have the sorts of stars you'd be likely to find natural Earthlike planets around (too old and metal poor in the case of globular clusters, too young in the case of most open clusters), but if you can terraform that should be solvable.
I honestly think Firefly being set in a large star cluster would be the most sensible explanation by far.
Or - gosh - they just made up convenient lies to tell their children/prevent attempts to leave/concentrate power in the hands of the few/etc. Since there's no actual evidence as to the status of Earth, all we have is speculation and an idiot like Kaylee saying 'it got used up' is the equivalent of listening to rednecks in a bar talk about the Korean War.
On a positive note for this thread, I found my sister's Xmas present, I'm going to get her the Kara Thrace BSG dogtags. for the low low price of $19.95!
Relevance for those that will wonder: they are sold at the same website the maps are sold on.
Sarevok wrote:Firefly would not have this problem and would be a hell lot better if they just avoided the every alien planet is somewhere in North America cliche. I imagine setting the independents as asteroid mining colonies rising up against the prosperous terraformed core worlds would had been very amazing to watch.
andrewgpaul wrote:The problem with that is, it gets expensive filming your fistfights in the Vomit Comet.
That's never been a problem for me; I can excuse every planet being 1G, and looking awfully like the wilderness outside L.A., on the grounds it makes the show cheap enough to film.
According to some interviews I read a long time ago the majority of people involved in making Firefly happen though along similar lines... except the people in accounting, for some mysterious reason.
/sigh I guess it is going to take another decade or two until GCI becomes cheap enough that you can make a long running SF series without having to resort to the old humanoids-with-slightly-different-heads cliché thats the bane of most TV shows.
Samuel wrote:I believe the best solution is no aliens- aliens don't interact with humans. Not space opreay, but certainly realistic.
Well, yeah. Firefly obviously had no aliens and that's one of the things I really like about it. But I meant it more in the sense that they can do whatever they want and still remain within a reasonable budget.
I man blockbuster movies are almost at the point where they can do whatever they want and still make it look realistic (i.e. completely unrealistic, but you cant tell its CGI) but they also require multi-billion budgets to pull that off.
So even with moore's law in full effect TV shows still have to wait quite a few years before they get to the same point.
Stark wrote:Or - gosh - they just made up convenient lies to tell their children/prevent attempts to leave/concentrate power in the hands of the few/etc. Since there's no actual evidence as to the status of Earth, all we have is speculation and an idiot like Kaylee saying 'it got used up' is the equivalent of listening to rednecks in a bar talk about the Korean War.
Don't be dissing my girl, dog. Anyway, I'd always assumed that too. Maybe everyone on Earth got sick of the Americans and Chinese and just kicked them out, or maybe the Alliance just lost a global war and had get the hell out of the proverbial Dodge.
Stark wrote:Or - gosh - they just made up convenient lies to tell their children/prevent attempts to leave/concentrate power in the hands of the few/etc. Since there's no actual evidence as to the status of Earth, all we have is speculation and an idiot like Kaylee saying 'it got used up' is the equivalent of listening to rednecks in a bar talk about the Korean War.
Don't be dissing my girl, dog. Anyway, I'd always assumed that too. Maybe everyone on Earth got sick of the Americans and Chinese and just kicked them out, or maybe the Alliance just lost a global war and had get the hell out of the proverbial Dodge.
Like in Freelancer? Doesn't make alot of sense still.
Considering the tech we see in the Alliance Core Worlds in the few shots we see I doubt that Earth is a strip mined piece of shit. If the tech exists to send of massive colony ships then the tech exists to use the resources of the entire solar system.
To me the Firefly verse was settled by colonists who chose to leave due to overcrowding or political choice. Hell it might have even been American and Chinese corporate ventures that launched the colony ships.
It would not surprise me in the least if Earth was a pretty decent place but with rather draconian laws about number of kids to keep the population where they want it. The colonists left to go find more room to grow.
Stark wrote:Or - gosh - they just made up convenient lies to tell their children/prevent attempts to leave/concentrate power in the hands of the few/etc. Since there's no actual evidence as to the status of Earth, all we have is speculation and an idiot like Kaylee saying 'it got used up' is the equivalent of listening to rednecks in a bar talk about the Korean War.
Don't be dissing my girl, dog. Anyway, I'd always assumed that too. Maybe everyone on Earth got sick of the Americans and Chinese and just kicked them out, or maybe the Alliance just lost a global war and had get the hell out of the proverbial Dodge.
You do realize that the logistics of shipping off every last man, woman, and child would amount to the same magic-tech that's been derided here already? It would take a technological power orders of magnitude greater than anything if the Firefly setting to make that happen.
Stark wrote:Or - gosh - they just made up convenient lies to tell their children/prevent attempts to leave/concentrate power in the hands of the few/etc. Since there's no actual evidence as to the status of Earth, all we have is speculation and an idiot like Kaylee saying 'it got used up' is the equivalent of listening to rednecks in a bar talk about the Korean War.
Don't be dissing my girl, dog. Anyway, I'd always assumed that too. Maybe everyone on Earth got sick of the Americans and Chinese and just kicked them out, or maybe the Alliance just lost a global war and had get the hell out of the proverbial Dodge.
You do realize that the logistics of shipping off every last man, woman, and child would amount to the same magic-tech that's been derided here already? It would take a technological power orders of magnitude greater than anything if the Firefly setting to make that happen.
That is why I refered to Freelancer. They have the US, Japan, Spain, Germany and England on the wrong side of a war and so they have people flee in colony ships... for some reason. Which only makes sense if the Coalition was commiting genocide against the Alliance, but it seems unlikely.
The two essentially have the same problem. Having ethnic cleansing on that scale is also unimaginable. To get rid of all the Chinese you'd have to move a fifth of humanities population... and that is only counting China. Add in ethnic Chinese in other countries and the US and you are getting rid of a significant portion of humanity- notably a portion that is technologically advanced and numerous enough to not be forced of.
Bilbo wrote:To me the Firefly verse was settled by colonists who chose to leave due to overcrowding or political choice. Hell it might have even been American and Chinese corporate ventures that launched the colony ships.
I'm sorry, there's not profit in sending millions or even thousands of people off to some far off region of space. If you can't communicate with them, you can't get money from them. There's no gorram way a venture capitalist would ever invest in this. Unless he was actually going, but then he'd be an idiot.
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Samuel wrote:That is why I refered to Freelancer. They have the US, Japan, Spain, Germany and England on the wrong side of a war and so they have people flee in colony ships... for some reason. Which only makes sense if the Coalition was commiting genocide against the Alliance, but it seems unlikely.
Not necessarily.
To illustrate the point, imagine an alternate world where the USSR/Warsaw Pact didn't collapse and eventually wins a war with the US/West at some point far enough in the future that it's feasible to send out a slow relativistic colony ship. Faced with Earth becoming the Red Planet, I could easily see some people sending out a colony ship to some nearby star system in the hopes that a "free" (not Communist) society could survive elsewhere.
It doesn't require genocide to motivate people to do something like that, just the imminent destruction of their culture. Or, heck, it could have been just a collection of refugees with enough resources to build a fleet of relativistic ships who didn't feel like living under the winning side and decided to get the hell out of dodge while they still could.
Samuel wrote:That is why I refered to Freelancer. They have the US, Japan, Spain, Germany and England on the wrong side of a war and so they have people flee in colony ships... for some reason. Which only makes sense if the Coalition was commiting genocide against the Alliance, but it seems unlikely.
Not necessarily.
To illustrate the point, imagine an alternate world where the USSR/Warsaw Pact didn't collapse and eventually wins a war with the US/West at some point far enough in the future that it's feasible to send out a slow relativistic colony ship. Faced with Earth becoming the Red Planet, I could easily see some people sending out a colony ship to some nearby star system in the hopes that a "free" (not Communist) society could survive elsewhere.
It doesn't require genocide to motivate people to do something like that, just the imminent destruction of their culture. Or, heck, it could have been just a collection of refugees with enough resources to build a fleet of relativistic ships who didn't feel like living under the winning side and decided to get the hell out of dodge while they still could.
Except they could hunt the ships down. The only way out is FTL that can't be tracked.
Samuel wrote:That is why I refered to Freelancer. They have the US, Japan, Spain, Germany and England on the wrong side of a war and so they have people flee in colony ships... for some reason. Which only makes sense if the Coalition was commiting genocide against the Alliance, but it seems unlikely.
Not necessarily.
To illustrate the point, imagine an alternate world where the USSR/Warsaw Pact didn't collapse and eventually wins a war with the US/West at some point far enough in the future that it's feasible to send out a slow relativistic colony ship. Faced with Earth becoming the Red Planet, I could easily see some people sending out a colony ship to some nearby star system in the hopes that a "free" (not Communist) society could survive elsewhere.
It doesn't require genocide to motivate people to do something like that, just the imminent destruction of their culture. Or, heck, it could have been just a collection of refugees with enough resources to build a fleet of relativistic ships who didn't feel like living under the winning side and decided to get the hell out of dodge while they still could.
Samuel wrote:That is why I refered to Freelancer. They have the US, Japan, Spain, Germany and England on the wrong side of a war and so they have people flee in colony ships... for some reason. Which only makes sense if the Coalition was commiting genocide against the Alliance, but it seems unlikely.
Not necessarily.
To illustrate the point, imagine an alternate world where the USSR/Warsaw Pact didn't collapse and eventually wins a war with the US/West at some point far enough in the future that it's feasible to send out a slow relativistic colony ship. Faced with Earth becoming the Red Planet, I could easily see some people sending out a colony ship to some nearby star system in the hopes that a "free" (not Communist) society could survive elsewhere.
Well, yeah, but that never made sense given what happens in Starlancer-while the Commie coalition holds the inner terrestrial worlds, there's still fighting on Earth and by the end of the game the good guys are holding the entire outersystem. Meh, still a fun game.
Anyway, I think part of the point was the people of the 'verse really don't have much of an idea of what happened on Earth-the story of why they think people actually left Earth is probably not at all what happened, with a thousand years or more of cultural drift.
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Firefly was never really "hard" on the science, and I quite enjoyed that the show didn't really try to explain things like how fast Serenity can travel, what Serenity's drive really does, how many habitable planets/moons there are, how the systems they visit are set up etc. - it just wouldn't mix with the style of the show. You can't have Mal talk about his "boat" and then have someone sputter out technobabble. It's also a bit more "realistic", I think: the tech is normal and every-day use for those people, if they started to throw around technobabble ST-style it'd be like a roadmovie where people explain details of their combustion engines all the time or start talking about the unique ecosystems they visit on their travels.
A map like this is nice to look at, but I think it ruins an aspect of the show. The verse is cooler when not explained in detail.
Also, from show and movie I got the impression that Earth and out solar system where somehow utterly fucked up, so that mankind took to the stars - and I don't think they'd talk about "Earth that was" if Earth still was there in a physical sense.
Samuel wrote:Except they could hunt the ships down. The only way out is FTL that can't be tracked.
Yeah, but your enemies might be too busy recovering from the massive war to send out probably super-expensive relativistic warships purpose-built just to hunt down one fleeing fish right away, giving you breathing room. It is a move of desperation, after all.
Besides, if you had a Bussard ramjet or some kind of inertialess drive you could wait until you reached a safe distance from the homeworld and head off in a different direction from your original vector (this paper suggests several light years will probably be good enough if you're using a fusion drive, which is what a Bussard ramjet basically is). For that matter you could do that with a conventional rocket too, it just means you have to go a lot slower.
Earth could've sent those colony ships as a way to ensure humanity's survival in a situation where Earth and the Solar System was no longer sustainable. The ships go out to find A New Hope (maybe they spotted systems that were potentially habitable), while the people back on Earth tried as best they could to survive in a very bad situation.
Earth recovered, but forgot of the ships they sent - or thought them lost.
The colonists thought Earth to be lost.
Viola!
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Depending on who won this war you may not want to follow them when they escape. Any sort of totalitarian regime will want them out there somewhere to point to as a continual threat to keep the Earth's population focused.
External threats have been used to distract the public from internal problems for centuries by governments.
There is no timeframe mentioned in the movie and I dont remember one mentioned in the tv show. Does the RPG or any other source give a timeline for how long ago the colonists made it to this system and started to rebuild?
The fact that it is myth to most people (at least that is what I assume from the voiceover) makes it seem as if at least a couple centuries have passed.
"
- PeZook