What happened to Earth?
POSTED BY: DaisyCutter
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 14:45
VIEWED: 13409
PAGE 2 of 4
An excerpt from my upcoming dissertation Building The 'Verse (A Boreyourpantsoff production):
(Note: For brevity’s sake, the term “Earth-That-Was” will be reduced to ETW.)
Except for a brief mention of ETW being “used up” in the opening narrations of the broadcast episodes, all that we know about Earth’s fate comes from two sources.
First, we have the shadow puppet theater narration from Heart of Gold:
A CIRCULAR SHADOW representing Earth-That-Was fills the frame.
NARRATOR
(Chinese)
the Earth up. Barren, she had
little left to offer them.>
Silhouetted shapes appear. SPACESHIPS. They radiate out from the shadow sphere, scatter in all directions. Leave it behind.
NARRATOR
(continuing)
< Swollen of her, they left. And
for the first time since the Great
Burn that birthed her, she was
alone. >
The ships are gone now. A wisp of SMOKE wafts off the sphere, creates a snake of shadow.
NARRATOR
(continuing)
< The Earth cried, and terrible
were her tears. Acid and caustic,
the spawn of the tribes' rape.
They flowed a century. >
The smoke INTENSIFIES, becomes shadowy FLAME.
NARRATOR
(continuing)
< The fire that finally came did so
as a blessing. >
The sphere SMOLDERS now, bits of it breaking up and disintegrating under the intense heat.
(Note that this narrative implies that the departed colonists somehow maintained communication with Sol system for more than a hundred years after departure. This further implies that there was someone left behind to communicate with.)
And second, we have the opening narrative and visuals from the BDM, in which it is stated that the major reason for the Exodus is overpopulation, rather than eco-catastrophe; while the two are not mutually contradictory, the Earth as seen in the opening of Serenity seems lush and verdant, and not grossly polluted or damaged in any manner easily observable from orbit.
Both of these scenarios need to be taken with a large grain of salt. The first is a poetic retelling of a legend, presented without context. We don’t know if the play it was part of was a serious adult historical drama like Shogun or a broad children’s pantomime on the level of Bugs Bunny helping Columbus discover America.
The second tale has to pass through several filters; even if we assume that River Tam’s nightmarish memories of her school days are accurate as to what she was taught in class, the Alliance is notoriously unopposed to journalism slanted in its favor. Perhaps they want to de-emphasize the damage their corporate/national predecessors did to the mother world. Or perhaps they're even telling the truth. Insufficient data exists for an informed opinion.
"She's tore up plenty. But she'll fly true." -- Zoë Washburn
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There was a disco revival, immediately followed by mass suicide of 2/3rds of the populace. Among the dead were all the farmers and McDonald's frycooks. Humanity's few starving survivors attached bottlerockets to dumpsters and went looking for fastfood in outer space.
XG
Soylent Green is peeeeeopuuuuul. Can I get it supersized?
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Quote:
Originally posted by XeroGravity:
There was a disco revival, immediately followed by mass suicide of 2/3rds of the populace. Among the dead were all the farmers and McDonald's frycooks. Humanity's few starving survivors attached bottlerockets to dumpsters and went looking for fastfood in outer space.
XG
Soylent Green is peeeeeopuuuuul. Can I get it supersized?
Yeah right. Went to the moon to find out if there really was cheese
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Yeah, it's possible they'll discuss Earth more in Serenity 2 - Wash's Revenge. 'Till then, we'll just have to speculate.
Really, though, it's fairly unimportant; it is no longer of any use, and pretty damned far away to boot.
-Steve
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Quote:
Originally posted by RocketJock:
...the Earth as seen in the opening of Serenity seems lush and verdant, and not grossly polluted or damaged in any manner easily observable from orbit.
Hello? Were you even watching the movie? I have seen hundreds upon thousands of pictures of present day Earth, and not a one, even in the worst cases (such as burning oil fields of Kuwait) looked as awful as Earth does in the opening of Serenity. It is clear that the planet is a mess. Probably the whole system, to a point.
And not just a bio or eco mess, but a political one too. Otherwise they could have just terraformed Mars, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and any number of moons in the SOL system. I would speculate that the new governments of those planets "looked down" on the people of Earth and refused to have anything to do with them, or eachother. OR permaybehaps, the other rocks in this system were not suitable for terraforming, as much as we would have hoped.
Thus the people of Earth, in order to survive, took the technology of Terraforming, and with the former US and China leading the charge (see the Official Visual Companion pg. 12), took the last of their resources, and headed to the nearest star with an inhabitable planet. Fortune smiled and the system was full of worlds to be terraformed, over 70 of 'em (in the series Mal refers to "over 70 earths spinnin', and the meek ain't inherited a one").
Entire lives were born, lived, and died on board these ships as it would take more than a generation to get to their new homes. Joss points this out in the Official Visual Companion (pg. 12)
Of course this could all be lies told by the cabalistic Allied government for so long, that the real truth is gone, or torn apart beyond recognition, or simply forgotten. In Serenity, Mal points out that half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Food for thought.
BWAH!
TCM
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I really can't imagine no one being left in the Sol system. The description of Earth being used up doesn't do it for me. If there were no resources left on Earth we'd still be trying to transport resources from somewhere else just to keep Earth humming. It's just the way people are.
If we had teraforming why not hit up mars first?
All I can imagine is that there was overpopulation, polution and to top it off a major war broke loose. The US and China ended up on the losing side and in a last ditch attempt at survival, took off to parts unknown. If they had stayed in system their enemies would have track them down and finished them off. So, the fled to a reasonable distance and started anew.
Such a close brush with total destruction would be a good catalyst for an oppressive government like the Alliance. They don't want that type of war happening again so they meddle. Then the independants start a war just like the Alliance didn't want. So, after they fought and won they tighten their grip even more. The Alliance is afraid and responding with force.
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I would of imagine it was something like the game Freelancer. In that game the story goes like this.
The Sol system was colonized to an extent, after some sort of disagreement, an inter-system war broke out between the Coalition (Former Soviet union and other eastern cultures) and the Alliance (Japan and Western Cultures).
The alliance found themselves on the losing side of the war. In desperation, four colony ships, named the Rheinland, Kusaki, Bretonia and the Liberty, blasted off from one of Jupiters moons and into the Sirius systems, where they began to flourish and prosper...
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There are only a few places in our solar system that can be terraformed, Mars, Venus, our moon, and a couple of the moons of Jupiter. My guess is that they succeeded in terraforming the moon, got arrogant, tried to terraform Mars and Venus but failed miserably.
"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam
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Quote:
Originally posted by Giantevilhead:
There are only a few places in our solar system that can be terraformed, Mars, Venus, our moon, and a couple of the moons of Jupiter. My guess is that they succeeded in terraforming the moon, got arrogant, tried to terraform Mars and Venus but failed miserably.
How can you tereform a body that has no atmosphere in the first place, ie Lunar?
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Not sure how most the steps would be done, but first you need to make sure the object has enough mass to hold a gas to it, then you need to make sure the core of the object is mainly iron, now melt the core, and introduce enough radioactive matter to keep it nice and hot for a long time. Make sure the core has a different angular momentum to the crust, but that will probably naturally happen, as further from the core, the liquid iron will cool, and become thicker. This rotating motion of the iron core will set up a magnetosphere, which will deflect most the solar wind ( is it still called ‘solar’ wind if its not from Solaris? Does that seem fair?) that would blast away an atmosphere (through ionisation, and evaporation. not 'airflow' or anything like that). Now we have a shielded planetoid that could have an atmosphere, but doesn’t. So now we use atmospheric processors to slowly churn out an atmosphere. Woo! Terraforming half way there!
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