What happened to Earth?

POSTED BY: DaisyCutter
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 14:45
VIEWED: 13409
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MER

Thursday, November 10, 2005 4:07 PM

wshat I'm now realizing is that they left and took so many people with them.
Not everybody in the world can fit in those ships, especially if one of them has material goods in order to use on the set of planets.

I kind of think of Earth kind of like Gundam Wing where they left people there who became poor and diseased as a result. Only a good number of people can fit in a ship to get to the new home planets out in space.

XEROGRAVITY

Thursday, November 10, 2005 5:32 PM

I so desperately wanna get technical and debate this issue.

In a nutshell, Mars cannot sustain life as it is.

It's mass and it's rate of rotation (relative to what percentage of it's core remains molten), and it's proximity to the gravitational field of the sun makes it unviable to "naturally" support human life. You can't build an atmosphere on that planet because it's electromagnetic field can't maintain a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere conducive to life.

At least not our way of life. Perhaps 3 foot tall invisible green martian men (Mars Needs Women) can survive there (and if they are invisible, who can prove they are green and 3 feet tall to begin with?).

Of course, we could use that secret government reverse-engineered grey alien technology and build human-friendly anti-grav platforms with forcefields maintaining atmospheres we can live in. First and foremost, the government will have to explain to us what all this cattle mutilation and abductee anal probing business was all about. Ain't gonna happen till then.

Vexxing.

XG

No such thing as gravity. The "Earth-that-was" just sucks.

GIANTEVILHEAD

Thursday, November 10, 2005 10:02 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by DaisyCutter:
How can you tereform a body that has no atmosphere in the first place, ie Lunar?

I'm not an expert in terraforming but I have read that Mercury, Titan, Europa, our Moon, and even Ceres a large asteroid, can be terraformed but it's going to be very hard to accomplish. The thing is that Mars and Venus are too valuable to be the prototypes of terraforming, if they screw up Mars and Venus they're screwed because even if they were able to terraform every other planet/moon in our solar system that's even remotely suitable for terraformation, they would not be able support the number of people that Mars and Venus could plus the living conditions on those other places would really suck.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

PURPLEYIN

Thursday, November 10, 2005 11:26 PM

In no way is mercury a viable planet. well.. unless you throw it out of its standard orbit, and shove it to an earth-like radius from the sun.. and then worry about the size issue, and how to keep it in the new orbit.. and hell, i just want to meet those 3 foot tall invisible aliens ive been promised!

GIANTEVILHEAD

Thursday, November 10, 2005 11:41 PM

Mercury is a viable planet, it just requires technology far superior to what we have. The highest temperature on Mercury is only about 700 Kelvin, to terraform Mercury we would need the technology to constantly retain a super thick layer of white clouds to reflect the sunlight.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

SAMURAIX47

Friday, November 11, 2005 2:22 AM

I get that a magnetosphere could shield a planet from solar wind and allow it to retain an atmosphere, but i think gravity has more to do with how much of an atmosphere a planet can have.

Quote:
Originally posted by PurpleYin:
This rotating motion of the iron core will set up a magnetosphere, which will deflect most the solar wind 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!

Jaymes

SAMURAIX47

Friday, November 11, 2005 3:04 AM

Read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

also read Gerard K. O'Neill's High Frontier
http://www.space-frontier.org/HighFrontier/

Habitable zone
http://www.pbs.org/lifebeyondearth/alone/habitable.html

A planet's gravity has more to do with how much atmosphere a planet can hold... and not the Sun's gravitational field which there is no "proximity" to it as all the planets are held in the Sun's gravitation field. Also the atmosphere can do a lot to protect from harmful solar radiation.

Also the a mjor component of lunar soil is aluminum oxide... part of the ore processing would break the oxygen from the aluminum... the metal can be used for building material and the oxygen used for supplying atmosphere... at first for just the small lunar station.
http://www.xefer.com/2005/06/moon

An easier way to make an atmosphere would be to drop ice chunks, either cometary or Saturn ring material, onto the moon or Mars. The impacts would melt the ice and then you can use simple processes to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen. On Mars as the atmosphere gets thicker it would retain more heat and eventually help melt the frozen water already there. Also as an atmosphere builds up you can get some plant life growing to recycle it and convert the CO2 which Mars has too much of.

Jupiter moons seem to be covered in thick layer of ices. I don't think we'll be able to melt enough of it to get to the solid rock surface, or the possible liquid layer on Europa, but you could get it to the point that it would be like living in Antartica. A cold atmosphere.

Quote:
Originally posted by XeroGravity:
I so desperately wanna get technical and debate this issue.

In a nutshell, Mars cannot sustain life as it is.

It's mass and it's rate of rotation (relative to what percentage of it's core remains molten), and it's proximity to the gravitational field of the sun makes it unviable to "naturally" support human life. You can't build an atmosphere on that planet because it's electromagnetic field can't maintain a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere conducive to life.

Jaymes

SAMURAIX47

Friday, November 11, 2005 3:43 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by DaisyCutter:
How can you tereform a body that has no atmosphere in the first place, ie Lunar?

The moon does have a slight atmosphere.
http://www.xefer.com/2005/06/moon

As part of the processing of lunar ore for building materials oxygen can be extracted. The lunar soil is composed mostly of oxides of silicon, aluminum, iron, titanium and calcium.
http://www.permanent.com/l-minera.htm#aluminum

Also we can use water, electrolize it to seperate the hydrogen and oxygen. Not enough water, then we can add more water. Take a cometary fragment or an ice chunk from Saturn's rings and drop it on the moon, or as in one short story the colonists on Mars strapped rockets to it and landed the ice chunk. Earth had been charging $$$ to supply the colony with water, so they found their own.

Jaymes

ROCKETJOCK

Saturday, November 12, 2005 6:44 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by XeroGravity:
I so desperately wanna get technical and debate this issue.

In a nutshell, Mars cannot sustain life as it is.

Of course, we could use that secret government reverse-engineered grey alien technology and build human-friendly anti-grav platforms with forcefields maintaining atmospheres we can live in.

Um, you do understand that we're talking about terraformation in a fictional future whose technology really does include gravity control on a planetary scale? Gravity tech so energy-efficient, in fact, that even with insufficient power for life support, Serenity never lost gravity in "Out of Gas".

In that context, I have no problem at all imagining a successful terraformation of Mars as part of the Firefly backstory. In fact, gravity tech might also explain two of the mysteries of the 'Verse, namely:

1: How can so many planets/moons be terraformed in the same solar system, when the "life belt" of a sun has a relatively narrow range?

and

2: if the planets of Firefly's solar system are varying distances from the same central sun, (as seen in the classroom display in the BDM), then why does that sun have the same apparent size in the sky of every planet/moon we've been shown?

The answer to both, I think, is some kind of Gravity Lens arrangement to funnel solar energy to or away from a planetary body. A side effect could easily be the illusion of the sun being nearer/further that it actually is.

This would, of course, mean terraformations outside of the natural "life belt" wouldn't be stable in the long-term sense without constant maintenance of the lens system. I could see this being a major disadvantage for the Indepentents during the war; if an enemy siezed your lens station a planet's ecosystem could be easily damaged beyond repair.

Joss is on record as saying Mal's homeworld of Shadow was destroyed by orbital attack during the war. Maybe it wasn't missiles.

"Burn the land and boil the sea..."

"Homo Sapiens hasn't had a natural environment since we climbed down out of the trees." -- Robert A. Heinlein

RABBIT2

Saturday, November 12, 2005 12:34 PM

Quote:
Humanity's few starving survivors attached bottlerockets to dumpsters and went looking for fastfood in outer space.

And became the reavers no doubt.

Seriously though, there is no reason to suppose there are not humans still living in the Solar System, living in underground habitats on the Moon or on a partially terraformed Mars.
There may possibly also be people surviving on Earth, although what we saw of the home planet at the beginning of the movie looked like the probable efects of a century or so`s worth of global warming. It looks like those flashes we see are located over major population centers, suggesting nukes.
Assuming that the `verse of Firely is located at a relatively nearby Sol type star (Tau Ceti or 61 Cygni?) then, if a measure of civilisation exists back home it should be possible to pick up the odd ten or twenty year old radio transmission with a sufficiently powerful radio receiver. But perhaps nobody is looking.

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