The Firefly/Serenity Solar System
POSTED BY: FraserBW
UPDATED: Tuesday, March 7, 2006 10:55
VIEWED: 27197
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Well the movie has established that the terraformed worlds all exsist in one solar system. I paused the DVD and counted the orbits to find there are 20 "planets" (an outdated term in astronomy today) with close to circular eliptic orbits. So it is a fairly large solar system compared to ours (we only have 8 "planets" with those regular orbits). Some of those "planets" would obviously be gaseous giants and unlivable, but would have multiple moons that may be terraformed. So I'm not sure how many terraformed worlds there are.
Now the newly rediscovered Miranda world might not be on that map and could be a 21st "planet" in orbit since it is unknown to the characters and gone from most databanks. What it looks like from the map on the bridge is that it is beyond a belt of debris and wreckage that is Reaver teritory. But it's possible that it represents a belt around Miranda and perhaps it is a moon around a gas giant.
It is not indicated how big or what type of star is at the center of this solar system. With 20 or 21 "planets" in orbit, there would be many frigid outer planets unless the sun was larger (which might be the case to form and hold so many "planets"). I wonder if there are any stronger cosmologists out there (I just teach a semester of high school astronomy) who might be able to model the formation of a solar system of this configuration and give us an idea of the size of the sun needed and how many earth-like planets might form. And which nearby stars might fit this model and be the location of the Firefly solar system.
I know people have wondered how humans got to this solar system to terraform the worlds and then bring setlers and supplies/equipment. Two ways I can think of, perhaps faster than light is possible but incredibly expensive and therefore only useful for interstellar travel (much like supersonic flight is possible, but you have a car that is limited to 75mph that you own). Or perhaps a wormhole between systems is possible, but again very expensive and labor intensive and so therefore only useful to send out terraforming teams and then latter send out the settlers. Once the new solar system is self sufficient, wormholing back or elsewhere would be unnecessary or very rare.
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Regarding how they got to the system I think they used sleeper ships, utilising a drive system similar to the Bussard Ramscoop, which could get close to the speed of light (very low Tau). This would allowthem to make the journey in a short (relative) time.
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The Visual Companion
by Joss Whedon
There is a brief history of the 'Verse in here, that Joss wrote. Effectively it took a LOOOONG time for the people of Earth to get to this new and habitable system. So long in fact, that an entire generation was born, lived, and died in space. The people who were the beneficiaries of mankind's brave attempt to resettle were their grandchildren. The brave ones never set foot on a new world.
Also, the system is HUGE, according to Joss...dozens of planets and hundreds of moons. Big enough that a planet like Miranda could easily be "lost" to everyday folk.
The show gives us a bit of additional info as to how far along they've come with terraforming by nature of Mal saying "...over 70 earths spinnin', and the meek ain't inherited a one..."
Hope that helps!
Oh, and I just want to take a moment and gloat to all the nay-sayers who thought I was a loon back in the days before the BDM when I said all the evidence points to ONE SYSTEM. Ahh, now I feel better. :) Nice to know I understand WWJD (What Would Joss Do)...even if my favorite character bought it in the film 
BWAH!
TCM
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Nothing like being proven right to make you feel better about having been laughed at, eh?
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Regarding how they got to the system I think they used sleeper ships, utilising a drive system similar to the Bussard Ramscoop, which could get close to the speed of light (very low Tau). This would allowthem to make the journey in a short (relative) time.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
Remember, the ice caps aren't melting, the water is being liberated.
Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years from Earth. So if they had built a vessel that could travel at half the speed of light (4.75 trillion km/yr) it would take 8.6 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri. But that is a tri-star system, so it can't be the Firefly system as it has a single sun at the center. So we need to find another star is that is fairly close to allow this slow travel plus the "several" decades needed to terraform that we'll say is 60 years (somewhat of a variable as it must be at least 30 years but probably less than 90 years as they would have said "almost a century") and then followed by time for settlers to arrive on sleeper ships (which may have started when terraforming was almost complete). Now one wild card we do not know is how long the system has been "settled". It could be that it is only a few generations that have built it up and lived there, so maybe only a century of occupation. With a 500 year time span from present day, it gives us about 300 years (assuming a system relatively close to ours) or less to arrive at the technology of speeds of space vehicles exceeding 520 million km/yr (speed of Voyager 1), the ability to terraform planets, and the ability to freeze human beings and revive them safely.
Assuming that Joss hasn't already picked a system that is the location of Firefly (pretty likely, he's not a very "sciencey" kind of guy), to locate a suitable system for it to take place in we need to look outward to from our system to the closest single star systems that are over 1.5 billion years old (enough time for worlds to form). Someone needs to run solar system formation models to estimate the size of a star needed to form a 20 or 21 "planet" (not including kaiper-belt-type objects like Pluto/Charon). This is a tough one since we only have one completely documented solar system on record (ours) and a few systems where we can currently measure the exsistence of gas giants around them. This part is a little beyond my capabilities, but there are probably some professional astronmers out there who might be interested in doing that simulation.
But if faster than light travel or wormholes are used (both are not beyond the realm of posibilities), but very expensive and energy/resource intensive that they could only be used for leapfrogging from one system to another but not practical to mount inside a ship, then that travel timeframe can be shortened.
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I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.
I mean, I accept it - it's outlined that this is the case and there's really no disputing it without ignoring canon, but I don't _buy_ it. I count it as a 'stupid thing Joss didn't get right but we have to live with'. The kind of thing that makes me cringe a bit every time I hear a reference to it, but I'll otherwise just repress.
Firefly, IMHO should be a 'verse with very SLOW FTL, around a few stars clustered relatively close together. If you don't do that, you have to do a hell of a lot of other stuff to make the 'verse consistent and realistic, and Joss doesn't have the skills or knowledge of science (he's admitted to it himself) to get that right.
But then he gets a pass on it because he got no-sound-in-space right and I give passes to other shows that get that wrong.
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Quote:
Originally posted by TenthCrewMember:
The Visual Companion
by Joss Whedon
There is a brief history of the 'Verse in here, that Joss wrote. Effectively it took a LOOOONG time for the people of Earth to get to this new and habitable system. So long in fact, that an entire generation was born, lived, and died in space. The people who were the beneficiaries of mankind's brave attempt to resettle were their grandchildren. The brave ones never set foot on a new world.
Also, the system is HUGE, according to Joss...dozens of planets and hundreds of moons. Big enough that a planet like Miranda could easily be "lost" to everyday folk.
The show gives us a bit of additional info as to how far along they've come with terraforming by nature of Mal saying "...over 70 earths spinnin', and the meek ain't inherited a one..."
Hope that helps!
Oh, and I just want to take a moment and gloat to all the nay-sayers who thought I was a loon back in the days before the BDM when I said all the evidence points to ONE SYSTEM. Ahh, now I feel better. :) Nice to know I understand WWJD (What Would Joss Do)...even if my favorite character bought it in the film
I'm not sure what the very closest grouped star systems are, but they would have to be far enough away not to form a binary system (two star) and therefore not be close enough to travel at sub-light speeds within a month (they've only spent 8 months since they picked up River and Simon according to the movie). And I know I have seen the propulsion system described as a sublight fusion drive (the light in the abdomen of the firefly class). And the diagram in the classroom clearly shows a single sun orbited by 20 "planets." So I concur, it is one solar system.
But, which one. If it took a over a generation in space, this suggests that they were not frozen (or stasis). They were awake the whole time (although by the time of Firefly they had technology to freeze River for at least a short period of time) and needed lots of resources (oxygen, clean water, food, carbon dioxide scrubbing) and therefore a pretty massive ship for colinization (which means a pretty massive propulsion system, which makes it less realistic than traveling frozen). The other problem for them being awake during the trip is how fast they travel. As they approach the speed of light, they age more slowly. So if they age like we do today, than the trip probably took 100 years in time on the spaceship. The faster they traveled, the longer this trip therefore took, so it is likely that if they were awake they traveled at much slower than light speed. And the movie also seems to suggest that the people of the Firefly solar system came straight from Earth (not leapfrogging from other systems after their development). So it needs to be a single star system with at least 20 planets (of unknown terrestrial/gas giant mix) that is within 100 years of Earth at very slow sub-light speed (need to do math here).
The interesting thing I just learned from a published discovery in November is that a red dwarf star has been discovered with a Uranus sized world very close to it. I was thinking that a star that would hold 20 or 21 planets around it would have to be larger than Sol (which can only hold 8 planets). So maybe smaller stars hold more planets and larger ones hold less. If this is the case, the Firefly system (does this system have a name?) would have a smaller sun at its center. This is problematic since all the planets/moons they visit seem to equally bright, including Miranda. If Miranda is the 21st planet, or a moon orbiting the 20th planet so that it is very remote than it should be a fairly dark world. This suggests that these planets are fairly close together to get an Earth dose of sunlight from the same dimmer star (than Sol) so far out. It's possible that Miranda is much closer to the sun, but it is unlikely to go undetected by the ships crisscrossing the system going from one world to the next. And the Reavers have always been refe
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A thought...though I have no evidence to support this idea, but it seems *possible* to me:
What if there were more than 1 planet in an orbit?
Similar to how asteroids could be in a belt, but far enough apart (possibly opposite sides of the star) to have minimal (or no) effects on the other(s)?
Scientifically speaking, it *could* happen, but again, we haven't seen this anywhere in the real 'Verse save for lunar orbits around Jupiter and Saturn, and even those are still slightly different orbits.
Perhaps this is how our own asteroid belt formed? Two planets in the same orbit, but one travelling slightly faster until they came close enough to eachother that their gravitational pulls slammed them together and *kablooey* space junk.
Just my random thought of the day. 
BWAH!
TCM
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Quote:Interesting idea. There are examples of stable horseshoe orbits in our own solar system. Feasibly there could be many planets in 1 to 1 orbital resonance, but I don’t know how likely that is.
Originally posted by TenthCrewMember:
A thought...though I have no evidence to support this idea, but it seems *possible* to me:
What if there were more than 1 planet in an orbit?
And I don’t really think that the sun is necessarily limited to 8 planets. In fact, there is widely considered to be 9 planets in our solar system. And then there are moons and asteroids, all of which are in solar orbit. And if you consider the many objects orbiting the sun in deep space, it is clear that the sun’s gravitational pull extends well beyond these 9 planets.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
And I don’t really think that the sun is necessarily limited to 8 planets. In fact, there is widely considered to be 9 planets in our solar system. And then there are moons and asteroids, all of which are in solar orbit. And if you consider the many objects orbiting the sun in deep space, it is clear that the sun’s gravitational pull extends well beyond these 9 planets.
As a matter of fact, Neptune and Pluto, on occasion, cross orbits (someday they might collide!).
And yes, the pull extends well beyond pluto, all the comets for example that orbit the sun...to what degree the strength of this is? I dunno, but it does exist, I agree.
Even without binary (or trinary) orbits, you could plop down several more planets in orbit of our own sun, though this might have some effect on things, there is plenty of "space" to go 'round.
A great tool for understanding planetary systems is Steve Jackson Games' GURPS: Space ( http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/space/ ), a tool I've used several times in running my own space campaigns (Star Wars, Firefly, and games of my own design). I've even done a conversion for "habital zones" around gas giants (my copy is 3rd ed.)
BWAH!
TCM
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