'Earth That Was...'

POSTED BY: Kurgan
UPDATED: Monday, August 11, 2003 02:04
VIEWED: 7464
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DRAKON

Friday, July 25, 2003 9:30 AM

"I imagine settlers set out to a nearby planet because their planet's resources have runout."

I gotta ping ya for this, as it is a bit of a peeve with me.

Resources do NOT run out. As a matter of fact, the material composition, the mass of a planet or any body will increase over time, as it attracts dust, gas and meteors.

Oil, and other raw materials may be used, but then what? When you burn gas, the gasoline becomes CO2, which plants breathe, creating sugar and releasing oxygen. The material components don't go anywhere, do not leave the planet. They are simply changed from one combination and form to another.

The trick is figuring out what to do with this new configuration. Bury the plant matter, or press it for a million years underground, you get gasoline again. (Or engineer a bacteria that turns rotting vegitation into gasoline, as many bacteria already do in converting such material into alcohol.)

The only thing that in any way can be said to be used up, is energy. And as almost all energy is either directly or indirectly solar in nature, as long as you got a sun, this is no problem.

Unless you are constructing HUGE, and I do mean HUGE!!!! spacecrafts, you can't "use up" a planet. You can poison it, render it unfit for human life, but without space travel, everything we started with, we still got.

[Which has always got me to wondering if the "Earth got used up" story was not some kind of a plot to evacuate the Earth. A fraud perpetrated on most people. Something like the B arc in "Hitchhiker's"

"my kind of stupid"

DRAKON

Friday, July 25, 2003 9:41 AM

They are not looking, nor with present technology, can they look for earth like planets.

Gas giants are huge, and easy to find by the tug they put on their sun. Earth type planets are very small in comparision, and the tug they produce gets washed out in the noise from the surface. The amount of tug an earth pulls on the sun is about the same as the normal surface changes that such big hot balls of gas have anyway.

But that should be changing before long. There is a new technique that is coming online, having to do with using two, (or several) telescopes ganged together and checking the interference pattern produced. It should resolve an object as small as an earth type planet, and even tell you what the atmosphere of such a planet is made of.

There is a setup designed to go up in 2011 for just such a purpose. Real shiny.

"my kind of stupid"

DRAKON

Friday, July 25, 2003 9:45 AM

"Or California for that matter!"

California does exist. I live here. As hard as it is to believe, it is a real place.

So is Japan. Been there, nice people.

France, I can't tell you about.

"my kind of stupid"

DRAKON

Friday, July 25, 2003 9:51 AM

Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a galaxy about 400 light days from earth.

This should read 400,000 light Years! The closest star is 5 light years away. (Okay 4.95 according to Hipparcos, ya happy?)

When talking about the truly cosmic scale of intersteller and intergalactic space, it is real easy to make such slips.

The Milky way Galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across, and the earth is roughtly 30,000 light years from the center.

I think the dwarf galaxy you are talking about was named "Snickers" astromoners have a sense of humor. There are several such galaxies around the Milky Way, most of them are being eaten by our own.

JAVIDRHO

Friday, July 25, 2003 10:43 AM

Actually, Gas Giants are my vote to explain the large number of habitable planets in Firefly's 'verse. Gas giants like Jupiter (or larger) could, and should, have many Earth-sized moons in orbit around them (Jupiter has a few). Now, if you find one or two such Giants around a Sol-sized sun, in an orbital distance somewhere between Venus and Mars, then you might find a dozen or more moons that could be habitable (maybe with minimal teraforming required).

Best of all, this would keep us from needing superluminal (faster than light) velocities in the show.

I also think that the "whole new galaxy of worlds" was a mistake. I preferred Book's original voice over, saying "After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system, and hundreds of new Earths were teraformed and colonized..." I don't know why they changed this. To the non-science person, it doesn't matter, but I think it sticks in the craw of the rest of us. As was mentioned before, Firefly is not "hard science" but at least they should keep things reasonable when they can...

A side note: I remember being irritated back when someone in the TV show Battlestar Galactica mention "we are entering another galaxy", when they actually meant they were entering another "solar system". I was just a kid, but even I knew the difference.

In regards to the original thread - it is another term that maybe should have been different, just for us persnickety types. Maybe something like "After we destroyed the Earth" (really bad nuclear war?) or simply "A few hundred years ago, we left Earth and found a new solar system with dozens of new worlds." That would simplify things and leave the reason for leaving Earth a mystery. Also, do we really need "hundreds" of worlds for this show? I think a dozen or so would do.

----------------
SIMON: What happens if they board us?
ZOE: If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing
and if we're very very lucky, they'll do it in that order.

BARNEYT

Friday, July 25, 2003 2:06 PM

The whole thing around reaching other galaxies is something I've been thinking about too (and not just for reaching the planets in the first place, but travelling between them in the series) because Firefly is not a universe that has faster than light travel...

In the pre-title introduction that Book says (rather the one that Mal does), it sounds more like they've found one new sun with hundreds of planets. If this is the case they wouldn't need inter-stellar travel once they got there, just the same sort of transport that we would be using to get to Mars (although maybe a little better... ). Actually making the exodus out to the new planets could have been done without faster than light travel using either generational ships or maybe some method of long-term sleep.

I reckon it would be the governments on old Earth who would foot the bill, if it really was decided that the whole planet needed to move then it would be a global exodus. Once people had got to the new system I guess it would be up to the individual families to settle where they want and that's where private enterprise would come in.

Of course, at this point I should point out that I've no idea what I'm talking about...

DRAKON

Saturday, July 26, 2003 9:05 AM

And just what have you got against faster than light travel?

YOur ideas about Jovians is okay, but, there is a limit to how many planets you can hold in the habitable zone of a star. And the bigger the planet, the fewer you can have, as they tend to screw up the orbits of other planets close by, as well as suck up material and prevent planets from forming.

I've always taken the "whole new galaxy of worlds" thing as poetry, rather than literal fact. There is a problem in sci fi that any explaination is considered gospel, and things like metaphor and the such get forgotten about. Or simply made up stuff to hide they don't know what they are talking about.

Just cause the captain said it, don't mean its the literal fact. He could be being poetical, or it could be in captain dummy talk.

And then there is this:
From the script for "The Message"

BOOK
There's nine armed and dangerous
desperados on this ship. You count in
at three. Why is it you didn't call
in for back-up?
(Womack skips a beat)
There's a Fed station eighty miles
from where you're standing.
(walks closer)
You got your command stripes at the
Silverhold colonies. Puts you about
eight solar systems away from your
jurisdiction...

"my kind of stupid"

SHEPHERDOFHERMAS

Sunday, July 27, 2003 1:09 AM

I am convinced that the Earth-that-was is actually the Earth-that-is - filled with all of those people the Alliance didn't want around -- easier for the Anglo-Sino Alliance to move to new worlds and leave old problems behind. Then the Alliance could dump all of their genetic experiments that didn't go as planned and move on. Then to keep people from pining away for Earth or wanting to return to Mother Earth -- they came up with the myth of the Earth-that-was. More gorram Alliance lies....

PDONNY

Wednesday, July 30, 2003 12:19 AM

500 years -
surely the idea of terraforming a planet involves creating an ecosystem that will sustain an atmosphere and then life, this would have to mean building it up from primative bacteria capable of survival in very harsh climates, then organisms which feed on the bacteria - and so on until you get a full working ecosystem, which given the number of possible things that could go wrong would take a long long time.
Habitable planets are extremely few and far between, so travel between them is likely to be slow, and come on we're not going to develop light speed transportation (unless something really daft happens to relativity)
Ao yeah I agree with all those who think 500 years just doesn't cut the mustard - also even with not being an historian I know of at least a few events that I can definately date to the 16th century and almost certainly more which happened then but for which I just don't know the date for.

pdonny

DRAKON

Wednesday, July 30, 2003 11:25 AM

"Habitable planets are extremely few and far between, so travel between them is likely to be slow, and come on we're not going to develop light speed transportation (unless something really daft happens to relativity)"

It appears somewhat correct on the first part. LONG term habital planets, on the order of billions of years, are probably pretty rare as there is a combination of star mass and age to consider. Higher mass stars burn faster, age faster, and die younger. But low mass stars don't put out enough energy, have very narrow habitability zones, and frequently are flare stars. All not good.

For a goldilocks planet, you need a goldilocks star.

BUT: almost all stars have habitable zones. Such that if a planet exists, it can be made habitable, even if it won't last for billions of years. A few million my suffice.

All that is needed besides a warm star, is a sutible atmosphere. Once you have that, you don't need the bacteria and other stuff to bootstrap the planet. Drop a few comets on a rock, (you get your warming almost immediately) and then you can set down seeds, trees etc. Short term terraforming ain't that difficult.

As for something "really daft" happening to relativity, it turns out that this is not necessary at all. Look in the FTL thread, there are some papers cited that indicate that withing relativity, faster than light travel is possible.

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