Faster Than Light
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Monday, August 2, 2004 20:22
VIEWED: 19488
PAGE 3 of 7
read more of the thread, my post was irrelavent :P
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FLYINFREE posted - "The Firefly 'verse simply can't exist without violating so many laws of time and physics .... Terraforming moons is a problem because moon's spend half their time behind the planets they are orbiting which means they'd all be arctic wastelands."
My response:
Um.... Nope. Unless the planets have no axial tilt, the plane of the moon's orbit will keep it out of the planet's shadow most of the time. How often are there lunar eclipses? Usually there are only 2 every few years, lasting about 3 hours from start to finish. This is because the moon's orbital plane is inclined with respect to the Earth's orbital plane with the Sun. You may be thinking of the fact that the moon is in darkness half the time - that's only true if the moons are tidal-locked to their planets. In that case, one half of their orbital period is spent "in darkness".
-Matt P.
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The "comfort zone" around a star that earth type planets can exist in is very thin in stellar terms. A moon orbiting a gas giant would not be able to stay in this zone, so would therefore bake and/or freeze as it moved closer/further from the sun during its lunar orbital path.
Still flyin'...
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That depends entirely on the star. The comfort zone of an "F" or "G" class star could be as wide as 60 million km. For "K" and "M" stars the comfort zone would be significantly smaller. In either case, the moon's orbital radius will be smaller than the width of the comfort zone. As long as the gas giant (or other planet, moons don't necessarily have to be orbiting a gas giant) is within the comfort zone, the moon will be also. Whether the moon will bake / freeze depends entirely on the radius and eccentricity of its orbit around the star.
Even if the gas giant is outside the comfort zone (to the colder side), if the gas giant radiates enough heat, the moon could be habitable even without much sunlight from the parent star.
-Matt P.
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Oh we fans have so much fun discussing how to make our fantasies more "real". But I've always liked what Diane Carey, the Star Trek writer said when asked by a fan to explain some piece of technology she had included in her story. "It's Magic - it's anything I need it to be to advance the story." And in keeping with the old chestnut that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinquishable from magic, I think we should continue to assume that Serenity flys where and how fast she needs to go to tell the story that Joss wants to tell. And that as we all know - IS Magic.
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Future Smith - Yup, in reality, SF writers make the tech fit thier stories. But the difference between SF and fantasy is that SF writers generally explain why something we believe to be impossible can happen, even if the technology they come up with to explain it is purely fictional. If you simply show ordinary rockets firing, and have your heros in a new star system three days later, that's fantasy. If you at least pay a bit of lip service to "warp drive", "hyperspace" or even just, "FTL stardrive", you've at least explained that some new tech not known to us today has made this possible. I suspect Joss is not big into this sort of SF stuff, but a handful of mentions would have been welcome. Is it one system, or many? Is there a difference between Serenity traveling slower than light and faster than light? Answering these very simple SF questions would have helped satisfy a lot of diehard SF fans, who are used to getting at least some basic answers to such questions at least going as far back as the 1956's Forbidden Planet (the first movie to mention the standard SF premise of hyperspace).
Acehunter - You're absolutely right that the comfort zone of a much larger star would likely be much larger than that of Earth's sun. Given a few gas giants, with a few dozen moons per planet, plus a handful of Earth-sized "core planets", in my mind accounts very well for what we see in the show.
As far as humans reaching this (admittedly huge) other solar system, you don't actually need FTL travel to account for a past historical exodus from Earth. Simply assume some really huge ships, capable of even just half the speed of light, and a star with multiple planets 20 light years away could be reached in 40 years (or a star 50 LY away reached in 100 years). Yes, it's a long time, but since Firefly takes place at least 500 years in the future, there's nothing to say that the past exodus from Earth didn't take as much as a century (it may have been a generational ship--where those who started grew old and died, or it may have involved suspended animation).
I have to comment on at least some clues suggesting "one system, no FTL travel" from the show:
- "Wargames" - It's mentioned that Serenity has traveled 20,000 miles from its last destination. That's not exactly an interstellar distance; it's not even the distance between planets in our own Solar System. However, it does seem like a reasonable distance between two moons of the same planet.
- "Serenity" - The Blue Hand Guys mention having traveled "83 million miles", as if it's a big deal. 83 million miles is nothing in interstellar terms, but could very well be the distance between planets in one system (the distance from the sun to the Earth is 93 million miles, for example).
- "Serenity" - Mention is made of transporting fugitives "across interplanetary borders". Note the use of "interplanetary", not "interstellar".
- No episode ever mentions arriving in a new star system. Destinations are always refered to by the name of the planetary body--again, implying planets and moons within one system.
- The concept of "inner core" or "central" planets and "the outer rim" suggests one solar system. If we're talking about multiple systems, there's no reason why the privileged planets should be at the center--our own sun is on the edge of our Galaxy--it would take much longer to reach the center of our Galaxy, if we left Earth, than other stars nearby. If we went to a new galaxy, the outer edges would be more accessible than the interior. And going to a new galaxy, as in the phrase "A whole new galaxy of Earths", makes little sense. The nearest galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy, 2 million light years away. Surely there are many stars with planets in our own Milky Way much, much closer.
- The physics of "Objects in Space" would appear to be impossible unless Serenity were traveling at a constant sublight speed. I can't see the bounty hunter drifting down from his ship to Serentiy if Serenity were traveling i
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Can anyone provide the blueprints for serenitys propulsion systems. I'd like to build me one and enter it in the X-Prize contest.
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"The "comfort zone" around a star that earth type planets can exist in is very thin in stellar terms."
Actually you might be surprised. The zone is a function of stellar heat, which in turns is a function of mass of the star, but for our sun, it is estimated to be somewhere between the orbits of Venus and Mars, (roughly .7 to 1.5 AU)
Also, gas giant moons stay pretty close to their parent. There is a kind of tug of war going on between the gas giant and the central star. So moons cannot get too far away from the planet, or else they get peeled off.
James Kasting has written extensively on this subject.
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I really do believe that Joss designed his show around multiple solar systems. There have been many quotes sited from the show to support this. Also, there have been no clues given that support Serenity moving faster than light, and also no evidence of any use of jump gates (although maybe they exist and we have simply not seen them yet).
Where does that leave us? Either Joss "screwed the pooch" and didn't think of this, or (hopefully) he has some as-yet-unexplained method of getting from one solar system to another.
So, I propose that the science-minded among us try to figure out another way to move between solar systems that does not require warp drives or jump gates. Something that would work in the Firefly world we have been presented. It doesn't have to be based on hard science, just internally consistent and reasonable to the lay person. After all, Firefly is not "hard science fiction" so let's not try to make it so.
But, on the other hand, if someone comes up with a novel and brilliant idea, maybe someone will use it someday (and we all know that one or more of the original FF writers has visited this site in the past - maybe we can give them something to work with)
Anyone up for the task?
----------------
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.
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Okay, I won't even try to come up with a workable theory here, but I want to point out once again that in Out of Gas, when the atmo and propulsion are out, there are still some lights and a working beacon (back-up battery, probably), but the gravity is also still on. The ship in Bushwhacked also had working gravity.
If I were any more than a layman I would try to tie this and the propulsion issue together, perhaps by suggesting the Firefly transport afterburner is coupled with some kind of gravitational slingshot effect.
Good thing I am a layman, and can do no such thing. (It's science fiction. Don't hit me.)
History repeats the old conceits
http://topshelftvshow.com
Updated! Improved! Shiny!
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