Why so far?

POSTED BY: zzetta13
UPDATED: Sunday, April 16, 2006 23:31
VIEWED: 3883
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ZZETTA13

Friday, April 14, 2006 2:43 PM

Hey everybody,

I've been thinking about this a little while. Don't think its been posted before.

Since in the Joss/verse we moved away from EARTH THAT WAS, why didn't we just move to MARS THAT IS, or JUPITER, SATURN, PLUTO... so on? Heck they're in the neighborhood and we'd have saved all that gas money.

Jupiter is so gorram big. 152 earths would fit inside I think. All that dang room. Course you'd have to stay clear of the BGS (Big Gorram Storm) spot. Don't think that being pelted by 687 mile per hour winds would be much fun

MILFORD

Friday, April 14, 2006 3:48 PM

Who's to say we didn't? Besides, terraforming a gas giant might be a bit more difficult than a more traditional terrestrial planet. Maybe they ruined Mars and the other planets with early terraforming efforts.

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Leaning into the wind that used to carry me-Stavesacre
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RABBIT2

Friday, April 14, 2006 4:36 PM

I think that there were probably colonies on at least some of the other planets/moons in the solar system. The terraforming technology had to be developed somewhere after all!
It`s just that this is a `Verse without FTL travel (but with possibly FTL communications developed later.)
So nobody really knows for sure whats currently going on back in the solar system (Maybe reterraforming Earth? Thats assuming the other solar colonies didnt get blown up in the final war or swamped by refugees from the destroyed Earth.)
I suspect that this system is unusually rich in terraformable bodies, making it a prime target for interstellar colonisation.
My best guess is that what we have here is a system much younger than the sol system with a large planetoid belt in the star`s habitable zone.
Some of these planetoids were close to Earth in mass and resembled the primeval Earth/Mars/Venus in composition. They just needed a slight push in the right direction to allow them to support terrestial type life forms.

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Me: Don`t crash?

STDOUBT

Friday, April 14, 2006 4:38 PM

We can't even do a manned fly-by of Jupiter- that
sucker puts out so much electromagnetic radiation
that you'd need a lead shield thick as the Earth
to go by let alone orbit it. By the time you landed
on it's surface (if there is one) you'd be good 'n
dead.

Mars is smaller than Earth by a bit, and if we had
found a solar system with dozens of planets and
100's of moons, it would make more sense to get
over there and spend the efforts on the new system
since there'd be more room to grow.

ALISS

Friday, April 14, 2006 5:09 PM

Also, wouldn't the gravitational force of Jupiter make us all squishy and dead?

DONCOAT

Friday, April 14, 2006 9:23 PM

I'd just like to point out that we only have the Alliance's word that Earth-That-Was was "used up".

It's interesting to speculate that the original colonists of Serenity's system might have had some other motivation entirely for leaving, and for covering up that reason.

That seems to be Alliance-like behavior to me.

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I don't disagree on any particular point.

ZZETTA13

Friday, April 14, 2006 11:30 PM

Interesting thoughts guys.

I think first of all Joss moving the Joss/verse outside of our own solar system is a pretty smart idea. Science fiction is such a free way of writting why not start the page completly blank. So to say, no landmarks, no having to describe planets as being "Red" or "Frozen" or "Third Rock from the Sun". Just put everything where and how you want it.

Now, MILFORD: Terrafarming such a giant planet as Jupiter could take much more time then lets say 10 smaller moons. I see your point. Plus that big dust cloud thats been roaming for ages, probibly would complicate things.

RABBIT2: Yep the old trial and error. We may have totaly trashed a few of our neighboring worlds before getting the art of creating air and livable land just right. So you could be right. Who wants to live in a crappy neighborhood?

STDOUBT: I'll have to give that one to ya. I know nothing about eletromagnetic radiation. But it "do" sounds as if it would hurt

ALISS: The gravitational pancake theory. Joss may have wanted to stay away from having his main character being called Captain Flatpants instead of Captain Tightpants.

DONCOAT: The governing body of an advanced, intelligent and extremely populace body of folk being lied to by their leadership? That is pure fiction and would never happen, would it?

nice posts guys,

Z

JOHNQPUBLIC

Saturday, April 15, 2006 1:46 PM

Jupiter and Saturn are just big balls of gas, They don't have a surface to land on (except possibly way deep down in the center of the planet where atmospheric pressure and gravity would kill you).

Pluto is very small (much smaller than Earth's Moon), and is 38 times as far away from the sun as Earth is, so it's a couple hundred degrees below zero there.

As for Mars, they probably accidentally blew it up in mankinds early attempts at terraforming planets.

ZZETTA13

Saturday, April 15, 2006 4:31 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JohnQPublic:
Jupiter and Saturn are just big balls of gas, They don't have a surface to land on (except possibly way deep down in the center of the planet where atmospheric pressure and gravity would kill you).

Pluto is very small (much smaller than Earth's Moon), and is 38 times as far away from the sun as Earth is, so it's a couple hundred degrees below zero there.

As for Mars, they probably accidentally blew it up in mankinds early attempts at terraforming planets.

Yes John but you're forgetting what Dr.Raynomd Franztien did back in the 2320s with his gasdisplacement invention.Remember the gasses of those 2 worlds were removed and either used for a never ending source of fuel for the evacuation of EARTH THAT WAS or reapllied to the sun gasses. That did make Jupiter and Saturn somewhat smaller in size. But from what I've heard size doesn't matter, all the time anyway. Its the quality.

Pluto was a very cold planet until the Core Heaters were injected. Then it became like Miami,FL. It was small henceforth accessible to only the wealthy.

The Mars canals were lengthened while its polar icecaps were under melt-control to bring water to the farmland in the central plains to feed the workforce and poor of the planet. Some working in the Mars mines died from the "RED DEATH". breathing all that fine red dust while digging up Platizod used by the wealthy on Pluto.

Hows that?

HERA

Saturday, April 15, 2006 5:17 PM

Very interesting and enjoyable thread. Thank you!

As a somewhat related aside, there's an article in the May issue of Discover, talking about the additional planets/objects that have been found in our (current) solar system.

https://www.discover.com/issues/may-06/cover/

Here's a snippet (you need a subscription for full access):

The Man Who Finds Planets
Give Caltech astronomer Mike Brown a telescope and there's no telling what he might discover out there
By Cal Fussman | Photography by Misha Gravenor
DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 05 | May 2006 | Astronomy & Physics

...Sedna was completely unexpected. It's 8 billion miles from the sun—Pluto is 3.6 billion—and in 2004 we had no idea that things in that very outer region of the solar system existed. The fact that they do is going to tell us an incredible amount about the birth of the sun and the earliest history of the solar system.

Sedna shouldn't be there. There's no way to put Sedna where it is. It never comes close enough to be affected by the sun, but it never goes far enough away from the sun to be affected by other stars, which is the case with comets that have been observed in the Kuiper belt. Sedna is stuck, frozen in place; there's no way to move it. And if there's no way to move it, basically there's no way to put it there—unless it formed there. But it's in a very elliptical orbit, and there's no way to form anything in an elliptical orbit like that. It simply can't be there. There's no possible way—except it is. So how, then?

I'm thinking it was placed there in the earliest history of the solar system. I'm thinking it could have gotten there if there used to be stars a lot closer than they are now and those stars affected Sedna on the outer part of its orbit and then later on moved away. So I call Sedna a fossil record of the earliest solar system. Eventually, when other fossil records are found, Sedna will help tell us how the sun formed and the number of stars that were close to the sun when it formed.

Sedna is incredibly far away, and we never would have seen it if it weren't as close as it gets on its orbit. In fact, there's about a 200-year period when we can see it, and it has a 12,000-year orbit. So what does that mean? If we see it for 200 years out of 12,000, that means there's only a 1 in 60 chance that we could've seen it, which means to me that there may be 60 of these things out there. And if there are 60 of these things, then there are probably 20 of these things just a little bigger and maybe a couple the size of Mercury or Mars. We're trying very hard to find the whole population. Once it's done, we'll be able to read the entire fossil record and learn incredible things.

"Wanna?" – Mal to Kaylee, Out of Gas

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