Where does Firefly take place?
POSTED BY: Hans
UPDATED: Sunday, July 2, 2006 05:23
VIEWED: 62435
PAGE 14 of 18
It's gotta be hypothesis #2 because hypothesis #1 is impossible. Yes, you could have a solar system with maybe a dozen planets each with 8 or 10 moons (unlikely but not impossible). But there's a limit to what terraforming can do. They'd *all* have to be relatively near to the habitable zone and that's out of the question. Gotta be hypothesis #2. Why invent a mythical, magical single system with an impossible number of habitable planets when you can just assume (as later episode dialogue indicates) that the worlds are spread over many systems?
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I can't accept hypothesis #1; I'm a Hard-Science Fiction fan, Nivenite persuasion. I find it hard enough to believe that mankind has terraformed more than seventy planetary bodies in somewhat less than 500 years; placing them all in a single planetary system strains my willing suspension of disbelief too far.
(Incidentally, the figure comes from Mal, in the scene deleted from "Our Mrs. Reynolds", bonus features disk four.)
I don't have any problem with having multiple terraformations within a system; but I'd think you'd have trouble finding more than six or eight prospects per system. And even if you place a dozen or so systems edge-to-edge within a dense cluster with no more than a light year average distance betweem them, that still implies either some kind of FTL drive or dealing with the effects of relativistic time compression -- something the show implies even less than FTL.
The existing fourteen episodes are tantalizingly short on engineering details. The "Hard Burn" engine and the two outboard mounts are clearly reaction drives, with some kind of fusion power implied ("Hard Burn" is referred to as a plasma explosion on the "Serenity" commentary track, although that might just refer to the CGI effect used.)
For the record, in "The Train Job" River states that Serenity has a "radionic power core", while in "The Message" Kaylee refers to the ship having "Gravity Drive". That last sound like something other than the reaction drives, and since no one has proven the propagation rate of gravity to be limited to "C", might just be a good basis for FTL. It might also explain why a Firefly's engine has to turn -- centrifugal rotation has traditionally implied antigravy in the visual shorthand of Science Fiction cinema -- C/R Harryhausen's classic "Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers."
RocketJock
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Another thought: If Joss had wanted the opening narrations to be accepted as canon, he would have included them on the DVD set, as bonus items if nothing else.
As he didn't, I'm assuming he wasn't happy with them, either because of style or content, and therefore don't feel bound by any statements made in them.
Who wrote the opening narrations anyway?
RocketJock
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Quote:
Originally posted by visvivalaw:
It's gotta be hypothesis #2 because hypothesis #1 is impossible. Yes, you could have a solar system with maybe a dozen planets each with 8 or 10 moons (unlikely but not impossible). But there's a limit to what terraforming can do. They'd *all* have to be relatively near to the habitable zone and that's out of the question. Gotta be hypothesis #2. Why invent a mythical, magical single system with an impossible number of habitable planets when you can just assume (as later episode dialogue indicates) that the worlds are spread over many systems?
But the thing is, hypothesis 2 requires a mythical, magical FTL drive. Which, while common enough in science fiction, is even more impossible. Anyway, hypothesis 1 is not, in fact, impossible. Just extremely unlikely.
Given enough time, money, and the inclination to do it, we could turn the Solar System into such a system without violating known laws of physics. If we had planet-scale gravity manipulation (as they do in the 'verse), it would be a piece of cake.
--
http://www.contretemps.net
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Even more impossible? Not at all. There are a variety of theoretical possibilities:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html
Such massive control of gravity is a much less believable technology than FTL. So why bother? Just assume FTL and the ability to terraform worlds in nearby systems (as later episodes make clear references to other systems).
And even if you could move planets around, it would be a celestrial mechanics nightmare to find stable orbits within the habitable zone for all these terraformed worlds. Building hundreds of many-miles-long O'Neil colonies is a tiny engineering project in comparison.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Surlyben:
But the thing is, hypothesis 2 requires a mythical, magical FTL drive. Which, while common enough in science fiction, is even more impossible. Anyway, hypothesis 1 is not, in fact, impossible. Just extremely unlikely.
Actually, Hypothesis 1 is impossible, 70 worlds in a single solar system, each with an earth normal temperature, let alone gravity, the physics simply don't work. The orbits would be unstable, and either most of these planets would be smacking into each other, or kicked out of the habitability zone of the parent star.
As for Hypothesis 2 being "even more impossible" You guys are operating from old data. This is no longer true. FTL is theoretically possible and the present debate over it now falls to technical issues, rather than theoretical ones.
In 1994, a grad student at the University of Cardiff wrote a paper that you can find here:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0009013
It was originall published in a peer reviewed journal Classical Quantum Gravity 11 (1994) L73-L77. Since then, there has been a good debate about the paper in many journals as well as on the LANL archives. Also, the paper's author, Miguel Alcubierre has moved on to do research at the Max Planc Institute in Germany on numerical relativity, or computer models of coliding black holes and such.
The basic theory is that you create a bubble in the space-time manifold, in the space and time we all share. You curve the walls of this bubble such that, in the forward direction, space is shrinking, and in the aft direction, space expands. This is done by controlling the amount of "negative energy" in a band that surrounds and bisects the bubble.
Negative energy is not that "out there" a concept, there are things like the Casimer effect that indicate such energy is not unrealistic.
The major objection was not that it inconsistent with General Relativity, but that the amount of negative energy was so high as to render it inpractical. However later papers by Chris Van Den Broeck, F. Loupe and others have shown work arounds to reduce the total energy requirements for the effect. There is even a paper by Hiscock that shows what the view from the bridge of such a vessel would look like.
I understand the idea that FTL is impossible. Its based on General Relativity, in that, it takes more and more energy to move a particle closer and closer to the speed of light. At lightspeed, a massive particle would require infinite energy. However Alcubierre's Warp Drive gets around this by not having the ship travel at all, but warping the space-time around the ship in the proper way to achieve the same effective results.
Relative to the inner walls of the warp bubble, the ship does not move. Space time is flat inside the bubble. Outside however, is a different story, but at present there is no violation of General Relativity, nor with any known physics. Space time curvature is how gravity works, and we know that mass and energy alter the shape of this manifold.
You can read more about it, by searching the LANL archives under the terms "Warp Drive". Also take a look at transverable worm holes as a lot of that theoretical work is applicable to warp drives as well. Its all about altering the shape of space and time.
"Wash, where is my damn spaceship?"
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Quote:
Originally posted by Drakon:
Actually, Hypothesis 1 is impossible, 70 worlds in a single solar system, each with an earth normal temperature, let alone gravity, the physics simply don't work. The orbits would be unstable, and either most of these planets would be smacking into each other, or kicked out of the habitability zone of the parent star.
As for Hypothesis 2 being "even more impossible" You guys are operating from old data. This is no longer true. FTL is theoretically possible and the present debate over it now falls to technical issues, rather than theoretical ones.
(stuff cut)
As someone who still supports hypothesis one (for various esthetic, storytelling, and technical reasons which are discussed ad nauseum above) I want to thank you for your great research on FTL drives. While I may not believe FTL exists in the Firefly universe, as a science fiction (and science fact) fan in general I love the idea that it might one day be possible.
Hans
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Quote:
Originally posted by Hans:
As someone who still supports hypothesis one (for various esthetic, storytelling, and technical reasons which are discussed ad nauseum above) I want to thank you for your great research on FTL drives. While I may not believe FTL exists in the Firefly universe, as a science fiction (and science fact) fan in general I love the idea that it might one day be possible.
Hans
More than welcome. It was this paper, when I first found it about 10 years ago that got me interested in the mathematics of General Relativity. I had always been told it was a beautiful theory, but unless you are a math geek, its kinda hard to see.
And the fact that it no longer proves a hindrance to FTL, well, even better.
"Wash, where is my damn spaceship?"
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Quote:
Originally posted by Drakon:
Actually, Hypothesis 1 is impossible, 70 worlds in a single solar system, each with an earth normal temperature, let alone gravity, the physics simply don't work. The orbits would be unstable, and either most of these planets would be smacking into each other, or kicked out of the habitability zone of the parent star.
There are about 30 worlds in the solar system right now, if you include moons of a reasonable size... All more or less in stable orbits, and there are plenty of orbital configurations that are stable which involve far more worlds than 70.
There is plenty of mass in the solar system to make more. At least 24 of them could be packed into a rosette style orbit in the habitable zone, and the habitable zone can be extended to a certain extent (via mirrors and the like). Atmospheric terraforming is quite possible, even for smaller bodies that can't hold an atmosphere. The important thing is not whether it can hold an atmosphere, but how fast it loses the atmosphere (and how much it costs to keep adding new atmosphere, I suppose)
With the exception of the stability of artificial orbits, none of this is theoretical. Planets have, in fact, been formed in the past, planets have atmospheres, and at least one of those atmospheres has been changed into what we now call earthlike.
As far as the altering the gravity of planets in the course of terraforming, I agree that in the real world, it's only plausible by altering the mass of the planet. But in Firefly, they have artificial gravity. If we can believe The Train Job, they have it on a planetary scale. This would make the terraforming and moving planets around a great deal easier (and thus makes the one system notion more plausible) but it isn't actually a requirement.
Regarding negative energy and wormholes and warp drives, I am vaguely familiar with them, but I guess my information is old. I thought that the energy requirements were like "let's convert jupiter to energy for our trip to Tau Ceti". Moving planets seemed more plausible to me.
The infinite energy requirement as you approach light speed isn't actually my only objection to FTL travel. The time travel and violations of causality that it implies bother me for aesthetic reasons. (I can easily imagine a world without causality, but that doesn't mean I want to live there.) I notice the paper you linked to actually addresses this to a limited extent, so that's good news, I guess. I had a physicist friend who claimed that inventing teleportation would be easy compared to the difficulty of avoiding also inventing time travel...
Hmm. I suppose a drive like that might explain why Serenity never encounters Reavers or Alliance patrol vessels at anything like the high relative velocities you would expect if they were flying between planets on conventional drives. The ships are actually only moving at 20 miles an hour locally... (Yes, I know Joss mentions the low speeds as a mistake in the Serenity commentary, but I don't mind an after the fact explanation that makes it seem intentional)
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Quote:
Originally posted by Surlyben:
Regarding negative energy and wormholes and warp drives, I am vaguely familiar with them, but I guess my information is old. I thought that the energy requirements were like "let's convert jupiter to energy for our trip to Tau Ceti". Moving planets seemed more plausible to me.
Original estimates by Ford et.al. put it at between 4 jovian masses and a mass greater than the known universe, just to get to light speed. And compress it into an extremely thin shell. But later papers have tackled this problem and seem to have reduced it to more reasonable levels.
Quote:
The infinite energy requirement as you approach light speed isn't actually my only objection to FTL travel. The time travel and violations of causality that it implies bother me for aesthetic reasons. (I can easily imagine a world without causality, but that doesn't mean I want to live there.) I notice the paper you linked to actually addresses this to a limited extent, so that's good news, I guess. I had a physicist friend who claimed that inventing teleportation would be easy compared to the difficulty of avoiding also inventing time travel...
Yeah, that would be a problem if the internal region of the bubble, where the ship is, is travelling at any speed approaching light. However, and here is a big part of the trick. The inside ain't moving and ain't curved. There is no time dilation or any of the other weird effects associated with close to light speed travel. There is even an argument that time inside the bubble can be run at any speed compared to time outside.
On the entire subject of time travel, which is another issue altogether, its kind of a guy feeling for me, but I don't think it is possible. I think there is a facet of time, that we do not understand or know well enough about yet, that prevents (backward) time travel. It may be something as simple as there only being on temporal dimension.
Quote:
Hmm. I suppose a drive like that might explain why Serenity never encounters Reavers or Alliance patrol vessels at anything like the high relative velocities you would expect if they were flying between planets on conventional drives. The ships are actually only moving at 20 miles an hour locally... (Yes, I know Joss mentions the low speeds as a mistake in the Serenity commentary, but I don't mind an after the fact explanation that makes it seem intentional)
Regardless of which hypothesis is true, you still need high speeds to get anywhere in space. However, it seems some sort of collision detection would also be needed, and if you are at high speed, it seems reasonable that the first thing you do when your proximity alarms trip, is to stop/slow the ship greatly. So I see this as possibly not even a bug or mistake.
As for your remarks on Hypothesis 1, I think the orbital considerations are what is most problematic. Yes, there are a lot of worlds in this system, but almost all of them are too light to maintain an atmosphere, or otherwise outside the habitability zone of the sun (roughly between the orbits of Venus and Earth) Moving them takes care of the latter complaint, but not the first. And the resulting orbital dynamics, well there is a nightmare of a computer simulation just waiting to be run.
"Wash, where is my damn spaceship?"
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