Earth that was
POSTED BY: VivaChimera
UPDATED: Monday, September 10, 2007 23:34
VIEWED: 9723
PAGE 3 of 3
Quote:
Originally posted by EmpireX:
I imagine some people and their families getting sent decades ahead to prepare the way (terraforming and then building cities)
...and clean the telephones...
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I personally won't crossover the 'verse with other locales.
I like the different space "universes" for different reasons. If I want semi mystical space opera I pull out SWG D6, If I want Aliens versus humans I pull out some Bab5, and if I want some low tech, barely enough fuel to keep her afloat I play and love Serenity.
To each their own though.
On the topic of changing the history to justify things. Well. The history of Earth That Was is handed down by the Alliance and who knows how much of the truth remains. Maybe a large portion of the populace did leave for one reason or another. That is for each GM to decide for their campaign. In mine, no person in the verse has ever even asked about ETW.
Cpt. Caille Jensen
Firefly Class Transport Heracles
金剛力士
((Alexis Dority
Shiny
^_^))
Browncoat through and through, more oft than not I have found myself adrift in the black, wondering if I had enough in me to keep flying. My ship is in good repair now and the nostalgia brought about by Firefly will continue to touch me for the rest of my life.
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Quote:
Originally posted by RojBlake:
I checked it out & yes there is an Imperial Shuttle in the pilot episode of Firefly.
So I can see Star Wars/Serenity crossover justifications already.
Also a Firefly is seen in the new Battlestar Galactica series.
I have no doubt that there are folk working out Farscape & Stargate plotlines as well.
I'm not a BSG fan, but I was under the impression that there are no aliens in BSG, and I've always been told that originally at least, the gimmick for the series was "What if life here came from out there?" (in other words, anything that happens in the story is part of our history so ancient we don't remember it and have lost much of the technology)... so that's slightly more justifiable as a crossover.
Sometimes I'm in the mood for 'verse-only ideas (I say ideas, because I never seem to get around to writing them, though I do sometimes read 'em), sometimes I'm in the mood for crazy crossovers.
Weirdly enough, some of the crossovers work better than others, and some of them go to such lengths to create the crossover, when a lot of the time I can see easier ways of doing it.
For one, Buffyverse is EASY. There are no aliens in the Buffyverse, save for demons that like to crawl into our dimension. But, a few things about the concept of Buffy/FF crossover jump out at me:
1.) They tend to do it on Earth (demons, I mean).
2.) the Fray comics, which are Buffyverse canon and the part of the canon set farthest into the future, still take place several centuries before the setting of Firefly. If only "an" entire generation grew up inside spaceships (which is what Joss claims), this works out perfectly fine - especially since Joss' patented "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and occasionally there are flying cars" shtick is still true in Fray. More to the point, the Lassiter - the first laser pistol - was apparently an ETW artifact. Fray's world has laser pistols.
3.) Most of the monsters are gone by a couple of hundred years from now, not that most humans hadn't taught themselves very excellently how to ignore them by the 20th century anyway. They do return, but Melaka Fray's story's end is open-ended - with a certain villainous character ominously still alive and vowing to slug it out with Melaka further. For all we know, the way THAT twisted tale ends is with massive upheaval, where the monsters slowly make the planet somehow uninhabitable (Joss has been known to do a wide variety of things with his demons, there are certainly ones that produce say, noxious fumes or other toxic substances, or which feed on, I dunno, core resources?), and certain governments choose to just plain evacuate (the American gov't, for one, knows the things exist and works to both hide and control them. Remember what makes up about half the Alliance? Yeah...).
Keeping in mind that no Slayer was called in between the Season 7/8 arcs of Buffy and Melaka's time because the monsters all went away (well actually, vampires became "lurks", assumed to be either mutants - which are fairly common because of some weird event, I think something to do with radioactivity levels - or street punks so pumped up on steroids it messes with their heads)... if we abandon Earth, what's to say we even need a Slayer?
Until, of course, the de-humanized Reavers come onto the scene. Then of course, one girl in all the world(s), a chosen one, with the power to fight the Reavers, is born. She is... the Slayer.
Hell, maybe she's even River - Slayers ARE supposed to have good self-healing (she DID get a chunk of her amygdala cut out despite the fact that "the first one died on the table", and survive herself), and some amazing instincts when it comes to fighting. Oh, and then there's that "Slayer sense" Buffy was always going on about...
A little absurd? Of course. But workable? Most certainly, if one put in the effort (though I suppose River doesn't have to be the Slayer. That is, admittedly, taking it to a logical but over the top conclusion, still not unworkable, but a lot
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I think that ETW was abandoned for political reasons by those who could afford to. I'm sure there were more than a couple billion poorer folks left behind to deal with the Earth's problems.
As for the issue of travel to and from ETW, I think they would have to have some sort of unconventional FTL travel. The reasons for this are:
1) It is physically impossible for there to be a single star system with that many rocky planets in the zone of habitability (the stretch of space not too far from the parent star, but not too close either), even if they use mirrors or orbiting lenses to amplify sunlight (such methods have serious limitations and would not be practical or cost effective to begin with), so there must be more than one system inhabited by humans.
2) The travel time involved (assuming it was 80-100 years), using STL drives would not be sufficient to travel any noticable distance (astronomically speaking). If they used Fusion drives, theoretically, their ships could achieve 5-10 percent the speed of light. That means that in 80-100 years, they would only travel 4-10 lightyears. Considering that Alpha Centauri, one of the closest stars to us is 4.5 lightyears away, they would have to be very close to the Earth, and if the inhabited systems were that close, we would have spotted at least the large planets already.
If they used the most powerful form of reactors currently known to man, Matter-Anti-Matter Annihilation reactors, the ships could still only reach 90 percent the speed of light, meaning that they would only travel 72-90 lightyears. When you consider the overall size of the galaxy (about 100,000 lightyears in diameter), that's almost nothing.
3) Because of the fact that there must be multiple systems, ships would need a form of FTL flight to move between the worlds in a matter of days as they seem to do, even if the systems were relatively close together.
Joss has said many times that he is not a science guy, which is proven by the ridiculous idea of having almost 100 planets and moons terraformed for human life (plus it's mentioned by the slaver captain in Shindig that terraforming is still going on; "Terraforming crews've got a prodigious death rate"; meaning that even more worlds are on the way to becoming new Earths, making the idea even more ludicrous) in one system. Even if you could cram that many bodies into the habitable zone, the conflicting gravity fields that densly packed would tear the planets apart. Personally, I like the theory ScrewtheAlliance used in his fanfics: Humans have learned to use the exotic properties of Dark Matter to bypass relativity and Einstein's Speed Limit (the speed of light), allowing ships to simply use conventional drives to accelerate up to, and past the speed of light. Little enough is known about Dark Matter to make this theory at least partially plausible for the time being.
If the exodus used FTL capable ships and lasted 80-100 years, they could be all the way across the galaxy, making contact with ETW virtually impossible.
Just my thoughts on it...
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"I refuse to submit,
To the god you say is kind.
I know what's right, and it is time,
It's time to fight, and free our minds!
Our spirits were forged in snow and ice,
To bend like steel forged over fire.
We were not made to bend like reed,
Or to turn the other cheek!"
- from the song "Thousand Years of Opression" by Amon Amarth
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