Interstellar or Interplanetary?

POSTED BY: Galfridus
UPDATED: Saturday, February 22, 2003 11:02
VIEWED: 19917
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UFO

Saturday, October 12, 2002 9:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Zicsoft:
yes, the Firefly stories all take place in a single solar system with a suprisingly large number of inhabitable worlds

I guess this is where the whole science debate in science fiction could come in. Many, many inhabitable worlds in the same system is basically impossible. Doesn't mean I can't have fun watching it tho.

UFO

Saturday, October 12, 2002 9:35 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
And yeah, the gas giant thing adds a whole other dimension. You could have 4 or 5 or possibly 16 or 20 "planets" orbiting a single gas giant. In essence, you have all these planets sharing the same earth-like orbit. Which (once again) concievably increases the number of possible earth-like planets a system like that could support.

BUT, any habitable planets orbiting a gas giant that big is in significant jeopardy from incoming meteors and comets. Theory is that Earth made it to the state it has because Jupiter absorbs many of the incoming objects into our system because of its gravity well. I image planets orbiting a HUGE gas giant would be orbiting targets for nearly everything entering they system near the planet.

THEGN

Saturday, October 12, 2002 10:14 PM

No one said you wouldn't take your chances. That doesn't mean it couldn't happen, though. All I said was that there's no law of physics preventing it. I didn't say it would be safe.

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

FREEZEFRAME

Sunday, October 13, 2002 4:31 PM

Actually, it wouldn't be unstable.... from a physics standpoint. Yeah, and distances would change.

Politically... probably.

But some could be moons of a gas giant, others could be moons of smaller planets than that... the "central" planets could be moons around a gas giant, and the "peripheral" planets could have a variable distance from core of civilization depending on the season.

FREEZEFRAME

Sunday, October 13, 2002 4:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by UFO:
BUT, any habitable planets orbiting a gas giant that big is in significant jeopardy from incoming meteors and comets. Theory is that Earth made it to the state it has because Jupiter absorbs many of the incoming objects into our system because of its gravity well. I image planets orbiting a HUGE gas giant would be orbiting targets for nearly everything entering they system near the planet.

So the moons would have a measurable probability of being hit by a comet every 10 million to 100 million years or so... people take their chances.

Also, we may be more surrounded by comets and other loosely attracted bodies than most solar systems. Because we basically know NOTHING about the local environments of other stars. The fact that we have as many comets as we do could be a regional abnormality of space.

DELVO

Sunday, October 13, 2002 11:00 PM

I've been lurking in this thread for a while and thinking about it, and earlier today I got started writing a response and then quit because it was getting so long. I was sort of drifting into a bunch of the science of how our solar system was formed, from the supply of atoms of heavy elements, to the way the long reach of gravity and the emptiness of space relate to consolidate the mass in a given orbital range into a single place because planets tend to sweep their path clear, to the supply of little comets and asteroids and their attraction to big masses, to the changes in matter density with distance from the center of the system and how this causes gravity to make planets of different sizes and densities and atmospheres (or no planets), to the way orbits fall into a rough plane instead of being distributed more spherically... I was actually trying to sort this all out as I went along, not lecture, but it started coming out that way!

BTW, a blue sun would be bad for life; its color is different because its EM emissions are different. It would be heavy in nasty radiation like UV and gamma, and short on the infra-red which photosynthesis depends on. And the colors we see on screen aren't all screwed up.

Anyway, the short version is that there's just no way such a thing would really happen. Even if you could find a place where, say a dozen or more supernovas had recently happened very close to each other and thus released such unimaginibly high amounts and densities of heavy atoms into the same place, and even if this mass somehow started forming a solar system mostly like ours only with extra solid planets (nevermind where all the extra energy and light elements went), the planets would then proceed to smash each other up anyway, which means that a system that still HAS all those planets is so young that the planets are being constantly pummeled by comets and asteroids and small lost moons and such, and the planets themselves are still ridiculously hot and toxic... not that the premise with which this run-on sentence began is really believable either.

So, unless and until something is specified in the show, you can choose whether to figure the setting uses technology that might someday turn out to be impossible to build (FTL travel) or is in a solar system whose existence violates known laws of motion. I prefer to believe in the one that, although perhaps far-fetched, might become possible after we've discovered more unknown physics, rather than the one that's already known not to work out with even rudimentary physics that's been well established for a while.

THEGN

Monday, October 14, 2002 12:08 AM

You're right about the blue giant thing. But it's not too far-fetched that, since we are assuming terraforming technology, atmospheres may be constructed to provide extra protection from the higher radiation. As for the photosynthesis thing, that could explain why we only see desert landscapes. (Although, I'm sure it doesn't. :D)

And it doesn't have to be a blue giant. I used that as an example of the size that stars can be, not their life supporting capacity. In fact, there is another more drastic problem with the blue giant hypothesis. And that is that few stars of that temperature live long enough to form planets. Long before the primordial gases that might someday become a new earth begin to settle, that star would have blown itself to pieces.

You could just drop down a size or two, to a white star, like a A or F, which might still give you the habitable zone large enough to support many habitable worlds with tolerable radiations ranges, especially if many of them are satellites of larger planets, given certain technologies.

And there's also another point that should be mentioned and that is that the habitable zones of stars are based on the premise that these are the orbits at which life is most likely to form on its own. If one does assume certain technologies, then the habitable zone might increase significantly.

However, there's also another problem, which I thought of, but didn't mention, and that is that it might not even be possible for a gas giant to form in a stars habitable zone. One of the reasons that the gas giants in our solar system are in orbits several au from the sun is because the closer to the sun you get, the stronger the solar wind gets. The solar wind moves out radially from the sun, so it diminishes as one over the distance squared, and therefore is exponentially greater the closer you get to the sun. There's a question as to whether a mass of gases could stay localized long enough to form a gas giant within that range.

If you considers more then just geometry, the story starts to get fuzzy. I'm not entirely sure that any laws of physics need to be violated, but you might need to insults some laws of statistics. If such a system did exist, it would seem that it would need to be almost mechanically laid out as to be improbable at best. But I'm not ready to say it's impossible, just yet. Although, it is intriguing.

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

GATORMARC

Tuesday, October 15, 2002 7:15 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by UFO:

BUT, any habitable planets orbiting a gas giant that big is in significant jeopardy from incoming meteors and comets. Theory is that Earth made it to the state it has because Jupiter absorbs many of the incoming objects into our system because of its gravity well. I image planets orbiting a HUGE gas giant would be orbiting targets for nearly everything entering they system near the planet.

And people voluntarily live in California, right on fault lines right now...

HOBBES

Tuesday, October 15, 2002 11:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by UFO:

BUT, any habitable planets orbiting a gas giant that big is in significant jeopardy from incoming meteors and comets. Theory is that Earth made it to the state it has because Jupiter absorbs many of the incoming objects into our system because of its gravity well. I image planets orbiting a HUGE gas giant would be orbiting targets for nearly everything entering they system near the planet.

I have just two words for you. Orbital Railguns.
Also useful in engaging any ship that might be passing by.
:)

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May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May you be in heaven an hour before
The Devil knows you’re dead.

WEBWARRIOR

Friday, October 18, 2002 4:53 AM

For one thing there are more then one solarsystem!!!
In both the first show ,and the last show it was said to that they had to go to other systems!!!

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