Question about the planet Miranda
POSTED BY: nihonniirugaijin
UPDATED: Monday, December 29, 2008 00:47
VIEWED: 9174
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For the love of God, is common sense so rare among some of us? The reason that some drugs' side effects are not apparent until large numbers of people take them is because the side effects affect a small number of patients, say 1 in 10,000. So the side affects aren't obvious until many people are on the drug. In contrast, the Pax affected 100% of the population. They all either died or became Reavers. So no matter how small the number of people tested with the Pax, the affects of the Pax would be clear. Even if only 10 people were tested, they all would have died or become Reavers. Therefore, the Alliance could not have tested the Pax before adding it to the air processors. The Alliance went to the expense of terraforming a planet, building dozens of cities, and moving 30 million people to Miranda, and then added an untested chemical to the air? That is plausible to some you?!?!
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Travel and communication are not that slow in the Firefly 'verse. First, the Firefly 'verse is just one solar system. The Cortex allows fast communication between all parts of the solar system, as evidenced by the Serenity crew always being able to contact whomever they want. Have you even seen an instance where they couldn't get ahold of the person they wanted to talk to? No!
Also, the travel times between planets are measured in days at most in the show.
So the idea that Miranda was so remote that nobody noticed a planet with dozens of cities and 30 million get wiped out, or that they forgot about such a catastrophic event in just 12 years, defies common sense.
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My point is that humans name the features in their landscape, no matter how remote. That's why we name remote uninhabited islands on Earth. The Firefly 'verse is one solar system. That something as large as a planet in a single inhabited solar system would not have a name on the charts is extremely implausible.
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Originally posted by AgentRouka:Quote:
Originally posted by nihonniirugaijin:
You analogy of Firefly astronomy and our current geography proves my point. Go on the internet, our version of the Cortex, and you can find information on every uninhabited tiny islet in any ocean of the world. Let's say you hear about, oh, Henderson Island, type it in Google and you have information on it.
Just because a planet is uninhabited certainly doesn't mean it is not going to be on the charts of the Firefly solar system.
For one, who randomly googles Henderson Island? Who would really notice if they renamed it Winchester Island?
It's lots more difficult, when just the name is removed from the databases. The planet itself was not, though it was listed as black rock, but the name was probably removed. Other related files (calls for settlers) maybe have been removed or altered to make the number of settlers appear smaller. Just enough to blur the connection between the failed planet and the black rock located behind Reaver Territory. Suppress reports about Reavers, as well... I see it fading from consciousness because no one cares about that area of space. IN particular because a giant war seemed to happened straight on the heels of that incident. For all we know there was more than one failed terraforming attempt, so why should Miranda stand out?
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What makes you think Miranda was a backwater like Whitefall? The city the crew lands in looks pretty substantial, like nothing portrayed on the border planets.
Also, in Serenity there is the following exchange:
Jayne: This ain't no little settlement.
Zoe: We flew over at least a dozen cities just as big.
So the evidence indicates a world with substantial infrastructure, probably with substantial trade links with other worlds, etc.
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Originally posted by ImNotHere:Quote:
Originally posted by nihonniirugaijin:
Go on the internet, our version of the Cortex, and you can find information on every uninhabited tiny islet in any ocean of the world.
Yes, because you can trust Google and Wikipedia not to censor things.
Hmm.
Even so, our Internet is an ungovernable free-for-all because it snuck in under the radar of the "powers that be" - even though they built big parts of it, they didn't anticipate what it would become. I'm sure the Alliance/Blue Sun corp wouldn't have made that mistake again and could suppress any info on the cortex they didn't like, unless it got into the hands of a well equipped hacker like Mr Universe.
I live in the UK, but I've visited the US many times and I have colleagues with family there - so on 24/7, I was immediately wondering whether so-and-so has got back from the States OK, and what part of New York wossname works in.
The 'verse isn't like that: travel time between worlds is measured in days and weeks, not hours. People who leave to settle other worlds are gone for good, their families will have had their "American wakes" and bade them farewell.
Plus, the only people with the money/free time to be tourists would be the good Alliance citizens of the inner planets, who strike me as a fairly hedonistic bunch who aren't going to slum it on some outback planet when they can have two weeks in a 5-star hotel on Ariel (especially as everywhere else looks like the desert 50 miles out from LA. The Miranda colonists were likely recruited from shitholes on the outer moons. Their families probably don't take foreign holidays or subscribe to broadband cortex access...
So, its likely to be much easier to pull off the "Miranda" deception in the 'verse than on Earth-that-currently-is.
As for the other plotholes:
(1) the PAX may well have been tested on small groups for limited periods, just like they did with thalidomide and all the other drugs with side effects that didn't turn up until they had been used on a large scale...
(2) We've only met the Reavers "in battle" in full beserker mode - when the bloodlust subsides they might calm down enough to achieve some sort of organization.
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Quote:
Originally posted by nihonniirugaijin:
My point is that humans name the features in their landscape, no matter how remote. That's why we name remote uninhabited islands on Earth. The Firefly 'verse is one solar system. That something as large as a planet in a single inhabited solar system would not have a name on the charts is extremely implausible.
Yeah, but considering the scale of the solar system they have colonized and the amount of traffic, it may make sense of - for example - differentiate in naming between terraformed and inhabitable places and those you shouldn't waste fuel approaching. They may well have renamed it "XXP34 - uninhabitable blackrock (used to be Miranda)" or some such. To most people "uninhabitable blackrock" would be a whole lot more important than any name attached. When people went exploring this planet, anything new that they found was awesome and it was a privilege to name it. Most people don't care about those names now. In a solar system that was already mapped before they ever entered it, naming individual rocks something fancy would be less important, just the knowing where they were, an identifier and the basic facts.
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Quote:
Originally posted by nihonniirugaijin:
What makes you think Miranda was a backwater like Whitefall? The city the crew lands in looks pretty substantial, like nothing portrayed on the border planets.
Also, in Serenity there is the following exchange:
Jayne: This ain't no little settlement.
Zoe: We flew over at least a dozen cities just as big.
So the evidence indicates a world with substantial infrastructure, probably with substantial trade links with other worlds, etc.
Miranda wouldn't have been a backwater in the common sense, but since we know they called for people of Kaylee's ilk (skilled but unwealthy) to settle there, we can rest assured that it wasn't the creme de la creme of the Alliance settling there. And that it was fairly recent, since Kaylee remembers it.
And considering that it is unusually developed for a remote planet, we can likely assume that it was artificially supported by Alliance investment, not through well-established trade links or private investment. It was most definitely NOT a planet as well established and known as even Persephone, let alone a place like Osiris. THOSE could not have been buried.
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Quote:
Originally posted by nihonniirugaijin:
Travel and communication are not that slow in the Firefly 'verse. First, the Firefly 'verse is just one solar system. The Cortex allows fast communication between all parts of the solar system, as evidenced by the Serenity crew always being able to contact whomever they want. Have you even seen an instance where they couldn't get ahold of the person they wanted to talk to? No!
Also, the travel times between planets are measured in days at most in the show.
So the idea that Miranda was so remote that nobody noticed a planet with dozens of cities and 30 million get wiped out, or that they forgot about such a catastrophic event in just 12 years, defies common sense.
MAYBE you could let your imagination wander toward the fact that they may have hidden its growth as part of their experiment?
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Quote:
Originally posted by nihonniirugaijin:
For the love of God, is common sense so rare among some of us? The reason that some drugs' side effects are not apparent until large numbers of people take them is because the side effects affect a small number of patients, say 1 in 10,000. So the side affects aren't obvious until many people are on the drug. In contrast, the Pax affected 100% of the population. They all either died or became Reavers. So no matter how small the number of people tested with the Pax, the affects of the Pax would be clear. Even if only 10 people were tested, they all would have died or become Reavers. Therefore, the Alliance could not have tested the Pax before adding it to the air processors. The Alliance went to the expense of terraforming a planet, building dozens of cities, and moving 30 million people to Miranda, and then added an untested chemical to the air? That is plausible to some you?!?!
And would it be plausible to you to tone down the language, yes?
You ignore that the air processors may have messed around with the dosage, that there may have been a chemical reaction in the atmosphere. OBVIOUSLY it's fairly unlikely that the Miranda catastrophe could have happened with proper experimentation before hand, but it is not entirely impossible and peopel are examining the nuances of these small possibilities here.
I think it's a huge plothole, too, but I still don't see any justification for you to behave like an ill-mannered three-year-old and insult people just because you disagree with them. Play in the Real World Events Forum, people are used to rudeness there.
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Quote:
Originally posted by nihonniirugaijin:
What makes you think Miranda was a backwater like Whitefall? The city the crew lands in looks pretty substantial, like nothing portrayed on the border planets.
The Alliance had clearly spent a lot of money on it, but I still got the impression that it was out on the fringes of the 'verse.
Miranda looked like a grand, well-meaning experiment by the Alliance to show that the Great Unwashed of the barbaric outer worlds could be civilized if you built them a nice place to live and work, with excellent education and leisure facilities (oh, and drugged them to stop them messing it up).
Doubtless, if it had worked, the Alliance whould have held it up triumphantly as a showcase of what life could be like on the outer worlds if only they joined the Alliance.
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Quote:
Originally posted by nihonniirugaijin:
The Alliance went to the expense of terraforming a planet, building dozens of cities, and moving 30 million people to Miranda, and then added an untested chemical to the air? That is plausible to some you?!?!
Big corporation with a lucrative top-secret contract to supply a new drug does a less-than-thorough job of testing rather than risk losing money.
Politicians who know squat about science don't stop to think that just because something has (perhaps) been used as a riot control gas for 5 years without problems doesn't mean its safe for use 24/7.
Does any of that sound at all plausible to you?
I'm sure that if Joss has wanted to kill the tension he could have had hologram lady give 5 minutes of exposition which explained it all before she got et by the Reavers...
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