Firefly Solar System

POSTED BY: Mahatatain
UPDATED: Thursday, July 1, 2010 14:28
VIEWED: 18911
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NCBROWNCOAT

Saturday, December 13, 2008 9:45 PM

As Joss said in the Visual Companion...(to paraphrase)"we didn't stop making babies." Sheer population pressure can be devastating to the environment. Just look at LA, Beijing, Mumbai, Mexico City etc.

Also, if you look at the population numbers on the new "Map of the 'Verse", the population numbers are astounding. Many, many billions of people. I don't the math, but it looks like many billions left Earth that Was.

Locally, Ft Bragg and Camp Lejuene are in the middle of a baby boomlet that has its peaks about 9 months after a unit returns from Iraq or Afghanistan. The hospitals can barely cope with the number of births and I'm sure other towns near other military bases are having the same "problem".

http://fireflyfaninnc.livejournal.com/

LEMMING

Saturday, December 13, 2008 10:41 PM

You may want to look over at The Map Of The Verse thread over in General Discussions where Andy Gore of QMX and myself offer a few responses.

Oh, and it's 5 stars (a temporarily, in cosmic terms, stable multiple star system...and that came down from Universal. We even had to substantially alter things to accomodate this :-)

One of the things that had to be dealt with was "this is how it is" i.e. how Joss had said things were, in both Firefly and Serenity. He didn't give many details (though we do now know from the BluRay commentary that animal life was mainly transported as embryos/cell banks) Filling in the details was basically where we came in and fanwanked it into something that *could* work. It didn't always necessarily follow logic (look, we'd already had to swallow grav control and terraforming in a matter of decades! :-) but it did fit the information that was canon and also was compatible with info from the Serenity Role Playing Game and even some selected fan fiction (mainly inclusion of certain planet/moon names)

The population thing is dealt with in some more detail in the forthcoming White Paper that Andy mentioned in the Signal interview. This will provide a lot of detail that went into the creation of The Map and hopefully fill in some (not all) of the blanks.

Joss can still turn round one day (we can hope!) and say, "no no no, it's actually like *this*", but until then, this is our (well, QMX's) best attempt at covering as many of the bases as possible.

Nick

AURAPTOR

Saturday, December 13, 2008 11:13 PM

I suppose a big part of it has to do w/ how many left ETW. To me, it seems incomprehensible that very many would be on the ships that made 'The journey'. Even in suspended animation, the use of resources would be massive. And the more folks on board, the bigger the problem. The most plausible scenario would be ships of 100, or maybe 1000, and then hope to ' seed ' outter planets from those who set up shop on the better , inner core planets. But this process would take 1000's of yrs, not the hundreds, which 500 or so which is where the story in the 'verse picks up.

Sure, artificial grav, terraforming a moon or planet in decades, those things seem remarkable, but not overly daunting. My issue is that if took us millions of yrs to populate one planet, how is it that we're over populating 100's of planets in just 500 yrs ?

It is not those who use the term "Islamo-Fascism" who are sullying the name of Islam; it is the Islamo-Fascists. - Dennis Prager

" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "

BYTEMITE

Sunday, December 14, 2008 4:31 AM

My understanding is that there were huge ships known as "arks," bigger even than alliance cruisers, and that many generations lived and died on the ships in transit to the new system.

LEMMING

Sunday, December 14, 2008 2:46 PM

How do humans populate the Verse in around 300 years (approx expansion time following the voyage and terraforming)?

Easy. The maths works.

We didn't (over)populate this planet in a million years. It took much less time. For most of our evolutionary history human population was low because we were hunter gatherers. This changed once we figured out agriculture around 10,000 years ago. The pop went up, but not that significantly. You need to look at the last hundred years or so with the advent of modern medicine to start getting into real increases. In 1800 world pop was just under a billion. In 1900, around one and a half billion. By 1959 3 bilion. We *doubled* population to 6 billion in just 40 years to 1999. Exponential growth (which should have lead to a Malthusian catastrophe by now, but somehow hasn't)
( http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html)

A technological, long lived base population with decent child survival rates would have no problem in cutting that doubling time even further, especially as in the early days of the Verse, large families would be encouraged and be practical (thats how you tame new territory). Birth control would likely be discouaged on newly opened up planets.

It is true though that you have to assume evacuation of around 2 billion from Earth that Was for the 2518 verse pop levels to be remotely feasible in the time available. But those arks were VAST and most of ETW remaining resources would have been bent to the evacuation effort as a matter of species survival. The details unfortunately have been lost in the chaos of those final days... :-)

Nick

MOONDOG

Tuesday, December 23, 2008 7:52 PM

Considering the primary in this system is named "sol" it being called the SOLer system is a big duh! The name seems to be genaric in it's use but it,s not correct.

ANDREWT1000

Monday, July 13, 2009 5:22 PM

I can believe we would make all the same mistakes again.
Have a think about the 'verse Firefly is set in.
In particular -
1)Indentured slaves.
2)The war for Independence.
3)The captain who's pocket Mal lifts some cash from in "The Train Job" talking about enslaving people for terraforming crews, which have a "prodigious death rate", "thicker doors, so everyone stays where they're supposed to be, didn't even have lay in more rations."
4)Settlers dropped off on newly terraformed worlds with "hatchets and blankets", "some of them make it, some of them."
5)Magistrate Higgens talking glibly about "owning people"
6)"The Pax", Paxilon D Hydrochloride, to "make people better"
So, yeah, I can see a corrupt government more concerned about control and power than it's citizens welfare letting things get out of control.

As to the star system, from the map it could be a trinary star system that was settled.
It makes more sense if you think about it.
Around any star there would be an inner and outer limit to which planet you could colonise, even with teraforming.
Look at our system, even with a moon, Venus would be really hot, Mars if it was larger would be goram cold.
A couple of the worlds in Firefly are moons of a gas giant.
A trinary star system would also explain why the colour temperature of "sunlight" was so different on most of the worlds the crew went to.
The other thing that could have been done is to "touch off" a big gas giant like Jupiter, which is a star that didn't quite make it. If you can generate "artificial" gravity then it's not much of an imagination stretch to think about starting up the nuclear fires of a gas giant.

Just a few thoughts I had, but then again, I'm an aspiring science fiction writer trying to get published!
:-)

Shiny! Lets be bad guys!

VILE

Sunday, July 26, 2009 5:41 AM

I don't try to over-think the physics of the 'Verse, that way lies madness. It's definitely a different star system (as people have rightly pointed out, there is only one Solar system and we're living in it). I've heard conflicting stories that it has either one, three or five stars. The rocky planets and moons were teraformed, by which Joss means "magic to make them like Earth".

As to how people, plants and animals took over, that's up to us to figure out. Population increase is the least of my worries, I find it a tad harder to believe that entire ecosystems can be recreated from scratch without going off the rails in completely unexpected ways (google "cane toad", "rainforest restoration", etc.). But that's all good from an RPG viewpoint, more plot hooks for the GM.

As for "gravity manipulation" on a planetary scale ... that kind of technology and people are using revolvers? Don't go there - just don't.

--
Too young to be an Urvile ...

NCBROWNCOAT

Sunday, July 26, 2009 3:20 PM

Thinking of the physics makes my head spin too. I'm more into the stories of the people.

As to weapons, think massive gun control. It seem the Alliance military are the only ones with high tech weapons such as sonic blasters and laser pistols.

Laser weapons are strictly illegal for anyone. Rance Burges obtained one somehow, likely with money greasing the right palms. (per both script and the RPG book is it must be canon).

Conventional weapons are easy to manufacture and ammunition should be easy to come by. Ammunition can even be home made-my Dad went through a phase where he was shooting trap (shooting at clay targets flung by a mechanical arm) and he reloaded his own shells with little problem.

http://fireflyfaninnc.livejournal.com/

VILE

Monday, July 27, 2009 2:09 PM

I guess gun control is an option, although I'm more inclined to go for weapons embargoes, given that gun tech seems to vary in direct proportion to the distance from the Core.

Anyway, that wasn't my main point, I'm just saying that there is no way the level of technology seen in Firefly or Serenity would allow the gravity of entire moons to be manipulated in that way. So, best not to delve too deeply behind the scenes ...

I do have a pet project for the day Mongoose comes out with their star system generation system for Traveller - building a reasonably realistic Firefly star system with as many stars as I can squeeze in there.

--
Too young to be an Urvile ...

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