Technology in the 'verse

POSTED BY: zeke023
UPDATED: Friday, October 31, 2003 03:24
VIEWED: 21912
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ZEKE023

Friday, May 30, 2003 12:51 PM

I'll post this in a new thread so hopefully more people will answer.

I have a few questions about technology in the 'verse.

communication
Are there becons to boost signals over long distances? I thought I heard this. We know that visual communication can only be used up close. Why?

geography
Has anyone come up with an actual citation from the show for this taking place in one solar system or many?

fuel
Anbody catch what they were using for fuel? Doesn't the dead or alive script make reference to a "fission battery"?

that's good for now.

Please respond with any insight.

-Zeke

ARCHER

Friday, May 30, 2003 1:42 PM

Can't speak to the other questions, but dear GOD I hope they clear up the geography (astrography?) of the show.

This whole 'One System, Hundreds of Worlds' thing just drives me nuts.

The show otherwise takes some effort to be technically correct.

SARAHETC

Friday, May 30, 2003 2:33 PM

I don't have links or anything, but the official press packet materials located the 'verse as the Ghost of Jupiter nebula. Type that into Google and you get real astronomy.

http://rao.150m.com/NGC3242.html
http://www.phy.mtu.edu/apod/ap970331.html
http://www.blackskies.com/pnweek4.htm

It appears that the star in the center of the nebula is a white dwarf (or remnant thereof) but it appears blue. There's your blue sun.

As for "hundreds" of planets, I think the opening has a touch of the hyperbole. In a deleted scene of OMR, Mal says "There's more'n seventy little earths spinnin' and the meek have inherited not a one." Or something like that. "More than seventy" would seem to me to be less than 100.

Plus there's the whole terraforming aspect. If it wasn't inhabitable to begin with, the Alliance will make it so, come hell or high water or bowden's malady.

Sarah

I'm a dying breed who still believes, haunted by American dreams. ---Neko Case

THEGN

Friday, May 30, 2003 2:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
communication
Are there becons to boost signals over long distances? I thought I heard this. We know that visual communication can only be used up close. Why?

I don't know about beacons. I would imagine any advanced space-fairing society relying on currently known laws of physics would require some kind of beacon network to communicate over very long distances. As far as visual communication is concerned the only explanation I can give for that is that visual communication requires a more-or-less strong coherent single. Visual communication would very likely be impaired over long distances.

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
geography
Has anyone come up with an actual citation from the show for this taking place in one solar system or many?

As of yet, there is no determining citation from the show, as far as I know. My biggest pet peeve is more with the planets they visit then with their celestial orientation. The fact is that you don’t need hundreds of planets. You only need about a dozen to make almost limitless possibilities. They visit one planet and somehow that one planet is defined almost completely be a single city/location. Which makes no sense to me at all. Only in the 'Train Job' did they make references to more then one major location on a planet, and I really think they need to exploit this more often. Although, seeing that the show is cancelled this may be a moot point.

-----------
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.

HAKEN

Friday, May 30, 2003 2:55 PM

Keep in mind too that "worlds" do not necessarily mean planets. We've seen in Firefly that many of these worlds could be teraformed moons or other celestial objects. At least that's my understanding.

ZEKE023

Friday, May 30, 2003 3:25 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Haken:
Keep in mind too that "worlds" do not necessarily mean planets. We've seen in Firefly that many of these worlds could be teraformed moons or other celestial objects. At least that's my understanding.

Still though - if we go with the aforementioned '70 earths'... there's aren't seventy planets and satelites in our solar system! If we are to use ours as a model - one would think that you could populate a bunch of planets and moons in a thin margin - but anything else would be way too hot or way too cold to support life. This simply cannot take place in one solar system. *shrug* can it?

And, btw, I could have sworn that the beacon idea came from "Out of Gas". I thought they were flying so far out of the way, the were far away from any beacons, hence their delima of communication. Can anybody verify this?

-Zeke

THEGN

Friday, May 30, 2003 3:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Still though - if we go with the aforementioned '70 earths'... there's aren't seventy planets and satelites in our solar system! If we are to use ours as a model - one would think that you could populate a bunch of planets and moons in a thin margin - but anything else would be way too hot or way too cold to support life. This simply cannot take place in one solar system. *shrug* can it?

What you are referring to is known as the "life-zone" of a star. Surrounding the Sun, for instance, there is a region more or less defined by the orbits of Venus and Mars in which a planet may orbit and receive an adequate amount of sunlight for life. This doesn't mean that any planet in this region will, necessarily be habitable (clearly only one is in our case), it simply means that the star your orbiting will not necessarily kill you. Before the cancellation of Firefly I was doing some calculations to determine the maximum number of habitable celestial objects a given star could support.

Although I never finished those calculations I can tell you that I don't believe it's likely that a single star would support 70 earth-like celestial objects, however I think it's possible that a binary system might be able to. It would require at least 4 gas giants however.

There are a lot of features involved in this. It's really a very precarious balancing game. Gas giants have a considerable amount of gravity, and while a Jupiter size planet might be able to support maybe ten to twenty earth-sized objects, it would not be common for such a thing to happen and even less likely that four of such systems to develop in a binary system within the life-zone of that system.

But science fiction is not necessarily about what will happen but about what might happen. So the point is that I do believe it's possible.

-----------
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.

ZEKE023

Friday, May 30, 2003 3:46 PM

wasn't there a post on a different thread where someone mentioned they heard reference to traveling to other systems?

THEGN

Friday, May 30, 2003 4:07 PM

I think so, but this doesn't necessarily mean they were traveling to another star system.

-----------
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.

ZEKE023

Friday, May 30, 2003 5:01 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
I think so, but this doesn't necessarily mean they were traveling to another star system.

I'm not sure what else they would be refering to. Solar Systems are the only thing that comes to mind when I think systems - at least in terms of Sci-fi.

-Zeke

SWITCHY

Friday, May 30, 2003 6:02 PM

Quote:
In a deleted scene of OMR, Mal says "There's more'n seventy little earths spinnin' and the meek have inherited not a one.

I'll ask you nicely. how do you have access to deleted scenes from OMR. HOW!!!!!! sorry
someone was asking about all the locations being one city/village per planet. While it does give a limited view of the globe I don't think it's neccesarily due to lack of scope. It's reasonable to think that colonies on previously uninhabited planets may or may not give birth to more cities depending on the flow of immigration. some planets may only be useful for resources (e.g. Canton)but otherwise aren't much of a destination for settlers.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Friday, May 30, 2003 6:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
I think so, but this doesn't necessarily mean they were traveling to another star system.

I'm not sure what else they would be refering to. Solar Systems are the only thing that comes to mind when I think systems - at least in terms of Sci-fi.

-Zeke

Planetary systems, the earth and moon are a planetary system. Most of the time you wouldn't use that terminology, but if you had places where there were multiple planets with as many moons as Jupiter you might.

The gravity is my only complaint, I don't see any teraforming operation that could change the gravity of a planet.

Temperature might be affected by adding things to the upper atmosphere (upper so you don't kill the people down on the ground.) Global warming might not be a very big deal here (i.e. it wont get so hot that we all die) but if we were working to increase it, and had technology like is shown on firefly it might be possible to trap enough heat to create a livable planet distant from it's sun.

CAPTBAGGYTROUSERS

Friday, May 30, 2003 6:45 PM

Quote:

christhecynic wrote:
Friday, May 30, 2003 08:37

The gravity is my only complaint, I don't see any teraforming operation that could change the gravity of a planet.

Okay, but bear in mind that in "Out of Gas" when serenity has lost all power and life support, Mal is still miraculously walking around (or limping, as the case may be). I think they have got some kind of artificial gravity business we simply haven't got in the here and now. I realize this is a bit of a stretch, but it's one of those times I say to myself "Space... Western... Space.. Western" and I should really just relax.

SARAHETC

Friday, May 30, 2003 7:09 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by switchy:
I'll ask you nicely. how do you have access to deleted scenes from OMR. HOW!!!!!! sorry

It used to be on www.buffyscripts.net but I see that they're no longer there. A google search will take you to a link to that page but there's a 404 error.

Sorry. But don't worry. You'll get to see it soon.

Sarah

I'm a dying breed who still believes, haunted by American dreams. ---Neko Case

THEGN

Friday, May 30, 2003 7:26 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
I'm not sure what else they would be refering to. Solar Systems are the only thing that comes to mind when I think systems - at least in terms of Sci-fi.

Solar system, planetary system, lunar system, sublunar system, subcelestial system. A Solar system is simply a collection of smaller systems.

Quote:
Originally posted by switchy:
someone was asking about all the locations being one city/village per planet. While it does give a limited view of the globe I don't think it's neccesarily due to lack of scope. It's reasonable to think that colonies on previously uninhabited planets may or may not give birth to more cities depending on the flow of immigration. some planets may only be useful for resources (e.g. Canton)but otherwise aren't much of a destination for settlers.

It's not reasonable to think that a planet with a city as large as those depicted on Persephone, for instance, would not themselves have smaller satellite cities/community which would be necessary to supply the larger cities. Cities that size do not exist in a vacuum. Furthermore, it does not make sense that a society advanced enough to build spaceships as large as those depicted by the Alliance Cruisers would have so limited an infrastructure. While your argument might be valid for the less inhabited planets, it is not valid for the "core" planets. I can only logically envision Core planets with dozens or perhaps hundreds of different provinces/countries and thousands of different major cities, and millions of communities. The border planets might have a little more flexibility, but the infrastructure must come from somewhere.

Most importantly, my point was that it is not necessary to have hundreds of planets when a single planet offers so much diversity. Even a small planet would provide enough room for thousands of small villages that would remain almost completely isolated form each other. The point is, based on what we have seen of Firefly so far, it could be set in a universe with only a dozen or so inhabited bodies, and this solves the problem of stuffing solar systems with planets.

It's just a tv show, and there's no reason it must be "reasonable," but I think it would add a lot of depth to the setting to depict these planets as more then just the planet of the episode, like they were in Star Trek. Although, the point may be moot.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
The gravity is my only complaint, I don't see any teraforming operation that could change the gravity of a planet.

Other then adding mass on colossal scale, there is no way of terraforming a planet to have a higher gravity.

-----------
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.

ARCHER

Friday, May 30, 2003 8:40 PM

Multiple star systems would just be so much simpler than trying to contrive an explanation for over seventy habitable bodies in a single system. Seventy-plus inhabitable planets, with all the ones we've seen possessing Earth-type gravity (okay, we understand that as lavish as they went on the sets, constructing a few on the moon and Mars was out of the question, unfortunately.) and other blatantly terrestrial features.

I guess it's partly my own prejuidice at work here. It just seems so unlikely that the human race would leap out and settle just one bloody system, if given the chance.

KNIGHTNAVRO

Friday, May 30, 2003 8:57 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Other then adding mass on colossal scale, there is no way of terraforming a planet to have a higher gravity.

While I generally agree, they clearly had artificial gravity on Serenity. It might be possible, if impractical, to arificially generate artificial gravity for an entire city or planet.

THEGN

Friday, May 30, 2003 9:05 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Archer:
I guess it's partly my own prejuidice at work here. It just seems so unlikely that the human race would leap out and settle just one bloody system, if given the chance.

This sounds like the 'star-trek-syndrome' to me. Because the popular sci-fi shows generally have crews gallivanting around the galaxy, people have decided this must be the most likely scenario.

Current science suggests a future that is somewhat less enthusiastic, however. Current theories of physics suggest that the speed of light is a boundary condition to the universe and that it cannot be broken. Contrary to science fiction pseudo science there is no realistically sound theories of physics that suggest that we will ever move across the universe at faster then light speeds. Any suggestion that it will happen is simply wishful thinking at best.

Given this, we can begin to construct what a 'Firefly-like' space-fairing society might look like. With stars averaging 5-20 light years apart, and mankind limited to a maximum speed of 0.999c, there are two interesting points that come to mind.

First is that man WILL be limited to a small number of solar systems and in fact, the vast majority of all mankind will be isolated to only one solar system, which will invariably lead to a distant future of very differently evolving human societies and possibly different species of man.

Second, any travel between solar systems will require huge vessels and colossally powerful propulsion system, and a crew that is capable and willing to endure the affects of time dilation, which at speeds of 0.999c and distances of 50 light years or more will be very extreme.

Although typically science fiction has avoided certain concepts. In general, you can almost always rely on two axioms of pseudo-science, non-centripetal artificial gravity and faster-then-light travel. So it just amounts to which assumptions you want to make in defining the theme of a show. In the end, we really don't know what the future holds.

-----------
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.

ARCHER

Friday, May 30, 2003 9:18 PM

Still, over seventy inhabited orbs in a single system? Other than proposals for terraforming Mars (there's a school of thought that that is untenable with the difficulty of getting Mars to retain an Earth-type atmosphere.) you end up in every case in our system being one of enclosed domes and/or subterranean construction rather than strolling around on the surface herding cattle.

One concept I hope FF picks up in the future is the concept of Belters, the folks who live off in asteroid colonies.

However, the single-system construct does mean that there are likely other systems totally independent of what we know of as the Firefly 'verse.

Smile when you say Star Trek Syndrome. NCC 1701 no bloody A, B, C, D, or E. ;)

THEGN

Friday, May 30, 2003 9:30 PM

I partially agree, I think both Mars and Venus are terraformable, but unlike scifi, it will require hundreds of years and the affect will not necessarily generate fields of dewy meadows.

But you're right, it is a little unrealistic to suggest that a solar system will have that many habitable celestial bodies. From what I've seen in the show, nothing leads me to believe that there is any need for that many habitable bodies. I think a solar system with 6 to 12 terraformed bodies would be more then sufficient for the story, and it would eliminate the logical difficulties with both faster-then-light travel and super-packed solar systems.

-----------
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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Friday, May 30, 2003 9:32 PM

Actually it is possible to increase (surface) gravity by a decrease size, which is just about as practical as adding mass. It would seem that they have something that can, without power, create a gravity on Serenity, so if they have that maybe they just stick it into a world at equally spaced intervals. Have a drone with a drill and some of this special stuff.

As for multiple systems, it just wouldn’t work. If we assume that there are multiple planets in single orbits, thus minimizing the distance between them we are still left with a fairly long trip to get from one to the next.

One would assume that if we were to up and leave we would pick the place with the most resources, so we would look for a system that would have a very large number of orbiting teraformable celestial bodies. This could happen if there were drastically different starting conditions than our own solar system.

Travel faster than the speed of light is actually possible, but there isn’t enough energy in the world to move a person that way.

(Sorry guys, but it just doesn’t work. Subspace, hyperspace, or whatever you want to call it this time can be created, but it would be enough to power the entire world, almost indefinitely, to move a macroscopic particle for well under a second, well under being many orders of magnitude smaller than.)

ARCHER

Friday, May 30, 2003 9:49 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
I partially agree, I think both Mars and Venus are terraformable, but unlike scifi, it will require hundreds of years and the affect will not necessarily generate fields of dewy meadows.

Out of curiosity, got any online references to the viability of terraforming Venus? I've heard mention of the possibility, but never seen any practical suggestions as to how it could be done.

Thanks.

THEGN

Friday, May 30, 2003 10:21 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Archer:
Out of curiosity, got any online references to the viability of terraforming Venus? I've heard mention of the possibility, but never seen any practical suggestions as to how it could be done.

I don't think anyone has ever really developed in science about how it might be done. There are some authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson who have made some feasible suggestions. Terraforming Venus would be far more difficult then terraforming Mars for the simple reason that, unlike Mars, Venus is currently uninhabitable. We can land on Mars, construct colonies and then terraform it, but Venus would need to be terraformed before we landed on it, which posses a problem.

An interesting idea that has sprung up recently is the use of self-replicating factories to terraform Venus. Robots that collect and refine resources from their surroundings and build versions of themselves, in the process of doing so, they release byproducts that terraform the environment. Over time their numbers build up exponentially therefore the rate terraforming increases exponentially. This is somewhat fanciful, but not entire ridiculous. Most of what factories do today can be completely automated included digging the resources, so all that need to be done is to throw it all in one huge roving vehicle and keep up with it by radio to make sure it stays on track.

As for online references, I don't really know of any. You might try NASA. The idea of self-replicating factories or SRS's can be found in an article in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

-----------
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.

ARCHER

Friday, May 30, 2003 10:26 PM

Yeah, self-replicating machinery isn't that farfetched.

Can we build it to survive the conditions on the surface, though?

Got me all sorts of curious, now.

THEGN

Friday, May 30, 2003 10:35 PM

The surface temperature is high, and I don't know how well they would operate in that environment. Certainly, they would have to be made of steel, because anything less would melt or deform. There has never been any real extensive scientific discussion done on this, so I really don't know to what degree it would work or what would have to be done to make it work. It's a long way in the future though, so there's plenty of time to develop the science for it.

-----------
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.

TALRIUS

Friday, May 30, 2003 10:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by switchy:
I'll ask you nicely. how do you have access to deleted scenes from OMR. HOW!!!!!!

Switchy,

I have the OMR script from Buffyscripts saved on my computer, if you want it. Just e-mail me and put Our Mrs. reynolds in the title or OMR. I also have the other three scripts from that site. Bushwhacked, The Unaired Serenity (With a Dobson scene that wasn't in either of the two versions of the pilot.), and Out of Gas. If you want those too just ask and remember to put the script title in title box otherwise you go out with the spam.

Catch me at: Talrius2@aol.com

ARCHER

Friday, May 30, 2003 10:43 PM

You've also got the factor of high pressure to account for.

Weather gets nasty around those parts, too.

Ah well, as you said it's a ways off in the future, and I probably won't see it. Gorramit.

Thanks for the discussion, though.

DEFENDER82

Saturday, May 31, 2003 1:32 AM

Plus the later trailer voiceovers in Mal's voice speaks of a "Whole new galaxay of earths."

WULFHAWK

Saturday, May 31, 2003 2:30 AM

Durn tootin' thar ain't no way fer a man to go off ta some fur off planet! It'll never happen, mark my words! There is no possible way to travel from one place to another on

WINGS!

don't wanna pee on your parade of pessimism, fellas, but it's gonna happen, probably sooner than we can imagine.

as for Neuman machines (quite an old concept) that use recursion/selfreplication to overcome a problem by sheer numbers, think of deep ocean volcanic vents. Massive pressure, intense heat, no radiated energy except for the heat of the vent. Critters live there quite happily, and might just be able to stand a little transgenetic tinkering to tailor them to Venus. Anyway, after we slam a few icey asteroids into the old girl, all bets are off. And Mars just needs a few tattoos...on the poles, mostly, but a few million acres blackened on the equator will help stir up some weather.

If all it takes is energy to pop open a wormhole, well, that'll probably happen in your lifetime. Our remote little neighborhood has energy density enough to send a considerable mass that way, which, coupled with future mass transmission, might get around a little faster than those pokey photons.

To increase gravity, you increase density. take a tectonicly stable world, say, a moon; add a generous amount of iron alloyed with other elements higher on the periodic table (iridium?); be sure to use considerable force when combining ingredients, since you want the iron to end up at the core. Follow with a bombardment of ice; Oort cloud ice is nice, but gas giant rings will do in a pinch. This will help develop a nice, smooth crust, hiding the marks you made when inserting the iron. Now add a few thousand quantum black holes, but not too many; I suggest adding one hundred at a time until your gravity is as you like it. They will settle in the dense mass in the core and feed there for a few million years.

In conclusion...o hell, it ain't over yet. Just remember, never say never.

tanstaafl

BLUEHOOT

Saturday, May 31, 2003 4:20 AM

Someone mentioned their discontent about the lack of mention of more than one city/town/settlement on each planet/moon/celestial body.

Well Ive been comparing (and further compiling) all the places mentioned in Firefly using all the transcripts I can find and all the sites with the places already listed (including this one, and I give much thanks to the person who did all that!) and watching as many eps as I have and using any other resources out there....so:

Specific mentions on Persephone include Eavesdown Docks, Cadric Pond, Southdown and Bathgate Abbeys. then there is Hancock and Paradisio in the Georgia System (whatever 'system' refers to I'm still not sure of) and then there is Serenity Valley and New Kasmir on Hera.

I think the lack of mentioning multiple places on worlds comes from the fact that there is no need to. There is already a massive amount of places mentioned and just name dropping of more for the sake of name dropping would just make things more cluttered.

On a side note, if the person who compiled the list of places on this site would be so kind to drop me an email, I would like to discuss some things.

SUCCATASH

Saturday, May 31, 2003 4:43 AM

ZEKE023 wrote:
geography: Has anyone come up with an actual citation from the show for this taking place in one solar system or many?

This sort of topic is certainly not my area of expertise, kind of like Maniac's Blue Print thread. My brain doesn't jump for joy when I think of this kind of thing. So if I come across as stupid, that's why.

But here's what I think. "Earth was used up." 100's of new worlds. It seems clear that Firefly involves multiple solar systems.

I'm kind of wondering why the question even needs to be asked. Am I just dumb and don't get all you people's space talk?

KENWOOD

Sunday, June 1, 2003 6:34 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:

Current science suggests a future that is somewhat less enthusiastic, however. Current theories of physics suggest that the speed of light is a boundary condition to the universe and that it cannot be broken. Contrary to science fiction pseudo science there is no realistically sound theories of physics that suggest that we will ever move across the universe at faster then light speeds. Any suggestion that it will happen is simply wishful thinking at best.

Given this, we can begin to construct what a 'Firefly-like' space-fairing society might look like. With stars averaging 5-20 light years apart, and mankind limited to a maximum speed of 0.999c, there are two interesting points that come to mind.

First is that man WILL be limited to a small number of solar systems and in fact, the vast majority of all mankind will be isolated to only one solar system, which will invariably lead to a distant future of very differently evolving human societies and possibly different species of man.

Second, any travel between solar systems will require huge vessels and colossally powerful propulsion system, and a crew that is capable and willing to endure the affects of time dilation, which at speeds of 0.999c and distances of 50 light years or more will be very extreme.

Although typically science fiction has avoided certain concepts. In general, you can almost always rely on two axioms of pseudo-science, non-centripetal artificial gravity and faster-then-light travel. So it just amounts to which assumptions you want to make in defining the theme of a show. In the end, we really don't know what the future holds.

Wrong. If our current understanding of the laws of the universe are correct ( any at least some of it is almost certainly wrong ) "FTL" travel
must be possible. The only problem is the energy required and there are theoretical ways around that. Additionaly if we assume that the Ghost of Jupiter nebula is the setting of Firefly some FLT travel is also required. Although this could be a one shot useing the power of the sun.

The artifical gravity is the real problem. There are some possibilities but nothing set in physics right now that would allow for it very well. The best answer for both of these ( excluding just saying it's FM ) would be exotic matter. Solves the energy problems for both ( assuming that gravity is a function of a single closed loop dimension which has it's own problems ).

Later,

ME.

Don't look back, som'thin' might be gainin' on ya.
Who let the pigs play poker?
Evo Shander was right!

CHRISTHECYNIC

Sunday, June 1, 2003 10:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by KenWood:
Wrong. If our current understanding of the laws of the universe are correct ( any at least some of it is almost certainly wrong ) "FTL" travel
must be possible. The only problem is the energy required and there are theoretical ways around that. Additionaly if we assume that the Ghost of Jupiter nebula is the setting of Firefly some FLT travel is also required. Although this could be a one shot useing the power of the sun.

The artifical gravity is the real problem. There are some possibilities but nothing set in physics right now that would allow for it very well. The best answer for both of these ( excluding just saying it's FM ) would be exotic matter. Solves the energy problems for both ( assuming that gravity is a function of a single closed loop dimension which has it's own problems ).

Later,

ME.

Don't look back, som'thin' might be gainin' on ya.
Who let the pigs play poker?
Evo Shander was right!

We have seen anything in Firefly to suggest FTL, if River could be frozen, so could everyone who got off earth, it could well be 500 years in the conscious future, and the time in transit wasn’t counted because everyone was asleep. Would be interesting when people woke up and found that their loved ones had died hundreds of years ago because the next ship over hit a meteor.

KAYTHRYN

Sunday, June 1, 2003 10:14 PM

Quote:
Posted by Christhecynic:
Would be interesting when people woke up and found that their loved ones had died hundreds of years ago because the next ship over hit a meteor.

I'm thinking you and I differ in our interpretations of the word "interesting"

-------------------------------------
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle

THEGN

Sunday, June 1, 2003 11:00 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by KenWood:
Wrong. If our current understanding of the laws of the universe are correct ( any at least some of it is almost certainly wrong ) "FTL" travel must be possible. The only problem is the energy required and there are theoretical ways around that.

Oh yeah? Well I'd like you to show me the equations that defined the particular law of physics which you claim indicates that faster-then-light travel "must be possible." I don't remember any mention of these laws when I was taking Relativistic Mechanics or Quantum Field Theory in Grad school.

Faster then light travel is only possible if your mass is effectively zero. Otherwise you are bound by Relativity, which clearly states that you cannot travel faster then light, or even at the speed of light. As a massive object travels faster, its mass actually increases. For relatively slow speeds, like those we encounter in our lives, the increase in mass is negligible, but at speeds close to the speed of light, mass begins to increase very quickly with an increase in velocity. With the increase in mass comes an increase in the amount of energy to further accelerate an object. At the speed of light, your mass is essentially infinite, according to Relativity, and you would need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light.

And THAT is what the current laws of physic state.

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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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Sunday, June 1, 2003 11:13 PM

Subspace, or hyperspace, depending on which sci fi show you watch, has been created. As I said before the power needed to transport anything big enough to see makes the creation useless. However the whole reason for making it is to make a region of space with laws of physics in which non-energy particles can be accelerated to, or passed the speed of light.

Further the ability to send information faster then light has been shown, and verified, though not accepted by the community at large. (The information sent was Mozart, though I have forgotten which bit of music.) Because the conversion of mass to energy, and energy to mass is accepted as possible (energy to mass is to my knowledge not verified) it would in theory be possible to convert something to energy, send it faster than the speed of light, and convert it back. I would not use this technology (were it to be created), because if whatever was used to convert back didn’t work I’d have died.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Sunday, June 1, 2003 11:21 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Kaythryn:

I'm thinking you and I differ in our interpretations of the word "interesting"

-------------------------------------
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle

Sorry, didn't see you responded. Interesting has no negative or positive connotations that I know of, so a horrible thing can be interesting just like a good thing or an indifferent one.

THEGN

Monday, June 2, 2003 12:23 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Further the ability to send information faster then light has been shown, and verified, though not accepted by the community at large.

Actually, nothing of the like has ever been verified. There have been some interesting experiments done and some interesting papers have been written on this topic, but nothing as of yet, as far as I know, has ever been verified.

I believe you are making reference to the Enders/Nimtz papers. But the newest of these papers that I know about, are almost 10 years old. And as far as I know there has been no further study done on this. If any of these papers actually verified the non-local transfer of information would you not think that someone would have done something with this knowledge by now? One of the single most groundbreaking laws of physics is just sitting on a shelf somewhere? Where are the major Universities clamoring to repeat the experiment, where's the news frenzy, where's the Nobel Prize? Something like this just doesn't get forgotten. This leads me to believe that the papers themselves probably don't say what you think they say, and I'm pretty certain they don't verify anything, interesting as they may be. Although admittedly, I haven't read them.

People are just a little too quick to jump on the faster then light bandwagon and claim "proof" of faster then light travel. The truth is that there is a lot that has to be bone before anything can be proven. Recently, an astronomer claimed to have found proof of faster then light travel in supernova eject, but that turned out to be basically an illusion of relativity, known as superluminal motion. It wasn't real. There is likely something similar at work in the Enders/Nimtz papers, and that has to be determined.

And what if it is possible to transfer information faster then light? There's no reason to believe that, if such a thing were possible, that it would also mean that faster then light travel of a massive body would also be possible. That is a fallacy of logic. Information and mass are not necessarily the same thing. I know that many scifi people don't like to hear this, but current laws of physics really do seem to be pretty sternly set on Relativity. You can't go throwing it out, every time some paper gets written that seems to oppose it.

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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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Monday, June 2, 2003 12:41 AM

Verified does not mean accepted, it merely means that it has been repeated. This was fairly recent, within the past two years. The scientific community doesn’t dispute that light (what the information had been encoded in) can be sent faster than c (the speed of normal light through a vacuum.) What is disputed is the fact that information encoded in said light will remain.

How does this effect objects with mass? Well it doesn’t. What it does effect is our understanding of acceleration of things at the speed of light. Why that matters is a little more odd. It is possible to change energy into matter, and we have been able to turn matter into energy. If it we could find a way to turn something into energy and then have it decay back into matter then it could be accelerated beyond the speed of light and turned back into matter after, thus creating FTL travel. The big if is whether energy can be converted back to matter, and if it can if it could be done without any technology on the other side.

THEGN

Monday, June 2, 2003 2:34 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Verified does not mean accepted, it merely means that it has been repeated. This was fairly recent, within the past two years. The scientific community doesn’t dispute that light (what the information had been encoded in) can be sent faster than c (the speed of normal light through a vacuum.) What is disputed is the fact that information encoded in said light will remain.

Verified does not mean repeated. Verified means that it has been shown to be true. As far as I know, there is no proof that information can move faster then light. There are a lot of interesting experiments, but nothing of what you are suggesting has been verified. If I am mistaken, then I want to see references to recent papers.

The problem I'm having with what you are saying is that you are essentially wrong according to Quantum theory, if I'm reading you correctly. I think you are jumping to conclusion without understanding the Physics. You seem to be suggesting that you can use quantum teleportation to move faster then the speed of light and quantum theory says you can not. Observable effects cannot propagate faster then light, therefore no information can be sent faster then light. I think you're making your mistake by assuming that Quantum entanglement means faster then light speed. It does not.

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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.

VETERAN

Monday, June 2, 2003 4:19 AM

Quote:
Oh yeah? Well I'd like you to show me the equations that defined the particular law of physics which you claim indicates that faster-then-light travel "must be possible." I don't remember any mention of these laws when I was taking Relativistic Mechanics or Quantum Field Theory in Grad school.

Faster then light travel is only possible if your mass is effectively zero. Otherwise you are bound by Relativity, which clearly states that you cannot travel faster then light, or even at the speed of light.

Man, I'm glad you're out there.

The infinite improbability drive was created by a graduate student who, while sweeping up in the lab one day realized that there must be a finite probablity that there was an infinite improbability drive. He plugged this into a finite probability drive and out popped an infinite improbability drive. Originally it was used to move the undergarments of party hostesses three feet to the left. ...he was eventually hung by a crowd of physicists who decided what they reallyd didn't like was a wise ass, and generally didn't get invited to parties. - Douglas Adams

THEGN

Monday, June 2, 2003 4:30 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Veteran:
The infinite improbability drive was created by a graduate student who, while sweeping up in the lab one day realized that there must be a finite probablity that there was an infinite improbability drive. He plugged this into a finite probability drive and out popped an infinite improbability drive. Originally it was used to move the undergarments of party hostesses three feet to the left. ...he was eventually hung by a crowd of physicists who decided what they reallyd didn't like was a wise ass, and generally didn't get invited to parties. - Douglas Adams

Ha! The Spaceship Heart of Gold, powered by a cup of tea. :D I love Douglas Adams.

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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.

KENWOOD

Monday, June 2, 2003 6:34 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Quote:
Originally posted by KenWood:
Wrong. If our current understanding of the laws of the universe are correct ( any at least some of it is almost certainly wrong ) "FTL" travel must be possible. The only problem is the energy required and there are theoretical ways around that.
Oh yeah? Well I'd like you to show me the equations that defined the particular law of physics which you claim indicates that faster-then-light travel "must be possible." I don't remember any mention of these laws when I was taking Relativistic Mechanics or Quantum Field Theory in Grad school.

Faster then light travel is only possible if your mass is effectively zero. Otherwise you are bound by Relativity, which clearly states that you cannot travel faster then light, or even at the speed of light. As a massive object travels faster, its mass actually increases. For relatively slow speeds, like those we encounter in our lives, the increase in mass is negligible, but at speeds close to the speed of light, mass begins to increase very quickly with an increase in velocity. With the increase in mass comes an increase in the amount of energy to further accelerate an object. At the speed of light, your mass is essentially infinite, according to Relativity, and you would need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light.

And THAT is what the current laws of physic state.

That would be string theory and hyperdimensional physics. As long as you have access to the Plank energy you can create artifical wormholes to effectivly allow FTL travel ( and time travel also ). Technicaly you are correct this is not traveling faster than light. It is instead avoiding the intervening space altogether, but the effect is for real world concerns "FTL". Of course you do need something like the energy output of the sun to pull this off. Sorta presents some engineering problems there, but again there are some theoretical possibilities. This all assumes superstring theory is correct ( a big assumption ), but it is the leading "theory of everything" right now. Actualy membrane theory but its just a refinment with one more dimension.

A mass of zero only allows travel at the speed of light ( photons ). Only something with zero mass can travel at the speed of light and can only travel at that speed. You need negative mass ( the unlikly tackyons ) to travel faster in "normal" space. Actualy I have reversed cause and effect there but it gets the idea across.

Quantum entanglement does not allow information to be sent FTL. Every thoery and experiment to try to get this to work has died on the vine. It seems the universe just doesn't want it to be.

The trick of getting light to go faster than it should is just that. A trick. It's literaly done with smoke and mirrors. Part of it has to do with the fact that light only travels at the "speed of light" in a vacume and part of it comes from tricks with how you measure the light pulse. The peak of the pulse can be shifted and the rise time altered to create the illusion of faster speeds or even arriving before it leaves. Makes for good press but it has no practical effect so far and probably never will. As far as I know nobody on this world has sent data, messages, music, etc. FTL.

This isn't a physics paper here, spelling may be off and liberties have been taken with definitions and some concepts for brevity. It's close enough for government work.

Later,

ME.

Don't look back, som'thin' might be gainin' on ya.
Who let the pigs play poker?
Evo Shander was right!

KENWOOD

Monday, June 2, 2003 6:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:

We have seen anything in Firefly to suggest FTL, if River could be frozen, so could everyone who got off earth, it could well be 500 years in the conscious future, and the time in transit wasn’t counted because everyone was asleep. Would be interesting when people woke up and found that their loved ones had died hundreds of years ago because the next ship over hit a meteor.

Yeah, I thought about this one. They have some sort of cryo/suspended animation so it could have been done that way. If so it would make sense to not count the "lost" years. Just for the psych effect if for no other reason.

Here's another thought I had: Maybe the comonly accepted history in the FF 'verse is a lie. That would account for the awful short time for terraforming and haveing all these populated core worlds. We debate today over the "facts" of history from 50 years ago. With a centralized computer database the "history" of 500 years ago would be very maliable. Just because the main characters in FF believe history went a certain way doesn't make it so.

Later,

ME.

Don't look back, som'thin' might be gainin' on ya.
Who let the pigs play poker?
Evo Shander was right!

CHRISTHECYNIC

Monday, June 2, 2003 7:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Verified does not mean repeated. Verified means that it has been shown to be true.

I understand that you may have trouble believing this, but nothing (when referring to laws of physics) has ever been proven to be true. Not one thing. Zip.

That’s because things can’t be proven to be true, if were able to somehow find out the speed of everything in the universe, and find out all of the speeds that had been and would be, there would still be no way to prove that the speed of light couldn’t be passed. You could say that it never had been or would be, but you couldn’t prove that it was impossible. Something is a law of physics if it is never proven wrong, NOT if it is proven true, because it can’t be proven true.

ver·i·fy
tr.v. ver·i·fied, ver·i·fy·ing, ver·i·fies
1. To prove the truth of by presentation of evidence or testimony; substantiate.
2. To determine or test the accuracy of, as by comparison, investigation, or reference:
3. To confirm
4. To affirm

sub·stan·ti·ate
tr.v. sub·stan·ti·at·ed, sub·stan·ti·at·ing, sub·stan·ti·ates
1. To support with proof or evidence; verify

con·firm
tr.v. con·firmed, con·firm·ing, con·firms
1. To support or establish the certainty or validity of; verify.
2. To make firmer; strengthen

af·firm
v. af·firmed, af·firm·ing, af·firms
v. tr.
1. To declare positively or firmly; maintain to be true.
2. To support or uphold the validity of; confirm.

Note that the main idea is to support with evidence. If you want to show something to be true, how about show that the world is flat. That can be shown to be true, it isn’t true, but it can be shown to be true. If you want to talk about something being verified in a scientific sense it means that experimental results were repeated that showed that in this instance the theory or hypothesis is an accurate predictor of whatever is being tested.

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Ha! The Spaceship Heart of Gold, powered by a cup of tea. :D I love Douglas Adams.

-----------
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.

It was a powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive, the Gold Bail, part of the Wicket Gate. The power of it had nothing to do with a cup of tea. Read the damn books.

The cup of tea was used in the creation of the Infinite Improbability Drive, not the powering of the ship. There are people who haven’t even read the books who know that.

SERGEANTX

Monday, June 2, 2003 7:30 PM

Quote:
I'm kind of wondering why the question even needs to be asked. Am I just dumb and don't get all you people's space talk?

What a spoiled sport. Don't you realize the 'gravity' of this argument? Establishing the internal consistency of the Firefly universe is of utmost importance. Without that, all we're left with is a bunch of stories about a group of people riding around in a boat. Get with the program!

SergeantX

"..and here's to all the dreamers, may our open hearts find rest." -- Nanci Griffith

ZEKE023

Monday, June 2, 2003 7:49 PM

Keep in mind that there ins't going to be a scientific explanation for all of this. It's science-fiction If we invent a lot of technobable to explain evything we'll end up with heisenberg regulators and inertial dampeners. Let's not go there.

The question was meant to be practicle - not technical. I don't think Joss really expected there to be a technical or scientific answer to all of these questions.

I dig the whole tech debate - but really all I wanted was enough to run a game on - not enough to write a Physics book.

Anyone got any insight on how communication works yet?

THEGN

Monday, June 2, 2003 8:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
I understand that you may have trouble believing this, but nothing (when referring to laws of physics) has ever been proven to be true. Not one thing. Zip.

That's very convenient for you, isn't it? So now you can sit and babble on about any speculative prattle at the outskirts of accepted theory and claim it to be verified because in the midst of it all, you have decided that ultimately nothing can be proven. But the reality is that many things in physics have been proven, just not the stuff you're going on and on about. You can't throw out a 100 years of Relativity because you've decided that's not the way you want the universe to work. Relativity and quantum theory have been far more verified then anything you're talking about, and that is fact.

And thank you for looking up "Verify" for me and proving that it does not mean repeated, but rather it means exactly as I said, "shown to be true." String Theory, M Theory ... none of it has been verified. It's all based on wishy washy mathematics that seems to change with the month.

And like I said, if you want to prove me wrong, simply show me the papers that demonstrate that it is possible to travel faster then light. That's all you have to do. So if you're done looking up definition in the dictionary to support my opinion, then post these papers that verify that Relatively is wrong. Otherwise, I can look up my own words in the dictionary. Thanks, anyway.

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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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Monday, June 2, 2003 8:43 PM

Wait, lets see if I got this straight. Einstein, Newton, Hawking and the like were all wrong, except where it agrees with you? How convenient. So when they all said that science couldn’t be proven they were wrong, but when Einstein, our pal here, put forth relativity that is correct, despite the fact that it doesn’t always hold true (look at very small and high gravity)?

You explain that one to me.

Wait. I got it. You’re god here so everything you say goes and all of science that came before is flat out wrong if you say so. Hang on, let me bow down before you.

Shall I sacrifice a lamb? How about a goat?

THEGN

Monday, June 2, 2003 9:01 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Keep in mind that there ins't going to be a scientific explanation for all of this. It's science-fiction If we invent a lot of technobable to explain evything we'll end up with heisenberg regulators and inertial dampeners. Let's not go there.

The question was meant to be practicle - not technical. I don't think Joss really expected there to be a technical or scientific answer to all of these questions.

I dig the whole tech debate - but really all I wanted was enough to run a game on - not enough to write a Physics book.

Anyone got any insight on how communication works yet?

Actually, we seem to have gotten sidetracked on the feasibility of faster then light flight. :) I guess one of my pet peeves is when people start throwing around so-called "proof" of faster then light travel. No such proof actually exists. It is all purely speculative.

There isn't really supposed to be a technical or scientific answer to what we see in Firefly. That's why they call it science fiction instead of science.

Well, I guess it depends on what kind of communication you're talking about? If you are referring to Firefly, then I have no clue, like you said, it's not meant to be real. If one assumes that they are using current laws of physics, then we might assume they are using some kind of radio or microwave signal. These kinds of signals have been used to successfully communicate as far as the outer planets (Neptune, Uranus). So it's quite possible to communicate the length of a solar system quite successfully. If you get into communication further then that, you run into the same barrier as in travel. Light only moves so fast. A communication to another star system would take years for a reply. Although there is some interesting work being done using something called quantum entanglement, in which particles are said to be "entangled" so that an examination of one reveals some identity of the other. For instance, if you took a photon and broke it up into two equal photons, sending one to Mars and the other to Earth. When you, on the Earth, received the particle with a certain polarization, you would know instantly that the particle that arrived at Mars would have an opposite polarization. This is often pleaded as faster-then-light communication, but it really is not. The best way I know to explain it is that if someone took a square piece of paper, cut it in half and sent half of it to you and the other to your brother, when that piece of paper arrived, you would instantly know the shape of your brother's piece if you know that the paper was initially square. There have been some interesting experiments beginning with Aspect and Bell's Inequality, and I'm curious to see what's going to happen in this field. It might be possible that this could be used to produce some kind of instantaneous communication, but this is quite speculative.

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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.

THEGN

Monday, June 2, 2003 9:05 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Wait, lets see if I got this straight. Einstein, Newton, Hawking and the like were all wrong, except where it agrees with you? How convenient. So when they all said that science couldn’t be proven they were wrong, but when Einstein, our pal here, put forth relativity that is correct, despite the fact that it doesn’t always hold true (look at very small and high gravity)?

You explain that one to me.

Wait. I got it. You’re god here so everything you say goes and all of science that came before is flat out wrong if you say so. Hang on, let me bow down before you.

Shall I sacrifice a lamb? How about a goat?

Uh hu. I see. Well do you have those papers yet?

Or I am just supposed to believe that you somehow are above proof? If you say it, it must be true, is that right? ;)

You show me the papers, and then we'll talk. Until then, you and I are really quite done on this topic. Wouldn't you think?

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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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Monday, June 2, 2003 10:04 PM

I've always believed that someone should be able to stand up to their own arguments. When you say that what I have said flies in the face of one hundred years of science that’s a bad thing, when what you say does that’s no problem. Then you move for a counter argument why? The only reason that I can think of is to take attention away from you lack of explanation.

I also think that one person should not have actively stop any others willful ignorance for the second person to take the seriously. Your supposed knowledge on this subject is laughable. I did a search on faster than light information just those words, nothing more. The experiment that I mentioned was the first one mentioned in the first page that came up [in it information was shown to move at four and seven tenths the speed of light].

As I said these results were experimentally verified, and as I tried to explain to you just because something is experimentally verified, or otherwise verified, does not mean that it is true. An example, the theory that the earth was flat was experimentally verified many times, as was the theory that the sun revolved around the earth. Neither of these are true. Further multiple witnesses verified the belief that the Titanic sunk without breaking up (on the surface), the belief that the Titanic broke up on the surface was also verified by multiple witnesses.

Were you to actually care you could have easily looked this up yourself, and found the information. But you chose not to, implying that you do not care who is right and you simply want to argue. On this assumption I wont show you so much as a link to said papers and I will predict that you will say that I’m just making it up.

As far as I am concerned this conversation ended a while ago and you simply haven’t realized yet. I may continue to humor you by responding, or may not. Whether I or not depends largely on the amount of orange juice I have.

HOTFORKAYLEE

Monday, June 2, 2003 10:10 PM

Wait a second, are you saying the earth isn't flat?
Why am I always the last one to find out about these things?

Quote:
"The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest."

ARCHER

Monday, June 2, 2003 10:23 PM

Here we go again with the whole "Earth isn't flat" thing.

LIES!

Zeke- Think the questions about the nature of the 'verse will have to be anwered before we can really expostulate on the communications issue. If we're talking multiple systems, they'd have to have some sort of FTL communications in order to maintain the Cortex.

But we're hung up on the issue of multiple systems vs. one system. Anybody got Joss' phone number laying around?

There ain't nothin' I can't overcome or come to know. So lay your heavy load down on me, strip everything I have away. I am not your prisoner, I am not afraid.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Monday, June 2, 2003 10:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by HotForKaylee:
Wait a second, are you saying the earth isn't flat?
Why am I always the last one to find out about these things?

Quote:
"The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest."

Here we go, this is good conversation.

My father used to be a card-carrying member of the flat earth society. He stopped paying the dues and thus isn’t anymore. Everyone knows the earth is flat, just like everyone knows that at it’s center is a mass of primordial Coca Cola, which makes it go round. This is as obvious as the fact that we really did go to the moon (if it was just a movie it would have had sex and violence.)

CAPTBAGGYTROUSERS

Monday, June 2, 2003 10:50 PM

OOookay, to swing this boat gradually back toward Firefly...

I think there might be something to the idea of ".99% of lightspeed" ships that took Earth to a single solar system, or cluster of nearby solar systems ("...whole new galaxy of Earths..."), then dumped 'em. Sleeper ships which contained frozen passengers from Earth-That-Was might have taken a couple of hundred years to get anywhere, hence the culture represented in the 'Verse might be fairly young.

I have often imagined the strong Old West influence on the characters on Firefly is not accidental, rather a social construction created by displaced people trying to re-affirm their identities. The first American settlers in space all-too-strongly identified themselves as cowboys, as most of the world thinks of us yankees now. After a few generations of ten-gallon hats and half-pretended swagger, it became the accepted norm. It's easy!

I mean, how many of y'all adopt a little drawl when posting to Fireflyfans? Honestly, now?

History repeats the old conceits

THEGN

Monday, June 2, 2003 10:58 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Were you to actually care you could have easily looked this up yourself, and found the information. But you chose not to, implying that you do not care who is right and you simply want to argue. On this assumption I wont show you so much as a link to said papers and I will predict that you will say that I’m just making it up.

What else can I say? You made that bed, not me. You're the one that said that you were basing your opinion on "recent" information. What are you twelve? Clearly, there can't be much of a discussion here, can there?

Just for the record, I am a physicist. I don't rely on the internet for what I know about physics, because I went to school for 10 years to learn that. I'm currently employed with the DoD and doing research in Theoretical Polarimetry. So I know a thing or two about electromagnetic and quantum theory. What can I say, sometimes I'm a little weary of amateur know-it-alls looking something up on the internet and then trying to tell me my business.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
As far as I am concerned this conversation ended a while ago and you simply haven’t realized yet. I may continue to humor you by responding, or may not. Whether I or not depends largely on the amount of orange juice I have.

You've got to be kidding me.

Anyway I'll be waiting for those papers.

-----------
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.

THEGN

Monday, June 2, 2003 11:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by CaptBaggytrousers:
I think there might be something to the idea of ".99% of lightspeed" ships that took Earth to a single solar system, or cluster of nearby solar systems ("...whole new galaxy of Earths..."), then dumped 'em. Sleeper ships which contained frozen passengers from Earth-That-Was might have taken a couple of hundred years to get anywhere, hence the culture represented in the 'Verse might be fairly young.

Excellent. This is what I like to hear. Scifi fans who aren't afraid to think inside the box.

There is a whole wealth of untapped scifi out there that could bring to light some great stories, that don't involve hokey physics. One of the things that I liked about Firefly was that Joss seemed to be trying move away from the whole issue of Star Trek science and develop a more 'real' space opera. Perhaps he could have consulted with some professionals before jumping into the mechanics of the setting, but at least he tried.

Quote:
Originally posted by CaptBaggytrousers:
I have often imagined the strong Old West influence on the characters on Firefly is not accidental, rather a social construction created by displaced people trying to re-affirm their identities. The first American settlers in space all-too-strongly identified themselves as cowboys, as most of the world thinks of us yankees now. After a few generations of ten-gallon hats and half-pretended swagger, it became the accepted norm. It's easy!

I'm not so sure this really need be true however. People seem to be associating this whole cowboy thing with the American West, but in reality, the American West developed the way it did, not because it was American, but because it was primitive. Almost the exact same culture developed in Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico. And similar cultures had already been in existence on the plains of Hungary and the Ukraine and in other parts of the world. The "Old West" was simply an example of a post-modern primitive society, and it existed in one form or another all over the world, where the geography and cultural influences were similar. So I don't think that it would be unusual to expect that a similar post-modern primitive society would develop in the future, given similar circumstances.

Quote:
Originally posted by CaptBaggytrousers:
I mean, how many of y'all adopt a little drawl when posting to Fireflyfans? Honestly, now?

I'm from Alabama, so I might already have the drawl. ;)

-----------
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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 12:11 AM

You know you are right, I am horrible at relaying information, it was 1995. To me that’s recent, but I’m sure that to someone as immature as you it was ages ago.

So lets see where this is going now, you went to school for ten years to learn physics, wow amazing ten years (can anyone else say short amount of time?) To recap, ten years at school and you still make the high school mistake of thinking that relativity and quantum physics are both correct. Where did you go to school? If you don’t believe me, believe Hawking, hell you can be the layman you’ve demonstrated yourself to be and read it in A Brief History of Time, the updated version of said book, or The Universe in a Nut Shell. There you wont have any of the hard physics stuff, so your lack of understanding wont hinder you.

I love the twelve year old comment, that is only one of the things that I base my belief in your immaturity on. Next you’re going to call me a meanie right? Or is it poopy head? Come on, if you went to school for ten years I hope you are at least capable of pretending you’ve put that kind of thing behind you.

You should have also learned in your time in school that any source is good if it can point you to information that you can check the credentials on yourself. The Internet is a very good place to do this as you can look something up, either on a reliable site, or go to the library and look into it on your own. Also if you don’t know about something, as you obviously don’t know about this subject the Internet would be a good thing to check before you assume other people are wrong.

Further if the only education into physics you got was at school then I have definitively wasted my time reading what you had to say as you either just got out of school, or there is a good chance that the parts of what you were taught concerning this area are already out of date. The ability to measure in increments small enough to find out if something in laboratory conditions exceeded the speed of light have only existed since 1993.

THEGN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 12:29 AM

You got those papers yet?

That's what I thought.

Incidentally, what is your background in physics, Einstein? Internet Physics? Theoretical Googling for Physics topics?

-----------
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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 12:46 AM

Are you illiterate? I already told you that I wasn’t going to encourage you ignorance by simply handing you knowledge. You should at least have to type something into a search engine, and preferably go to a library.

Start of with the Heisenberg uncertainly principle. This was done by Werner Heisenberg in 1927

Next look into quantum tunneling, first try Eugene Wigner and his student L. Eisenbud and the work they did at Princeton in 1955

You can take a detour to Steven Chu and Stephen Wong at this point but I would recommend skipping to the 1993 work done by Raymond Chiao and his team at the University of California in Berkeley.

The Mozart thing happened later still, that was a team headed by Nimtz.

Now then if you actually care about being correct you will plug these names into a card catalogue and read what happened. If you are lazy you can plug them into a search engine. In fact I waould wager that you will find multiple pages that have all of their names.

If you do this you will be sending bioelectric impulses through that badly neglected bit of graymatter in your head. It’s called thinking, do it more often. If you don’t you will have done exactly what I expected.

THEGN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 1:13 AM

Some hack is lecturing me on first principles? It's not even first principles though. It's just a brief history of physics topics found on search engines.

Do you even know what the uncertainty principle is? Or did that just pop up while you were googling?

It doesn't really matter though, because the uncertainty principle was eighty years ago. And you're talking about, supposedly, recent physics. You're going to need a little more then basic physics, undergraduate sophomore physics. Some of the concepts that are being thrown around in this thread are way, way beyond that. So here's some introductory physics that you will need to know to understand photon entanglement.

Advanced Quantum Mechanics, J.J. Sakurai.

This is an advanced graduate level book however, and you won't find it on the Internet. But it will give you a pretty good introduction to the concept of relativistic quantum mechanics. It's the book I used. I'm sure for an Einstein like you, it'll be a leisurely read.

Oh by the way, do you have those papers yet? Do you have those papers at all? :)

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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.

MAGUINAN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 1:25 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
You got those papers yet?

That's what I thought.

Incidentally, what is your background in physics, Einstein? Internet Physics? Theoretical Googling for Physics topics?

{sarcasm}You'd better watch out Thegn. If you get too mean, Chris is gonna take his "Quantum Chromodynamics for Dummies" and go home Talrius style (i.e. in three weeks).{/sarcasm}

Seriously, maybe everyone else is being nice to Christhecynic and Talrius, but I'm more of a "don't-let-the-door-hit-you-where-the-good-lord-split-you" kind of a gal myself.

-maguinan "pack your bags, we're going on a guilt trip" the meanie.

----------------
"That brings us to who we need,
A place where we can save
A heart that beats as both siphon and reservoir." -Jeff Buckley

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 1:35 AM

Do you know anything first off I told you it was almost 80 years ago, and I brought you up through 8 years ago, sorry if you can't make it the rest of the way on your own.

The uncertainty principle is the explanation of things such as ground state fluctuations. It states that one can never know both the exact position and velocity. There is also the statement that the product of the uncertainty in position and uncertainty in velocity was always greater than Planck’s constant. Einstein’s thought experiment was meant to disprove this on the basis that information can not be sent faster than the speed of light. The thought experiment was naturally incorrect in it’s conclusions.

Have you learned to read what others say yet? If you do you will discover 1) I have the papers, 2) I have no plans to “give” them to you. 3) I correctly predicted that you would claim that they did not exist, despite the fact that almost negligible effort on your part would give you evidence to the contrary.

Einstein’s IQ was only 13 points higher than mine, and he did incredible things in spite of it. If you think that by sarcastically calling me Einstein it’s going to get anything more out of me than when you called me a twelve year old you are very wrong.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 1:38 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by maguinan:
Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
You got those papers yet?

That's what I thought.

Incidentally, what is your background in physics, Einstein? Internet Physics? Theoretical Googling for Physics topics?

{sarcasm}You'd better watch out Thegn. If you get too mean, Chris is gonna take his "Quantum Chromodynamics for Dummies" and go home Talrius style (i.e. in three weeks).{/sarcasm}

Seriously, maybe everyone else is being nice to Christhecynic and Talrius, but I'm more of a "don't-let-the-door-hit-you-where-the-good-lord-split-you" kind of a gal myself.

-maguinan "pack your bags, we're going on a guilt trip" the meanie.

----------------
"That brings us to who we need,
A place where we can save
A heart that beats as both siphon and reservoir." -Jeff Buckley

Hey at least you're more mature about it than he is (sorry if it's she not he.)

THEGN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 2:04 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Einstein’s IQ was only 13 points higher than mine, and he did incredible things in spite of it. If you think that by sarcastically calling me Einstein it’s going to get anything more out of me than when you called me a twelve year old you are very wrong.

Of course, we all knew you were a genius. Eventually, you had to become a genius in this discussion, didn't you.

Comparing yourself to Einstein is just too much. That takes the cake, man.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Have you learned to read what others say yet? If you do you will discover 1) I have the papers, 2) I have no plans to “give” them to you. 3) I correctly predicted that you would claim that they did not exist, despite the fact that almost negligible effort on your part would give you evidence to the contrary.

Of course you have the fictional papers. You're unwillingness to present these papers is no reason at all to doubt that you have them. You wrote them didn't you? Yeah, that's the ticket! Remember when you won the Nobel Prize for those papers. Wasn't that fun!

I figured you're already comparing yourself to Einstein. At the expense of upsetting your meds, I'll play along. It's worth a few laughs.

I was just joking about calling you twelve, but I'm starting to think I might have actually been right. You're either that or delusional.

-----------
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.

THEGN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 2:08 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by maguinan:
{sarcasm}You'd better watch out Thegn. If you get too mean, Chris is gonna take his "Quantum Chromodynamics for Dummies" and go home Talrius style (i.e. in three weeks).{/sarcasm}

Seriously, maybe everyone else is being nice to Christhecynic and Talrius, but I'm more of a "don't-let-the-door-hit-you-where-the-good-lord-split-you" kind of a gal myself.

HA, That's good. Quantum Chromodynamics for Dummies.

Or The Idiots Guide to Relativistic Field Theory.

-----------
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.

MAGUINAN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 2:50 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
]HA, That's good. Quantum Chromodynamics for Dummies.

Or The Idiots Guide to Relativistic Field Theory.

How about "Teach Yourself Linear and Nonlinear Dirac Equations in 24 hours". That's a good read.

-maguinan

----------------
"That brings us to who we need,
A place where we can save
A heart that beats as both siphon and reservoir." -Jeff Buckley

P.S. This is like "name-dropping" physics nerd style.

JIMMYJAMES

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 6:57 AM

I just want to say something about the gravity on the ship. Well if you've seen "trash" you will have noticed some floating islands that used anti-gravity, so if they have that, then it's quite logical to assume they use that to generate gravity in the ship.

just thought i'd point that out.

--------------------------------------------------
do you know what the chain of command is? it's the chain i go get and beat you with till you understand who's in rutten command here

ARCHER

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 11:44 AM

One thing that strikes me is the incredible stability of the ship. I mean, they pound that thing through atmo, and everybody just stands around like nothing's going on.

So not only do we have some fierce artificial gravity, but we got some massive intertial compensation going on.

Not that I'm asking for any Star Trek TOS camera-tilting effects while everyone grabs something and pretends like they're being rocked or anything.

There ain't nothin' I can't overcome or come to know. So lay your heavy load down on me, strip everything I have away. I am not your prisoner, I am not afraid.

THEGN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 3:59 PM

The artificial gravity thing in Firefly is not really that interesting to me, because it's painfully apparent that it exists because the production companies simply didn't have enough money to simulate accurate artificial gravity or micro- or zero-gravity conditions on TV. This is sort of star trek science and I chunk it up to suspended reality. For that reason, I'm a little weary about going into too much detail on this issue. Anything I say would be fantastic, and its not guaranteed to match with what the producer of the upcoming shows, assuming such upcoming shows.

However, I will point out my biggest problem with this Firefly gravity as it's discussed in this thread. What exactly powers it? On Serenity, one might assume that the engines would generate the needed energy, but on a moon the size of, well, the Moon, am I to believe that the ground is covered in invisible self-powered gravity producing machinery? First of all, how do you generate soch advanced technology over an entire moon, with the (apparent) infrastructure of no more then a couple of primitive villages? And most of all, there is absolutely no presentation of this in the show; this is purely the imagination of the fans. So I have a real problem with this. This kind of thinking will just ruin the show for me. I'd rather just ignore it and hope it goes away.

-----------
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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 6:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Of course, we all knew you were a genius. Eventually, you had to become a genius in this discussion, didn't you.

Comparing yourself to Einstein is just too much. That takes the cake, man.

Actually you compared me to Einstein, I just elaborated based upon the most common estimate of his IQ and pointed that it wasn't that that made him great.

Interestingly you are correct, of the definitions of genius I meet one by 7 points, however this is just stupid as genius is used to refer to Extraordinary intellectual and creative power or extraordinary intellect and talent, note that neither of these is caused by a high IQ.

Your jump from IQ to genius is as archaic as defining idiot as “and inoffensive term referring to people of extreme mental retardation have a mental age below three. Most of the people classified as idiot are unable to learn connected speech.”

When did you go to school? Were they still using these terms then? By the way, when these terms were in wide use the Intelligence Quotient was defined as a person’s mental age, divided by their chronological age, multiplied by one hundred. Now there are ageless IQ tests, so although IQ testing isn’t my strong point I’m guessing that it’s changed, and for this reason the association between genius and IQ is no longer applicable.

By using the IQ-genius association, and the estimate you gave for my age (twelve) we can say that for me to be a genius I would need to have a mental age of 16.8 or greater. Well in that case I am a genius, but somehow I don’t think that that is what you meant, so I urge you again: find out what you’re talking about before you say it.

As to my meds, that is a low thing to attack, now isn't it? Good guess though, dysthymia and chronic fatigue. Sorry, no delusions here.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 6:54 PM

By the way, just got you book, Advanced Quantum Mechanics, J.J. Sakurai.

You're right, light reading. I love calculus, by the way, so it's nice that the first differential equation is on the second page of text. Equation (1.1) Of course it isn’t like that’s a big deal, but some books open with lengthy history of the science introductions, this one had just enough of that.

ZEKE023

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 7:31 PM

*steps in between THEGN and CHRISTHECYNIC to prevent the enevitable fisticuffs*

If we can come up with some specific questions - I can direct them to my friend who's a graduate student in Physics. She's specializing in the study of black holes - I imagine that can relate to what we're talking about in terms of space-time and gravity and such.

(she's hot too - many why did I let that one slip through my fingers... *doh*)

In other news - I'm still going with the executive decision of more than one system. Although it is possible for this to take place in one system - I think it unlikely due to the plethora of terraformable planets. Can we just go with that for the purposes of this conversation?

-Zeke

THEGN

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 7:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
If we can come up with some specific questions - I can direct them to my friend who's a graduate student in Physics. She's specializing in the study of black holes - I imagine that can relate to what we're talking about in terms of space-time and gravity and such.

There aren't really any questions here. I lost interest in that discussion a long time ago, after that it was just funny.

But the important issue is this:

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
she's hot too - many why did I let that one slip through my fingers... *doh*

Really? Tell your friend to come to this board. Female physicists are extremely rare.

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
In other news - I'm still going with the executive decision of more than one system. Although it is possible for this to take place in one system - I think it unlikely due to the plethora of terraformable planets. Can we just go with that for the purposes of this conversation?

You're the boss. What do you want to know?

-----------
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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 8:05 PM

It is time that this stop, but I was looking forward to what he was going to say about the book.

I was wondering if he was going to say that I psychically came up with the fact that the first equation is on the second page of text, and that equation is a differential, or if he thought that I simply made it up and was lucky to be correct. Or, and this is the big or, if he would admit that although he is too lazy to do a search on the Internet when I gave him all of the information that he needed to get it on the first hit, I was willing to go down to the library to familiarize myself with new information rather then hide from it and pretend that it wasn’t real like he did.

Oh well, guess I’ll never know. Should probably return it to the library now (it's not really worth the read from what I can tell.)

CHRISTHECYNIC

Tuesday, June 3, 2003 8:20 PM

I think the one system idea is better if we want to avoid mucking about with the whole FTL travel. But if you prefer multiple, I’ll go with it till we find out for sure one way or the other.

Back to the subject this started with. We have seen that the worlds in the core seem to have water a plenty, but those father out have a western atmosphere (not actual air, just the feel). This could easily be explained if the teraforming creates worlds like this and it requires further teraforming to make it lush and sea like. We can assume that entire worlds are the western like stuff we’ve seen because as Trash shows on worlds where it’s not all that way people don’t live in those bits.

Also assuming that a material that creates gravity (in a way other than mass) were to be found (a graviton emitter perhaps if you follow the graviton theory) then artificial gravity and changing the gravity of moons would be no problem.

The problem is that if this were to be something that was simply laid down that causes of gravity (through mass, the normal way) of earth level (9.8m/s^2) then if it were say a meter below the deck of the ship, when you were up a meter you would be affected by only one fourth of earth gravity. Also a mass to do this would be 146,882,494,005 Kg. Not exactly what you want to tote around in your ship.

It would be likely that something that created gravity via a means other than mass would act like this 147 billion-kilo weight, and thus would weaken as such.

In fact this is a drastic simplification, but I think it shows the problems well.

Note that if it were to cause gravity in all directions it would be indistinguishable from a mass of equal size in terms of gravitational attraction (it would still be a lot easier to move.)

ZEKE023

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 2:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Theign
Really? Tell your friend to come to this board. Female physicists are extremely rare.

I know... I know... the ironic thing about that whole situation was the fact that we had sparks - but I was dating someone else at the time. So things got to a point where I avoided her out of respect for my then current girlfriend - who is the bitch who ended up cheating on me with three people! Irony.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Back to the subject this started with.
Note that if it were to cause gravity in all directions it would be indistinguishable from a mass of equal size in terms of gravitational attraction (it would still be a lot easier to move.)

My interest is in function, not method. Although I agree with you in that some degree of understanding of method is nessisary to deduce function.

That being said - there could be hundred of different ways to create gravity. Did you notice that a part of this ship is rotating? Like the B5 ships? Could that have anything to do with it?

I hate to drive this question into the ground - but beacons? Did I make this up? Can anyone speak to the validity of this?

-Zeke

THEGN

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 3:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
I know... I know... the ironic thing about that whole situation was the fact that we had sparks - but I was dating someone else at the time. So things got to a point where I avoided her out of respect for my then current girlfriend - who is the bitch who ended up cheating on me with three people! Irony.

Yeah, dude. I've been there.

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
I hate to drive this question into the ground - but beacons? Did I make this up? Can anyone speak to the validity of this?

I think I heard someone mention beacons too. A beacon is generally something used for guidance, not necessarily transmission. Usually a beacon would be a device that emits a regular pulse or stream which one might use to recalibrate their coordinates, but there's also no reason why regularly placed beacons might not also contain something like loading coils that might be used to boost a signal. This would relate to what we saw in Out of Gas.

-----------
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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 4:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
My interest is in function, not method. Although I agree with you in that some degree of understanding of method is nessisary to deduce function.

That being said - there could be hundred of different ways to create gravity. Did you notice that a part of this ship is rotating? Like the B5 ships? Could that have anything to do with it?
-Zeke

No, no it couldn't. For that to work the floors would have to be rotating. If you look at B5, the station, you will see that the ground on the station is the hull, which is rotating. This isn’t true for everything so I assume that they have a form of artificial gravity but it was simply more efficient to use rotation.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 4:37 PM

No idea why it posted twice on me.

ZEKE023

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 5:10 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:

No, no it couldn't. For that to work the floors would have to be rotating. If you look at B5, the station, you will see that the ground on the station is the hull, which is rotating. This isn’t true for everything so I assume that they have a form of artificial gravity but it was simply more efficient to use rotation.

Not the B5 station. The cruisers. There was a single rotating segment that supplied gravity. Obviously not through any science we can understand today - but it is a common thread in sci-fi. no?

CHRISTHECYNIC

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 5:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Not the B5 station. The cruisers. There was a single rotating segment that supplied gravity. Obviously not through any science we can understand today - but it is a common thread in sci-fi. no?

I have no idea, I don't think the ever gave a reason why that did what it did what it did, so we can't tell if it would work in firefly. I don't think it was spinning when the power was off in Out of Gas, so that would mean it doesn’t give the gravity (but I am not sure o this point).

JIMMYJAMES

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 7:45 PM

that spinning part of the cruisers in B5 was where all the ships crew was. the front half of the ships was where all the fighters were kept... this is of course my assumption. it would seem to make the most sence. if you've seen 2010 you will notice that ship has that same spinning thing. well that's were all the crew stayed on that ship most of the time and when they were in other parts of the ship there was no gravity, so i'm just assuming that the artists and designers of B5 copied that idea.

and there is no way that little spinning thing on FF creates gravity. i think it's related to the engine. probably even connected to it in some way hence the engine inside rotating. who knows :)

--------------------------------------------------
do you know what the chain of command is? it's the chain i go get and beat you with till you understand who's in rutten command here

THEGN

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 8:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JimmyJames:
and there is no way that little spinning thing on FF creates gravity.

There's no way anything else on that ship creates the gravity we see there either, but if you have to make something up, that sounds good to me. ;)

I liked the way Babylon Five made use of centrifugal motion to simulate gravity. This is really the only realistic way of generating a "gravity-like" environment in zero-g or free fall. Also I liked the way the little ships moved in space, using rotating thrusters and reaction control thrusters. Babylon Five took its share of liberties, after it was essentially fantasy, but the use of realistic science made the fantasy seem very plausible. Although I didn't get a chance to watch much of it. What I saw was good.

-----------
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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 8:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
communication
Are there becons to boost signals over long distances?

In OoG they send out a beacon.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 12:27 PM

beacons
I was thinking more along the lines of beacons from planet to planet in order to boost signals or relay stations to receive signals and send them out again strong.

I'm thinking that FTL radio has to exist from planet to planet (system to system) in order for the cortex not to have a significant amount of lag. Every sci-fi ever has FTL radio (and none of them explain it - except for maybe Star Trek, and they use Tachions).

However, it doesn't seem like the ships have FTL radio - since they need to be really close to somewhere to get good audio and even closer to have visual. This would not be a problem if they could send info faster than light, no?

gravity
JimmyJames - Huh. I never really thought about that... but I think you're probably right. The crew must all be in the spinning part - cause as I recall, it was pretty big.
Nonetheless - the more advanced races in B5 (the vorlons and the membari) had artificial gravity that *just worked*.
I think that firefly gravity is like the later.

engines
so you think that engine is a fission reactor?
They make reference to the Reavers using an "uncontained" engine - and it being suicide. That, to me, screams "fission reactor".
Any thoughts?

-Zeke

PS: Thanks for helping me out with this. You guys rock!

FARADAY

Thursday, June 5, 2003 2:02 PM

Beacons:

Keep in mind that a beacon can be either a physical device or a transmission signal.

So when Mal says "You get that beacon sent?" he could have been talking about a little cry-baby type device -or- he could have been asking whether Wash sent out the SOS signal using the radio. I tend to think he meant the latter, but you could speculate either way.

Also keep in mind that even if you have FTL signals, they're not necessarily limitless. You could still have a signal that degrades over great distances to the point where it's no longer decipherable.

One could speculate that planet-based transmitters such as the ones used for the Cortex are really huge, allowing them to transmit over greater distances than ship-based ones. Each planet (moon, asteroid, whatever) then acts as a repeater, picking up the signal and re-broadcasting it so it goes even further. There could also be strategically-placed deep space repeaters that do the same thing.

If you go with that interpretation, then it's possible to imagine a scenario like what happened in Out of Gas: a ship gets so far away from a planet or repeater satellite that it no longer has access to the Cortex. The only things it can communicate with are ships within the range of its smaller ship-based transmitter, and the chances of there being someone around (since you're out in the middle of nowhere) are very slim.

THEGN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 2:38 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
beacons
I was thinking more along the lines of beacons from planet to planet in order to boost signals or relay stations to receive signals and send them out again strong.

I'm thinking that FTL radio has to exist from planet to planet (system to system) in order for the cortex not to have a significant amount of lag. Every sci-fi ever has FTL radio (and none of them explain it - except for maybe Star Trek, and they use Tachions).

However, it doesn't seem like the ships have FTL radio - since they need to be really close to somewhere to get good audio and even closer to have visual. This would not be a problem if they could send info faster than light, no?

Beacon might not be the right word for what you are talking about, but it's probably a small matter.

On your question of faster the light communication, you're drawing on a lot of assumptions here. A signal does not drop off in intensity because it is moving slower then c; rather it is the geometry of the system that causes the signal to decrease. If such geometry applied to this fictional faster then light communication, one would expect that it would also fall off in intensity similarly. So based on what you're referring to here, one might expect that it would make no difference whether the signal was traveling slower or faster then light. It is the geometry, not the speed of the signal that dictates the decrease intensity. [All other factors being equal.]

(Although technically, the signal couldn't travel slower or faster then light. Light always travels at c, no slower or faster.)

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
engines
so you think that engine is a fission reactor?
They make reference to the Reavers using an "uncontained" engine - and it being suicide. That, to me, screams "fission reactor".
Any thoughts?

I don't know what they mean by "uncontained" nuclear reactor. If the reaction is not contained, then you essentially have a bomb. If by "uncontained" they mean no shielding, then there would not necessarily be an explosion, but the amount of radiation coming off an unshielded nuclear reactor is enough to kill a man very quickly (within hours or minutes), Reavers or otherwise I would guess. So I really don't know what they meant by "uncontained." A nuclear fission reactor is not the only kind of reactor that requires containment. Any kind of nuclear reactor would require some kind of containment.

(Technically, even a wood burning steam engine requires containment. The term is really quite vague.)

-----------
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.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 5:05 PM

The beacon would have to be a physical thing because it is constantly trasmiting, otherwise it wouldn't mess up the other ships for more than a momnet. So it couldn't just be a signal, because it is sending out a singnal.

Becuse of the limited range of their signals it only makes sense to have beacons around all over, if we assume that FTL signals degrade quickly everything we know about the radio makes sense.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 5:46 PM

I agree with all of what has been said.

communication
It seems to me that given the crew's off handed comments and given what we can deduce from the senarios of the episodes (especially OoG) - I think that the are booster stations like FARADAY mentioned above.

And Theign - you're right. All types of communication would degrade over distance.

engine
the engine turns to create electricity (just like a nuclear power plant turns a carbine). I would imagine that's why life support is linked to it - because it needs electricity to work. It needs containment - without whcih it would be "suicide" (not uncomfortable as with a wood stove - but "suicide"). It needs to be refueled (a fusion reactor would need to be refueled every five years or so depending on its size... maybe less frequntly - remember stars are big fusion reactors - and they last billions of years).

arguments for multiple star systems based on Out of Gas
FACT 1: Using information trasmitted by radio waves - a mesage could go one AU in 5 days. The distance between planets in any given system is SIGNIFICANTLY less than one AU. It would only take a matter of hours for radio waves to get to Mars (depending on its current distance from Earth)

FACT 2: A system could only support planets within its life zone. There are only so many planets that can fit in a life zone - and the more there are the less distance is between them.

FACT 3: We have never seen any reason to conclude that any story has taken place under multiple suns (i.e. in a bianary system). Meaning, there is always a nightfall - we never see two suns, etc.

For these facts, I can deduce that if Firefly took place in a single solar system, the plot line of OoG would be a moot point. The odds of them not being able to contact another ship within radio broadcast distance would be astronomical. And that's with the technology of today - not 500 years in the future.

THORNKIN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 6:01 PM

"No, no it couldn't. For that to work the floors would have to be rotating. If you look at B5, the station, you will see that the ground on the station is the hull, which is rotating. This isn’t true for everything so I assume that they have a form of artificial gravity but it was simply more efficient to use rotation."

Babylon 5 was a complex Universe. Some races (like the Centauri) had artificial gravity. Others, like Earthforce, didn't. That is why the station rotates and why the larger ships had a rotating section--to create the effect of gravity. Many of the alien races had it and so their ships could be constructed differently.

THEGN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 6:53 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
FACT 1: Using information trasmitted by radio waves - a mesage could go one AU in 5 days. The distance between planets in any given system is SIGNIFICANTLY less than one AU. It would only take a matter of hours for radio waves to get to Mars (depending on its current distance from Earth)

FACT 2: A system could only support planets within its life zone. There are only so many planets that can fit in a life zone - and the more there are the less distance is between them.

FACT 3: We have never seen any reason to conclude that any story has taken place under multiple suns (i.e. in a bianary system). Meaning, there is always a nightfall - we never see two suns, etc.

For these facts, I can deduce that if Firefly took place in a single solar system, the plot line of OoG would be a moot point. The odds of them not being able to contact another ship within radio broadcast distance would be astronomical. And that's with the technology of today - not 500 years in the future.

Couple of mistakes here. ;)

First of all, a radio signal would travel one AU in about 8.317 minutes.

Second of all, we cannot say that the distance between planets in any given system will be much less then one AU. This is technically incorrect. Most of the time, the distance between most planets in our solar system is more then one AU. But it would actually take only a matter of minutes for a radio signal to reach Mars from Earth; at most, about 20 minutes. The distance between moons of a gas giant, might be less then one AU. But the distances between gas giants would be much larger; probably several AU.

Thirdly, if the Firefly system was a binary system you would not see a double sun and it would be unlikely that nightfall would ever be affected. The distance between two stars in a binary system is generally pretty large. Half a lightyear on the low end, maybe less, to two or three lightyears on the upper end, maybe more. From those kinds of distances the companion star might not even be distinguishable from other stars in the sky.

-----------
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.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:17 PM

THEIGN,
wait - let me think this out. If a radio signal can travel an AU in 8 minutes (give or take) - then it could travel the length of our whole solar system in less than an hour.

No - admitidly, I don't know much about the sizes of solar systems outside of our own - however, how can you explain being anywhere within a soloar system and not being able to contact a planet, or another ship between planets, within a few hours (that was the time right?)

My calculations say that it would take 5.2 hours for a radio transmission to go from the sun to Pluto (if Pluto is 5 billion km away).

Now my math might be a little off - but even if it is - the real question here is:

Can you feasibly design a solar system where you can have so many habitable and teraformable worlds as appear in the show where you could not send a radio signal to a single other habitable world within a few hours?
(keep in mind that ships will be traveling on the shortest courses between habitable worlds at any given time)

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:23 PM

Hey...
can communication be coded on light and shot in a direct laser? Is this how information travels across fiber optics right now? Couldn't communications be aimed at a hub and shot there - and then shot from hub to hub and then finally to a final destination?

This makes more sense than filling up space with radio signals.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:26 PM

Also remember that the life zone around a star does not need to remotely resemble that around our star, and the life zone can be extended through manipulation of things such as atmosphere. It would be possible with enough messing abbot to make a planet as distant from the sun as Pluto habitable, why someone would go through the trouble of messing about that much is beyond me, but it could be done.

Add to this the possibility of a much larger life zone around a hotter star and you have a one-system possibility. Is it one system, they never make that clear, it is clear that there is a center, and that other things rotate around the center (wheel never stops turning, wouldn’t matter to the people on the rim if they weren’t the outside edge of said wheel.) Also we know that the civil war was not intergalactic, but rather interplanetary. Sorry it said intergalactic civil war in there somewhere so I had to respond.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
Add to this the possibility of a much larger life zone around a hotter star and you have a one-system possibility.

but the point is that you would have a to have a life zone three times the size of our whole solar system in order for the plot of Out of Gas to make any sense. I don't think that's possible
And that's not even considering ships passing between planets!

Not only this, but the ship would have to be constantly traveling closer to its destination based on its inertia when the engine gave out. (Ships can't stop moving in space without thrusting in the opposite direction - except in Star Trek Nemisis).

How can you account for that kind of distance in a single system?

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 7:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Can you feasibly design a solar system where you can have so many habitable and teraformable worlds as appear in the show where you could not send a radio signal to a single other habitable world within a few hours?
(keep in mind that ships will be traveling on the shortest courses between habitable worlds at any given time)

They were intentionally getting where they wouldn't be detected, thus they would have aimed for a spot where there were not easy signals. Interference might make radio a bad choice, and light expands thus weakening the signal, unless you were to use a laser (like you said) but that wouldn't work for an SOS because you don't know where to send it. It is conceivable that there would be a place (many places actually) out of the line of sight of laser communications.

All kinds of things cause radio interference, and it might be that in the space of the system high quantitys of EM radiation make radio non viable. There is more but I type so slowly that if I tried there would be a new topic going by then.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 8:02 PM

Does anyone know how far a radio signal would travel before it faded into the background? The distance would of course be relative to the strength and the frequency of the signal, and of course the amount of background. We can assume that a ship would have a very small transmitter compared to planet based things, and of course space based background would have to be taken into account if we were to assume a “loud” area of space. I don’t think they use radio communications on Firefly, but I’m wondering about this.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 8:02 PM

I poseted this question on the fox site - hopefully a cast member can speak to this.

On a side note:
speed of travel between worlds, fuel consumption, communication speed...?

What else is necessary for RPG rules?
(aside from general game mechanics, obviously)

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