Solar System Vs. Galaxy

POSTED BY: MadJack
UPDATED: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 17:41
VIEWED: 40136
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AJ

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 9:15 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Lodril:
What if he has some sort of 'jump' technology that lets him skip trillions of miles in between? Is it 30 million straight he's talking about, or 30 million at sublight/analog travel? FTL might well just avoid the passage of time entirely, in which case he might not count it.

Interesting point. It may be logical to say that it's pure lunacy to travel at FTL within a solar system, as you're more than likely to plough into planets, debris, other ships, etc..., so the necessary approach is to plod through all those millions of miles to get to the edge of a system, jump to the edge of the next, and plod on again.

Although personally I'm still leaning towards the single (large, blue sunned) solar system theory.

HANS

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 1:23 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by LtNOWIS:
Personally I gotta go with the no FTL side, simply because they never show any evidende or references to FTL. Though I gotta say that it would hard to have "sectors," as book says, if all the planets are spinning. So I tend to side with the Star Cluster theory.

The references to sectors and quadrants are a little confusing if they are in an ever-changing solar system. However, it makes sense that they would come up with some geographic system to differentiate different parts of the system. A sector could be a certain degree arc out from the sun, while a quadrant could be a 45 degree "slice" of the orbit that contains a particular planet, or vice versa, or something completely different. Just because they use geographic terms doesn't mean those regions are fixed in space. A sector could be a certain portion of a planet's orbit that rotates around the sun with the planet - think of the tumblers of a lock spinning around a central axis. Thus, when someone is "8 sectors away" they are 8 orbits into (or out of) your current location.

Star clusters sounds like a nice solution, but from everything I've heard if the stars are close enough together that you don't need FTL, then the gravity effects from nearby stars would make planetary orbits unstable. Even if the next star was only 1/10th of a light year away (extremely close in galactic terms) it would still take months at half-lightspeed to reach them. However, I'm not as astrophysicist and may be wrong...

Quote:
Originally posted by LtNOWIS:

But do you think Joss'll ever tell us? I think that even if the series goes on for a couple more seasons, the writers won't resolve this little mystery, to avoid ticking off half the fans. That, and they don't think it's important

Ultimately, it's not important. 99% of why I enjoy the show is the characters, the plots, the drama. However, as an intellectual exercise, it's a fun topic to debate...

Hans

LODRIL

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 2:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Hans:
Star clusters sounds like a nice solution, but from everything I've heard if the stars are close enough together that you don't need FTL, then the gravity effects from nearby stars would make planetary orbits unstable.

Good points all around in your post.

With the unstable gravitation though, that might explain why most of the planets are so much less civilized. If they're only habitable for a few decades before massive earthquakes or something, that would keep the less stable planets less civilized. Big infrastructure just wouldn't be justified if it only lasted a few years.

Another point, which could go towards the single system argument, is that in "Trash" they're on an asteroid that's been terraformed, but it seems to have Earth level gravity. This would point towards normalization of gravity being part of the terraforming process. Serenity obviously has artificial gravity of some kind throughout, and so the technology to effect an entire planet could be within reach. Depending on how much control over gravity can be exerted with their technology, and how expensive it is to do so, it vastly expands the type of worlds that can be settled, since you no longer have to worry about size when considering a potential settlement.

If that's the case, then any boulder floating in space could be terraformed and settled. Even our own solar system might have enough raw surface area to make reasonable colonies.

Of course, that doesn't address the issue of proximity to the sun as an environmental condition. Or any other number of things (tectonics springs to mind). I still lean towards a cluster of close planets, but no argument so far has really been able to rule out anything.

LODRIL

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 2:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Hans:
Star clusters sounds like a nice solution, but from everything I've heard if the stars are close enough together that you don't need FTL, then the gravity effects from nearby stars would make planetary orbits unstable.

Good points all around in your post.

With the unstable gravitation though, that might explain why most of the planets are so much less civilized. If they're only habitable for a few decades before massive earthquakes or something, that would keep the less stable planets less civilized. Big infrastructure just wouldn't be justified if it only lasted a few years.

Another point, which could go towards the single system argument, is that in "Trash" they're on an asteroid that's been terraformed, but it seems to have Earth level gravity. This would point towards normalization of gravity being part of the terraforming process. Serenity obviously has artificial gravity of some kind throughout, and so the technology to effect an entire planet could be within reach. Depending on how much control over gravity can be exerted with their technology, and how expensive it is to do so, it vastly expands the type of worlds that can be settled, since you no longer have to worry about size when considering a potential settlement.

If that's the case, then any boulder floating in space could be terraformed and settled. Even our own solar system might have enough raw surface area to make reasonable colonies.

Of course, that doesn't address the issue of proximity to the sun as an environmental condition. Or any other number of things (tectonics springs to mind). I still lean towards a cluster of close planets, but no argument so far has really been able to rule out anything.

ROCKETJOCK

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 3:17 PM

A question that's been bothering me. If the Alliance (or whatever ancestor of the alliance sponsored the great emmigration) has terraformation technology advanced enough to reshape 70-100 worlds in less that 500 years, then why did they leave Sol system to begin with?

Presumably Earth-that-was has been ruined in some way that isn't easily repairable (radioactive half-lives being what they are), but Sol system is as likely a target for terraformation projects as any other.

Why bother to cross interstellar gulfs to reach a solar system that you're going to have to rebuild anyway, when you have a perfectly good one at your front door?

I'm sure someone will point out that the proto-alliance might not have known the target system was without earthlike worlds until they got there; but logically they must have had the T-Tech before departure; they sure as hell couldn't develop it on the way. And if they had it, why didn't they reshape Mars, Venus, or Europa?

Of course, if the multiple systems hypothesis is correct, this isn't a problem. They speak of "Earth-that-was", not "Sol-System-that-was", after all. Perhaps some of the worlds we saw were right here in home space all along...

Come to think of it, "Ariel" is the name of a moon right here in Sol System...

RocketJock

SAINT JAYNE

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 3:56 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Hans:
Ultimately, it's not important. 99% of why I enjoy the show is the characters, the plots, the drama. However, as an intellectual exercise, it's a fun topic to debate...

It's fun to read, although I don't have much to add. I thought these type of debates always ended with "Stephen Hawking wasn't on the writing team so none of it makes a lick of sense". Who, BTW, I send my best wishes to during his illness.

GROUNDED

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 7:01 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Lodril:

With the unstable gravitation though, that might explain why most of the planets are so much less civilized. If they're only habitable for a few decades before massive earthquakes or something, that would keep the less stable planets less civilized. Big infrastructure just wouldn't be justified if it only lasted a few years.

If the orbits of the planets were erratic they'd have a lot more than earthquakes to worry about! I think the point is that if there was a star cluster then planets wouldn't be able to form stable orbits in the first place.

WYDRAZ

Wednesday, February 25, 2004 3:45 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by RocketJock:
If the Alliance has terraformation technology advanced enough to reshape 70-100 worlds in less that 500 years, then why did they leave Sol system to begin with?

No doubt Mars and Venus are among the Core Worlds, I'd gather.

But there is the sun's "biozone" to consider, which puts most other planets in the system either too close (and too hot) or too far (and too cold) to terraform. Thus, it's time to go exploring other systems!

Once you colonize Mars and Venus, you might need more room in other systems. That probably happened before the Earth was ruined, and where we learned to terraform.

JASONZZZ

Wednesday, February 25, 2004 4:31 AM

Plenty of material in the system. We can toll stuff from the asteroid belt and other places, put them around the LeGrange points in the same orbital path as Earth, viola, start filling up the biozone in exactly the same place where everything else has worked.

Quote:
Originally posted by wydraz:
Quote:
Originally posted by RocketJock:
If the Alliance has terraformation technology advanced enough to reshape 70-100 worlds in less that 500 years, then why did they leave Sol system to begin with?

No doubt Mars and Venus are among the Core Worlds, I'd gather.

But there is the sun's "biozone" to consider, which puts most other planets in the system either too close (and too hot) or too far (and too cold) to terraform. Thus, it's time to go exploring other systems!

Once you colonize Mars and Venus, you might need more room in other systems. That probably happened before the Earth was ruined, and where we learned to terraform.

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NOOCYTE

Wednesday, February 25, 2004 6:01 AM

You know, something's been vexing me on this subject. Please pardon the scanty, too-long-since-being-refreshed layman's knowledge of relativity.

We've been going back and forth on the question of supralight speeds, what with the mass-increases-exponentially-close-to-light-speed (okay, now is when I stop with the hyphens) conundrum.

Buuut...

We already know that ships in the 'verse are able to generate artificial gravity, at least within their own hulls, without the need to spin sections of the ship for centripedal "gravity." Hell, they can even turn it on and off (witness the boxes crashing to the deck near the beginning of "Serenity," when everyone was safe and sound in the airlock). This would, I believe, make it necessary to have some ability to locally alter the curvature of spacetime. Indeed, this is done in such a blase, no-fuss way that no one ever comments on it (except for Kaylee with the buffeting in "The Message"), and it works even when primary power is out (OOG). Incidentally, it would also be robust enough that rich folks with all manner of expensive stuff would choose to live on floaty island estates...and, presumably still get insurance!

So, the question which occurs to me is whether such an ability to essentially alter the gravitational constant in the vicinity of the ship might not in itself constitute a way to get around the light-speed barrier, and so enable interstellar travel without all the fireworks of a Warp Drive (and so escape specific mention as a separate drive system, being a subset of the "grav drive"). The problem of being able to exceed C in flat space would be sidestepped because space would not, strictly speaking, be flat around the ship (this might also address the issue of the folks planetside getting older a lot faster from a ship's crew's perspective, what with them zooming around at near-relativistic speeds all the time. Time dilation for such a well-travelled crew would be a Big Problem. For example, Badger might have aged as much as a few years between "Serenity" and "Shindig!").

So, is there anyone with enough of a knowledge of General Relativity to comment on such wildly speculative stuff?

Keep Flyin'!

Department of Redundancy Department

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