Interstellar or Interplanetary?

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

Friday, October 18, 2002 5:37 PM

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

I'm certainly not disagreeing with you. That might be one of the reasons only poor people want to live on those outer planets in Firefly. I would love it if that could be the subject of a future episode.

GTHING

Friday, October 18, 2002 6:14 PM

When the narration says, "After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths to be terraformed and colonized," they might mean they found a planet that could support life in a solar system that is part of a globular cluster. In a globular cluster, there are between 10,000 and 1,000,000 stars spread over a volume of several 10s to 200 light years in diameter. If we could travel to a cluster of 10,000 stars, we might find hundreds of Earth-like planets. These planets could be terraformed with the terraforming technology we apparently have in the future.

Terraforming Earth-like planets seems more plausible to me than terraforming moons of gas giants. Hence, I'm leaning toward interstellar travel to stars that are relatively close together on Firefly. Still, that doesn't explain the huge gas giant we see at the beginning of "The Train Job".

THEGN

Friday, October 18, 2002 10:24 PM

I don't see any reason why those hundreds of planets can't be spread over several star systems. The narrator may be talking about the number of planets colonized by the earth, not the number of planets readily accessible to the crew of the Serenity. And interstellar travel does not necessarily require faster then light speeds. A vessel that is capable of 0.5 - 0.8 the speed of light would be suitable for feasible interstellar flight as long as the stars were close. Of course individual star systems would still be very isolated, perhaps in much the way Europe was isolated from the Americas, after the Discovery.

On Globular Clusters:
A globular cluster would be a very poor place for planets to form. The stars may be far too densely packed. I doubt, planets would ever begin to form. If you somehow transplanted a planet (hypothetically speaking) the tidal forces between the starts would rip it out of orbit or tear it to crumbs. Some astronomers like to say that the number of stars makes it unlikely that enough heavy elements would be present to form planets, but I'm not a big proponent of the "lack of material" theories. They are essentially cop-out theories, because in the end, we don't know how much heavy material there is in the universe, and there's no way to find out. But if there's any place where such a theory is valid, it's a globular cluster. And recent observations have confirmed that globular clusters seem to be lacking in planets.

One could hypothesis the existence of planets on the outermost stars of a globular cluster, but that might not give you what you're looking for.

Now Open Clusters are a different story. They would be more likely to have life supporting stars and planets

On teraforming planets instead of moons:
It really doesn't matter, whether it's a moon or a planet. It's the size and orbit of a planet, given a habitable star that is important. Whether that "planet" is directly orbiting the star or a larger planet really has nothing to do with the plausibility of teraforming 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.

DELVO

Friday, October 18, 2002 11:51 PM

How far do you have to go from here to find the nearest of these clusters? Too far for STL, I'd bet. And even if the stars are really close together, it's still going to be years between them at less than c... which is just too impractical. There'd be no trade; the most there MIGHT even be at a stretch is some sparse migration of permanent one-way movers.

In the narration, he says that those who lost the war drifted to the outer edges of the system. If you figure he's talking about a solar system, there's just no way. Beyond Saturn, the sun is hardly distinguishable from other stars; at Pluto's range, not at all. There's a REASON why those planets have such low temperatures. You don't have to be very scientific to figure out that farther away from the heat source equals colder. It HAS to be multiple different solar systems. So this quote just has to be either dismissed as an unrecoverable mistake or interpretted some other way, like maybe that "the system" refers to the region of space that humans occupy.

THEGN

Saturday, October 19, 2002 2:46 AM

This is why the idea of a double star seems the most plausible solution. The stars would be close enough that interstellar flight may not be impractical yet increases the number of habitable planets in the system.

The outer edges of solar system could just as likely be an analogy for a certain group of moons further from the star then an inner group. No matter how it's interpreted, you're right that it can't mean the actual outer edges of the solar system in question, at least in reality, but it also doesn’t necessarily have to mean entire other star system either.

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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.

DELVO

Saturday, October 19, 2002 2:51 PM

Quote:
This is why the idea of a double star seems the most plausible solution. The stars would be close enough that interstellar flight may not be impractical yet increases the number of habitable planets in the system.

Unfortunately, we'd still be talking about flight times of weeks or months. How many times in a lifetime does one traveller do that? How much should wee see them age if there's that much inactive travel time between episodes and the show goes on for a few seasons? What cargo is worth that?

THEGN

Saturday, October 19, 2002 3:25 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Delvo:
Unfortunately, we'd still be talking about flight times of weeks or months. How many times in a lifetime does one traveller do that? How much should wee see them age if there's that much inactive travel time between episodes and the show goes on for a few seasons? What cargo is worth that?

Firstly, back 300 or so years ago, travel between China/India, Europe and the Americas, could take months, yet trade was very vibrant. In fact, most travel between those regions was done for trading purposes. It wasn’t unusually for some people to spend years on a sailing vessel to get somewhere. So weeks and months of travel time is well within the plausible range. Don’t underestimate the levels that mankind is willing to go for the almighty dollar.

Secondly, On time dilation:
First, what makes you think that Joss Whedon or any other Firefly writer as the first clue what that is?

Second, even if they did, the effects of time dilation would only be evident from a frame reference stationary relative to the Serenity. Most of the episodes have been told mostly from the same frame reference as the crew of the Serenity. So time dilation wouldn’t necessarily be noticeable at all. And time dilation is really only very evident beyond about 0.7-0.8c. Below that time dilation is more-or-less negligible. At 0.8c time dilation is only about 2 days for every day on the ship.

It would be interesting though if Joss would incorporate time-dilation into Firefly, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I think we’ve already over-thought this show long way back in this thread.

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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.

DELVO

Saturday, October 19, 2002 4:15 PM

Ya, I knew that voyages by ship took a long time, especially back then... but that doesn't make for very good TV! (And with the aging comment, I wasn't saying anything about time dilation, I was just pointing out how much of one's life such long voyages take.)

WEBWARRIOR

Sunday, October 20, 2002 6:09 AM

A solar system can only support only so many planets, and gas"Giants"( and thats the Corect way of describleing it)not only is there rotational factors to considder, but there are planitary factors to consider.
If Earth was one Degree closer to the sun would be talking about another hundred degree, in climet.
This means that if you had only one ordit base oppone the earth orbit you would only be able to support two or three,if lucky four but not Likely!!!
So it's bull that there is only"One Solar" system, that supports more then that number and forget about "hundreds", there are more then one solar system, thats for sure watch the show!!!

REXRAYGUN

Saturday, October 26, 2002 9:50 AM

I think they may have addressed this issue tonight. In the new intro, by Mal instead of Book, they changed it to say that Humans had found a new galaxy, rather than the old intro that said a new solar system.

Just my dos pesos,

Rex!

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