GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

What happened to Earth?

POSTED BY: DAISYCUTTER
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 04:45
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VIEWED: 11061
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Monday, November 7, 2005 1:19 PM

DAISYCUTTER


Basically what the topic says. What I believe from listening to the prologue to the film is that the Earth is overpopulated and that is why they went to the other star systems to colonize. There is mention of Earth in the firefly series, but there are a few things I want to know.

-Are they in communication with Earth?
-Is Earth an alliance planet?
-Was the Earth destroyed?

I was hoping someone could explain

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Monday, November 7, 2005 2:19 PM

PURPLEYIN


The film and series says its 'used up' which leaves allot to interpretation. The Earth-that-was seems to have a near mythic quality to it in the series, which makes me think they’re not in any form of communication with it. (Depending on where the verses' system is- it would take anywhere between 100 years to hundreds of thousands of years to get a signal, or send a signal to it).

My guess (and several others) is that there was a war. a big one too, with allot of fallout that killed off the planet, so the remaining governments banded together to send terraforming ships to a far away system, and then send millions in vast ships to live there. Although it only mentions Earth, there would probably have been habited asteroids with contained atmospheres, and with enough solar reflectors, and a molten core (to hopefully create a magnetosphere) mars could have been made Earth like, perhaps the first trial run of terraforming. In which case the other inhabited planetoids would have to have been involved in the war.

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Monday, November 7, 2005 2:58 PM

GIANTEVILHEAD


They used it up, they left and they've never looked back.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

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Monday, November 7, 2005 3:42 PM

THUNDAR


In the opening scene you can see Nukes going off in several places around the globe. At least, that's what they looked like to me.

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Monday, November 7, 2005 3:43 PM

GIANTEVILHEAD


Those were not nukes, they were ships blasting off. If they were nukes, it would have been a lot brighter and no one would have been able to escape.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

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Monday, November 7, 2005 4:02 PM

MISBEHAVEN


I agree that to simply say it was "used up" does leave a lot to interpretation; however, the Earth-that-was tag line makes it sound as if it was all but rendered uninhabitable either through war, pollution, over-population....take your pick. The fact that they "found a new solar system" leads me to believe that those that could make the journey left for good, and most likely have no contact with the Earth-that-was.

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Monday, November 7, 2005 4:40 PM

GIANTEVILHEAD


I've written two fan fics about the earth that was and one about the journey to the new worlds. I put them in the Blue Sun room, you can read them if you want.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

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Monday, November 7, 2005 5:27 PM

MISBEHAVEN


What are the titles?

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Monday, November 7, 2005 5:34 PM

GIANTEVILHEAD


Just click on my username and scroll down a bit.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

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Monday, November 7, 2005 6:06 PM

MISBEHAVEN


The stories have a lot of promise. I thought "The Void" was particularly interesting, and the first person perspective and the epsitolary structure is a unique way of communicating the experience.

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Monday, November 7, 2005 8:15 PM

ROCKETJOCK


An excerpt from my upcoming dissertation Building The 'Verse (A Boreyourpantsoff production):

(Note: For brevity’s sake, the term “Earth-That-Was” will be reduced to ETW.)

Except for a brief mention of ETW being “used up” in the opening narrations of the broadcast episodes, all that we know about Earth’s fate comes from two sources.

First, we have the shadow puppet theater narration from Heart of Gold:

A CIRCULAR SHADOW representing Earth-That-Was fills the frame.
NARRATOR
(Chinese)

the Earth up. Barren, she had
little left to offer them.>
Silhouetted shapes appear. SPACESHIPS. They radiate out from the shadow sphere, scatter in all directions. Leave it behind.
NARRATOR
(continuing)
< Swollen of her, they left. And
for the first time since the Great
Burn that birthed her, she was
alone. >
The ships are gone now. A wisp of SMOKE wafts off the sphere, creates a snake of shadow.
NARRATOR
(continuing)
< The Earth cried, and terrible
were her tears. Acid and caustic,
the spawn of the tribes' rape.
They flowed a century. >
The smoke INTENSIFIES, becomes shadowy FLAME.
NARRATOR
(continuing)
< The fire that finally came did so
as a blessing. >
The sphere SMOLDERS now, bits of it breaking up and disintegrating under the intense heat.

(Note that this narrative implies that the departed colonists somehow maintained communication with Sol system for more than a hundred years after departure. This further implies that there was someone left behind to communicate with.)

And second, we have the opening narrative and visuals from the BDM, in which it is stated that the major reason for the Exodus is overpopulation, rather than eco-catastrophe; while the two are not mutually contradictory, the Earth as seen in the opening of Serenity seems lush and verdant, and not grossly polluted or damaged in any manner easily observable from orbit.

Both of these scenarios need to be taken with a large grain of salt. The first is a poetic retelling of a legend, presented without context. We don’t know if the play it was part of was a serious adult historical drama like Shogun or a broad children’s pantomime on the level of Bugs Bunny helping Columbus discover America.

The second tale has to pass through several filters; even if we assume that River Tam’s nightmarish memories of her school days are accurate as to what she was taught in class, the Alliance is notoriously unopposed to journalism slanted in its favor. Perhaps they want to de-emphasize the damage their corporate/national predecessors did to the mother world. Or perhaps they're even telling the truth. Insufficient data exists for an informed opinion.






"She's tore up plenty. But she'll fly true." -- Zoë Washburn

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Tuesday, November 8, 2005 11:45 AM

XEROGRAVITY


There was a disco revival, immediately followed by mass suicide of 2/3rds of the populace. Among the dead were all the farmers and McDonald's frycooks. Humanity's few starving survivors attached bottlerockets to dumpsters and went looking for fastfood in outer space.

XG



Soylent Green is peeeeeopuuuuul. Can I get it supersized?

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Tuesday, November 8, 2005 12:07 PM

DAISYCUTTER


Quote:

Originally posted by XeroGravity:
There was a disco revival, immediately followed by mass suicide of 2/3rds of the populace. Among the dead were all the farmers and McDonald's frycooks. Humanity's few starving survivors attached bottlerockets to dumpsters and went looking for fastfood in outer space.

XG



Soylent Green is peeeeeopuuuuul. Can I get it supersized?



Yeah right. Went to the moon to find out if there really was cheese

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Grenade Ping Pong is pointless as both players loose, unless the grenade is whacked into the crowd, in which case its a lawsuit

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Wednesday, November 9, 2005 7:50 AM

STEVE580


Yeah, it's possible they'll discuss Earth more in Serenity 2 - Wash's Revenge. 'Till then, we'll just have to speculate.

Really, though, it's fairly unimportant; it is no longer of any use, and pretty damned far away to boot.
-Steve

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Wednesday, November 9, 2005 9:43 AM

TENTHCREWMEMBER

Could you please just make it stranger? Stranger. Odder. Could be weirder. More bizarre. How about uncanny?


Quote:

Originally posted by RocketJock:
...the Earth as seen in the opening of Serenity seems lush and verdant, and not grossly polluted or damaged in any manner easily observable from orbit.



Hello? Were you even watching the movie? I have seen hundreds upon thousands of pictures of present day Earth, and not a one, even in the worst cases (such as burning oil fields of Kuwait) looked as awful as Earth does in the opening of Serenity. It is clear that the planet is a mess. Probably the whole system, to a point.

And not just a bio or eco mess, but a political one too. Otherwise they could have just terraformed Mars, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and any number of moons in the SOL system. I would speculate that the new governments of those planets "looked down" on the people of Earth and refused to have anything to do with them, or eachother. OR permaybehaps, the other rocks in this system were not suitable for terraforming, as much as we would have hoped.

Thus the people of Earth, in order to survive, took the technology of Terraforming, and with the former US and China leading the charge (see the Official Visual Companion pg. 12), took the last of their resources, and headed to the nearest star with an inhabitable planet. Fortune smiled and the system was full of worlds to be terraformed, over 70 of 'em (in the series Mal refers to "over 70 earths spinnin', and the meek ain't inherited a one").

Entire lives were born, lived, and died on board these ships as it would take more than a generation to get to their new homes. Joss points this out in the Official Visual Companion (pg. 12)

Of course this could all be lies told by the cabalistic Allied government for so long, that the real truth is gone, or torn apart beyond recognition, or simply forgotten. In Serenity, Mal points out that half of writing history is hiding the truth.

Food for thought.


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Wednesday, November 9, 2005 10:32 AM

ZEEK


I really can't imagine no one being left in the Sol system. The description of Earth being used up doesn't do it for me. If there were no resources left on Earth we'd still be trying to transport resources from somewhere else just to keep Earth humming. It's just the way people are.

If we had teraforming why not hit up mars first?

All I can imagine is that there was overpopulation, polution and to top it off a major war broke loose. The US and China ended up on the losing side and in a last ditch attempt at survival, took off to parts unknown. If they had stayed in system their enemies would have track them down and finished them off. So, the fled to a reasonable distance and started anew.

Such a close brush with total destruction would be a good catalyst for an oppressive government like the Alliance. They don't want that type of war happening again so they meddle. Then the independants start a war just like the Alliance didn't want. So, after they fought and won they tighten their grip even more. The Alliance is afraid and responding with force.

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Wednesday, November 9, 2005 11:49 AM

DAISYCUTTER


I would of imagine it was something like the game Freelancer. In that game the story goes like this.

The Sol system was colonized to an extent, after some sort of disagreement, an inter-system war broke out between the Coalition (Former Soviet union and other eastern cultures) and the Alliance (Japan and Western Cultures).

The alliance found themselves on the losing side of the war. In desperation, four colony ships, named the Rheinland, Kusaki, Bretonia and the Liberty, blasted off from one of Jupiters moons and into the Sirius systems, where they began to flourish and prosper...

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Wednesday, November 9, 2005 6:49 PM

GIANTEVILHEAD


There are only a few places in our solar system that can be terraformed, Mars, Venus, our moon, and a couple of the moons of Jupiter. My guess is that they succeeded in terraforming the moon, got arrogant, tried to terraform Mars and Venus but failed miserably.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 2:45 AM

DAISYCUTTER


Quote:

Originally posted by Giantevilhead:
There are only a few places in our solar system that can be terraformed, Mars, Venus, our moon, and a couple of the moons of Jupiter. My guess is that they succeeded in terraforming the moon, got arrogant, tried to terraform Mars and Venus but failed miserably.




How can you tereform a body that has no atmosphere in the first place, ie Lunar?



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Thursday, November 10, 2005 5:26 AM

PURPLEYIN


Not sure how most the steps would be done, but first you need to make sure the object has enough mass to hold a gas to it, then you need to make sure the core of the object is mainly iron, now melt the core, and introduce enough radioactive matter to keep it nice and hot for a long time. Make sure the core has a different angular momentum to the crust, but that will probably naturally happen, as further from the core, the liquid iron will cool, and become thicker. This rotating motion of the iron core will set up a magnetosphere, which will deflect most the solar wind ( is it still called ‘solar’ wind if its not from Solaris? Does that seem fair?) that would blast away an atmosphere (through ionisation, and evaporation. not 'airflow' or anything like that). Now we have a shielded planetoid that could have an atmosphere, but doesn’t. So now we use atmospheric processors to slowly churn out an atmosphere. Woo! Terraforming half way there!

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 6:07 AM

MER


wshat I'm now realizing is that they left and took so many people with them.
Not everybody in the world can fit in those ships, especially if one of them has material goods in order to use on the set of planets.

I kind of think of Earth kind of like Gundam Wing where they left people there who became poor and diseased as a result. Only a good number of people can fit in a ship to get to the new home planets out in space.

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 7:32 AM

XEROGRAVITY


I so desperately wanna get technical and debate this issue.

In a nutshell, Mars cannot sustain life as it is.

It's mass and it's rate of rotation (relative to what percentage of it's core remains molten), and it's proximity to the gravitational field of the sun makes it unviable to "naturally" support human life. You can't build an atmosphere on that planet because it's electromagnetic field can't maintain a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere conducive to life.

At least not our way of life. Perhaps 3 foot tall invisible green martian men (Mars Needs Women) can survive there (and if they are invisible, who can prove they are green and 3 feet tall to begin with?).

Of course, we could use that secret government reverse-engineered grey alien technology and build human-friendly anti-grav platforms with forcefields maintaining atmospheres we can live in. First and foremost, the government will have to explain to us what all this cattle mutilation and abductee anal probing business was all about. Ain't gonna happen till then.


Vexxing.

XG


No such thing as gravity. The "Earth-that-was" just sucks.

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 12:02 PM

GIANTEVILHEAD


Quote:

Originally posted by DaisyCutter:
How can you tereform a body that has no atmosphere in the first place, ie Lunar?


I'm not an expert in terraforming but I have read that Mercury, Titan, Europa, our Moon, and even Ceres a large asteroid, can be terraformed but it's going to be very hard to accomplish. The thing is that Mars and Venus are too valuable to be the prototypes of terraforming, if they screw up Mars and Venus they're screwed because even if they were able to terraform every other planet/moon in our solar system that's even remotely suitable for terraformation, they would not be able support the number of people that Mars and Venus could plus the living conditions on those other places would really suck.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 1:26 PM

PURPLEYIN


In no way is mercury a viable planet. well.. unless you throw it out of its standard orbit, and shove it to an earth-like radius from the sun.. and then worry about the size issue, and how to keep it in the new orbit.. and hell, i just want to meet those 3 foot tall invisible aliens ive been promised!

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 1:41 PM

GIANTEVILHEAD


Mercury is a viable planet, it just requires technology far superior to what we have. The highest temperature on Mercury is only about 700 Kelvin, to terraform Mercury we would need the technology to constantly retain a super thick layer of white clouds to reflect the sunlight.

"I swallowed a bug." -River Tam

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 4:22 PM

SAMURAIX47


I get that a magnetosphere could shield a planet from solar wind and allow it to retain an atmosphere, but i think gravity has more to do with how much of an atmosphere a planet can have.

Quote:

Originally posted by PurpleYin:
This rotating motion of the iron core will set up a magnetosphere, which will deflect most the solar wind that would blast away an atmosphere (through ionisation, and evaporation. not 'airflow' or anything like that). Now we have a shielded planetoid that could have an atmosphere, but doesn’t. So now we use atmospheric processors to slowly churn out an atmosphere. Woo! Terraforming half way there!



Jaymes

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 5:04 PM

SAMURAIX47


Read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

also read Gerard K. O'Neill's High Frontier
http://www.space-frontier.org/HighFrontier/

Habitable zone
http://www.pbs.org/lifebeyondearth/alone/habitable.html

A planet's gravity has more to do with how much atmosphere a planet can hold... and not the Sun's gravitational field which there is no "proximity" to it as all the planets are held in the Sun's gravitation field. Also the atmosphere can do a lot to protect from harmful solar radiation.

Also the a mjor component of lunar soil is aluminum oxide... part of the ore processing would break the oxygen from the aluminum... the metal can be used for building material and the oxygen used for supplying atmosphere... at first for just the small lunar station.
http://www.xefer.com/2005/06/moon

An easier way to make an atmosphere would be to drop ice chunks, either cometary or Saturn ring material, onto the moon or Mars. The impacts would melt the ice and then you can use simple processes to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen. On Mars as the atmosphere gets thicker it would retain more heat and eventually help melt the frozen water already there. Also as an atmosphere builds up you can get some plant life growing to recycle it and convert the CO2 which Mars has too much of.

Jupiter moons seem to be covered in thick layer of ices. I don't think we'll be able to melt enough of it to get to the solid rock surface, or the possible liquid layer on Europa, but you could get it to the point that it would be like living in Antartica. A cold atmosphere.

Quote:

Originally posted by XeroGravity:
I so desperately wanna get technical and debate this issue.

In a nutshell, Mars cannot sustain life as it is.

It's mass and it's rate of rotation (relative to what percentage of it's core remains molten), and it's proximity to the gravitational field of the sun makes it unviable to "naturally" support human life. You can't build an atmosphere on that planet because it's electromagnetic field can't maintain a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere conducive to life.



Jaymes

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Thursday, November 10, 2005 5:43 PM

SAMURAIX47


Quote:

Originally posted by DaisyCutter:
How can you tereform a body that has no atmosphere in the first place, ie Lunar?



The moon does have a slight atmosphere.
http://www.xefer.com/2005/06/moon

As part of the processing of lunar ore for building materials oxygen can be extracted. The lunar soil is composed mostly of oxides of silicon, aluminum, iron, titanium and calcium.
http://www.permanent.com/l-minera.htm#aluminum

Also we can use water, electrolize it to seperate the hydrogen and oxygen. Not enough water, then we can add more water. Take a cometary fragment or an ice chunk from Saturn's rings and drop it on the moon, or as in one short story the colonists on Mars strapped rockets to it and landed the ice chunk. Earth had been charging $$$ to supply the colony with water, so they found their own.

Jaymes

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Friday, November 11, 2005 8:44 PM

ROCKETJOCK


Quote:

Originally posted by XeroGravity:
I so desperately wanna get technical and debate this issue.

In a nutshell, Mars cannot sustain life as it is.

Of course, we could use that secret government reverse-engineered grey alien technology and build human-friendly anti-grav platforms with forcefields maintaining atmospheres we can live in.



Um, you do understand that we're talking about terraformation in a fictional future whose technology really does include gravity control on a planetary scale? Gravity tech so energy-efficient, in fact, that even with insufficient power for life support, Serenity never lost gravity in "Out of Gas".

In that context, I have no problem at all imagining a successful terraformation of Mars as part of the Firefly backstory. In fact, gravity tech might also explain two of the mysteries of the 'Verse, namely:

1: How can so many planets/moons be terraformed in the same solar system, when the "life belt" of a sun has a relatively narrow range?

and

2: if the planets of Firefly's solar system are varying distances from the same central sun, (as seen in the classroom display in the BDM), then why does that sun have the same apparent size in the sky of every planet/moon we've been shown?

The answer to both, I think, is some kind of Gravity Lens arrangement to funnel solar energy to or away from a planetary body. A side effect could easily be the illusion of the sun being nearer/further that it actually is.

This would, of course, mean terraformations outside of the natural "life belt" wouldn't be stable in the long-term sense without constant maintenance of the lens system. I could see this being a major disadvantage for the Indepentents during the war; if an enemy siezed your lens station a planet's ecosystem could be easily damaged beyond repair.

Joss is on record as saying Mal's homeworld of Shadow was destroyed by orbital attack during the war. Maybe it wasn't missiles.

"Burn the land and boil the sea..."

"Homo Sapiens hasn't had a natural environment since we climbed down out of the trees." -- Robert A. Heinlein

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Saturday, November 12, 2005 2:34 AM

RABBIT2


Quote:

Humanity's few starving survivors attached bottlerockets to dumpsters and went looking for fastfood in outer space.


And became the reavers no doubt.

Seriously though, there is no reason to suppose there are not humans still living in the Solar System, living in underground habitats on the Moon or on a partially terraformed Mars.
There may possibly also be people surviving on Earth, although what we saw of the home planet at the beginning of the movie looked like the probable efects of a century or so`s worth of global warming. It looks like those flashes we see are located over major population centers, suggesting nukes.
Assuming that the `verse of Firely is located at a relatively nearby Sol type star (Tau Ceti or 61 Cygni?) then, if a measure of civilisation exists back home it should be possible to pick up the odd ten or twenty year old radio transmission with a sufficiently powerful radio receiver. But perhaps nobody is looking.

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Saturday, November 12, 2005 3:38 AM

PURPLEYIN


Damn, i never thought about gravity lensing, thats so much better than solar reflectors (that would be shredded by the first meteor shower).
Nice one!

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Saturday, November 12, 2005 4:46 AM

XEROGRAVITY


Rocketjock, U will be known from here-forward as RocketjockStrap unless you do the following...

STUDY ye olde FOLLOWING Texts...

(1) anything giving you a basic concept of the life of Ramanujan (could even be an Encylopedia Galactica entry ~ don't forget to bring a towel ~, just learn who he was cuz all the rest of us wanna figure out what the hell he was talking about)

(1.3 part A) "The Life and not-quite-dead Death of the nearly-dead guy writing this book"
---{author} whatshisname

(2) the penultimate series of math books, MATHTYPE for the Common Man (written by whatsHisName) , study them, know them forwards and backwards --- algebra, geom and trigon ---ometry, and calculus), then learn to do them mentally. Rest of us will build temples worshipping you if you do. We'll fight wars over who could best interpret how or why you did what you did in later generations, but that's beside the point. Learn to do yer math-o-matics in base 2 (binary), base 3, base 8, etc. and every other base (only mentally).

(3) then study any basic high school chemistry book. there will be a pop quiz. What is a an electroid, and what role does it play in the life of an adam's nucleitis? Furthermore, how does the protozoin and neutromonius give the whole adam it's basic gastronomic weight? you will be tested on these issues. of that there can be no doubt.



Then we'll move on to your ABCs of physics and astronomy. If you dare utter the following words... "Einstein", "special", "general", "cheetohs", "Feynman", or "quantum" without having read "Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" (you're new bible of weirdness), you will be immediately outcast from the physical universe of all intelligent lifeforms and made to live on a mostly drab-colored uninhabited planet where your only companion for the rest of eternity (and yes, suicide is not an option) will be a very boring yet-super-intelligent shade of the color blue.

And believe-you-me mister. That particular shade of the color spectrum is an especially boring chatting companion. If you only knew.

await further instructions.

XG

No such thing as gravity. The "Earth-that-was" just sucks.

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 1:31 PM

ROCKETJOCK


Ah, XeroGravity, you are stoned, right?

"She's tore up plenty. But she'll fly true." -- Zoë Washburn

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 4:45 AM

XEROGRAVITY


Stoned? Nah, maybe I sniffed a little too much model glue back in the days (ya I used to make airplane and rockets and hang them from my ceiling with string). I do drink like a fish, if in fact fish actually do drink.

Go read HHGTG.

XG


No such thing as gravity. The "Earth-that-was" just sucks.

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Is Joss Whedon finished as a film maker, is his future destiny to be some muttering version of Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Sean Penn, Charlie Sheen, Danny Glover?
Sun, November 24, 2024 06:15 - 13 posts
Bad writers go on strike, late night talk is doomed
Fri, November 22, 2024 13:49 - 22 posts
Here's how it was.....Do you remember & even mourn the humble beginnings?
Mon, November 18, 2024 09:38 - 13 posts
Where are the Extraterrestrial Civilizations
Sat, November 16, 2024 20:08 - 54 posts
Serenity Rescued by Disney!
Fri, November 15, 2024 00:31 - 5 posts
What is your favourite historical or war film/television show???
Fri, November 8, 2024 07:18 - 37 posts
When did you join poll?
Tue, November 5, 2024 04:28 - 69 posts
Joss was right... Mandarin is the language of the future...
Mon, November 4, 2024 09:19 - 34 posts
Best movie that only a few people know about
Mon, November 4, 2024 07:14 - 118 posts
Halloween
Sun, November 3, 2024 15:21 - 43 posts
Teri Garr, the offbeat comic actor of 'Young Frankenstein' has died
Thu, October 31, 2024 20:20 - 5 posts
Poetry in song
Sat, October 26, 2024 20:16 - 19 posts

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