Brave new worlds... In Flat-pack. by Mark

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

Brave new worlds... In Flat-pack.

POSTED BY: MARK
UPDATED: Friday, November 15, 2002 11:03
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Thursday, November 14, 2002 2:10 PM

I've been thinking a lot about the terraforming of the 'Hundreds of new Earths' that are mentioned in Firefly... If we assume that the Earth is 'Used up' around a hundred years from today, and it takes us another hundred years to migrate to our new Earth and start Terraforming the new worlds in the local space, then that gives us about two hundred and fifty years to get up and going before we've got things like the war to unite the planets going on. Maybe trim it down to one hundred and fifty years of terraforming owing to large numbers of imponderables... But the difference between two-fifty and one-fifty isn' that much in terms of terraforming as we understand it today, so I think we have to assume some kind of major break-through in biotech not too far in the future.

Any planet or moon to be terraformed is going to have to have almost Earth-Standard gravity, be in a star's liquid water/life zone, have tolerable levels of free toxins in the biosphere (Unlike David Weber's 'Grayson') and at least some kind of edible flora.

If we look at Canton, from Jayne's Town then we can see several points about Terraforming. For one thing the atmosphere stank. Now we don't know if that was down to the mud or if the planet just naturally smelt like that, but I'd put odds on it just being a planet with a VERY active sulphur cycle. Then there're the Bamboo thickets. Bamboo grows fast, and it's an excellent all purpose material. Structural, strong, flexible and it floats. If that was one of the principle terraforming introductions to a world then it might help explain the prvelance of Chinese culture in the future... It's been embraced because it contains so many traits that lend themselves to space survival. Bamboo and rice paddies... Very oriental sights and also very easy to produce on other worlds.

So, how do the planets get Terraformed? I'm guesing the Alliance has several terraforming ships, who's purpose it is to journey from system to system in search of habitable worlds and then dumping engineered bacteria, seedlings and various agents into the biosphere. Not to mention checking for homebrew viruses, bacteria and local resources. After the planet's well on its way, they probably slap a satelite beacon in orbit and report back to base.

This relates to another thread, where one chap said he thought colonies would generally be quite well supplied and equipped... I think some would. Probably the Alliance looks over the lists of new worlds and says 'Right! We'll have this, this and this'. Those worlds get ships full of alliance colonists loaded to the gills with the best homesteading gear money can buy and full military backup for any emergency. Then you have the outer planets... The ones that the Alliance decided it didn't want. They are 'Generously' handed out free by the big A to anyone who wants to take a pop at it. But anyone who does, does so without any support but that which they haul with them. Hence the rather low-tech beginnings. Also hence the need for advanced food supplies and expensive gear, as seen in 'Serenity' and 'Bushwhacked'. These unofficial colonists turn up on a planet knowing that it will have some plants they can eat, water they can drink, no major sicknesses readily apparent and that's about it. Everything else is pot luck.

These colonys are going to have to drag themselves up out of the gutter. Mining would be their first, most obvious, task... Producing a decent quantity of minerals would encourage freighters to stop by. As they stop by, more people are going to come and more money is going to enter the settlement until eventually they have enough to quit mining and set themselves up with a higher paying, higher tech planetary industry. This means that most planets are going to start out as mining colonies. That also explains the necessity of Mag-Lev trains... For hauling ore to spaceports and processing centres. Easier to lay a few rail lines than a heavy duty road network.

Slipping away from the topic slightly... I've been wondering about how Serenity works. Regarding their puttering around the worlds. Could it be that flying between systems takes weeks, so instead Mal intends to work around one star-system for a season or two and then, when it gets too hot there, they slip away to the next system and work their planets? That would be why we haven't really seen an interstellar drive yet and yet we have seen Persephone twice.

Well, I think that's all the ranting for the time being... I'll probably remember something I forgot as I hit send, but never mind. I can always post again later.

Twelve spheres of unendurable brightness spalled the velvety blackness of space.
The silence on Lester Tourville's flag bridge was absolute
And then the spell was broken as Shannon Foraker looked up from her console from where she had just sent a seemingly innocent command to the main computers of State Security's finest Superdreadnoughts.
"Oops." She said.

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Thursday, November 14, 2002 5:19 PM

DOCEBO

I think it has been mentioned before and in the VO (although there is some contradiction in the series) that all the terraformed planets/moons are in one system. Probably planets like Jupiter that have a lot of moons. If the planet were in the "zone" like I believe some of the newly discovered planents are then the moons such as the one jupiter has should be terraformable. most of the Jup. moons have atmo and water already if I remeber my astronomy correctly. Anyway if ya got a few Jup like planets in one system then u got plenty of moons to colonize.

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Thursday, November 14, 2002 5:32 PM

HOBBES

Yeah there are lots of moons around gas giants but that doesn't mean there good places to live. Just from reading around on the site there are better qualified people out there but my quick summary is here first :)

1) Gravity is too low. Humans need gravity, that's one reason Mars (a planet) would be bad to colonize.

2) Keeping that atmosphere. Low gravity, thin atmosphere. Can be thickened but with low gravity it will just keep on going away.

3) I'm sure there are more but I'm tired and that's all I can think off.

Of course the simple solution (which we know they have from their spaceships) is gravity generators. Whether or not they are large-scale enough to handle moons is another matter.

Reference threads:
Intersteller vs. Interplanatery
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=2&t=729

Colonizing Mars
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=11&t=840

Faster than Light
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=2&t=463

I know this isn't Realistic
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=2&t=650

-------------------------------------------------
May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May you be in heaven an hour before
The Devil knows you’re dead.

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Friday, November 15, 2002 5:00 AM

DOCEBO

Here is some "science" that says some of jupiters moons probably have water and even some have at least some type of atmo.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2290005.stm

Io also has a thin atmosphere of volcanic gases. The atmosphere is thicker above active volcanoes and patches of evaporating ice. The outer region of the atmosphere is gradually escaping into space.

It also saw deep canyons and broad, smooth plains created by the motions of Ganymede's crust — like the motions of the continents on Earth. And it detected hints of a thin, cold atmosphere.

Ok so i was kinda off on the whole atmo thing /shrug

-Docebo

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Friday, November 15, 2002 8:17 AM

MARK

I think the guys and gals at Fox finally realised that it would be kinda difficult to fit hundreds of life bearing planets into a single system, hence the modification of the VO in the latest Eps. Now Mal's reading it, they're saying a whole new Galaxy, which I think might be going too far in the other direction, but I'm more prepared to accept that they moved to Andromeda rather than to a Trinary+ system with hundreds of habitable moons.

By the way, a smaller or larger planet than Earth can have Earth-like gravity as long as it's dense enough. So a small moon might contain larger proportions of heavy metals and have the same Gravitational pull as a huge, low density world.

Twelve spheres of unendurable brightness spalled the velvety blackness of space.
The silence on Lester Tourville's flag bridge was absolute
And then the spell was broken as Shannon Foraker looked up from her console from where she had just sent a seemingly innocent command to the main computers of State Security's finest Superdreadnoughts.
"Oops." She said.

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Friday, November 15, 2002 11:03 AM

MARK

Quote:

The whole concept of the other galaxy is stupid. Why would anyone think that anyone would need to travel to another galaxy to find a habitable planet? First, the laws of physics and probability are going to be the same in that galaxy as they are in this galaxy, so what makes anyone think that there will be larger number of earth-like bodies there then here? Second, there are as many as a hundred billion stars in this galaxy. Are we to believe they exhausted them all in 500 years and had to find another galaxy? Third the nearest galaxy is 2 million light years away. That's 19,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers. How did they get there and why would they even contemplate travelling that far if they still had planets in this galaxy to travel too? I would far prefer a trinary star with a disproportionate number of planets and moons to this fantastical plot. But no one asked me.

Now, I must admit, the oddness of going all the way to another Galaxy in search of a new home (not necessarily Andromeda) had occured to me. It seemed silly... But then I had a brainwave. This mass migration is going to happen some time in the next two to three hundred years by my calculations, which means that somehow we have to find a method of shipping 6/7 BILLION people across interstellar distances of more than ten lightyears in a short period of time... And I don't think that could be done unless...

What if, the first development of interstellar drive technology wan't a drive so much as the understanding of wormholes. Currently, we have quite a bit of math describing M-theory and eleven dimensional space and wormholes themelves but we've only found one example of travelling faster than light and that was some kind of communication between entangled quantum particles. So what if our first discovery is naturally occuring wormholes that we can transit? If we found one, it's HIGHLY unlikely that it would pop-out right next to another Earth-type world... But if we found a LOT of them, then the chances are that one might empty out a lot less than ten lightyears from a star system we could use, but since it's a natural wormhole, its exit point could be on the other side of the Universe and we wouldn't have a say in the matter.

So, that's my theory... In a hundred years or so, Earth is used up, but luckily enough, scientists have discovered wormholes and a way to transit them safely from near Earth. Hundreds, maybe even millions, are found and explored, only to be rejected as unsuitable. Non-Earth type planets in the nearest system, unfavourable stellar phenomenon or atmospheric conditions or even the hole emerging into inter-galactic space. But eventually we find one that opens into a star system with a Sol type star, maybe two habitable planets, or one and a nice looking moon, and then we start shuttling people there en-masse. Probably have a few plagues, wars and sundry bunfights during the crossing, reducing the migrant population and eventually setting everyone up on our new world. We spend fifty to a hundred years rebuilding the sciences and industry to what we had and more, and then we're off terraforming and colonising like crazy. Then, a hundred and fifty years on, we've got independants, hundreds of worlds, interstellar drive, cargo ships and the makings of the first Interstellar war to unite the planets.

The timetable just about fits, if you're willing to accept my version of events.

Which you probably shouldn't... Not, at least, without a LARGE grain of salt.

Still... Not a bad try.

Twelve spheres of unendurable brightness spalled the velvety blackness of space.
The silence on Lester Tourville's flag bridge was absolute
And then the spell was broken as Shannon Foraker looked up from her console from where she had just sent a seemingly innocent command to the main computers of State Security's finest Superdreadnoughts.
"Oops." She said.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

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