The discussion on weapons used in the series “Firefly” brought up another question. How did these morons get there? (Our crew excepted, of course) The guys at the mud factory, the good ol’ boys buying the cattle, the miners from “the Train Job”.
Surely they didn’t pay to emigrate. Were they deported from other planets as criminals, like Australia? Were they Shanghaied? Did the colonies fail, like mining towns and these people are the result a couple of generations later?
I can’t see anyone wanting to emigrate to a terra formed planet to take up a career as mud techinician.
Just like in real life, there probably wasn’t any one reason for people to become colonists, but there are several major ones that could have contributed:
Promise of a Better Life: “The grass is always greener” syndrome. Life sucks where you live? Emigrate, become a colonist, go to Planet X where the streets are paved with gold!
Promise of Space/Land: Tired of living cramped up with your neighbors close enough to touch? Colonize, and be given free land, and more space than you know what to do with!
Promise of Wealth/Resources: (this is actually covered in the series) Sorry, no more resources left on Earth…you want something, you go somewhere else to find it! Or…hey, Planet B is loaded with gold! Let’s Emigrate and strike it rich!
Promise of Independance: Dang ole’ repressive governments won’t let me do things my way. If only there was a way to get away from them. What’s that? Frontier colony? Independant living? Sign me up!
Look at history, find your answers. 
You’re forgetting that a planet where the chief source of income is mud has one vast advantage over anywhere else:
Kickass mud wrestling.
Surely that would be enough to encourage almost anyone to move there!
But here’s my semi-serious explanation: The border planets are the super-crappy ones, and they’re mostly populated by outlaws, independants, or people who, for one reason or another, can’t or don’t want to be on planets frequented by the Alliance. Remember also, that these planets are still recovering from a big old nasty war, and they may have been a lot nicer before the fightin’… Who knows what weapons the Alliance may have used to make them all dry and dusty? Or maybe they settled for good old fashioned sanctions, to make inhabitants of the border planets a lot poorer than they started out.
Think Blade Runner: “Visit the offworld colonies!”
No, this wouldn’t necessarily be a corporation with an interest in the product exporting its workers to the site (Amalgamated Mud?). It’s quite plausible that shippers a bit more reputable than Captain Reynolds would be willing to offer berths when space was available. “We’re dropping off desalinization parts on Grobneck, but we can stop off at any one of these half-dozen planets that are within a couple of degrees of deviation from that course. If you’re willing to sit off to the side and not make a lot of noise about the fact that the journey takes a month and a half, the ticket costs X.”
Just my speculation. Given the complexity of the universe they created, it’s possible to come up with all sorts of possible scenarios.
Weren’t the Mud Colonists indentured to the “Governor”? (I didn’t watch all that closely.)
I believe that indentured labor was mentioned in the mud factory.
The guys with the sword fight had slaves, did they not?
Remember that we’re talking about a number of generations after the original colonists would have landed.
My ‘picture’ (a guess, of course) of what might have happened was that at some point the resource situation on Earth got bad enough that the various governments undertook a crash program to get humanity off the planet. Once FTL drives were invented, robotic drones were sent out with the equipment to terraform the closest habitable planets.
Once they were ready for people, ‘seed’ colonies were sent out, consisting of a few astronauts and probably a lot of human and animal embryos. A ship would land on a terraformed world, and the handful of astronauts, augmented by lots of automation and power, would begin building a new world. As time went on, embryos were thawed and lots of kids made. And as time went on, high-tech equipment would break down and be replaced with low-tech home-made stuff.
These original colonies would have been pretty much completely cut off from Earth. They had lots of digital material (probably the equivalent of all of Earth’s libraries), but the only equipment they took with them was stuff that could be replaced indigenously.
So, a couple of hundred years pass. Mankind is now much wealthier and higher-tech, and can move between the stars relatively cheaply. The closest terraformed planets have been re-occupied by a spacefaring Earth, and they are the ‘core worlds’. The farthest ones out are the last to be re-established as Earth colonies, but by now they have had enough time to develop their own cultures, politics, and desires, and they don’t want to be ‘assimilated’, especially since by now the Alliance is kind of rotten. These far-flung planets have had to make do with what they could build locally, and have managed to work their own indiginous technological base back up to the steam era, albeit supplemented with lots of really high tech stuff that would have the lowest shipment-cost-to-utility ratio. So they’ve got high tech computers, medicines, and power plants, but low tech houses, streets, and a mix of high and low tech transportation.
War breaks out between the alliance and these older, more established, lower-tech worlds. The alliance wins, strips them of any high-tech weaponry they might have, puts strict import-export controls on them to keep them suppressed, and ships like the Firefly spring up to address the growing black market that trade controls always cause.
How’s that?
To harp on Stagecoach again, I wonder if some of them aren’t fleeing alliance control.
They did go into this a bit on the “premiere”. Zoe and Mal describe a process whereby after worlds are terraformed so that they have breathable atmospheres and water and so on, settlers are “dumped” on them with “blankets, hatchets, and maybe a herd”. This tends to use up settlers, but presumably the Alliance finds it an efficient way to populate new worlds.
Or maybe it’s not about using up settlers, but rather a solution to overpopulation.
It’s not hard to imagine a populous country like China resorting to forcible relocation of its populace. Or at least, giving good incentives to immigrate off-world.
Perhaps there is a compromise on the cost of Transportation and sending supplies.
The crew mentioned how much fuel cost several times, yet one can make money smuggling cows. The distance would also be important since that would determine the amount of fuel.
How much stuff did the British give people when they were sentenced to Transportation to Australia?
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but is part of the premise of the OP that people wouldn’t willingly become ranchers or miners?
Tengu: Oh no, not at all. The miners in the Train Job certainly fit that situation. The guys buying the cattle though, I would neither hire to kick manure nor spend money on to Transport.
Alrighty - so you’re asking why the apparently sub-par employees are there. Check.