Humans use Earth up. Find another solar system. (collect underpants)
???
We’ve got hundreds of terraformed Earth-like planets! (Profit!)
Step two still has me wondering, and I haven’t heard anything that precludes the fact that humans developed FTL and about the time we found this new solar system, we also set about colonizing all the solar systems around it, and then divided known space into quadrants, with that first star being the “core” system, the planets around that making up the additional core systems, the outlying areas around that being the fringe worlds, and the areas still beyond being the edges of the galaxy where the Reavers went and subsequently lost their minds & civilization.
What do you wonder about? How it could happen? How about like this:
Earth is slowly dying, and in recognition of that it sends probes out to local star systems that telescopic search has shown to have candidate planets. The probes ‘seed’ all the planets with terraforming nano-machines. One star system around a very large, very hot star has a huge ‘habitable zone’ with ten rocky planets and several gas giants that have dozens of moons each. The terraforming works splendedly, and when the time comes the Earth ships out a colony ship with hundreds of people and tens of thousands of frozen embryos. We know the Firefly ‘verse’ has very advanced propulsion technology and suspended animation, so they can send out hundreds or thousands of colonists. Eventually they arrive, and cruise through the system ‘seeding’ all the terraformed worlds with maybe a dozen people and thousands of embryos. They each get a standard colony starter kit, and they’re on their own.
Eventually, the colony ship picks the nicest of the core worlds, and settles there. Eventually, eath sends out supply ship after supply ship to re-stock the ‘core worlds’ with technology, culture, etc. With a huge headstart, the core worlds rapidly regain Earth levels of technology. Maybe the plan all along is to re-start industrializtion on the core worlds then head out to the colonies and build them up as well. But the Alliance takes over, and it never happens.
Eventually, the outer rim worlds begin to gain technology as they trade for it or slowly develop it on their own. Some have more resources than others, and have moved farther along. Others are totally backwards.
Wait a minute. What’s this nano-machine terraforming stuff? Wouldn’t seeding a planet with nano-machines be just like seeding a planet with bacteria & algae? Wouldn’t that take several hundred thousand years to even create a semi-breathable atmosphere, assuming you were starting out with a more or less primordial Earth-like planet to begin with?
How did they manage to terraform 100’s of planets within 500 years?
I don’t know - can self replicating nanomachines terraform a planet faster than nature can? Why not? There’s nothing physically impossible about it - it just requires engineering we don’t know how to do.
And Firefly is set 500 years in the future. Maybe the nano-machines were sent out 50 years from now, and had several hundred years to work their magic before the colonists showed up. And anyway, terraforming is written right into the Firefly universe, so they had some way to do it. Q.E.D. What I’m talking about is whether the single solar system theory fits the available evidence.
“…and get out of this quadrant as soon as you can.”
If it’s a solar system, wait at the most three months (or 1/4 of the planet’s year) and the orbit takes you out.
But then the use of quadrant may be no more based in physics than giving Vera air or Serenity encountering the Reaver ship at the speed of Volksvagens in a school zone.
Anyway, be it solar system or galaxy, it’s establishment is poetic license and part of the setting. One last dig; if it’s a solar system, why the hell use that silly term " 'verse"?
Well, I done it this time. Joking that I was going to go home sick was bad for my karma - now I really am sick. Feel like shit. Seriously. Emailed in sick.
I wonder if lots and lots of Firefly can make me feel better.
Because when you’re a spacefaring society, you start thinking more in terms of the universe? Why not? We already use the term today - “There’s a whole universe of options available to you!” I see no reason why 'verse might not have developed into a common adjective in a society that has travelled across interstellar space to a new home.
As for ‘Quadrant’, I have no idea.
Why is everyone so resistent to this idea? Has modern SF made the notion of galaxy travel so normal that you assume every space show has to have it? You’re nitpicking terms and details to ‘prove’ that it can’t be a single star system, while being totally willing to accept faster than light travel, which as far as we know is impossible. You’re unwilling to accept a term like 'verse or quadrant because it ‘doesn’t make sense’, but failing to see that if humanity can flit between the stars, then a show like ‘Out of Gas’ fails to make any sense at all. I can buy the possibility of two ships travelling in the same orbit to the same planet running within detection range of each other. I can’t buy two ships in intestellar space happening across each other.
Plus, the original opening voice-over to the series SAID it was a single solar system full of terraformed worlds. So that’s what it is. It’s canon. The only remaining question is whether it’s plausible, and it is. One of the things I like about Firefly is that it doesn’t follow the SF conventions of galaxy-wide space travel, aliens, sound in space, etc. It’s much more ‘classic SF’ than it is a child of ‘Star Trek’, which most post-Trek TV science fiction is.
Best BS guess is it’s the Firefly slang for one use of ‘world’, as in the maximum area about which the speaker has knowledge. There’s nothing beyond the edge of the solar system which most people really know or care about, so the system is their universe in which they live.
Also they could just be talking about the universe as a whole, which isn’t contradictory in phrases like ‘No power in the [uni]verse can stop me.’
How 'bout that Miss Universe pageant? Not a tentacle or a silicon based life form to be seen! (Plenty of silicone-based life forms, though.) Damn Earthist judges!
I don’t think it is as weak as all that. One of the big themes of this episode is power – specifically with regard to Mal. For someone like Mal, being powerless is pretty much the worst thing you can do to him, and this is a big part of the philosophy of torture as well, from what I understand. It’s not so much the actual pain, as the knowledge that there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop the pain and it will continue based on the whim of your torturer. Or, for torturing to extract information, the whole point is to get the person to acknowledge that the onlyway to stop it is to reveal information. Either way, the object is complete surrender of the one being tortured to the will of the torturer. I can see why this would destroy Mal, so it’s possible Zoe thought the captain needed to symbolically reclaim himself by disposing of the guy who killed him. (After all, he don’t much like folks that killed him, not as a rule.)
Plus, it was really funny.
On the quadrant discussion, it’s also possible Zoe was exaggerating to hammer the point home.
For the same reason we call our sun THE sun. Because humans are obnoxious and self-centered.
Also, this is my favorite episode. Possibly of all TV, ever. It’s brilliant, it’s perfect, but I am too busy to keep up with the ruttin’ thread! ARGH!
Mal and Wash have gone missing! You think Jayne should, what, be put on sensor duty? He’s Mr. weapons guy! Grabbing his weapon is what he does! Both ways! That’s what makes it funny!
The commentary for the pilot is possibly the funniest commentary I have ever watched on anything. Okay, a lot of it is Joss enjoying the sound of his own voice, but there is some truly hilarious stuff on there. Like, Joss and Nathan Fillion discussing David Boreanaz’s fear of chickens. What the hell was that about? I don’t know, but I laughed and laughed. Also, you get exchanges like:
NF: A series is only as good as its extras.
JW: True, but if your star sucks, you’ll only get, oh, eleven episodes.
and
NF: Gina Torres. Homely.
JW: Yeah, shame about the face.
Is there any reason (grammatically, astronomically, historically) that a single star system might not be arbitrarily divided into “Quadrants” by it’s inhabitants?
No, but the positions of the planets would move from one quadrant to another as they orbited about the sun. Quadrants might serve to indicate which planets are near each other, but without FTL you don’t “goto” a planet in the same quadrant, you aim your tripod for where it will be in the case of Mars to Earth in the next six months.
They may have a poetic license that gives them near light speed to make the story move a bit faster.
