I just saw the movie this afternoon and got the impression that “used up” refers to Earth’s surface. In other words, the entire planet became so populated that they were quickly running out of room to put everyone.
The problem with using space colonization as a mean to reduce population is logistics. Consider the anount of energy required just to boost seven people into low orbit in a space shuttle. Now try scaling that up to one million people, and even if you got them off the surface, that’s less than a tenth of a percent of Earth’s current population.
Rather than suggesting that Earth had been trashed, I picture a million or so intrepid (and hard-core) colonists funding the seach for extrasolar planets, FTL robot probes and FTL one-way colony ships, because they felt Earth was overcrowded.
Who says they are doing it to reduce overpopulation? Rather, overcrowding has simply led to a desire to find newer, unspoiled living spaces. Lebensraum doesn’t imply depopulating the mother land, it just means finding more room for your own kind.
I think this is the most plausible explanation. The Earth isn’t ‘used up’ in the sense that it’s worthless, it’s ‘used up’ in the sense that it’s all in use. No room for anyone else, everything hellishly expensive, all the best stuff already taken and all the best real estate already occupied. So, you start to look elsewhere for your new digs.
This also doesn’t explain the fact that ‘earth that was’ has become almost mythic… or at least, the type of stories that people are telling about it in the firefly verse. If earth was still occupied by billions of people, I don’t think you’d have people speaking about it as if it were… almost a myth, even if it’s uncrossable light years away. Though maybe that’s just me. (shrugs.) The idea that they had to completely evacuate it for some reason seems to jive better with that stuff.
That’s a lot of people and space ships and gas, unless a lot of the population had been killed off.
For giggles, I just took a look at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and read:
So, I suppose if, in the next 50 years or so we build a large, efficient space plane of some kind, and then go on to build a large fleet of these things, we could theoretically get a lot of people off the planet.
It’s mind boggling to imagine what it would take in fuel to get say, one billion people off the planet. Also, what do we do with these people once we do? Huge space arks/colonies?
I agree whatever happened to the “Earth that was,” we never actually evacuated the planet. Get a bunch of refugees off the planet sure, but evacuate the whole planet? No way.
Clearly, they had to evacuate Earth after the war with the Cylons (who followed the Galactica home) became too costly.
New Jersey.
Why not? Let’s say Earth is 100 light years away, and the first colony ships were sent with people in suspended animation. Even a round-trip radio conversation with Earth would take 200 years for each message, which may be only as long as the Firefly system has existed in the first place.