You need FTL or have to be quite fortuitous and/or have hundreds of years to settle another solar system, at least one of the planets to Earth standards. FTL and a galaxy just seems easier.
I don’t know about the math on a 1 G drive or stopping when you get there. Seems like you’d have to accelerate half the time and them decelerate the other half. They’e kind of vague on the physics, anyway. The engine looks like a large electric aramture rather than a spaceship. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
As I recall, it was added to the series after the fact, to help viewers get their heads around the concept. Joss felt it wasn’t necessary for the DVDs, and didn’t include it.
The voiceover was at the beginning of every episode. There were two of them - one by Mal, and one by Book.
You don’t have to look for it with ships. You look for it with telescopes. In fact, we’re doing that now. We have already spotted planets around other star systems and gotten rudimentary atmospheric data, and we’ll soon be building large interferometry arrays that can even image features on the planets and do detailed studies of their atmospheres. This is about 20 years down the road. And in fact, interferometry arrays can be built almost any size - we could theoretically build one so big that we could look at planets in other star systems with the kind of detail we look at our own moon with today.
I suspect that within 100 years we will have mapped every planet of reasonable size around every star within, say 50 light years of Earth.
And given terraforming, you don’t even need perfect planets.
Here’s the scenario:
We image hundreds of star systems, and catalog thousands of planets. Then we sit down, and figure out which ones are the best candidates for colony ships. Say we limit ourselves to the stars that are 10 light-years away or so. That gives us a couple of dozen star systems, which we spend a decade or two telescopically mapping with great detail. If we find a candidate system (or two, or ten…), we build robotic ships with terraforming gear, and ship them off to each one of the candidate systems. Maybe they use self-replicating nano-bots to do the terraforming or something, using native materials. Anyway, given a drive capable of getting us close to the speed of light, within ten years the ships arrive. In 20, we start getting data back from them. They start terraforming, and beaming back detailed information on the progress of the terraforming. Maybe it takes a hundred years before there are habitable planets, or maybe we get lucky and a system has planets that are already suitable for humans, and we can ship people off relatively soon.
Anyway, so we wait until our system has been prepped, then we put people in cryo suspension (this exists in the Firefly universe), and ship a few thousand of them off as cargo, along with lots of primitive equipment so they can survive. No infrastructure means no high-tech. Instead of getting cars and factories, they get to travel with frozen horse and cow embryos and the plans for how to build Conestoga wagons and other hardware that can be built from native materials and maintained without the help of Earth.
Anyway, maybe 100-200 years from now, the first colony ships are on their way. Maybe they’re even packed with hundreds of thousands of embryos on ice, and when the colonists are thawed out they immediately begin raising families of 10 kids each, to get the population off to a quick start. As soon as those kids are old enough to be an asset to a farm, the family uncorks 10 more. A geometric explosion of humanity.
Once our colony is established and the Earth decides it’s the new ‘home’, a crash program begins to expend as much resources as possible on the construction of fleets of ships that send technology, people, historical artifacts, and whatever else is needed to transplant Earth culture. All this heads to the ‘core worlds’, and jump starts technological civilization there. The ‘outer worlds’ - mostly terraformed moons - have to make do with what they can barter for from the core worlds or make themselves.
There you have it. Within 500 years our new system has billions of people, some planets with high technology and some with none, and you have the Firefly universe. No magic required, no techno-babble, no acceptance of the impossible like FTL drive to make it happen.
You do have to decelerate half the way. Anyway, at 1g it’s roughly 2 weeks from Earth to Pluto at closest approach. That’s the kind of time scale I think of in the Firefly ‘verse’. A few hours or days to move between moons, maybe a week or two to take a longer hop down to the core worlds or something.
And with Enterprise warp drive it’s 45 minutes. Sounds too good to be true. You sure as heck need a power source we don’t know about.
Asking in a most friendly manner, would you have a citation on that?
It occurs to me that Whedon isn’t concerned much with the physics of space travel; like I said, the engine looks like an electric motor. That’s no big deal, some sci fi just takes space travel as a fact and doesn’t try to explain it. Taxi didn’t explain how the internal combustion engine works. Anyway, that might reduce our discussion to trivial.
However unlikely that an appropiate solar system would be found and at least one planet settled to Earth standards without FTL, it’s given as a plot device, it happened; we have to live with it.
The planets we find by telescope are huge. Maybe we could settle the moons. How do we know if they have water, food and cable? The real problem is a power source to get a lot of mass there. Which brings to mind one of my favorite Firefly arguements: They should have horses and cell phones with wooden towers.
Oh yeah, Jayne’s favorite being a “futuristic space-weapon” when the cowboys on the various planets have black powder revolvers. It looked like an 80 year old BAR to me. Of course, Hans Solo’s blaster look suspiciously like a broom handle Mauser. In your defense, Mal’s handgun doesn’t look contemporary.
Way I see it, Vera didn’t need air to fire, Vera needed to be warm enough to fire, since the trace amount of lubricant on the gun is likely would freeze solid in a vacuum.
Aaaand, given the general science knowledge today (quick! What’s the circumference of the Earth?) I’m not too worried about characters screwing up the difference between galaxy, solar system, and universe.
It would probably evaporate. Whedon addresses the issue on the DVD.
An interesting experiment. Perhaps NASA will send up a couple of dopers, a BAR and a can of three in one. 25 000 miles
I base my decision on Destination Moon, when the whole damn crew has to exit the rocket because the mechanic lubed up the extendable radio antenna and it freezes solid?
