If you’re going to nitpick… Given the size of the ship, there was a LOT of air for Mal. A SCUBA tank holds 72 cu ft of air and can last for an hour, but a human only metabolizes about 5% of the oxygen - the rest is simply exhausted with the CO2. In a closed circuit system (the spaceship), the real limiting factor is CO2 level, not lack of oxygen. If you can scrub the CO2 out of the air, a couple of cubic feet of air is enough for more than an hour.
According to Whedon, Serenity is 191 ft long, about 50 ft high, and probably about as wide. Not all of that is breathable space, but let’s say half of it is. Call it 200,000 cubic feet. Let’s say a third the air was lost to the fire (there was enough pressure left for the crew to not become hypoxic, so the cabin altitude couldn’t have been more than about 12,000 ft, meaning no more than about 1/3 of the air could have been lost). So… There was probably 150,000 cubic feet of air left in Serenity. With CO2 scrubbing, that could last 9 people maybe two years. Without CO2 scrubbing, it gets a little more complex:
Our body makes about 200 cc’s of CO2 every minute. So in an hour, we produce 12,000 cc’s of CO2, or about half a cubic foot of CO2 per hour. CO2 starts to become toxic at about 50,000 ppm, and can kill you around 500,000 ppm. Let’s assume the lower limit, and say that the crew is in trouble once the CO2 level is at about 5%. That means the crew needs to start worrying once they’ve made about 7500 cubic feet of CO2, which would take the 9 of them about 1600 hours, or about 69 days.
And no doubt, I got something horribly wrong in the calculations somewhere, but suffice it to say that they could have lasted a long, long time. River was right - they’d freeze to death first.
As a sanity check to my geekiness, I just remembered that the show Mythbusters did a segment to see how long you could survive being buried alive in a sealed coffin. They put one of the Mythbusters in the coffin set up with Oxygen and CO2 bloodstream sensors, and sealed it up. He was okay 50 minutes later, although his CO2 levels were beginning to rise substantially. An empty coffin is what, about 50 cubic feet? Assume the person takes up the bulk of that space, there could have been no more than 5 or 10 cubic feet of air for him to breathe. If Mal had even sealed himself up in a 10 x 10 x 10 bedroom on the ship, he could have survived for days.
Funny. You think River’s line about how they’d all freeze to death before they suffocated (back when Serentity’s air was being used by NINE people) would have already have made this pretty clear. Abundantly clear. Completely clear.
Excellent point! Mal is brilliant about people, but he leaves the math and science to other people on board. For all he (and Jayne!) knew, sealing up the decks was the only way for him to keep on breathing.
I also wonder, it may be one thing to be in a small space with air, and it may be another to be in a large space. If there is less oxygen in a large space, it might not be where you can breathe it, if you take my drift.
Mal seem to be extremely good at reading people, he does that continually, but most of all, he does it with Jayne–remember the pilot episode, he knew what Jayne was likely to do, without being there.
So explain this one to me, please. Sci-fi isn’t normally my thing and my most scientific area of knowledge is horticulture (where I’m a beginner), so I’m lost. But intrigued.
Simplistically, sound needs air to travel from its origin to your ear. Air molecules buffet each other all the way up to your eardrum, causing it to vibrate and report to your brain as sound. No air, no eardrum vibration, no sound.
As for silence increasing the dramatic impact, I can’t answer that as simply, but I imagine it has to do with the lack of sound forcing you to focus more closely on the visuals.
Just as a for instance, when the pirate ship suddenly appeared and sorta startled Mal, because he hadn’t heard their radio transmission. Basically on Earth, or any planet with an atmosphere, Mal would’ve heard the roar of the other ship’s engines, but in space, no sound of engines.
I’m sure you’re familiar with that distinctive sound the Tie fighters make in Star Wars, as well as the sound of their blasters firing. In reality, and in Firefly, you don’t hear any of that, and if handled well, it adds to the spookiness of space.
Thanks BayleDomon and levdrakon for the explanation. Got it now. The scene with the shuttles leaving Serenity conveys this concept as well, if I’ve understood it correctly. Hmmm, guess I’ll have to go and watch this again and think on it a bit more…
I think the best thing about no sound in space is that it gets across the absolute strangeness of the environment, and really cements home the idea that the ship is just a little oasis of life in a lot of nothing. It helps give the show that Das Boot feel in some ways and heightens the drama (they did that as well in the pilot when they basically ‘rigged for silent running’ when they were being ‘bugged’ by the Alliance cruiser.
In fact, I think the isolation aspect makes the characters closer, and enhances their relationships. Again, movies like Das Boot had that same thing - a small number of people living in an isolated world, with nowhere to go.
I really hope they keep the soundlessness of space intact in the movie. It’s a very strong device, besides being technically accurate. I’m amazed that other SF producers haven’t figured that out.
I know we haven’t gotten to it yet, but that reminds me of one of my favorite lines in Trashed, when Wash says “How did she get on the ship? We’re in outer space!” The first time I saw it, it made me sit up and think. Outer space. I guess you wouldn’t really expect a lot of hitchhikers, huh? Really isolated. You’d have to trust your crewmates pretty much.
Incidentally, I finally broke down and ordered my own Firefly set today. I know! I’m going into the Peace Corps and couldn’t justify spending money on DVDs when I won’t be able to watch them for a couple years, but my leave date just got put off from August to…uh, some unidentified date that’s further in the future (damn gimpy spine). Anyway, I look forward to actually watching the episodes in time for future FFF threads.
Kyla, just a quick reminder of the rules- please put spoilers for upcoming episodes in a marked spoiler box. Some of the people reading these threads are watching Firefly for the first time, and we wouldn’t want to spoil the fun for them.
Stanley Kubrick did. Actually he went one step further and only showed spaceships coasting with their engines off, which is technically accurate and really conveys the desolate atmosphere. (Or lack of atmosphere… um… you know what I mean.)
Of course Serenity had the engines off too, in this episode.
Well, Kubrick sort of cheated by playing a musical score over the space scenes. I think the dead silence works better.
And Serenity coasts with engines off, too. In the pilot episode, after they do the ‘Crazy Ivan’ there’s a shot of them leaving orbit and their engines shutting down as they fly away from the planet.
Or maybe that’s just the main engine, and they still fly on the little side engines. Or vice versa. With the times it takes them to move from planet to planet and moon to moon it’s clear that they have a constant-acceleration drive of some sort anyway. If you’re flying towards another planet at constant acceleration and your engine quits, you are quite literally ‘drifting’, just like Kaylee said. Doesn’t mean you’re motionless in space, it just means that you’re now in an orbit that isn’t going to take you anywhere near where you want to go. And if the failure comes early enough in the boost phase, you’ll be going very slowly and take a long time to get anywhere.
