So we finally got around to watching Firefly on Netflix, and are currently on episode 10. My wife and I were saying that it was strange that the Earth is gone and apparently we have the technology to travel to other star systems and terraform planets, yet every planet we visit has a USA Wild West (mid/late 1800’s) technology.
I get that the worlds shown so far are “outer planets” and are heavily populated by anti-Alliance types, but it still seems a bit…odd. The planets were terraformed, was there NO tech left behind? Some of them seem to have generators and electric lights, and there’s a few mentions of “waves” being sent/received, but that’s about it. No vid screens, no gadgets, no fancy tech at all.
I’d have expected that they’d have at least some toys and gadgets. Some of the settlers seem to have a good bit of money and thus nice furniture, clothes, etc, and even a high tech weapon or two, but ride horses and live in primitive wooden houses and don’t seem to use the electrics for more than lights.
I understand that there hasn’t been that much time since U-Day and some are struggling to survive but once you have electricity and the knowledge to mine metals I’d think you’d be able to at least have somewhat advanced tech. You just keep refining and building better and better tools.
The last episode we saw was on a more central planet and you could see way more advanced stuff (like the body scanner the doc used on his sister), but it seems like every other world we’ve been on is at the exact same level of pre-technology.
Before I started watching it I’d heard it described as a “Space Western”. That fits it pretty well, doesn’t it.
But, yeah, it’s like watching Star Wars for the first time and realizing that all the places they go to, that are big wide open areas, look an awful lot like Earth.
I understand what the OP is saying. The background in the series makes no logical sense. When the series originally aired, they lost me because of that.
You just have to throw out the idea that there’s any science in the science fiction. Imagine it as a really strange western. Or treat it like a fantasy and say that a wizard did it. Then relax and enjoy the characters and the dialogues, which is what the series is really about.
Keep in mind that the Alliance controls most everything. If you were on an outer planet, you got squat. If you lived on Londinium or Sihnon, live was good. The few shots we get during the show (and movie) show many places to be very high-tech.
Horses breed more horses and give you fertilizer. Tractors and cars just break and pollute.
The background makes perfect sense. The idea of primitive settlers in a technological age was explored repeatedly by Heinlein and others. Heinlein’s writing was a big influence on Firefly.
It goes like this: If you are an expansionary power and want to settle a lot of worlds, you might expend the one-shot expense to terraform them. Or they might even have been terraformed by earlier probes before the migration even started.
But once a marginal world is ready for settlers, you have a couple of options:
You can try to build a technological society on a new world. But technology breaks down. It requires repair and replacement. It requires people who can be trained on it, and who can train others. It requires an entire logistical chain of spare parts and probably local manufacturing. It requires energy supplies and distribution. Unless you are going to ship absolutely everything into this world all the time, it requires a huge population to maintain the machines, the machines that make the machines, the mining for the materials to make the parts that make the machines, ad infinitum. It’s a huge, endless task that requires millions of people to be viable.
You can plonk a bunch of settlers down with horses and wagons and other low tech. Horses breed and replace themselves. They require simple maintenance the owner can do himself. Their energy requirements are simple to meet. Conestoga wagons can be repaired locally with indigenous materials. In other words, you can stand up a self-sustaining society very quickly and at very low cost. Then you can supplement it with targeted technology to improve the weak spots. Hence you get a hovertrain existing in the middle of the ‘wild west’, because trains are very useful, and if you’re going to import a train system you might as well use the best tech you’ve got since either one has to be imported. And of course, the wealthy can import their own tech, so you get enclaves of technology in the midst of a low-tech society.
Makes perfect sense to me. Remember, this isn’t tens of thousands of years after the migration from earth - as I recall it’s only a few hundred years. So the border planets simply haven’t had enough time to build up their tech and grow their populations to the point where they can sustain it. The inner planets which were the focus of the migration have managed to do so.
Space western is a genre of film, and they have to invent plot devices to explain how this is possible to have 19th century and 22nd+ century coexisting at the same time. For Firefly it is the idea that the outer planets are not given access to the central planets technologies.
It was a good series and after being told I’d like it, I watched it about 10 years later. The movie was better I think.
Right, I get all that. I’m just saying, if the central planets are so advanced (and they seem to be in the few glimpses we get), then I’d expect to see at least a little trickle down tech in the outlands. Maybe they don’t have the ability to build roads or flying cars yet, but someone would have a Playstation X or a robotic apple peeler or something that they’d stolen or smuggled from the more advanced.
Anyway, I do agree that the characters and story are pretty interesting, and this is a minor thing to me. It kinda sucks that there’s only 5 episodes and a movie left though.
Well, in “The Train Job” the eponymous train is some kind of maglev/monorail thingy. There’s also that forcefield “window” in the bar that Mal gets thrown through. And there’s at least some reasonably advanced pharmaceutical tech available for treating various horrible degenerative diseases that develop on the frontier worlds.
There’s all sorts of tech we don’t see. None of the episodes deal with the home life of regular people, so we have no idea what tech level the average home is at. I would expect that pioneer-types wouldn’t have much time for a PlayStation or the like. And I have yet to see a non-industrial apple peeler that can beat one I can buy from Lehman’s today. Hand powered and it will core and peel apples faster than you can pick them out of the basket.
But remember, the very first episode broadcast featured a force field window on the saloon.
I know this is a digression but my parents have one of those (an original one, not a new one) and it is amazingly good if you need to peel a lot of apples quickly. Old school!
You did- the force-field window, the rather ubiquitous video monitors, etc…
Let’s do a thought experiment. If we had to repeat the same thing today, using today’s tech, what would we end up with?
I suspect you’d end up with a late 19th century level of technology; stuff that could be built and maintained with a simple machine shop powered by solar/wind energy.
Most any electronic tech that would be relatively durable and low power consumption would probably be available- stuff like quartz clocks, calculators, etc…
But for your average space-age dirt farmer, it would probably be animal drawn plows and harvesters, etc…
I suspect that people who need firearms would use the most advanced ones they could lay hands on along with a sufficient supply of ammunition.
So you’d have a mix of low and high tech, probably mostly dependent on energy usage and supply chain concerns. Nobody’s going to trade in stuff like diesel powered super-combines if the planet doesn’t have the infrastructure to manufacture and distribute diesel oil and high-tech spares.
