I'd love to populate the map using the bitmaps from the official visual companion (below) and have in fact pieced those out, but I'm having the classic problem of sorting out what goes where. I've sort of guessed where Sihnon and Londinium go here, but I'm hoping someone here knows a good resource (other than the straight Wiki) or knows someone else who is tackling this.
It's hard even just sorting out what's a moon and what's a planet...
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Neato. (No constructive help here, though, alas.)
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
I never really bought the idea of that many planetary bodies surviving in a multistellar system. And so I ignore that map (which is dreadfully beautiful, mind you) and focus on what we saw teacher telling about in the movie. I'd perused the Wiki earlier, but at he who shall not be named's suggestion, I returned and so did the following:
Lookie! Colors! And planets are related to one another and I mostly ignored the whole orbital proximity thing in favor of things making sense in my head.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
I don't understand. Maybe because I haven't actually seen the film yet (bought it first day out in the UK, but I've been busy what with moving and all). But Hobbes' map seems to imply the 'Verse is a small globular cluster or complex binary/trinary/whateverenary star system. That sort-of makes sense, although best I can remember such systems have conditions that aren't really conducive to supporting life, or at least letting it develop.
So why then do it as a map showing everything as in orbit of one star, especially when it ignores the theory of the circumstellar habitable zone? Sure, that's just a theory, mind, but it's a good one. And according to that theory, the CHZ's distance to the star may change according to the star's mass, luminosity etc., but the size of the zone itself varies very little. You're not gonna get several dozen planets/planetoids/moons/moonlets into it without multiple/shared/overlapping orbits. And the chances of that. . .
Posted by HerbShrump (Member # 1230) on :
I'm taking the bodies in Hobbs map to be planets. They are just depicted as solid glowing balls without surface detail.
The movie clearly establishes the 'Verse is in one star system.
Which does strain credibility.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
In one star system, or a one-star system? Do they talk about one star, or something being "The Sun?"
Credibility. . . Whedon had just come off a show where he'd created a whole universe that was ostensibly like our own but actually quite different, in terms of the use of magic and the existence of magical creatures. The question then becomes, could he do the same with a science fiction show, with slightly different physical laws, and get away with it?
We live on a space ship, dear. . .
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
Not to give anything away, but I literally traced this off of screen-caps, Lee. I do get you on the CHZ thing, and the whole plausibility thing. I have a hard time thinking wee Lilac out there is getting anywhere near enough light, but I do what the voices tell me. They murmur a bit about all the terra-forming plus there's all that gravity technology evidently in regular use in the show and the movie (which you should probably watch soon.)
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
Beaumonde is on there twice. I think.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
One possible way to explain the outer reaches of the system, at least that I've thought slightly plausible, is that most or all of the outer planets are actually moons orbiting gas giants. That would allow there to be many Earth-sized bodies per orbit (since our own star system shows that's probably possible). But it wouldn't exactly explain the lighting...
Concerning the CHZ idea, I've kinda always thought that a bigger star � one that generated more heat and energy � would also have a wider CHZ. The statistics for various stars that I've seen � for example at the Internet Stellar Database � seems to indicate that hotter stars like Sirius have a wider CHZ. (The database lists the CHZ as the "Comfort Zone".) So, who knows? Maybe it's within the realm of physics that more planets could fit around a larger star and still be habitable.
Posted by B.J. (Member # 858) on :
Is it possible that there are one or more brown dwarfs in this system that some of the planets are orbiting? That would heat those planets and give them some more light, and you wouldn't have to deal with another full-on star.
B.J.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
Pesky Beaumonde. This is good though. Lets me move Persephone out and maybe makes that innermost planet uninhabitable like it ought to be.
I made the most distant body more star-like as I never had a name for it and it might explain the vast CHZ.
As it is, Georgia and Heinlein are both listed as gas giants around which many of the worlds the BDH explore are to be found. Those can be emissive without actually being stars right? (watched 2010 too many times when I was young.)
For what it's worth, these are two of the images upon which I'm basing all this:
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
Well proximity to a star isn't the only way for a planet to warm up enough for life. Jupiter for instance keeps Io nice and toasty with all that gravitational tidal forces bending the mantle. Then there's the terraforming efforts which may have included induced greenhouse effects, orbital mirrors and just plain 'ol hight tech gobbledy gook.
The bottom line is that we really don't know enough about star systems to form a definate opinion as to what's possible. For starters we've only studied one in any real detail and there's shed loads of systemsout there, most of which are probably unique.
Oh and Joss Whedon isn't the sciency type and so he (rightly) dosen't care. It's a fictional story that takes place in a system with lots of planets, ergo the system has lost of planets. Unlikely you say? Well that don't mean they ain't there now does it?
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
Well, the Serenity 'verse certainly makes the Twelve Colonies being located inside a single star system seem a whole lot more reasonable. Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Firefly (and Battlestar Galactica too) are good examples of how picking a handful of realistic elements and sticking to them can let talented storytellers get away with all sorts of weirdness elsewhere.
Maybe?
(Also, what is it with Walt's mom and kids with psychic powers?)
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
(Typecasting?)
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
(That is a narrow type. At least Walt never got a pen in his head.)
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
(What are you two on about?)
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
(Taking things too far; also the pictured actress from Serenity is on Lost, occasionally, playing Walt's mother.)
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
That Zoe woman isn't the same woman as Walt's mother is she!?! I definately know that Zoe? was Jasmin in Angel.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
That's not Zoe, or at least I don't think it is. . .
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
Zoe was the other black chick's best friend from the second or third Matrix movie. I think it's the second one, she's the one that comes over after the guy that plays Walt comes home and has an argument with his wife about him joining Morpheus' ship.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
God, I could stab you all in the face for all this Lost/Matrix confusion. The guy in the Matrix movie doesn't play Walt, he plays Walt's father, Michael. As to whether the teacher from Serenity and Walt's mom are the same person. She is. Which is to say that Simon's complicated joke was very funny to a select group of people.
[ March 24, 2006, 12:41 PM: Message edited by: bX ]
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
Also: Having been in contact via some unnamed channel with he who shall not be named, I've elaborated and altered the map a touch incorporating several of his ideas:
He hit upon what I think is a pretty clever (and in retrospect, totally obvious) idea about how to organize the planets and I suspect I'll switch to that for future discussion so as to save my time and Charles' bandwidth. That idea being to list the bodies from innermost to outermost, with moons/secondary bodies following a colon. Thusly:
For those who may be interested: I made Jiangyin a moon of Greenleaf based on the statement in the episode safe that Greenleaf was ten hours away which (according the estimation of Serenity's speed from the RPG) would barely let them make it across even the narrowest planetary orbits. I moved Beaumonde and placed Haven (and placed Aberdeen based on my belief that the Companion Training House is on that world) for proximity to Lilac so as to better correspond to the events of the movie.
Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :
Having the moons apparently on the same orbit as their planets makes them all seem like planets. Two suggestions: 1) place the moons on a ring around the planet (on a single ring or on multiple rings) or 2) place them vertically in a straight line (maybe placed slightly to the right), rather than following the planet's orbit. You might also try placing the planets at other places along their orbits rather than placing them all at the top, since you're sort of wasting a lot of the space below (only being used to show moons of a few planets).
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Just watched the movie. Loved it.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
What the bloody hell took you so long?
As for the map, yeah, I agree with Masao it's a little confusing since some of those (Londinium & Bellerophon for example) could be interpreted at twin planets rather than satellites.
I'd suggest either adding a separate set of diagrams below the system layout that illustrates the orbits of the various moons or stager the planets in their orbits and line the moons up horizontally along a line. I'm a little tire right now so that's probably not as clear a description as it probably should have been.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
I diddled with the moons and also the position of Whitefall.
I just remembered a similar-yet-really-wildly-different situation from a book: Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks. It's set in a star system called Thrial, which is a rogue star floating in intergalactic space, with "a million light years" in any direction. In the book, just about every planet has been terraformed (or golterformed, since that's the home planet of the human or humanlike species which evolved there); I forget how many planets there were but it seemed quite a few, some of which were actually moons. So, literary precedent of a sort. Because the star is isolated, the inhabitatnts of the system have endured thousands of years of boom and bust, with no way to expand or break out of the cycle they're condemned to. . . A bit like the Moties in Niven & Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
Congratulations on finally seeing the movie, Lee.
It's likely I'm going to be the single-gun theory here, but I'm going to stick to the shitpiles-o'-planets-'n-moons orbiting one big sun thing. (Am I right in believing we never saw a sky with more than one sun?) I realize it strains credulity, but maybe it's a much more compact set of orbits around a larger sun with some intentionally terraformed thick-ass ozone layers for the inner planets. If a CHZ was, say, 400 million miles across, these twenty orbits would fit with an average of 20 million miles of space between each.
Also: he-who-(with increasing ridiculousness)-goes-unamed has brought to my attention certain information which has caused me to reshuffle the list some.
Notably, it's mentioned that Persephone is an outer planet in the same breath as Hera and Shadow in the SVC.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Can we see the reasoning? Because without sitting down and actually watching the whole show again to see which planets were visited and when. . .
I've wondered about using orbital mirrors to increase sunlight in the outer planets, but such tech would require constant maintenance and who'd do it? Not the Alliance, they obviously don't give a shit about the outer planets beyond making sure they don't develop some kind of govermental authority to challenge their own. I suppose the often-backwards nature of some of the settlements we saw doesn't necessarily preclude planets/moons having some kind of ground-to-space sattellite-maintenance capability. And, given their alleged ability to modify the gravity of a planet during terraforming, you can get into all kinds of arcane stuff like using gravity to focus sunlight, exotic physiscs like that. . .
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
Looks like Venus to me. Like it's got a thick atmosphere.
Sihnon
Core planet primarily settled by the decendents of the Sino powers, per the SVC one of the larger central earth-like planets. To my knowledge the show never went there.
Osiris
Wealthy core planet. Where the Tams are from. Except in flashback the show never visted there.
Three Hills
To my knowledge never seen, but mentioned as a place for Mal to sell their stolen 'goods' after Badger refuses them on Persephone.
Highgate
Hoighty-toighty name.
Londinium: Bellerophon
Core planet primarily settled by the decendents of the Anglo/American powers. Per the SVC one of the larger central earth-like planets. To my knowledge the show never went there. Bellerophon is known to be an Alliance moon where the wealthy keep their homes. Floating estates, etc. Visited in the episode "Trash."
Ariel: Bernadette, Kerry
Core planet home to at least one major medical center (St. Lucy's). Visited in the episode "Ariel." Bernadette from the Wiki "is a non-terraformed moon near the core worlds whose environmentally-sealed station is used as a staging location for ships of settlers headed for the border planets. The settlers in "Bushwhacked" left from here on their way to Newhall." I think it's also where Mal claims to be coming from in "The Train Job." Kerry? I knew a girl named Kerry once. She was pretty.
Border Planets
Greenleaf: Jiangyin, Harvest
Alliance planet (though not specifically mentioned as "core". As previously mentioned, noted as being 10 hours from Jiangyin where the crew of Serenity were selling their cattle in the episode "Safe". Zoe figures this pretty quick, so I'm assuming it's a number that doesn't change, which makes me think Jiangyin must be a moon. Jiangyin is apparently 3 weeks from Persephone which, I am assuming here is more distant due to orbital mechanics. Harvest just felt right there
I have no information how we know that Ezra and Regina orbit a gas giant called Georgia beyond the Wiki. Ezra is the desert moon around which Niska's skyplex orbits. If I recall correctly we see a large ringed moon impossibly close behind the BDH after Mal gets tossed through the window. Beylix is the only body shown with rings from the SVC. Regina is the mining town where Mal and Zoe are detained in the episode "The Train Job."
Hera: Santo, Persephone, Shadow, Silverhold
Hera was where the Battle of Serenity Valley was fought. According to the SVC, Hera was an outer world and along with Persephone and Shadow raised an army (half volunteers) to fight for independence. Given the Civil War parallels of the show and the technological disparity, I'm guessing these were fought primarily as defensive battles. In her speech about the Independents, River's teacher shows an animation from which all of these orbits have been traced. But before that, we see a desert planet with a frontier outpost falling under the shadow of what is presumably an Alliance warship. This dissolves to a reddish, Mars-like world, which, ultimately winds up in this orbit in the animation. I'm totally guessing here, but she was talking about the Independents, so it stands to reason she'd show a place significant to the conflict. Serenity Valley would be significant. Shadow (Mal's home, mentioned in "Our Mrs. Reynolds") was evidently devastated and rendered uninhabitable as the RPG would have it. The episodes "Serenity", "Shindig" as well as the comic (TLB) have stories set on Persephone, primarily dealing with crime-lord Badger. Has to be 3 weeks from Jiangyin at some point. Plus I liked the Hera/Persephone thing. Santo is also close as the barfight with the slavers at the holo-pool-table occurs shortly before Serenity's arrival on Persephone. Silverhold which is shown as reddish in the SVC Graphic is the locus of Womack's authority from the episode "The Message." The icy, frontier world of St. Albans is 7 (or 8?) sectors away according to Book in that episode. Whatever sectors are.
Heinlein: Higgin's Moon, Salisbury, Triumph
Another gas-giant whose mention I don't know, other than the Wiki. Higgins' Moon is where the Mudders mine the ceramic clays for a Magistrate named, Higgins as shown in "Jaynestown". Salisbury, don't know. If Heinlein is a gas giant, then it should probably have lots of moons. Salisbury could be one. Triumph is where the crew of Serenity is first introduced to the character Saffron (Yo-Saff-Bridge) in the episode "Our Mrs Reynolds." I figure it's got to be a little fringey and a lot back-water-y with the rainsticks gifts and strange marriage ceremonies.
Athens: Deadwood, Beaumonde, Ita, Whitefall
Whitefall is mentioned as being the fourth moon of Athens in the episode "Serenity." That the crime-lord Patience is able to control so much of it with her mostly horse-mounted posse, makes me think it's in the sticks. Plus in the article "A Brief History of the Universe circa 2507 A.D.", Joss specifically calls Whitefall and Beaumonde pissant moons. The fighting in the War for Independence apparently never reached these worlds. Beaumonde is visited in the movie "Serenity" where the crew meet Fanty and Mingo at a bar called The Maidenhead. Ita is a moon in a remote sector (whatever a sector is) and is from where the crew of the S.S. Walden is returning from a salvage mission when they pick up Serenity's boosted distress beacon in the episode "Out of Gas"
Boros: Constance
Boros was Serenity's posted destination before Badger's refusal to purchase their "goods" forced them to detour to Whitefall which detour evidently wouldn't put them more than a day or so off schedule. Constance is a world where Mal, Zoe and Jayne attempt a bank heist in the TLB comic
Frontier Planets
Newhall
Original destination of the settlers before they were hijacked by Reavers from the episode "Bushwacked."
Dyton
Badger's home world.
St. Albans: Aberdeen, Haven
Icy frontier world, home of Tracy visited in the episode "The Message." He-who-shall-not-be-named pointed out that Aberdeen and St Albans are both Scottish. I believe Inara's Companion Training House is on a colder world, and Aberdeen just seems right somehow. Also, from the movie, Haven ain't but a few hours out or something. Actually all the worlds in the movie are REALLY close together. According to the script in the SVC, Serenity could get to Mr. Universe in four hours at hard burn from Miranda. (In that same line River mentions the distance as something like 367,644 miles. 367,644 miles is barely farther away than Earth's moon! Historical revisionism or no, I'm thinking a planet capable of supporting 30 million souls would be quite visible to anyone capable of looking skyward. But Joss gave us the Musical episode of Buffy, so we forgive him his not-so-science-y bits.)
Verbena
Formerly a poor, underdeveloped world frontier planet when the Alliance chose it as a site of a new gearshift assembly factory for military skiffs from the unaired script "Dead Or Alive". From the Wiki
Lilac
A planet presumably near Reaver territory shown as having a purplish atmosphere as seen from orbit. The crew of Serenity are here robbing an Alliance bank when the town is hit by Reavers in the "Serenity" movie.
[ March 27, 2006, 07:12 AM: Message edited by: bX ]
Posted by HerbShrump (Member # 1230) on :
What is the difference between a border planet and a frontier planet?
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Interesting question. If there was to ever be a distinction made - as opposed, say, to just using two different words for the same thing, which is the likely option in this case - I'd say that a border denoted a line beyond which was something or someone they didn't like and wanted to keep away from: an enemy, in other words; while, a frontier was something beyond which the territory was either unknown, or unexplored, or generally unwanted: say, the edge of the system.
In this context, you'd have a border between the Alliance and the Independents - or you would have had, before the war, and the planets along that border would be border planets. The outermost planet or planets in the system, and their associated moons, would be frontier worlds.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
Those are pretty much exactly the definitions I'm using. There are those big gaps in the orbits and I sort of see those as rough boundaries. It definitely provided a leg-up on positioning things.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
I'm just talking to myself at this point. How sad am I? NO DON'T ANSWER YET! Because I've made more changes:
Lilac is a planet presumably near Reaver territory shown as having a purplish atmosphere as seen from orbit. The crew of Serenity are here robbing an Alliance bank when the town is hit by Reavers in the "Serenity" movie. Lilac is stated as being ten hours from Beaumonde which pretty much makes it a moon in the same system.
Boros
Frontier Planets
Newhall
Constance
Verbena
Aberdeen: Haven, St. Albans
Dyton
Badger's home world was originally settled by convicts.
Burnham
I'm taking Inara's line about Miranda being located in the Burnham quadrant, furthest planet out, to mean that Miranda occupies the last orbit of a planet, possibly a gas giant, named "Burnham."
I love the show, but that's retarded. All the moons/planets/stations would suffer from a zillion comets, debris, unforseen gravitational pulls and other navigation hazards. aNd the liklehood of the occasional Not to mention that some planetary body would probably be in every space scene and most worlds would have several moons (or planets) in their sky in most scenes...
And of course, there's the issue of everyone on the outer worlds freezing to death.
But I love the show in spite of all that stuff. Stuff that we would rail against Trek for doing, I might point out.
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
I still find a single star system unbelieveable. The outer planets would be iceballs that far away from their sun. And the two different introductions during the show, one implied they colonized many star systems while the other puts it all in one system.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Many moons good, many planets bad!
That is, it's easier to reconcile the system with known scientific principles if the number of actual planets is kept to a minimum in favour of boosting the number of moons. The question is, do we know how many planets there are? They talk about "worlds" but that's no help. And the images are vague - the pic with the teacher in front appears to have 19 at a stretch (work monitor isn't very good with dark backgrounds); the image below it 14 (although that could be a closer-in image showing the inner worlds; does the pattern of separation match?); and your map 21.
Mind you, for all we know, some moons are actually referred to as planets because of their size, and to avoid having implied second-class status just because they orbit a gas giant and not the actual star.
So really the innermost planets (what do we actually know about Angel and Liann Jiun?) and the outermost (ditto Burnham) need to be the most uninhabitable. That way, you're starting to get towards an almost-believable CHZ; I can well imagine planets like Sihnon and Osiris having a balmy tropical climate that's popular with the wealthy elite, a global St. Tropez as it were. I think your map is starting to represent that, once the number of planets-orbiting-the sun is brought down to the minimum justifiable by the evidence.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
The teacher's voiceover at the beginning of the movie talks about "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons". In my mind, that means at least 24 planets. But as it turns out, Teacher's voiceover was all a nightmare River was having. So who knows if we can even believe it.
Malcolm talks about Mr. Universe being able to broadcast either to "30 worlds" or "THE 30 worlds" (I never can tell fromt he dialogue).
Posted by Wraith (Member # 779) on :
quote:Originally posted by Aban Rune: The teacher's voiceover at the beginning of the movie talks about "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons". In my mind, that means at least 24 planets. But as it turns out, Teacher's voiceover was all a nightmare River was having. So who knows if we can even believe it.
The dozens of planets bit could well refer to non-habitable (gas giants) as well as those which have been or could be terraformed. As Lee says, I think as many as possible need to be moons. We know the terraforming techniques are VERY advanced, possibly even to the extent of planetary gravity control so it's possible the habitable zone is wider than we assume, taking this into consideration.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: ...Not to mention that some planetary body would probably be in every space scene and most worlds would have several moons (or planets) in their sky in most scenes...
It's true. We didn't see a lot of that. But we did see some. From The Train Job:
They're SO close!!
quote:Originally posted by Hobbes: I still find a single star system unbelieveable. The outer planets would be iceballs that far away from their sun...
Which assumes a geometry very similar to our own. I don't know how plausible it is, but in an interview with CHUD Joss responded to a question along these lines:
quote:... Q: Does Serenity go faster than light? Joss: I don't think so. Q: Are the planets really close together? Joss: They�re really close together. You�ve never seen a planet cluster like this one. It�s a little planet village. If you start asking my science questions I�m going to cry. ...
Which (among other things) is adorable and makes it clear why he'd never write for Star Trek. Add to this that we've never seen multiple stars in any of the skies (to my knowledge), and there hasn't been any dialogue about different stars or how to get to them in reasonable amounts of time given sub-luminal velocities. Anyway, yes. It is sort of silly to assume that they can have this many habitable planets orbiting one sun. But we don't have much else besides our present understanding of planetary mechanics on which to base our assumptions.
And at the beginning of the movie here we have this teacher explaining things by way of exposition, and behind her there is this animation with what appear to be planetary orbits:
quote:Originally posted by Lee: ...And the images are vague - the pic with the teacher in front appears to have 19 at a stretch (work monitor isn't very good with dark backgrounds); the image below it 14 (although that could be a closer-in image showing the inner worlds; does the pattern of separation match?); and your map 21...
For the purposes of this map (and before I started really), I took frame grabs as this animation unfolded and layered those into an Illustrator file so as to include as much detail as possible. The pattern of separation does match such that the lower image with 14 orbits shows closer detail than the wider one (with teacher's shoulder obscurring the innermost portion of the map.) Which is where I got the placement of the 20 (not 21) orbits that I have been using.
Posted by B.J. (Member # 858) on :
Adjusting gravity was specifically mentioned in one episode.
Sidestepping the heating issue for the outer worlds for a moment, what about the amount of light those worlds get? I'm sure they had more than one way to heat them up (I like the possiblity moons around brown dwarfs myself), but all the places we saw had plenty of light. Even at Mars, there's a noticeable drop in the light level. I don't have any good way of explaining this.
B.J.
Posted by Makotokat (Member # 1041) on :
Maybe introducing greenhouse gases to keep heat in?
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Let's not forget that it isn't impossible to have more than one planet in the same orbit (assuming you're willing to ignore that map from the movie, of course).
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Even midway out from the star, you'd need a thick Venus-like atmosphere to retain enough heat, but that leads to a non-breathable and light blocking situation.
Baaad pressure issues as well.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Twenty? Like I said, the monitor on my work PC is really bad with dark backgrounds.
Doubling up on orbits would be the only way to reconcile "dozens" of planets with the CHZ theory. But to have more than maybe two or three planets sharing the same orbit (I'm sure there's a word for it) stretches credibility as well.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
How about "bi-planetary orbit"? Sounds smart.
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
Is there's a definate count for planets/moons? In the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" Mal says "There's over 70 earths in this verse, and the meek have inherited not a one." Our solar system has 9 planets and 158 moons.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
So, to reconcile that with Teacher's number, we'd have to say that there are between 71 an 79 inhabited/terraformed planets and moons, with many more not (or not yet) inhabited/terraformed. There could be far distant planets in orbit of the star that the Alliance has no intention of trying to terraform, but are still planets in the 'Verse.
Posted by WizArtist II (Member # 1425) on :
There is also the possibility that the orbits are not on the same plane. My question would be concerning the gravitational effects of so many bodies in so small a space. You would think that most of the planets would be unstable or have massive tidal or tectonic shifts from all the gravity wells pulling on them from so many directions.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
Perhaps explaining the failure of some terraforming efforts.
Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :
You know what happens when two planets are in the same orbit? They develop into mirror images of each other but their inhabitants are completely unaware of the others' existence until they launch a probe and crash land thinking they're on their home planet but are actually on the other then are branded cowards for not carrying out their mission but are finally believed and sent on a mission in an attempt to return but a reversed polarity problem means things end badly for all! So not a good idea!!!
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
One of those planets would be Evil or run by monkees or something.
Posted by machf (Member # 1233) on :
quote:Originally posted by Masao: You know what happens when two planets are in the same orbit? They develop into mirror images of each other but their inhabitants are completely unaware of the others' existence until they launch a probe and crash land thinking they're on their home planet but are actually on the other then are branded cowards for not carrying out their mission but are finally believed and sent on a mission in an attempt to return but a reversed polarity problem means things end badly for all! So not a good idea!!!
Oh, I remember that one...! Journey to the far side of the Sun a.k.a. Doppelg�nger, with Roy Thinnes.
So, does it apply to the Trojan asteroids too?
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Bow, peasant, before the almighty King Nesmith.
Edit : You couldn't have waited four minutes to post that, and not ruin my joke? Bah.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
A disturbing world where Walter Koenig is president of the United States instead of someone that looks like an actual monkey.
...and The New Monkees is their TNG (complete with fan boards discussing every aspect of each episode ad naseum).
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
I'm playing catchup.. but one thing that makes this sort of crazy system work better would be a HUGE sun. That would make for a wider life-zone, making it easier to justify even terraformed planets. Then, it wouldn't take many Super-jupiter's to have a couple dozen small Earth-like worlds. Heh, even Super-Jupiter's in the same orbit.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
The problem I see with a giant sun is stability. It's my understanding the flares from a stellar giant would be unpredictable and deadly making the "core worlds" rather inhospitable. That and the fact that the sun always looks pretty normal in the series. I'm still advocating that these planets are just somehow much closer together than the structure of our own solar system and the conventions of science presently predict.
So now I've started going through, episode by episode and noting where the crew is and any time anyone talks about planets, systems, etc, and also taking caps of any planets and moons we see. Coolest find I hadn't noticed before: in the episode "Serenity" Zoe talks about moons in this belt they aint' seen (emphasis mine and it should be noted this deviates from the subtitles), and Mal counters talking about the prospect of the ship getting towed out to something called the "scrap belt" (which I think may have appeared in the comic though I'm not sure if it was named). So maybe belts could be like aggregated asteroid belts with multiple "moons" occupying the same orbit as has been suggested by a few people here. Anyway it's giving me a good excuse to watch this brilliant series again.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Is a giant necessarily prone to worse flare activity? (Of course, our own sun's flares are unpredictable, though at worst they just shut the power off in Ontario.) My search engine wizardry is failing me on this question.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
It was my understanding that the unstable nature of certain giants only applied to the red giant stars that are nearing the end of their lives. Those wouldn't be suitable for colonization anyway, because those stars would be likely to blow up on you at any moment, and I shouldn't have to tell you what that would do for the local property values.
I do recall reading something about a relatively rare kind of star called a yellow giant, which has a light frequency range similar to Sol's but with a much greater mass. The larger and hotter the star, the greater the habitable zone. And it's eminently possible that that star system map we saw was NOT to scale. Most maps of our own solar system aren't.
Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
Yeah it's kind of depressing to see the solar system to scale. Everything is so tiny and far away. I mean I suspect part of the reason Joss had things clustered so close had to do with that not being as interesting visually.
So forgive me if I'm being redundant, but giants aren't so much a type of star as they are at a stage of the sequence in their stellar life-cycle. Where the latter stages it's true take eons, but they seemed to me to be fraught with stability and size issues as their fusion fires move further from their cores. Everything I know I learned from Carl Sagan and Cosmos, so I could be totally full of shit.
quote:Towards the end of their lives, most stars, including our sun, evolve into red giant stars. They then become some ten thousand times as luminous as the sun is today. The outermost layers (called the atmosphere) of such a star are cool enough to enable the formation of molecules and dust grains. Most red giants are so-called long-period variables, stars that change their luminosity over periods of around a year. These changes are caused by stellar pulsations - the stars expand and contract periodically. Shock waves will then develop in the atmospheres and change the densities and temperatures and hereby the conditions for molecules and dust to form. These are very efficient in absorbing the stellar radiation from below and the radiation pressure can cause a massive outflow of gas and dust, a stellar wind.
Some searching reveals I may have been hasty in discarding the notion of habitable giant stars. The previously linked article hypothesizes for certain stars 10^9 years of a stable habitable zone 7 to 22 AU, which is pretty huge for pretty long.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
True, but red giants are not the only kind of giant star. There's also blue giants, and yellow giants, with blue giants being much more common (because stars that get that massive burn hotter). Blue giants are fairly stable but short-lived; on the average of about ten to twenty million years versus ten to twenty billion. But hey; even ten million years is plenty of time for Humanity to settle down for a few centuries before moving on.
I'd speculate that Serenity was set in a blue giant system, which would be fitting to provide a connection for the Blue Sun corporation, except for the obvious note that the star was seen several times and was quite clearly yellow. Posted by bX (Member # 419) on :
But blue giants emit so much UV radiation and yellow are so rare (plus aren't they always variable/pulsating?). And while 20 million years is certainly enough time for humanity to rise, flourish and fall, is it enough time for planets to coalesce into something terraformable?
The massive habitable zone of giants truly is a very tempting idea, and I'm not saying it isn't possible. It's just we never saw anything on screen or heard anything in dialogue (again, to my knowledge) that indicated the star was anything other than your run-of-the-mill G2 (or so) yellow dwarf. Or that there was more than one of 'em. I like the idea that the Blue Sun for which the corporation is named might be a nearby star the company is exploiting as their private playground and cash cow. That or a nemesis type star, a stellar apocalypse still dozens of millenia in the future, known, and yet an immutable and unrelenting death.
Seems like someone has created a poster map of the Verse lookie
There's also a nice companion that goes into detail about terraforming, sizes of planets, moons, etc. here.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
I'd seen that first one before. I thought it was a great way to resolve various statements involving "systems" while still keeping the Verse within a relatively small area.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Verse? Isn't it more like Xy?
Has there ever been a detailed render of an Alliance Citadel from the series? Or dareisay a physical model?
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
One thing that always puzzled me somewhat; if the Alliance is primarily descended from a union of the US & China then why do half the planets have British derived names?
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
"...represent the most painstakingly-researched and thoughtful effort to make sense of a bunch of hooey that I've encountered"... Ha!
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
quote:Originally posted by Reverend: why do half the planets have British derived names?
Alot of U.S. stuff is based on British stuff even now. A bunch of cities and even states are named after British territories. New York comes to mind.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
Oh sure, but Albion? Londinium? even Salisbury for goodness sake! I guess I'd expect the American named colonies to reflect US specific culture, not the leftovers from the 17th century. I suppose planets named after the founding fathers would probably a bit on the nose, but still it seams to be a deliberate choice on the writer's part and I just wonder what the idea behind that was. Of course if that chronology is right then the people that named those planets were born in space, never having set foot on Earth-that-was so maybe it's simply that they just took the names from books without really understanding their significance.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
Found a flaw in the chronology: it doesn't take account for relativistic effects during the migration.
Posted by The Ginger Beacon (Member # 1585) on :
quote:Originally posted by Aban Rune:
quote:Originally posted by Reverend: why do half the planets have British derived names?
Alot of U.S. stuff is based on British stuff even now. A bunch of cities and even states are named after British territories. New York comes to mind.
New York is named after the Duke, not the place.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Found a flaw in the chronology: it doesn't take account for relativistic effects during the migration.
Perhaps the dates are subjective?
quote:Originally posted by The Ginger Beacon:
quote:Originally posted by Aban Rune: Alot of U.S. stuff is based on British stuff even now. A bunch of cities and even states are named after British territories. New York comes to mind.
New York is named after the Duke, not the place.
Either way it amounts to the same thing.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
quote:Originally posted by The Ginger Beacon:
quote:Originally posted by Aban Rune:
quote:Originally posted by Reverend: why do half the planets have British derived names?
Alot of U.S. stuff is based on British stuff even now. A bunch of cities and even states are named after British territories. New York comes to mind.
New York is named after the Duke, not the place.
Caldwell Texas (home of our former President) is named after one of my ancestors.
One day I will raise an army and drive the Bush's off my ancesteral lands...
The planetary names might derive from the firstin-system colonists- mostly British, followed by refugees from an alliance here or a remaining soverign nation there.
Did they ever say weither anyone still lived on Earth?
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
quote:Did they ever say weither anyone still lived on Earth?
Not in the show... The impression I got was that anyone left behind wasn't going to make a sustainable population and probably died out.
One clever bit from the system analysis that makes sense in hindsight: the reason for the exodus was global warming and overpopulation, but once they decided to evacuate the planet, they stopped worrying about creating pollution and ran amok building the spaceships, accelerating the whole problem. Kinda creepy.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
I'd believe it. Actually sounds somewhat similar to the 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' scenario. Most who can leave have and most of those that are left are left to rot with not real effort to repair, or even combat the damage done to the environment. Also lends credence as to how Blue Sun became so powerful, when they were building the arks the elected governments were probably already just figureheads with the megacorps actually running the show.
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