posted
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.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
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.
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posted
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.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
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.
posted
I'd speculate that Serenity was set in a green giant system, with fresh peas for all.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
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.
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posted
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
"...represent the most painstakingly-researched and thoughtful effort to make sense of a bunch of hooey that I've encountered"... Ha!
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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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.
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posted
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
Found a flaw in the chronology: it doesn't take account for relativistic effects during the migration.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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