Pseudo-Science In Some Sci-Fi Shows

[Garovorkin]

Vacantlook I think there might be a viability issue here if in fact we are talking about this all taking place in earth solar system

 

[vacantlook]

here is a question with regard to Firefly, now when the show starts up they explain that earth got all used up meaning no longer habitable i suppose. If they have terrafroming technology, what is preventing them from making earth at least habitable again. Also I don't see how this could all be taking place in Earth Solar system. If they are in fact terraforming the moons and I am assuming we are talking about say the moons of Jupiter Saturn ext. There is problem here and it has to do with the distance that those bodies are from earth sun.also the gravity of these bodies is not enough to sustain an atmosphere Those terraformed worlds would be dim place given the distance they are from the sun and without the right amount of sunlight you cannot live on the surface of those moons, nor plants grow nor will you have a temperate climate, so how is it that these wild west worlds could exist as they are? Its never established or explained also most of them might not have active molten core without which no life is possible on any planet some of them are made of Ice and Rock which you cannot terraform in any event No molten core no magnetic field the solar winds would erode any atmosphere that you could put on that planet, no internal heat means atmosphere is frozen to the ground anyways This cannot be in the Earth Solar system it has to be other systems so they must have FTL drive otherwise this show concept is not viable

Well, the terraforming process is long-term, taking decades for a single planetary body. And Earth was over populated, which would make it difficult to move all of humanity off of the planet for decades to terraform Earth.

Firefly does not take place in Earth's solar system. It's another system some distance from Earth that took hundreds of years to get to. Big ships that people lived their entire lives on, so called generational ships, are what were used to get the human groups from Earth's solar system to the solar system Firefly takes place in.

 

[Garovorkin]

Actually that is more reasonable. Here is question had this series been given a five year run would we have gotten Aliens or maybe there are aliens living among the populations in secret. the reason I am asking this question is the episode involving the two guys wearing the gloves who killed all those alliance agents who had any contact with river and company. Could those two guys have been Aliens pretending to be humans.

 

[vacantlook]

For fun, here's a list of the inhabitable planets and moons in the solar system of Firefly that I'm getting from the official visual companion to Serenity.

Londinium "called so after the Roman name for England's capital (a country long before annexed by America in a somewhat ironic reversal), represented what was once the American Empire."

Sihnon "a bastardization of Sino, our word for 'Chinese') was the new China, basically."

Those were the first two and are the most populous of the worlds. Other worlds, big and small, are:

Beylix
Greenleaf
Hera
Border Moons
Osiris
Jiang Yin
Dyton
Ita
Verbena
Angel
Boros
Higgins' Moon
Ezra
Bellerophon
Athens
Whitefall
Shadow
Ariel
Beaumonde
Liann Jiun
Silverhold
Santo
Haven
Three Hills
Deadwood
Newhall
Lilac
Paquin
Salisbury
Aberdeen
Whittier
Muir
St Albans
Kerry
Highgate
Harvest
Regina
Bernadette
Persephone

 

[Garovorkin]

That many? that is a lot of Moons must be large system , larger the Sol and maybe more then one Sun?

 

[vacantlook]

Actually that is more reasonable. Here is question had this series been given a five year run would we have gotten Aliens or maybe there are aliens living among the populations in secret. the reason I am asking this question is the episode involving the two guys wearing the gloves who killed all those alliance agents who had any contact with river and company. Could those two guys have been Aliens pretending to be humans.

No, there would be no aliens. If my understanding is correct...

Spoiler for :

...the blue-gloved men would eventually have been revealed to be secret agents of the government with connections to a MAJOR corporation called Blue Sun. There were little tiny hints that the Blue Sun corporation had bad things going on behind the scenes in what episodes we got. For example, there's an episode in which River slashes Jane with a knife. You think that she's just being crazy and attacking him. But her target wasn't him; it was the Blue Sun logo on the tshirt he was wearing, as once the shirt's ripped she calms. Also, there's a scene in which she rips all the labels off of cans of food; that canned food was manufactured by Blue Sun.

 

[Garovorkin]

The reason that i bring up the issue of Multiple suns that I am assuming that this system would have two binary primary suns, for habitability purpose there could not be more then two primary central stars but. if the system had one or tow jovian planets like jupiter it would be theoretically possible to convert them into secondary suns which though not as powerful would be sufficient to probably sustain mini solar systems which would go a long way to making this concept viable. the reason i say this is because Jupiter is a Star that failed head it had twice its mass then it would have become a sun .If they have terraforming technology then its possible that they may have limited stellar engineering technology Smaller secondary sun would not pose a serious problem fro the system inner planets. there would probably be multiple primary planets in this system sharing twin orbits. I don't suppose that they published a solar system map of the firefly system.

 

[Cell]

Yep, and if you read the Serenity comic, Those left Behind, it shows the ultimate fates of "The blue hands of Blue Sun" and why their ultimate failure in getting to River led the way for the government taking over the matter and sicking the Operative on the crew of the Serenity.

 

[Garovorkin]

Did not know there was a serenity comic is still ongoing?

 

[Cell]

Nope, there was a three, maybe four, issue mini-series before the theatrical release of Serenity, entitled: Serenity: Those Left Behind. Dark Horse is currently in the middle of publishing another three or four issue mini-series entitled, Serenity: Better Days.

 

[Garovorkin]

Its too bad that Serenity didn't make it at the Box office, the film was actually quite good, I did read sometime back that they were contemplating doing Serenity Direct to dvd movies, that would be an interesting way to keep it alive, i should think.

 

[Cell]

I'm not holding my breath, if they make them they make them, if not I'm okay with that too. To be honest at this point the Browncoats, hardcore Firefly/Serenity fans, are really starting to put me off with their constant drives to "buy yet another copy of Serenity, etc." to show the studio execs that people want another Serenity. In between that and their always annoying "conversion" stories it has gotten to the point where I can't frequent a single Firefly/Serenity message board and am having trouble listening to usually stellar podcasts like The Signal.

 

[Garovorkin]

Now that is scary. What some fans will resort to for the sake of their favorite show, like the Nuts Campaign that the Jericho fans did. That one actually worked though It's to bad Jericho failed again. The fans that get to me the most are the hardcore trek fans who are against Abrams and the new trek movie and want it not to succeed, which is foolish because right now there are no other trek projects on the horizon outside of this movie they might want to keep that in mind.

 

[Garovorkin]

Movie that I like but have to put under the heading of Pseudo science is the Movie Event Horizon,. The event Horizon a ship with a experimental FTL drive disappears for seven years after activating the drive. the ship comes back empty except for one vivisected corpse on the bridge. hat log entries they find reveal that the crew suffered a bizarre fate, then certain members of the boarding party start experiencing ghostly encounters with loved onces deceased and other wise, and one tries to flush himself out an Airlock. The movie gets more and more strange later you find out what happened to the Crew, apparently the ship went into a chaos Dimension which could Hell itself.

 

[hypatia]

I don't know if that would necessarily be pseudo-science. I'd either say it's a story that isn't too interested in science at all (more "science-ignoring") or maybe even one that could loosely be considered plausible (little to nothing is known about parallel dimensions, perhaps there is at least one that could drive a crew insane, making them halucinate virtually anything).

A crew could easily think itself in hell if they became mentally confused enough.

 

[Truth_Seeker]

I still haven't seen Firefly but I've heard that terraforming is a process that takes millions of years using our modern technology.We need to wait a really long time before it takes effect on Mars for example.I also don't think that every planet is suitable for terraforming.If the surface and the atmosphere are full of poisonous chemicals like Venus it would be almost impossible to grow any vegetation.

Terraforming the moons of big gas giants sounds very tempting, Garovorkin.The problem with the moons of Jupiter will be the deadly levels of radiation coming from this huge planet.If we manage somehow to melt the icy ocean that covers Europa that would probably create a thick atmosphere which would prevent the moon from Jupiter's radiation.

 

[Garovorkin]

Terraforming Mars might have some technical problems to overcome namely the fact that Mars has no volcanic activity of any kind, which you do need to replenish and maintain an Atmosphere the core is also a major element in maintaining planetary temperature, Also Mars has no magnetic field, without a magnetic field, the solar winds would erode away the Atmosphere, which is what happened to Mars billions of years ago. With no atmosphere not liquid water either. But its gravity is more then sufficient to hold onto an Atmosphere. The Gravity Issue could be a stumbling block to terraforming Moons, they would have to be sufficient mass and gravity to hold on to an atmosphere also they would need molten core. the Question is, would any of the moons of jupiter or Saturn be likely candidates in this regard. Hey I could be wrong on all of this. This depends on what type of technolgy and science that have in the future. More then likely we may have to develop this technology because I think that we are slowly Poisoning this planet and we need to look for another place to live.

 

[hypatia]

We'll never terraform any planet that well in time. I say that with extreme certainty, if we keep the poisoning at the same rate it is now.

By the way, does anyone know how we'd handle the cold problem terraforming even Mars? With an atmosphere it would warm up significantly, but wouldn't it still be an uninhaibably sub-0 environment?

 

[Garovorkin]

Without a molten core that might be a problem. one possibility would be to release large amounts of green house gases into the atmosphere of the planet. We would also have to engineer plants that could handle not only the colder temperatures but with less sunlight and probably less rainfall to work with I am not sure but i think mars gets about half the sunlight that Earth does. Mars has one other problematic issue and that is that it situated a lot closer to the asteroid belt then Earth, so there would a danger there as well.

 

[hypatia]

Yes, and yet Mars is the most like Earth in our solar system.

So for the forseeable future, we're here, we're stuck here, and we need to remember that.