11 Replies to “The Worlds of Serenity”

  2. Plus, you get enough gravity working on a moon like Titan or Io and you could have liquid water way out a billion miles from a G class star and that makes a good base to terraform off of. We’ve seen cold planets in Firefly, so that’s a posibility there.

  4. Nah, my brain only hurts when Doyce tells me all the broken laws of physics don’t matter to him.
    If you want the single-star-system thing to fly in a universe with some semblence of hard sf (real world physics *plus* artificial gravity and such) Then you’re lookin at a larger star than Sol, a GII subgiant, off the main sequence but still putting out a Sol-like spectrum.
    The planetary system is artificial, with multiple — probably three — worlds in each orbital track and several orbital planes in use. Planetary orbits are kept stable by a combination of the inertial dampers used on the ships (the burst accelerations accompanied by a glowy effect) and the same gravitic engines that give moons Earthlike gravity.
    Obviously, the system was either built by Somebody Else and abandoned or the refugees from Earth have superduperfantastical ar-grav and inertial manipulation tech. They had to grab all the moons from a couple of super-Jovian gas giants and move them into the Life Zone of the star, then give them artificially enhanced surface gravity. If built by Others they might not have needed superduperfantastical terraforming tech. If built by humans they’d need either really extreme nanotech, and there’s no sign of it in the series, or to have kept most of the colonists in stasis for hundreds of thousands or millions of years while robots did the work. And if they had all that terraforming tech then why leave? Re-terraform Earth, then do Mars, Venus, Ganymede, etc.
    As it is the Alliance Star System is about as ludicrous as ERB’s Solar System with Barsoom, Pellucidar and Amtor. Or the Star Wars galaxy — Force, midichlorians and all. I can’t help but think that some sort of hyperspace and multiple systems would have been less of a stretch.
    Not that I don’t love Firefly and Serenity. I do. I just have to shift gears to go with the flow of the Barsoom-class science and enjoy the Whedony goodness.

  5. Actually, it all being a Ringworld Engineers-style artifact is a nice little solution. If only I thought Joss had that in mind, rather than having a sort of vague sense of astrophysics that led to something so highly improbable …
    Meh. Doesn’t much worry me. Fact is, the cartography involved doesn’t much matter in the series.

  6. O.k. you are all totally geeks – after the first paragraph I shut down. I just wanted to say I saw the first commercial for the movie over the weekend and the black chick that is in the movie (Lawrence Fishburne’s wife by the by) is in this months issue of Muscle and Fitness (the one with a barely dressed football gal/stripper on the cover). Check it out – nice little one page article about movies, workout stuff etc.

  8. They say it in the first couple voice-overs in the original series, but then Fox bitched and they started making it sound like multiple systems.
    In the intro to Serenity, Joss goes back to his original vision and very specifically states it’s ONE solar system.
    Almost all the inhabited rocks in Firefly are Moons. Well over two-thirds are specifically mentioned to be moons, and they use the term ‘planet’ only very very rarely… of the one-third they don’t specifically call a moon, almost none of them are called planets, either.
    And Bonnie — that amazing woman would be Gina Torres, who is not only awesome, but actually sent me email to ask if I’d put a link to her official site on fireflywiki.org (and obviously had read it enough to know there a personal info page on all the actors — she corrected a factoid on Jewel Stait), thus ensuring her place as my new favorite actor on the show. :)

  10. Geeky correction: that would be a GIV or GIII star. I’m not sure GIIs exist.
    (Sol is a GV, which means it’s a main sequence star of ordinary size. GIVs are subgiants, GIIIs are giants, GIIs are bright giants.)

  11. Yeah, that’s her name and very cool of her to do that. If you guys every hook up I want in.

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