SONG'S BLOG

Song

Terraforming economics
Tuesday, June 28, 2005

OK, I feel the need to balance last blog's guilty giggles with some grander thoughts. I've been thinking about the whole premise of the Firefly solar system, with the 500-years-from-now timeline and all those terraformed planets and moons.

How's this for a grand thought: 500 years? Emigration from a dying Earth-that-was, colonizing the first planet, establishing the melting-pot civilization, accumulating adequate wealth and resources to terraform another planet, and then actually transforming its entire atmosphere, ecology, etc? Times how many planets and moons? In 500 lousy years? Nah, I don't think so. Maybe 5000 years.

Here's my other grand thought: Terraforming a lifeless rock into even a harsh but survivable environment has gotta be incredibly expensive, requiring an enormous upfront investment before anything remotely profitable could be undertaken there. It would have to be undertaken by a large government or huge corporation. Whoever paid for it, they wouldn't be likely to then walk away and leave it open for whatever roughneck pioneers feel like establishing a stake. Yet by all appearances, this is precisely what we find on all the border worlds where Firefly does its petty-crime jobs. How does someone like Patience get her grubby little hands on an entire newly-terraformed world? Economically speaking, it is not making sense to me.

Suggestions welcome.

COMMENTS

Friday, July 15, 2005 1:24 PM

CITIZEN


Terraforming doesn't have to mean changing the atmosphere/environment of course, it could mean simply seeding a planet with plant life.
We also don't really know how well developed those planets are.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 1:42 PM

GROUNDED


I mentioned that I thought 500 years was a little tight in one of the epic Solar System vs. Galaxy threads, mainly because of what Bleyddyn mentioned - if they have the technology to achieve widespread colonisation so quickly, there's no reason for people to be living in frontier-like conditions.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 11:34 AM

TETRACANTH


Supposing that terraforming a world takes a considerable amount of time, and isn't a surefire deal, it would make sense to seed as many worlds as possible with life, in the hopes that in a hundred years or so at least some of them will be habitable. The best ones became the core planets, and other major centers, and the ones that took longer, were too far away, or didn't turn out so nicely became the lesser worlds. (One must allow for some very snazzy, as-yet-unknown technology to perform an unsupervised terraform in 100 years, of course) But a shotgun approach would leave unclaimed worlds that the fringes of society would move to, as they weren't feasible for the mainstream economy, just leftovers of some great project of a bygone age.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 4:21 AM

BLEYDDYN


The problem I have with all the terraformed worlds is not that they couldn't have been done in 500 years. If current ideas about molecular manufacturing are even close to being accurate then you could drop a couple of robots and a nanofactory on a planet/moon and have a massive world straddling system of terraformers running within a year. The problem I see is that with that kind of tech, you would not be seeing anything ressembling the 'verse we've all come to know and love. As a simple example, ships wouldn't be made out of metal, for the most part, but various forms of carbon.

There could be the very slight possibility that the Alliance has full molecular manufacturing that they keep to themselves, but I would find it very hard to beleive that it would not leak out.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005 10:09 PM

SIGMANUNKI


I'm not sure that we should be putting any limitations on unknown tech. Plus I believe that Joss himself has stated that he didn't really put a lot of thought into the tech side of things. He thought about the story.

Also, this might be useful:
http://www.mts.net/~arphaxad/firefly.html

Haven't had time to go through the entire thing myself, but it should shed some light on some of the time stuff.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005 3:12 PM

REGINAROADIE


In FINDING SERENITY, one of the essays deals with this leap of logic (one thing he says is that all the terra formed planets look like the Malibu Hills that are on the Fox Ranch), but the way I see it, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Think about all the technological advances we've made in the last 100 years, or even in the last 30. I don't think it's too much to imagine the FIREFLY verse actually happening.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005 2:50 PM

SIMONWHO


My take on it is that we all emigrated from Earth in a big fleet, all life in suspended animation/gene pools. Therefore it is not AD 2502 but five hundred years of conscious life later (time would have been distorted anyway). So, we turn up at this new solar system and terraform 4-8 planets first. These become the rich ones. Then all the used equipment starts on the next set of planets, then the next until it's all worn out but there's still lots of planets and moons to go.

Most of the groundwork was down while we were all still sleeping (i.e. automated atmosphere replacement, seed planting, etc, etc) so it was pretty close to being ready when everyone woke up.


POST YOUR COMMENTS

You must log in to post comments.

YOUR OPTIONS

OUR SPONSOR