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The mighty GKarsEye watches Firefly
- Thread starter GKarsEye
- Start date
KoshFan
Regular
Jade wrote:
And everything about B5 made sense? In the Firefly 'verse, cattle are as important to the story as spoo is, or the Swedish meatballs deal. Vital? Only in the context of needing a world, a real world, for the story to live in.
JMS classically wrote of the StarFuries that they travelled "at the speed of plot." As far as I'm concerned, Joss felt that the whole western feel was vital to the tale, and that meant a few nonsensical things slipped in.
Recoil: I think what darth_librarian was getting at was not so much "I can't think for myself" as "Well, I'm a little lazy when it comes to checking out new things. Why don't you folks tell me if you think it's worth it, and since I respect your opinions, I'll use them as a guide for whether or not I should invest time in this." I do it all the time.
And everything about B5 made sense? In the Firefly 'verse, cattle are as important to the story as spoo is, or the Swedish meatballs deal. Vital? Only in the context of needing a world, a real world, for the story to live in.
JMS classically wrote of the StarFuries that they travelled "at the speed of plot." As far as I'm concerned, Joss felt that the whole western feel was vital to the tale, and that meant a few nonsensical things slipped in.
Recoil: I think what darth_librarian was getting at was not so much "I can't think for myself" as "Well, I'm a little lazy when it comes to checking out new things. Why don't you folks tell me if you think it's worth it, and since I respect your opinions, I'll use them as a guide for whether or not I should invest time in this." I do it all the time.
Jan
Regular
You're right, it's pretty unlikely that they'd haul oxen and horses. But why assume that they brought entire full-grown animals rather than embryos? Oxen and horses would be invaluable for a pioneer settlement and yokes for them are easily made from native materials.
Heck, if I'm willing to believe in interstellar flight, I can certainly assume that they'd find a way to economically transport necessary food and work animals. The embryo idea has been used in SF books going back to Heinlein, at least.
Jan
admiraldave
Regular
Unlike, say, mechanical devices, oxen and horses don't require spare parts, they can live off the land, provide transportation and a source of power. I'm more willing to believe cattle is valuable cargo than the glorified protein bars in the pilot.
vacantlook
Super Moderator
KoshFan, ever the diplomat (in the broader, non-political administration sort of way)!
Jade Jaguar
Regular
Seems more likely to me that they would use native animals. But, maybe he didn't want the show to look too much like scifi. They could have just added some head bumps, ala STNG. An extra horn or two, or extra pair of appendages...
Somehow, I doubt that we will give up our mechanical devices when we move into space, especially to farm, as the mechanicals are so much more efficient and productive.
admiraldave
Regular
It's not a matter of giving up, it's more a matter of infrastructure. What do you do when the machines break down? People ride horses on the poor planets that lack the technological depth to support the planes, trains and automobiles. Afterall, horses are self-replicating, and mainly require the same food that humans eat.
If you take farming machines to a new world, you have two problems, setting up the farms to feed you and setting up facilities to maintain those machines, unless you want to pay through the nose to import every sparkplug and belt that needs replacing. Take horses, you've got one problem, producing enough food for you and the horses. If things go really south, you can eat the horses.
Most, if not all of worlds were terraformed to match Earth conditions. I'd imagine the process would kill off any natives.
If you take farming machines to a new world, you have two problems, setting up the farms to feed you and setting up facilities to maintain those machines, unless you want to pay through the nose to import every sparkplug and belt that needs replacing. Take horses, you've got one problem, producing enough food for you and the horses. If things go really south, you can eat the horses.
Most, if not all of worlds were terraformed to match Earth conditions. I'd imagine the process would kill off any natives.
vacantlook
Super Moderator
Yeah, I'm under the impression that all the colony planets were terraformed to get them as close as possible to the Earth-that-was, and for some reason, maybe just my own biases, I figured all those planets that were terraformed started as lifeless hunks of rock. So I'm thinking there weren't any native animals on any of the worlds. At least, I would think as much with Joss seemingly wanting the show to have no aliens in it at all.
Jade Jaguar
Regular
I don't know... I think some oxen with foreheads like Klingons would really have made the show. They could have brought them in from a near-by planet.
vacantlook
Super Moderator
Of course all this talk of aliens makes me think of the Alien Museum scene in "The Message." I like that scene, but I'm not sure if it's because the scene's good or if it's because I think Simon's just damn cute.
darth_librarian
Regular
Yeah, because choices on chosen influences for sci-fi TV and political decisions can be lumped into the same boat. Whatever. Its a TV series, not the election.
FYI, I don't usually post in Politics, and when I do its usually on UK stuff, where I feel i'm only really educated enough to make my own mind up. I did spend four years studying UK politics, for whatever that was worth. It gave me time to form opinions at least.
I could reply further and angrilyer, but Koshfan said it so well. Except its not so much a matter of being a little lazy but having little time to watch any sci-fi TV (my partner hates it), and I only get about 2 hours spare each night. Ergo, I have to chose carefully in order to maximise my view pleasure per hour. Hell, i might have picked Andromeda. but I'd rather spend quality time cleaning the bathroom.
Added to this is the fact that i'd have to shell out £30+ in order to buy the whole set on DVD if I wanted to watch it, so naturally, i'd check out other peoples opinions first. I'm on a public sector wage scale, so I can;t just shell out on things like that.
Its called me respecting other's opinions, it wasn't arse licking or any such nonsense. I value judgements from everyone here including GKE and you. Sorry if my being being honest about my influences f***ed you off, I was only trying to encourage the guy to keep viewing and post some more info.
There are far sillier things said here everyday than anything I have ever posted.
PillowRock
Regular
Kill off what "natives"?
As far as I can remember, in the entire run of the series we never saw any species (sentient or otherwise) that hadn't been exported from Earth (in the parlance of the Firefly "Verse", "Earth that was").
Interplanetary trade in cattle "on the hoof" would make no sense as a short term trade item (just to get that amount of beef to the destination). However, if the goal was to establish herds for the long term on newly emerging colonies on terraformed planets, I can see how bringing in cattle and horses could make sense.
The thing about frozen embrios is that you have to grow them to "independent viability" once you get them to the destination. We never saw anything in Firefly that would tell us that they were capable of doing that without having adult females that the embrios could be implanted into.
That leaves freezing the adult (or at least already born) cattle. We saw that adult mammals (namely humans) being frozen (or put into some form of suspended animation) for extended periods. However, even at that it was never more than one at a time, and always came as surprise to everyone that saw the person come out of it. In fact, one of the plots hinged on the idea that a suspended person could routinely pass for being dead, which I would think would imply that people / animals being in that suspended state was not a routine thing. Therefore, I don't think that it is a big leap to think that the cost of suspending an entire herd as cargo might be beyond what Serenity's crew would have readily available.
hypatia
Regular
I'd be willing to suspend disbelief in the "so this is how humanity goes out to the stars" thing. I know I'm a broken record on this point, but I think A.C. Clarke is the only one I've ever read to really, realistically, look at just how it might be done. Seeding makes the most sense to me. But that would make for a very boring series.
Our specific requirements are so narrow and picky, I can't see how we'd ever survive anywhere reachable. It'll be too cold, too hot, too much gravity, too little, too much of something, too little.
I say we send the cockroaches. They adapt better.
Our specific requirements are so narrow and picky, I can't see how we'd ever survive anywhere reachable. It'll be too cold, too hot, too much gravity, too little, too much of something, too little.
I say we send the cockroaches. They adapt better.
