Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

<shrug> That causality is never under any circumstances violated is a premise that scientists generally have a great emotional attachment to, but that doesn't mean it's true.


That's what makes it more plausible. It is virtually certain that on a fundamental level, physics as we know it, is somehow wrong. I'm pretty certain it won't be wrong in the kind of convenient way that will make speedy and cheap interstellar travel possible but I don't absolutely know that it's impossible, the way I know no system like the 'verse exists within a hundred light years of us because if it did, we would have seen it.

And of course one of the fundamental principles of Firefly is that there shall be no aliens, so that leaves us no alternative except the supernatural...which would explain the instant terraforming and how humanity got to a system that doesn't exist.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

You spend X days in your FTL starship going to some neighboring system. You spend Y days there. You spend X days going home. You arrive home 2X+Y days after you left. Where's the causality violation? There's no overt causality violation there. It's all buried in a slew of scientific mumbo-jumbo. Narratively there is no causality violation; indeed, there is no possibility of any causality violation.


Hans

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

But if relativity is correct (and everything we know suggests that, fundamentally, it is), any method that allows for faster than light travel (or communication) can be used to break causality. If it can't, it suggests the universe works radically different from the way [we think] ours does.

The thing is, FTL only works the way you are suggesting it does in a universe that has a universal time flow. Our universe does not. The simple math of motion is close enough for going to the library on a bicycle. It isn't even close when going to Alpha Centauri on a torchship.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

Yeah, as an example quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense by any natural sort of human intuition but it appears to work anyway.

So demonstrate that any proposed FTL system would violate a few conservation laws (probably not difficult) and you're getting somewhere. Complain that it violates human ideas of logic and that doesn't amount to much.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

No aliens may not be a fundamental principle for the OP.

I've already suggested that the Verse may be understood as a miracle, the handiwork of God, or gods, making a new home possible for humanity.

As for not spotting it, that's easy. Alternate universe. No one on Earth-that Was could know the difference until extreme range telescopes had reached a certain point of development.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

I don't see what makes it necessary. IMO, Firefly would have worked just as well in an open cluster (the Hyades is a really good candidate; both close and dense) with a very fast STL drive (probably some gravitic pseudovelocity warp drive). Taking a couple of years to get from the core to the fringe doesn't, IMO, hurt anything.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

That's not a bad idea, not at all.

A gravitic pseudo velocity warp drive looks like another physics-busting miracle, but that may not be a problem. Firefly already does have gravitic tech, including, IIRC, a grav drive on ships. I pointed out the gravitic super science in a previous post. Not that the show counts as hard sci fi! It doesn't.

The miracle system seems like a classic mega-engineering sort of thing. It reminds me a wee bit of Niven's Ringworld.

YMMV

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

So far, it's not.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

It has math behind it anyway. Math and physics aren't the same thing but one can be mistaken for the other.

Re: Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting
 

There's no physics that says it can't work, though, either.