Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Causality violations! ;)

<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.

A miracle system with multiple planets and moons in the habitable zone is super dooper unlikely, but not flatly impossible.
It would violate most of what we think we know about planetary and system formation, but as I understand it such a solar system could in theory exist without violating physical laws.
Which FTL can't do. FTL requires breaking basic physics in a more fundamental way.

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.

It's just that the miracle system really would be an obvious miracle. Somebody or something made it that way. It almost certainly had to be set up by intelligent design. And people ought to see it as such.

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.