I figure Earth's evacuation was as successful as any. In other words: a few hold-outs could not be moved, many perished.

They never explicitly stated that Earth was completely abandoned. It was kinda implied in the cheesy opening voice-overs both for the series and the movie.

There is this translation of the shadow show going on in the background when Mal meets the Bad Guy in "Heart of Gold":

CIRCULAR SHADOW representing Earth-That-Was fills the frame.

NARRATOR (Chinese): Little by little, the tribes used the Earth up. Barren, she had little left to offer them.

Silhouetted shapes appear. SPACESHIPS. They radiate out from the shadow sphere, scatter in all directions. Leave it behind.

NARRATOR: Swollen of her, they left. And for the first time since the Great Burn that birthed her, she was alone.

The ships are gone now. A wisp of SMOKE wafts off the sphere, creates a snake of shadow.

NARRATOR: The Earth cried, and terrible were her tears. Acid and caustic, the spawn of the tribes' rape. They flowed a century.

The smoke INTENSIFIES, becomes shadowy FLAME.

NARRATOR: The fire that finally came did so as a blessing.

The sphere SMOLDERS now, bits of it breaking up and disintegrating under the intense heat.

Which strongly implies either a) complete evacuation or b) anybody left behind is dead dead deadski now.

Oh yeah, the implication was that everyone that didn't make it on a Ark was basically left to die. But EtW biosphere death does help explain why the Exodus was an event rather than a process, because after the 'fire', there was no point on going back and there were no Arks trickling into the Verse decades later.

Hrm, that also brings up the idea if spaceships are leaving in all directions, I wonder if the 'Verse was the only destination. If several different solar clusters in addition the 'Verse received different Exodus fleets.

Reminds me that back in the day, one of my thoughts was that the Reavers were going to end up being the refugees from Earth that left too late and were pissed on being left behind. The whole idea of link the Reavers with the Indians, Indians being the original inhabitants of the West and the Rievers (if from Earth) being the humanity's home.

Hrm, that also brings up the idea if spaceships are leaving in all directions, I wonder if the 'Verse was the only destination. If several different solar clusters in addition the 'Verse received different Exodus fleets.

Where did you get the idea they left in all directions?

Not being snotty, I'm curious.

Seems to me...and I am having the gorramest difficulty finding a transcript of that horrible voice-over they tacked on to some of the air eps...that the implication was "We were dying, we found *a* system with hundreds of planets and moons and whatnot, we ditched Earth and headed for it." But I can't nail that down.

*My* question was always "Why go to a whole other system? We got dozens upon dozens of moons and whatnot right here in ol' Sol System. Mars, anyone?" But that's probably just me.

I think the idea that everything was taking place in a single system was in Serenity (the movie).

I think the idea that everything was taking place in a single system was in Serenity (the movie).

I actually got that feeling from the show, too. Damn it, I know I can find that fucking thing...

Where did you get the idea they left in all directions?

SPACESHIPS. They radiate out from the shadow sphere, scatter in all directions. Leave it behind.

*My* question was always "Why go to a whole other system? We got dozens upon dozens of moons and whatnot right here in ol' Sol System. Mars, anyone?" But that's probably just me.

Mars is the only real terraforming candidate in Sol. Beyond the asteroid belt, solar luminescence is far too low to support plant life, and Mercury is way too close. Also you would need to accelerate Mercury's rotation without breaking it apart so there is planetary temp evens out a bit. Venus would be a good candidate if only it had a magnetic field. The planet is very close, it has an atmosphere, lots of free CO2, but without the magnetosphere free O2 gets blown into the solar winds way too fast, which explains why there is no free H20 on Venus. And to get a magnetosphere you need a rotating liquid iron core, not something that is easy to whip up.

As for the 'Verse, it is my understanding is that is a tight cluster of solar systems, making traveling between systems of the Verse possible though long (in the month long trip category, very pioneer/settler trail analogy) but the trip to system outside the 'Verse across the Deep Black would take years, which is beyond most ship's endurance.

DXMachina was the first to bring it up, in the Buffista archives, now, in the first Firefly thread [link] AKA Firefly 1: Josssssss Innnnn Spaaaaaaaaaaace! :

DXMachina - Sep 21, 2002 10:02:41 pm PDT #533 of 10011

"After the Earth was used up, we found *a* new solar system, and *hundreds* of new earths were terraformed and colonized."

Mars is the only real terraforming candidate in Sol. Beyond the asteroid belt, solar luminescence is far too low to support plant life, and Mercury is way too close. Also you would need to accelerate Mercury's rotation without breaking it apart so there is planetary temp evens out a bit. Venus would be a good candidate if only it had a magnetic field. The planet is very close, it has an atmosphere, lots of free CO2, but without the magnetosphere free O2 gets blown into the solar winds way too fast, which explains why there is no free H20 on Venus. And to get a magnetosphere you need a rotating liquid iron core, not something that is easy to whip up.

Okay, yes, you're right...in real life.

But they made it pretty clear in Firefly that their terraforming technology was damn near magical. I believe they even mention specifics, kind of, in the Serenity RPG book. Using artifical gravity generators and whatnot to keep atmosphere around a given heavenly body and so forth.

So, assuming that that tech wasn't developed on the way to the new system, because how do you test it, then the question remains...why travel for years and years to a brand new system when you've got a perfectly useful one right here?

And the answer to that is: It's TV, Joe, shut up already.

Well, there is the grey goo school of terraforming.

Grey goo is nickname for a possible apocalypse, where nanites dissemble everything on the planet down to grey goo.

Grey goo school of terraforming is let loose a nanite plague onto a world, maybe crash some of its moons or large asteroids to give the nanites something more material to work with, and let them reduce the planet to grey goo, and then rebuild the planet into something more supporting of human life. Increase gravity by increasing planetary density, create an atmosphere by freeing Oxygen from its binded state, and so on.

With that, you could terraform Jupiter into several nice vacation worlds. But that requires a tech curve for nanite manipulation to be on the subatomic scale where right now there does not even seem to be any reliable theory to even approach it below the molecular scale.

(And yes, I know there have been some success, but the methodologies require specific circumstances and materials, without any apparent generalizable methods arising from that.)