Disney Plus could be rebooting Firefly

[doctorbadwolf]

No. It was forgotten. As I recall, when the crew of Serenity learned about it they went, in effect, "Miranda? What's that? Never heard of it." If it had been sold as a massive accident or catastrophe within their lifetimes, folks would remember it, because it took 30 million lives.

No, that doesn't necessarily follow. This is a world in which whole colonies being lost is extremely unlikely to be a unique or even decade defining event.

And most people probably never heard of the place to begin with, or ever heard about 30 million people being lost, or anything.

 

[MarkB]

No. It was forgotten. As I recall, when the crew of Serenity learned about it they went, in effect, "Miranda? What's that? Never heard of it." If it had been sold as a massive accident or catastrophe within their lifetimes, folks would remember it, because it took 30 million lives.

Wash remembers there being a call for colonists to settle there, but nothing after that. For it to have been so completely forgotten, information about the place would have had to be suppressed right from the start, even before there was any disaster. Essentially, it was planned as a science experiment from the beginning, and was isolated to keep the testing environment clean, and to ensure nobody knew what was actually happening there.

Certainly a huge undertaking, and an implausible one, but not entirely impossible. The Firefly 'verse has a huge number of terraformed moons and planets in its one star system, many of which have a whole slew of issues, and communication can get flaky out past the inner worlds.

 

[Umbran]

No, that doesn't necessarily follow. This is a world in which whole colonies being lost is extremely unlikely to be a unique or even decade defining event.

Upon what do you base that?

We have no direct canon statement as to the population of the 'Verse. The non-canon number we have is about 50 billion people. To scale, then, the loss of Miranda would have been equivalent to about 4 million people dying in a single event on our Earth today.

Basically, it should be about the equivalent of nuking Los Angeles.

 

[Deset Gled]

Wash remembers there being a call for colonists to settle there, but nothing after that. For it to have been so completely forgotten, information about the place would have had to be suppressed right from the start, even before there was any disaster. Essentially, it was planned as a science experiment from the beginning, and was isolated to keep the testing environment clean, and to ensure nobody knew what was actually happening there.

Certainly a huge undertaking, and an implausible one, but not entirely impossible. The Firefly 'verse has a huge number of terraformed moons and planets in its one star system, many of which have a whole slew of issues, and communication can get flaky out past the inner worlds.

I'll also throw out there that the name "Miranda" was probably not the name that it would be remembered by. Everybody knows about Chernobyl, the number of people that recognize the name Pripyat is much smaller, the number of people who remember Shipelicki village is lower still.

Also, what percentage of people in the current western world could name the Banqiao Dam failure, the San Juanico disaster, or the Bhobal chemical spill off the top of their heads?*

*Edit: Full disclosure, the only one I could remember the full name of myself without googling was Bhobal, and I couldn't spell that without checking. And I totally cheated by using Wikipedia to pull out the disasters with the most deaths. I was going to go with the Boston molasses incident and 2005 BP oil explosion on my first round.

 

[Deset Gled]

Upon what do you base that?

We have no direct canon statement as to the population of the 'Verse. The non-canon number we have is about 50 billion people. To scale, then, the loss of Miranda would have been equivalent to about 4 million people dying in a single event on our Earth today.

Basically, it should be about the equivalent of nuking Los Angeles.

Upon what do you base your assumption that we're wrong? We have the canon as presented by the movie as proof. You have to prove it's wrong for it to be a plot hole.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Upon what do you base that?

We have no direct canon statement as to the population of the 'Verse. The non-canon number we have is about 50 billion people. To scale, then, the loss of Miranda would have been equivalent to about 4 million people dying in a single event on our Earth today.

Basically, it should be about the equivalent of nuking Los Angeles.

Except people know about Los Angeles, it's been around for generations, it's a central hub of trade and culture.

The number of people doesn't actually impact the likelyhood of covering it up all that much. What we have is a small town on the frontier, run by government doctors, abandoned when the experiment went bad, and no maps show it's location, no record speak of it, etc.

30 million people doesn't make it so people know anything about it. Wash recalls a call for colonists, but nothing else. That seems pretty normal. Why would the govt even announce tht those people are dead or that the colony failed? Just quietly erase all mention of the place and move on, let the public be distracted by other stuff.

 

[Dioltach]

Also, it's stated somewhere that standard practice for new colonies was to dump the population on a moon or planet and let them fend for themselves. So presumably, until they can establish themselves as a viable trading partner or other form of destination, the rest of the 'Verse has no meaningful information about them.

If this happens with, say, a dozen new colonies, it's not hard to imagine that nobody wonders much about one that doesn't make contact.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

30 millions in a far planet in Firefly universe would be like 30 people killed by a terrorist attack in a far African town, or dead for a (air)shipwreck in the news of the real life. And if it was the place of a secret experiment then then name would be hidden since the first moment. I guess a solar system in a "rich zone" could be fifteen billios of inhabitants.

 

[Ryujin]

No. It was forgotten. As I recall, when the crew of Serenity learned about it they went, in effect, "Miranda? What's that? Never heard of it." If it had been sold as a massive accident or catastrophe within their lifetimes, folks would remember it, because it took 30 million lives.

I vaguely recall someone (Kaylee?) mentioning something about remembering advertising for colonists for Miranda. Could be wrong.

 

[trappedslider]

I vaguely recall someone (Kaylee?) mentioning something about remembering advertising for colonists for Miranda. Could be wrong.

She mentions it and then says something about being told the terraforming didn't take hold.