The rate of increase is decreasing . The absolute increase is also decreasing. The UN's latest projections have a majority of even the developing countries falling below the replacement level. And on their "low" projection, the absolute world population peaks at less than 8 billion in the 2030s and then starts declining.
Ah, AIDS, curse, or blessing? What's worse I often wonder, an overpopulated world where people die of hunger (yeah, I know many already do, but stay with me here), or a less overpopulated world where people die of AIDS (well, or of whatever kills you after AIDS weakened you).
They ate reasonably well on penguin and seal, and of course were surrounded by lots of (frozen) fresh water. I fail to see how you can compare this type of environment with space travel.
The penguins and seals are only located on the shores. Once you go inland, its a desert.
Space is, of course, worse, but we are humans, we don't let the fact that it hard, stop us. It took us thousands of years of trying before we got the hang of flying. Maybe it will take us hundreds more before we get the hang of colonising other planets.
What was there to find at the pole? Wind, ice, rock, and nothing else. Did that stop him from going? Or others from following? Should it have?
They told Columbus there would be nothing but empty ocean, but he found a new world. We know there are new world out there, we know they suck, but we might learn to make them better. Why shouldn't we try? What would we loose, except a few dollars, maybe some lives. We allready spend thousands more on making sure people will get killed. Why should the possibility of people getting killed stop us? People die taking showers, it won't stop me from taking them. People will die exploring space, it shouldn't stop us from doing it, because there is so much more to gain than there is to loose.
So you think that for humanity to survive, our best bet is to move to another planet? Perhaps a better idea is to stop f*cking up this one?
No. I think our best bet is to take care of this world as best we can, and to also spread to other worlds, and take care of them as best wecan. Its not one or the other you know.
People seem to forget that the earth has sustained humans in their present form for over 150,000 years, and it's only in, say, the last 100 or so that we've even had to worry about losing humanity to some (usually man-made) catastrophe.
Balderdash! We have documented evidence that people were worried about the end of the world that is as old as history itself! End of days? Apocalypse? Those are 100 year old concepts to you? Every civilisation in the history of mankind has thought about the end of the world, the usual way to fix it was to turn to the gods and ask them to take care of it for us, offering sacrifices and prayers. Now we have a chance to actually do something real, something concrete about it. And you say we shouldn't? I'm happy to have some of my tax money going to helping prepare for the worst...there's already too much of it going to help the worst happen.
If an asteriod's coming to get us, is your last thought really going to be about the loss of our species?
Knowing about their affiliations will tell you about their motivations. But it wont tell you if their argument is good or bad.
It puts their reasoning in perspective. It doesn't change the validity of the arguments themselves, but if his argumentation is flawed, its interresting to be able to find out why that person is holding on to those opinions.
Also, if you are debating the importance of, say, a hot new find in biology, knowing that he person telling you its unimportant is a militant right-wing young-earth creationist is going to help you figure out why he's rejecting all reason to support his unsubstanciated claims.
Don't mean we can't listen to that old koot's arguments, but you've seen the number of post wondering why "for the adventure" is not a valid reason. Perspective helps when the argument's value isn't objective.
But much more importantly, wherever these explorers aimed for, they always had a hope that when they came to the end of their journey, the land that they arrived at could sustain them.
Allright, lets compare them to Roald Amundsen then. He knew what he was up against. And why do I know his name? Because he went.
A journey to the moon or to Mars would be the equivalent of Christopher Columbus setting off on a voyage to the gates of hell in the hope that future generations could somehow make hell hospitable and profit from it (perhaps the flames would provide a free energy source?).
Or to a cold, barren land of ice and wind... There are scientific reasons, and bragging rights reasons. Personally I think that humanity needs to learn to spread around some, just in case...
An opinion is an opinion, and it doesnt matter whether the person voicing it is young or old. The matter should be considered on its merits and not with regard to the age of the speaker.
Well, I can understand that someone with an slashdot I.D. of 1950 might be a little iffy about us yungins talking that way about the opinions of you old timers;-) but putting a person's opinion in perspective is not a daft notion. If I read someone's opinion on, say, firearm regulations, I'll find it interresting to know if they are a member of the NRA. And if someone is talking down on the notion of adventure, its interresting to know that its a person of experience: adventure is a young man's game.
Now we might even start vaccinating people so that they don't try out these demonic drugs. Jeez, someone get me off this damn planet.
Don't you know that if you smoke the pot, you'll shoot your best friend in the head, then run over a little girl on her bicycle after watching an infant drown? All the while financing terrorists!
You child-killing terrorist supporter!
Re:Most annoying of all
on
Are You Annoying?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Extremists of all types are really annoying:
The Mac zealot.
Oh yeah, 'cause its a JOY to deal with the people, whom when informed that you have a mac at home, inevitably ask "are you stupid" or some variant of it. They usually then proceed with demonstrating their abysmal ignorance of all things mac, like stating "it must suck not to be able to open the case" or "man, why did you buy that? You can't even upgrade anything in it!".
Yeah, THOSE people aren't annoying.
health nut who tells you how crappy what you're eating is.
Yeah, people who want you to live long and healthy piss me off...
I think I saw all the ones that were on Fox, but it's possible I missed a few. And maybe if it had gone on longer or if I'd seen them in the proper order (as opposed to the aired order), I have liked it more. No complaints about the effects. The characters were likable enough, but I thought the writing wasn't nearly as good as for Buffy & Angel. (Overall, that is.)
Well, I suggest getting your hands on the DVDs to see them in order. Its better that way. I really enjoyed it myself, and, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "writing", maybe you had a problem with the future space-southern accent? Anyway, the general consensus seems to be that getting the proper order makes a BIG difference.
You are right about series needing time to hit their stride, though this series seemed to hit it much faster than most. By "objects in space"...man, it was getting intense. I was actually caring about these people, that's not something I'm familiar with;-)
Let's try not to exaggerate, okay? "number-1 slot" on Amazon, hahahaha.
Er, it was. The day that Amazon started accepting preorders for the DVDs, it got to the top of the "top five" list of DVD sales...that is, until they stopped accepting preorders (that very day).
you just sound like a fucking idiot
Yes, you do, you anonymous troll you. Whozza troll? Whozza troll? You are! Yes you are, you trolling coward you...awww...he's all scared of loosing karma, ain't that cute!
That's the part that turned me off on the show. That was so stupid it just boggled my mind. Where is this camera man standing?
Also, there's music playing under the dialogue in many scenes, yet it's never established why invisible musicians are following the characters around every week. Unprecedented and baffling!
And sometimes, that cameraman is right in someone's bedroom when they wake up, or even when they are making love! Are we to believe that it is an invisible cameraman? Preposterous!
I saw all the eps that aired on TV and it just seems mediocre to me.
Considering that I was hooked from the first show and that I made a lot of effort to try and catch them all, but couldn't, I have a hard time believing that someone would manage to watch them all if he found it mediocre.
When Fox first aired them, they would advertise it to be on friday nights at 8, and sometimes it was, but sometimes it didn't play at all, or played at 12:05am, another time at 12:20am... you just couldn't know in advance.
I did try my best to watch them all, but missed one or two.
But in case you got a magic TiVo, or by "aired on TV" you mean not by Fox, and not in the states:
What's the big draw of Firefly?
Great FX, great writing, great characters, serious sci in their fi, and Kaylee. Hmmmm.... Kaylee...
It's not until Troy, Saving Private Ryan, Jaws and Pretty Woman at 39-42 that you finally get an actual run of consecutive movies on the list which aren't fantasy or science fiction.
Troy is fantasy. Well, mythology, but that's not much different : )
On the other hand, Firefly was an absolutely tremendous show, and people who don't like it pretty clearly hate Jesus and eat babies.
So if Vera looks like a given level of technology, why would that technology have undergone such a regressive evolution as to require environmental oxygen to function? It just makes no sense.
Does Jayne know this? Jayne is handy with a gun, but does he know about oxydisers and such? He's the one who said Vera needs air to fire...
Also, maybe there is some kind of pneumatic system in there, a recoil dampener or whatever that does need air to fuction properly, we just don't know.
But mostly, if you disagree with the scientific validity of what Jayne "if I wanted schoolin', I'd had gone to school" Cobb says, you take it up with him. ;-)
As much as I liked Firefly (and I liked it a lot) in almost every episode I watched I kept on thinking, "if Whedon wanted to do a Western, why did he set it in space"?
He actually wanted to do a sci-fi show, the western theme is there for flavour. And remember, space-cowboys is a time honoured sci-fi sub-genre, dating back to the early days of science-fiction itself.
The psychic girl could just as easily have been a mystic rather than surgically enhanced [...] Most of the plots would be exactly the same
Well, for what we actually saw, the one-show plots, yes. But he was definatly going somewhere with this, he had a meta plot that wouldn't work in a simple western setting. The psychic was made that way by a group within the Alliance government, there is a conspiracy story there that wouldn't be the same with a mystic, psychics aren't designed by western governments, they are designed by sci-fi governments.
really every plot could have been done just as easily in the 1870s rather than the 2700s (or whenever it was meant to be).
I think the main reason why he made a story in the future rather than in the past is because of the storytelling freedom it gives him. He can shape the future any way he wants to, but the past has to conform to what we read in the history books. In his future, humanity lives under a bicultural hegemony, the Anglo-Sino Alliance. In the past, that wasn't so. He couldn't have had everyone biligual in english and chineese in an actual western. In fact, it was part of the mood of the show, to have a western feel while at the same time have the chineese a dominant force, while they were dominated and abused in the actual western past.
I'm sure this is going to make me unpopular
Nah, there's plenty of trolls for us to hate, we won't pounce on you for having an honest opinion. I think its actually interresting too, most people complain that the sci-fi was tainted by the western, you see it the other way around : )
Personally, I think that mixing the two together is one of the aspects of the show's feel, its intrinsic nature. Its a constant dichotomy:
Western / sci-fi, old and new.
English / Chineese, west and east.
High-tech / low tech, rich and poor.
Heroes / villains, good and bad.
Wimpy pilot / Amazon warrior, husband and wife.
Coarse captain high on morals / Sofisticated call girl, (you get the picture).
Etc.
The show was made of opposing things mixing together, yin and yang, it made it the fascinating watch that it was.
You have the technology to go faster than light. You have the energy to take a ship out of a damn deep gravity well w/o sweating and you don't have the technology to breed cattle from embryos and you have to ship it around in a spaceship which is full of forementioned technology.
We have the technology to go faster than sound, we have the energy to take a ship out of the damn deep gravity well, we have the technology to breed cattle from frozen embryos.
Doesn't mean everyone has the budget for it. Have you ever been faster than sound? Or out of the gravity well? Why not? You have the technology don't you?
You know that right now, on this planet, there are people eating genetically altered foods grown hydroponically while working on the latest fusion rector designs, while somewhere else, on this very planet, someone is planting rice, by hand, and worrying about the health of the family donkey? A donkey they need to get their rice to the market! What will they do if the donkey dies? Use a fusion reactor to move their rice from their crappy hand-built hovel to the market?
Similarly, you have a ship which can go in space but your "cowboy mates" still sit in 1850s kitchen to have their lunch. It just doesn't work.
Yes, because, as soon as you invent FTL travel, you have no more need for a gorram kichen table.
Look at us now, its the 21st century, we have telecommunications satellites and doors that open by themselves when you walk up to them. No one, no where, uses wooden tables anymore!
Personal anecdote: I once took a jet plane to mexico, from the airport I rode in an air conditioned pick-up to a comfy solar-powered fith-wheel trailer in a camp ground. There, I watched as vacheros (mexican cow boys) on horses hurded their cows to the nearby village. According to your logic, this is impossible. If we have the technology for jet propulsion airplanes, therefore everyone on the planet is rich enough to afford all the latest technology and will therefore never EVER again ride on a horse (a self-replicating, self-refulling, edible, semi-autonomous all terrain vehicle) to herd cows (self replicating food sources that can be used as farm equipment AND that fertilises the very soil it uses to feed itself). As soon as a commercial spaceship goes on sale, WHAM, all of humanity stops herding cows.
I mean, as soon as someone invents something high-tech, humanity as a whole has no more use for its low-tech predecessors. Right?
And right now, as throughout all of history, some people live in high-tech luxury, while others have to run barefoot for hours to find barely-drinkable water. They think a fat insect is a feast. They struggle to scratch a living off the dry dirt they had the misfortune be born on, or were displaced to forcibly by well-armed thugs. This is reality: People are poor, people are uneducated, dirty, desperate, while others are rich, educated, comfortable and well fed. Any other setting is unrealistic. Having very rich people in one place and very poor people in another, THAT is realistic.
Firefly, cowboy bebop, trigun, star trek, star wars, they all had that sub genre to some degree (amongst many other). Look at a picture of Han Solo, imagine him with a cowboy hat. There you go : ) He even has an indian (wookie) life partner.
What amazes me is the amount of people unaware of this sub-genre. Its as old as sci-fi! Heck, there's even a bit of space-cowboyism in Toy Story.
You mean, more unrealistic than Star Trek? Or Star Wars? Or Matrix? Or Spider Man? Or Back to the Future? Or Metropolis? Etc?
This show was cancelled for a reason
Yes it was cancelled for a reason: Fox killed it. Played it out of order, on alternating weeks, on the random shifting time slot of death, and played the FIRST ep LAST. Then, when no one could know when it was on, or understand what the hell was going on from the incoherent order of the eps, they claimed "low ratings" and canned it. You know what? NO show would have had good ratings with that treatment, and they know it. They decided to kill it, they wanted Whedon to make another teen hit, in space, but instead he made something original. So they killed it, it wasn't the immediate gratification that they wanted, it wasn't another Buffy, they were mad.
just doesnt do it for me [...] it just wasn't good. In fact many people think its terrible.
Funny, everyone I've loaned my DVDs to absolutly loved it, in fact, some bought the set after having already seen them all. Come to think of it, I had a hard time finding the DVDs for myself because they were sold out in the first 3 stores I went to. Of course some people won't like it. Do you really think its humanly possible to make a show that will be liked by 100% of the population? Whedon and co. were not trying to make a bland piece of commercial masses-feed to be tolerated by all, he was making somethiing good, wich will be loved by many and disliked by some. That's art.
Look, find someone to loan you the DVDs, and watch them in order, starting from the beginning, make your way to the second DVD. You should see the allure by then. Of course, if your mind is already made up and you just sit there feeding your hate with every shot you see...there's no point. But there is a reason why it was an instant cult classic, if you're a sci-fi geek, you should try to see why.
Slashdot Mirror
The rate of increase is decreasing . The absolute increase is also decreasing. The UN's latest projections have a majority of even the developing countries falling below the replacement level. And on their "low" projection, the absolute world population peaks at less than 8 billion in the 2030s and then starts declining.
Ah, AIDS, curse, or blessing?
What's worse I often wonder, an overpopulated world where people die of hunger (yeah, I know many already do, but stay with me here), or a less overpopulated world where people die of AIDS (well, or of whatever kills you after AIDS weakened you).
And I say to myself: what a wonderfull world...
It isn't even made by Apple. They bought the OS and most of the hardware spec from PortalPlayer and then customized it to their liking.
Doesn't that make it theirs then?
If they bought it, and customised it?
iPod
They ate reasonably well on penguin and seal, and of course were surrounded by lots of (frozen) fresh water.
I fail to see how you can compare this type of environment with space travel.
The penguins and seals are only located on the shores. Once you go inland, its a desert.
Space is, of course, worse, but we are humans, we don't let the fact that it hard, stop us. It took us thousands of years of trying before we got the hang of flying. Maybe it will take us hundreds more before we get the hang of colonising other planets.
What was there to find at the pole? Wind, ice, rock, and nothing else. Did that stop him from going? Or others from following? Should it have?
They told Columbus there would be nothing but empty ocean, but he found a new world. We know there are new world out there, we know they suck, but we might learn to make them better. Why shouldn't we try? What would we loose, except a few dollars, maybe some lives. We allready spend thousands more on making sure people will get killed. Why should the possibility of people getting killed stop us? People die taking showers, it won't stop me from taking them. People will die exploring space, it shouldn't stop us from doing it, because there is so much more to gain than there is to loose.
So you think that for humanity to survive, our best bet is to move to another planet? Perhaps a better idea is to stop f*cking up this one?
No.
I think our best bet is to take care of this world as best we can, and to also spread to other worlds, and take care of them as best wecan.
Its not one or the other you know.
People seem to forget that the earth has sustained humans in their present form for over 150,000 years, and it's only in, say, the last 100 or so that we've even had to worry about losing humanity to some (usually man-made) catastrophe.
Balderdash! We have documented evidence that people were worried about the end of the world that is as old as history itself! End of days? Apocalypse? Those are 100 year old concepts to you?
Every civilisation in the history of mankind has thought about the end of the world, the usual way to fix it was to turn to the gods and ask them to take care of it for us, offering sacrifices and prayers. Now we have a chance to actually do something real, something concrete about it. And you say we shouldn't? I'm happy to have some of my tax money going to helping prepare for the worst...there's already too much of it going to help the worst happen.
If an asteriod's coming to get us, is your last thought really going to be about the loss of our species?
Not if we prepared for it...
I was objecting to your statements about that.
I wasn't the original poster : )
Knowing about their affiliations will tell you about their motivations. But it wont tell you if their argument is good or bad.
It puts their reasoning in perspective.
It doesn't change the validity of the arguments themselves, but if his argumentation is flawed, its interresting to be able to find out why that person is holding on to those opinions.
Also, if you are debating the importance of, say, a hot new find in biology, knowing that he person telling you its unimportant is a militant right-wing young-earth creationist is going to help you figure out why he's rejecting all reason to support his unsubstanciated claims.
Don't mean we can't listen to that old koot's arguments, but you've seen the number of post wondering why "for the adventure" is not a valid reason. Perspective helps when the argument's value isn't objective.
What about showing democracy is superior to communism.
First of all, 1950 called, they want their ideology back.
Secondly, democracy isnt not the antithesis of communism.
Its capitalism VS communism.
Just because there hasn't been a democratic communist nation doesn't mean there couldn't be one (as unlikely as it is).
But much more importantly, wherever these explorers aimed for, they always had a hope that when they came to the end of their journey, the land that they arrived at could sustain them.
;-) but putting a person's opinion in perspective is not a daft notion. If I read someone's opinion on, say, firearm regulations, I'll find it interresting to know if they are a member of the NRA. And if someone is talking down on the notion of adventure, its interresting to know that its a person of experience: adventure is a young man's game.
Allright, lets compare them to Roald Amundsen then.
He knew what he was up against. And why do I know his name? Because he went.
A journey to the moon or to Mars would be the equivalent of Christopher Columbus setting off on a voyage to the gates of hell in the hope that future generations could somehow make hell hospitable and profit from it (perhaps the flames would provide a free energy source?).
Or to a cold, barren land of ice and wind...
There are scientific reasons, and bragging rights reasons. Personally I think that humanity needs to learn to spread around some, just in case...
An opinion is an opinion, and it doesnt matter whether the person voicing it is young or old. The matter should be considered on its merits and not with regard to the age of the speaker.
Well, I can understand that someone with an slashdot I.D. of 1950 might be a little iffy about us yungins talking that way about the opinions of you old timers
So slashdot has been slashdotting for years...And they still haven't realized it's *bad* to link large files in the original submission?
I think they enjoy it, they sit there looking at those poor sites being slashdotted to oblivion, laughing like maniacs...
Sadists I tells youz!
Out of print used to mean something was rare and worth something. In the digital media world it apparently now means 'Ok to steal.
Or in other words:
"Oh no, poor us! We can no longer artificially inflate our products value by purposefully underproducing it! Woe is our industry!"
So not just troll, but overrated too!
Now we might even start vaccinating people so that they don't try out these demonic drugs. Jeez, someone get me off this damn planet.
Don't you know that if you smoke the pot, you'll shoot your best friend in the head, then run over a little girl on her bicycle after watching an infant drown?
All the while financing terrorists!
You child-killing terrorist supporter!
Extremists of all types are really annoying:
The Mac zealot.
Oh yeah, 'cause its a JOY to deal with the people, whom when informed that you have a mac at home, inevitably ask "are you stupid" or some variant of it.
They usually then proceed with demonstrating their abysmal ignorance of all things mac, like stating "it must suck not to be able to open the case" or "man, why did you buy that? You can't even upgrade anything in it!".
Yeah, THOSE people aren't annoying.
health nut who tells you how crappy what you're eating is.
Yeah, people who want you to live long and healthy piss me off...
I think I saw all the ones that were on Fox, but it's possible I missed a few.
;-)
And maybe if it had gone on longer or if I'd seen them in the proper order (as opposed to the aired order), I have liked it more.
No complaints about the effects. The characters were likable enough, but I thought the writing wasn't nearly as good as for Buffy & Angel. (Overall, that is.)
Well, I suggest getting your hands on the DVDs to see them in order. Its better that way.
I really enjoyed it myself, and, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "writing", maybe you had a problem with the future space-southern accent? Anyway, the general consensus seems to be that getting the proper order makes a BIG difference.
You are right about series needing time to hit their stride, though this series seemed to hit it much faster than most. By "objects in space"...man, it was getting intense. I was actually caring about these people, that's not something I'm familiar with
Though if you already don't like it...
Let's try not to exaggerate, okay? "number-1 slot" on Amazon, hahahaha.
Er, it was. The day that Amazon started accepting preorders for the DVDs, it got to the top of the "top five" list of DVD sales...that is, until they stopped accepting preorders (that very day).
you just sound like a fucking idiot
Yes, you do, you anonymous troll you. Whozza troll? Whozza troll? You are! Yes you are, you trolling coward you...awww...he's all scared of loosing karma, ain't that cute!
I saw all the eps that aired on TV and it just seems mediocre to me.
Considering that I was hooked from the first show and that I made a lot of effort to try and catch them all, but couldn't, I have a hard time believing that someone would manage to watch them all if he found it mediocre.
When Fox first aired them, they would advertise it to be on friday nights at 8, and sometimes it was, but sometimes it didn't play at all, or played at 12:05am, another time at 12:20am... you just couldn't know in advance.
I did try my best to watch them all, but missed one or two.
But in case you got a magic TiVo, or by "aired on TV" you mean not by Fox, and not in the states:
What's the big draw of Firefly?
Great FX, great writing, great characters, serious sci in their fi, and Kaylee. Hmmmm.... Kaylee...
It's not until Troy, Saving Private Ryan, Jaws and Pretty Woman at 39-42 that you finally get an actual run of consecutive movies on the list which aren't fantasy or science fiction.
Troy is fantasy. Well, mythology, but that's not much different : )
On the other hand, Firefly was an absolutely tremendous show, and people who don't like it pretty clearly hate Jesus and eat babies.
Yup, reavers, the lot of them.
So if Vera looks like a given level of technology, why would that technology have undergone such a regressive evolution as to require environmental oxygen to function? It just makes no sense.
Does Jayne know this?
Jayne is handy with a gun, but does he know about oxydisers and such? He's the one who said Vera needs air to fire...
Also, maybe there is some kind of pneumatic system in there, a recoil dampener or whatever that does need air to fuction properly, we just don't know.
But mostly, if you disagree with the scientific validity of what Jayne "if I wanted schoolin', I'd had gone to school" Cobb says, you take it up with him.
;-)
And, I would be happy to sit for hours and watch Jewel Staite do anything, anything at all.
Now THAT is a reality show I would watch! : )
Especially if strawberries are involved...
He actually wanted to do a sci-fi show, the western theme is there for flavour.
And remember, space-cowboys is a time honoured sci-fi sub-genre, dating back to the early days of science-fiction itself.
The psychic girl could just as easily have been a mystic rather than surgically enhanced [...] Most of the plots would be exactly the same
Well, for what we actually saw, the one-show plots, yes. But he was definatly going somewhere with this, he had a meta plot that wouldn't work in a simple western setting. The psychic was made that way by a group within the Alliance government, there is a conspiracy story there that wouldn't be the same with a mystic, psychics aren't designed by western governments, they are designed by sci-fi governments.
really every plot could have been done just as easily in the 1870s rather than the 2700s (or whenever it was meant to be).
I think the main reason why he made a story in the future rather than in the past is because of the storytelling freedom it gives him. He can shape the future any way he wants to, but the past has to conform to what we read in the history books.
In his future, humanity lives under a bicultural hegemony, the Anglo-Sino Alliance. In the past, that wasn't so. He couldn't have had everyone biligual in english and chineese in an actual western. In fact, it was part of the mood of the show, to have a western feel while at the same time have the chineese a dominant force, while they were dominated and abused in the actual western past.
I'm sure this is going to make me unpopular
Nah, there's plenty of trolls for us to hate, we won't pounce on you for having an honest opinion.
I think its actually interresting too, most people complain that the sci-fi was tainted by the western, you see it the other way around : )
Personally, I think that mixing the two together is one of the aspects of the show's feel, its intrinsic nature. Its a constant dichotomy:
The show was made of opposing things mixing together, yin and yang, it made it the fascinating watch that it was.
You have the technology to go faster than light. You have the energy to take a ship out of a damn deep gravity well w/o sweating and you don't have the technology to breed cattle from embryos and you have to ship it around in a spaceship which is full of forementioned technology.
We have the technology to go faster than sound, we have the energy to take a ship out of the damn deep gravity well, we have the technology to breed cattle from frozen embryos.
Doesn't mean everyone has the budget for it.
Have you ever been faster than sound? Or out of the gravity well? Why not? You have the technology don't you?
You know that right now, on this planet, there are people eating genetically altered foods grown hydroponically while working on the latest fusion rector designs, while somewhere else, on this very planet, someone is planting rice, by hand, and worrying about the health of the family donkey? A donkey they need to get their rice to the market! What will they do if the donkey dies? Use a fusion reactor to move their rice from their crappy hand-built hovel to the market?
Similarly, you have a ship which can go in space but your "cowboy mates" still sit in 1850s kitchen to have their lunch.
It just doesn't work.
Yes, because, as soon as you invent FTL travel, you have no more need for a gorram kichen table.
Look at us now, its the 21st century, we have telecommunications satellites and doors that open by themselves when you walk up to them. No one, no where, uses wooden tables anymore!
Personal anecdote:
I once took a jet plane to mexico, from the airport I rode in an air conditioned pick-up to a comfy solar-powered fith-wheel trailer in a camp ground. There, I watched as vacheros (mexican cow boys) on horses hurded their cows to the nearby village.
According to your logic, this is impossible. If we have the technology for jet propulsion airplanes, therefore everyone on the planet is rich enough to afford all the latest technology and will therefore never EVER again ride on a horse (a self-replicating, self-refulling, edible, semi-autonomous all terrain vehicle) to herd cows (self replicating food sources that can be used as farm equipment AND that fertilises the very soil it uses to feed itself). As soon as a commercial spaceship goes on sale, WHAM, all of humanity stops herding cows.
I mean, as soon as someone invents something high-tech, humanity as a whole has no more use for its low-tech predecessors. Right?
And right now, as throughout all of history, some people live in high-tech luxury, while others have to run barefoot for hours to find barely-drinkable water. They think a fat insect is a feast. They struggle to scratch a living off the dry dirt they had the misfortune be born on, or were displaced to forcibly by well-armed thugs. This is reality: People are poor, people are uneducated, dirty, desperate, while others are rich, educated, comfortable and well fed. Any other setting is unrealistic. Having very rich people in one place and very poor people in another, THAT is realistic.
isn't Joss a girls name?
;-)
Yes, and he knows it. He's a feminist.
I suspect its a ploy to get chicks, personally
Yes, space-cowboy is a sci-fi sub genre.
Firefly, cowboy bebop, trigun, star trek, star wars, they all had that sub genre to some degree (amongst many other).
Look at a picture of Han Solo, imagine him with a cowboy hat. There you go : ) He even has an indian (wookie) life partner.
What amazes me is the amount of people unaware of this sub-genre. Its as old as sci-fi! Heck, there's even a bit of space-cowboyism in Toy Story.
a very unrealistic setting
You mean, more unrealistic than Star Trek? Or Star Wars? Or Matrix? Or Spider Man? Or Back to the Future? Or Metropolis? Etc?
This show was cancelled for a reason
Yes it was cancelled for a reason: Fox killed it.
Played it out of order, on alternating weeks, on the random shifting time slot of death, and played the FIRST ep LAST. Then, when no one could know when it was on, or understand what the hell was going on from the incoherent order of the eps, they claimed "low ratings" and canned it.
You know what? NO show would have had good ratings with that treatment, and they know it. They decided to kill it, they wanted Whedon to make another teen hit, in space, but instead he made something original. So they killed it, it wasn't the immediate gratification that they wanted, it wasn't another Buffy, they were mad.
just doesnt do it for me [...] it just wasn't good. In fact many people think its terrible.
Funny, everyone I've loaned my DVDs to absolutly loved it, in fact, some bought the set after having already seen them all. Come to think of it, I had a hard time finding the DVDs for myself because they were sold out in the first 3 stores I went to.
Of course some people won't like it. Do you really think its humanly possible to make a show that will be liked by 100% of the population? Whedon and co. were not trying to make a bland piece of commercial masses-feed to be tolerated by all, he was making somethiing good, wich will be loved by many and disliked by some. That's art.
Look, find someone to loan you the DVDs, and watch them in order, starting from the beginning, make your way to the second DVD. You should see the allure by then.
Of course, if your mind is already made up and you just sit there feeding your hate with every shot you see...there's no point. But there is a reason why it was an instant cult classic, if you're a sci-fi geek, you should try to see why.
Cowboys-in-space. Cowboys doesn't seem quite right -- more kind of bandits. But you got the general feel, at least.
Well, they had cows that one time...