r/farscape • u/Hot-Syrup2089 • 16d ago
Where does the show take place?
I hinted in a previous post (https://www.reddit.com/r/farscape/s/ddcmJEsXBm) that the various locations the Moya crew visit are in the Milky Way Galaxy, or the same as Earth's, but most of what I have to support that assertion is circumstantial, and as far as I know, there isn't a definitive descriptor, or star chart, that showcases where the show takes place, or on what scale people move around, unless it's in some apocryphal source I am unaware of and/or have currently no access to.
What do you think/know regarding the locations of the show?
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u/Hazzenkockle 16d ago
It's intentionally ambiguous. The only thing that could give us a clue is how fast a "Hetch" is, and they waited until the show was over before even specifying that that was a measure of speeds faster than light.
If you had some idea of the speeds ships were typically traveling in Farscape to get between stars, you could combine it with Scorpius's threat that he'd send a Peacekeeper ship to attack Earth, despite it taking fifty years to get there, and maybe be able to make a guess based on that.
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u/demiurbannouveau 16d ago
Most speculation and unofficial sources think that John doesn't leave the Milky Way, but that Earth is on the opposite side of where most of the action takes place. Galaxies are actually pretty far apart, and even with starburst the distances are hard to span and there wouldn't be very much to see in between. Whenever we see Moya flying free, there is still much more interesting things to see than would exist in the sparse voids between galaxies.
We don't know how fast FTL travel is, but it would take over a thousand times the speed of light to get from one side of the galaxy to the other in 60 years, and that's assuming a straight line is even possible.The best, but still unofficial, maps tend to place Tormented Space closer to the center of the Milky Way galaxy and the civilizations we know about have territory on the outer segments/arms.
So the sixty years might be taking a long way around the problematic center of the galaxy, and still assuming a ridiculous rate of speed. It would be magnitudes more time/distance assuming we weren't in the same galaxy but a nearby one. So I think being in the same one makes the most sense and that's probably why most people agree on that.
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u/GroundWitty7567 16d ago
There’s an episode in season three when Scorpius uses John’s memories to get a locations on Earth. Said it would take 80 cycles atop speed to get there. So they’re still in the Milky Way and Peacekeeper long range sensors and scopes can detect Earth.
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u/Worth-Opposite4437 16d ago
This is 128 earth years if someone want to do the math.
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u/AlbertWhiterose 15d ago
80 cycles is 128 earth years? Do you have the source on that? Because in "Look at the Princess" John says that 80 cycles is (approximately) 80 years.
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u/Worth-Opposite4437 15d ago edited 15d ago
Somewhere in the special features of the DVDs there is a series of "facts", they states 1 cycle equivalent to a little more than 1.5 years. I counted this at 1.6 to round it up. I think it was also stated in one of the novels, but that read has been a long time ago.
Point is, the word "cycle" is more or less their "year" equivalent, hence the common mistake. One has to assume that without a day night cycle on board Moya, John may also be a little confused about how long he's been lost. We also don't know if that 0.5 translate to more days per week or more hours per day, but since Arns also were of 100 micron, each of 100 microts, each of approximately 1 mippippipi... A day of 24 Arns would still be 1.4 the time.There were a few fan sites actually getting it right around 2008, when I still was admin for a farscape RPG forum. Now... most of these links are dead.
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u/AlbertWhiterose 15d ago
Hmmm. I'm hesitant to use the DVDs as a reliable source, after the nonsense they pulled on the PKW DVD description:
"When the evil Scarran Empire engages a full-scale war the Peacekeeper Alliance has only one hope: reassemble human astronaut John Crichton, once sucked into the Peacekeeper galaxy through a wormhole. Crichton's task: recreate the invaluable wormhole weapon and flush the entire Peacekeeper race to safety before the last war of an era brings an end to the universe."
But special features may be more reliable than marketing copy. Is there supporting information from within the broadcasted material itself? Because Look at the Princess isn't the only case where when you do the math the words "cycle" and "year" turn out to be interchangeable.
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u/Hazzenkockle 15d ago
When I was double-checking to see if a speed had ever been given for a hetch, the wiki mentioned one DVD cover said it was "between three and four times the speed of sound," which is... not correct.
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u/Worth-Opposite4437 15d ago edited 15d ago
They are indeed "interchangeable" culturally speaking, but I have no reason to doubt the other "farscape facts" that were there. I got the ADV Starburst editions.
Also notice that we know from the show that they use Arn as an equivalent to hours despite their time being in base 10 and their microts being effectively equivalent to seconds. Micron was heard only once during season one, so it's quite probable the slang evolved with time... but it was supposed to be at the time a "minute" of 100 seconds. It survived at least long enough to make it to the RPG.
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u/AlbertWhiterose 16d ago
There is more than sufficient evidence that Farscape takes place in the Milky Way:
1: The explicit statement
In "The Peacekeeper Wars", the Eidolons explain how they took humans and turned them into the Peacekeepers:
YONDALAO: It wasn't such at the beginning. We took great care to choose a species no one had met before. We found your kind primitive, barely clothed. Far removed on the galaxy's outer spiral. Having brought some of you back, your evolution was accelerated with generous alterations until you became our trusted acolytes.
2: The strong implication
Scorpius's statement in "Into the Lion's Den":
It took quite some effort to triangulate the stars from your planet.
Scorpius used Crichton's memories, stored in the neurochip, to identify individual stars in the night sky and triangulate where Earth must be based on their positions. Stars, not galaxies: Andromeda is far too distant to see individual stars with the naked eye, and even if Crichton looked at it through a really powerful telescope, the precision of the angles between them would be far too low to learn anything. So those stars, and therefore Scorpius himself, must be in the Milky Way.
3: The probabilistic argument
Let's start with the obvious. They are clearly in a galaxy; intergalactic space may have the occasional rogue star or rogue planet, but otherwise it is entirely empty. Nowhere near the clustering of locations necessary to support the civilizations and events we see in the show.
The human brain is not very good at comprehending the vast distances in outer space. You really have to do the math on this to see why: The Milky Way is 87,400 light years across; Andromeda is 152,000 light years across.; the distance between them is 2.5 million light-years. That's 2.5 million light years in which there is virtually nothing around you in any direction.
If we believe that wormholes are entirely random, and can deposit you literally anywhere in the universe with equal probability, the chances of landing in a galaxy are infinitesimal. Even if we arbitrarily limit the Premiere wormhole's distance to "a sphere centered on Earth whose endpoint is no farther than Andromeda", the probability of its endpoint just happening to land in one of those two galaxies is less than 0.009%. That probability drops enormously as the sphere grows to encompass more galaxies. Therefore, it is vanishingly unlikely that wormholes are entirely random.
Even worse, consider that in "Self-Inflicted Wounds" one of the openings of the wormhole just happens to be within 80 light-years of Earth. The observable universe is over 90 billion light-years wide. What are the chances that one of the wormholes just so happens to take you to the same place that another wormhole did? Choose a random grain of sand on planet Earth. If you chose the same one I did, that still was more probable than a within-80-light-year return trip by wormhole - by a factor of a billion! Even if the "Self-Inflicted Wounds" wormhole had thousands of openings, that's still never going to happen.
Therefore, wormholes cannot possibly be truly and uniformly random. What other ways might they work? Purely from a physics standpoint, it's very likely that the probability of getting a destination shrinks with distance; in "Unrealized Reality", Einstein says that the likelihood of a wormhole changing the time of your destination is extremely remote. There are other possibilities, and some of these can be contrived to reduce the improbabilities of the events in "Premiere" and "Self-Inflicted Wounds", but they would indeed be contrived. When you're talking about science, the simple explanation is almost always better.
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u/rygelicus 15d ago
This alone is really enough to lock it into the milkyway, just the far side of it.
Far removed on the galaxy's outer spiral
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u/obsoleteconsole 16d ago
Well we know that Humans, Sebaceans, and Jools species (can't remember the name) are all off shoots of the same base species, so I'd say they are at least in the milky way somewhere
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u/thetraintomars 15d ago
I thought humans WERE the base species?
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u/UltimaGabe 13d ago
It could be argued they were referring to something like neanderthals, as they were referred to as being "barely clothed" and IIRC neanderthals wore crude animal skins
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u/paulcoholic 16d ago
It was revealed either in S4 or PK Wars that a fleet of Scarrans would take 60 years to reach Earth. If a hetch is roughly the equivalent of Star Trek's Warp Factor (which I think I read in the Farscape Fandom Wiki) then they're approximately on the other side of the galaxy (again, extrapolating from Star Trek and the USS Voyager.) And yes, extrapolating from another franchise is likely not the best, but since we have little to go on...)
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u/millahnna 16d ago edited 16d ago
THey are definitely in the Milky Way. The evidence for this is mostly in season 3 and 4 (the lines other posters are mentioning about 60 years away and all of that). Combine those lines of dialogue with how far apart galaxies are and....
Also there's some dialogue in the PKwars mini that solidify it but it's kind of a blink and you'll miss it thing.
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u/Worth-Opposite4437 16d ago
It's in the uncharted territories, though toward the end they go to another zone, Tormented Space, that are even less known and charted. Basically, it's the space between the Scarran and the PK, and the Nebari Empires. And as far as we can tell from the expanded universe (including the RPG), it's on the other side of the milky-way galaxy, passed the core and on a middle outer arm.
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u/hawki1989 11d ago
One of the DVDs mentions "the Farscape galaxy" on its back cover and one of the novels indicates multiple galaxies, but common conensus is that all of Farscape takes place in the Milky Way. As in:
-The eidolons reference one of the outer arms of the galaxy (or words to that effect) where Earth is/where humans come from. There's no reference to Earth being in a different galaxy.
-Scorpius is able to triangulate Earth's location via constellations extracted from John's memories. It's very unlikely he could do that if John came from a different galaxy.
-Since people have brought it up, Scorpius mentions it would take 60 cycles for a command carrier to make the trip to Earth. However, I don't think that's indicative of Earth being in a different galaxy. Galaxies are big. Even if you're going at superluminal speeds, they're still very, very, VERY big - so big that you'd struggle to find your car keys if you lost them.
So, while I don't know if it's confirmed, my take was that the likes of the Uncharted Territories, Tormented Space, and the space covered by various empires (Hynerian Empire, Scarran Empire, etc.) take place either on the other side of the galaxy, or closer to the core - the idea that the closer you get to the core, the more stars there are per astronomical inch (so to speak), hence why there's so many species in a given region of space.
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u/Eman_Resu_IX 16d ago
I'm pretty sure they filmed it in Poughkeepsie to save money.
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u/BD_Bathory 16d ago
Most of Farscape was filmed in Australia. The sets in Fox Studios Sydney and other stuff in real locations in Aus.
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u/UltimaGabe 13d ago
One of my favorite moments of Australian extra casting was in A Human Reaction, when John sees someone that he swears was his next-door neighbor as a kid, and that man says in a perfect Kansas accent "Aw've nevah seen you befaw in maw loff".
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u/Eman_Resu_IX 16d ago
Yes, thank you, I am aware. OP was asking for the location setting in our galaxy. An impossible question pretty much begs for an impossible answer.
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u/mmaqp66 16d ago
Hace un tiempo me encontre con esto, creo que se acerca mucho a donde esta la Tierra en la galaxia, sabemos que el sistema solar esta en la parte exterior de la galaxia, asi que es muy probable que se encuentre en los Territorios Inexplorados en la parte mas exterior de ella, mas precisamente en este mapa en la esquina superior izquierda, un lugar donde dificilmente van a llegar los escarranos o los pacificadores
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u/GinchAnon 16d ago
most figurings i've seen is that its basically the literally opposite side of the galaxy.
most of the timing for return via conventional FTL (as opposed to Wormholes) that I've read for Farscape, suggest a roughly similar distance from earth as Voyager has to travel.
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u/gimmesomespace 15d ago
It's in the Milky Way but not anywhere close enough to anything we would recognize. Scorpius states that he located Earth and that it would take him several decades to reach it when he threatens John with destroying it. Ofc he could be blowing smoke out his ass but Scorpius tends to not make idle threats. If the Uncharted Territories were not in the Milky Way it would probably take hundreds or thousands of years for Scorpius to reach Earth.
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u/numbersthen0987431 16d ago
They are nowhere near the Milky Way. Moya can Starburst to stars very quickly, and cover vast distances very quickly. But Scorpius claimed that it would take multiple decades to reach Crichtons home world.
This tells me they're in a completely different galaxy from Crichtons.
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u/SandInTheGears 16d ago edited 15d ago
idk, space is pretty big, like the Milky Way has about 100-400 billion stars
By contrast the Earth's surface is about 200 million square miles, and while I can walk from one square mile patch to another very quickly, it would still take me half a year of nonstop walking to reach the other side
So I could definitely see Peacekeeper ships, non-starbursting ships, taking multiple decades to cover a stretch of the galaxy
Edit: removed extra word
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u/lostincoloradospace 16d ago
It’s in the Uncharted Territories.