Whedon went into the series with the thundering ignorance of basic astronomy and science that many movie and TV people have, and hit several of my pet peeves at once, including the strange inability of SF producers to show any alien sky without at least three planets in it, each covering about sixty degrees of the sky.

He made a decent patch job of it, especially on this map (I still bet this massive star system isn't physically possible) but geeze, how hard would it have been to work it out a bit in advance?

Remember Irwin Allen?

Classic Irwin Allen moments: the submarine Seaview in the original Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea movie being battered deep underwater by huge chunks of falling ice, and the Jupiter II in Lost in Space suffering a thruster error and being "thrown out of the galaxy."

If you like "destroyed Earth, terraformed planets" SF, try "Cowboy Bebop."