A Thought About Ceti Alpha VI

[JonnyQuest037]

"Ceti Alpha VI exploded six months after we were left here. The shock shifted the orbit of this planet and everything was laid waste."

One of the big plot holes/headscratchers about TWOK is exactly how the Reliant didn't notice an entire missing planet when it first entered the Ceti Alpha system. I've heard various theories on this over the years, none of the them 100% satisfying, but I think I've just come up with a solution that works for me.

I was just rereading Superman #18 from 1988. It was written by John Byrne and penciled by Mike Mignola. In it, Superman travels with Hawkman and Hawkgirl back to the area of space where Krypton was before it exploded, and they find the last thing they ever expected to see... the planet Krypton whole once again.

The Hawks' ship scans the planet further, and they discover that despite appearances, it's not a whole planet, but rather a particle cloud of kryptonite around a molten core. Not every piece of the Krypton reached escape velocity. In the fifty years since Krypton's explosion, certain chunks were recaptured by the planet's gravity and fell back into a planetary shape, a cloud of dust & gasses around a liquid core. Larger fragments formed a temporary ring around the planet, until those too eventually collapse back into the planet. After a few million more years, there's the possibility that Krypton might condense enough to form a new world again, but at the present, it's a dead planet.

Do you think that something similar might have happened to Ceti Alpha VI after it exploded? That way, the Reliant would still see a sixth planet at first glance when it entered the system, and not realize that anything was out of the ordinary until it scanned that specific planetary body.

What do you folks think? It makes a certain amount of scientific sense (or at least Star Trek science fiction sense), and it makes the Reliant look a lot less incompetent.

 

[Smellmet]

"Ceti Alpha VI exploded six months after we were left here. The shock shifted the orbit of this planet and everything was laid waste."

One of the big plot holes/headscratchers about TWOK is exactly how the Reliant didn't notice an entire missing planet when it first entered the Ceti Alpha system. I've heard various theories on this over the years, none of the them 100% satisfying, but I think I've just come up with a solution that works for me.

I was just rereading Superman #18 from 1988. It was written by John Byrne and penciled by Mike Mignola. In it, Superman travels with Hawkman and Hawkgirl back to the area of space where Krypton was before it exploded, and they find the last thing they ever expected to see... the planet Krypton whole once again.

The Hawks' ship scans the planet further, and they discover that despite appearances, it's not a whole planet, but rather a particle cloud of kryptonite around a molten core. Not every piece of the Krypton reached escape velocity. In the fifty years since Krypton's explosion, certain chunks were recaptured by the planet's gravity and fell back into a planetary shape, a cloud of dust & gasses around a liquid core. Larger fragments formed a temporary ring around the planet, until those too eventually collapse back into the planet. After a few million more years, there's the possibility that Krypton might condense enough to form a new world again, but at the present, it's a dead planet.

Do you think that something similar might have happened to Ceti Alpha VI after it exploded? That way, the Reliant would still see a sixth planet at first glance when it entered the system, and not realize that anything was out of the ordinary until it scanned that specific planetary body.

What do you folks think? It makes a certain amount of scientific sense (or at least Star Trek science fiction sense), and it makes the Reliant look a lot less incompetent.

I can live with that, though the question still stands - why did Ceti Alpha VI explode at all?

 

[Ronald Held]

No canonical answer. There is a thread in TOS/TAS where this thread might fit into.

 

[Timo]

The only one to claim that Ceti Alpha VI exploded is Khan. What would he know? He's stuck down on a planet, with just the basic tools to ensure his survival (and guarantee that he won't be able to escape) - does he even have a telescope?

If Mars exploded today, would we notice? And by we I mean those of us who don't go out to the back yard every night to toy with a telescope, and I won't accept "Fox just said Mars blew!" as "noticing".

OTOH, if a Klingon starship a few centuries ago suffered a combined cloak and reactor malfunction next to Mars, resulting in a really big fireball, and Earth subsequently was covered in clouds, who would doubt that Mars had exploded?

For all we know, nothing much happened to Ceti Alpha VI, and Khan's woes on CA V were due to different factors altogether.

Then again, I see no reason for Captain Terrell to count the planets in the Ceti Alpha system. I mean, what possible reason would he have for doing that? If you aren't obsessive-compulsive, do you count the city blocks on your way to work in the morning? Or even when heading for the Empire State Building for the first time you visit New York in your life? And that's along a route that goes past all those city blocks, each of which helps comprise the city - Terrell would not feel compelled to fly past any of the planets on his way to the desertlike one, in a solar system that doesn't mind whether it has planets or not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I can live with that, though the question still stands - why did Ceti Alpha VI explode at all?

That I don't know, but I'm inclined to believe a relatively simple/unconvoluted explanation -- It had a geological instability that went unnoticed because it wasn't thoroughly scanned.

 

[Timo]

Might have been dilithium in the bedrock, as in "Pen Pals". Although if mankind had been in the general area where "Space Seed" took place and found it unworthy of further attention, then petatons of dilithium might not have been present after all...

But as pointed out in that other thread, planets do blow up a lot in TOS, and a bit in the spinoff shows. Would this be an exception, a period in history remarkable for its planeticidal monsters? Or is the ubiquitousness of planets spontaneously blowing up the very reason why Matt Decker so callously investigates these events in "Doomsday Machine", the only remarkable aspect there being that all the planets in a given system blow up all of a sudden?

It might even be that what the Genesis team was looking for was unstable planets. An airless desert didn't suffice, or Terrell would have found a dozen already. A desert planet with air in it but no life to sustain the free oxygen might be a planet in rare transition - possibly a planet wisely abandoned by its former owners as they recognized the impending catastrophe, owners technologically advanced and therefore guilty of having erased basically all other life from their planet already.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

Or could it have been that the Federation thought that Ceti Alpha V exploded and because Kirk didn't report that he left Kahn there, no one decided to take a look, and Kirk suspecting they were dead, never bothered to check on their progress. The shift and other issues later made it seem logical that the planet remaining was Ceti Alpha VI once someone decided to actually investigate the system. "On Ceti Alpha V there was life, a fair chance" Was....past tense. Chekov seems surprised to see Kahn, even though it is clear he knows who that is and what the Botany Bay was. And not is the 'oh he should be in the other planet in this system sort of way', but in the, 'aren't you died?' way.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Chekov said "was" because he still thought they were on Ceti Alpha VI. He was assuming that Khan and his people had migrated from one planet to another somehow.

 

[Timo]

Which sort of makes it possible to think that Chekov knew all along that Khan was in the system, and was simply thinking of not telling anybody. He thought migration would be impossible, and then he saw the cargo strap. "Oh no" indeed!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I think he likely honestly forgot the name of the planet they left Khan on. I feel like it didn't all click into place for him until he saw the name "Botany Bay."

 

[BillJ]

I just chalk it up to human error.

 

[Tenacity]

and because Kirk didn't report that he left Kahn there

I just can't see Kirk not including this in his official logs and reports. I don't think Kirk would have imprisoned Khan and company on the planet if he didn't have the authority to do so.

... and Kirk suspecting they were dead, never bothered to check on their progress.

Kirk said something about checking back in a century, to see what progress they group had made. Why would he feel the need to check up on them every few years?

I can easily put the whole mess down to Captain Terrell running a slack ship, the planet was generally in the right place and that was good enought for Terrell. He scanned the planet, but not the system, and he never had the scanner readings compare to any records of previous surveys.

Sloppy.

 

[BillJ]

I just can't see Kirk not including this in his official logs and reports. I don't think Kirk would have imprisoned Khan and company on the planet if he didn't have the authority to do so.

Plus, there's the whole missing officer that he would have to file a report on. Then the idea that 430 people would stay quiet if Kirk didn't file a report is kinda dumb.

 

[KennyB]

Plus, there's the whole missing officer that he would have to file a report on. Then the idea that 430 people would stay quiet if Kirk didn't file a report is kinda dumb.

It's that paperwork that kills ya........

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Kirk said something about checking back in a century, to see what progress they group had made. Why would he feel the need to check up on them every few years?

That was Spock's line, actually, but Kirk agreed with him that it would be interesting to see what sort of civilization Khan and his people built. But those were just idle musings, not an official statement of policy.

I can easily put the whole mess down to Captain Terrell running a slack ship, the planet was generally in the right place and that was good enough for Terrell. He scanned the planet, but not the system, and he never had the scanner readings compare to any records of previous surveys.

I hate to disparage Terrell like that, but there probably is something to that. He and Chekov are obviously pretty bored and worn down from the dull Genesis scouting assignment in their opening scene. They probably were cutting a few corners at that point. They can't all be James T. Kirk, I guess.

Does anyone have any thoughts on Ceti Alpha VI partially reforming?

 

[BillJ]

That was Spock's line, actually, but Kirk agreed with him that it would be interesting to see what sort of civilization Khan and his people built. But those were just idle musings, not an official statement of policy.

Might have been interesting material for TNG to tackle, if not for TWOK. Maybe a future 24th century reboot can tackle the idea?

Does anyone have any thoughts on Ceti Alpha VI partially reforming?

Don't love it or hate it. Just tossing it on the pile with the numerous other rationalizations that have come up over the years.

 

[Nebusj]

Does anyone have any thoughts on Ceti Alpha VI partially reforming?

It seems plausible enough to me. It takes a pretty big boom to destroy a planet and not leave any kind of rubble behind. And there's moons in our own solar system that look like they might have been pulverized and reformed from the rubble;

 

[DonIago]

I hate to disparage Terrell like that, but there probably is something to that. He and Chekov are obviously pretty bored and worn down from the dull Genesis scouting assignment in their opening scene. They probably were cutting a few corners at that point. They can't all be James T. Kirk, I guess.

Of course, in the same movie Kirk "gets caught with his britches down".

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Good point! Maybe Terrell was just having an off day.

 

[Timo]

"Keeping 430 people quiet" isn't really a requirement: there were only about twenty people in the episode, not counting the villains...

We have no idea how Kirk's shipwide infodumps really sound to the crew. Does Uhura quietly fill in the apparent gaps? Is there an AI routine for doing that? Or does the crew just hear that there's this handsome castaway aboard; then there's this red alert and all goes to hell; and then suddenly all is fine again and the castaway has been dealt with? Nobody is ever heard announcing to the crew that there's this stopover at Ceti Alpha, say.

As for authority, Kirk has plenty. He is known for having ignited (and squelched) a war or two all on his own!

Ceti Alpha VI exploding would have to be a pretty impressive event. Mere collision with a 0.1c asteroid probably wouldn't suffice - the event has to be visible all the way to Ceti Alpha V, after all. The two options would seem to be a "blink and you miss it" annihilation event of immense brightness, and Khan didn't happen to blink (or be on the wrong side of the planet); and a prolonged fireworks event of some sort. The former could be an impact involving a Dreadnought style giant warhead (a weapon of war or a power system gone haywire or a scientific experiment gone too far); the latter could be the DDM or comparable monster having a snack. Either way, "utter destruction" is a distinct if unnatural option, with rubble either scattered to effectively that it will take millennia for it to come back together, or blown to such tiny pieces that it will hardly register.

How did all those bright and dense midget nebulae of Trek come about? I'd suspect space battle as a leading cause. But our heroes don't explicate such a belief in any adventure, so a micronebula inside the Ceti Alpha system might go just as unnoticed as the Mutara Nebula inside the Regula system goes, until it becomes a story point for unrelated reasons.

Timo Saloniemi