What if Ceti Alpha 6 did not explode?
- Thread starter dswynne1
- Start date
I speculate that as long as Khan is happy building his empire, he would only try and leave if a starship stopped by and was easily taken over.
Perhaps I should have put an emoticon after the "did not officially exist" bit after all...
But the fact of the matter is that Kirk finds it news that the Reliant ought to be where Regula I is. Yet this very connection is central to the ship and the station and the plot - it is a secret that Starfleet keeps from Kirk, no two ways around that one.
One might do a careful analysis of the travel times and passages of time mentioned in the movie, and indeed one has done that very thing, for quite a few values of one. It's not required reading, though: Terrell's ship is scouting for Marcus' benefit, and scouting for the most convenient desert world available. Going far from Regula wouldn't make sense, then. But blindly going through star systems (and then with a fine comb, scanning everything) makes even less sense. Even for a science vessel, which the Reliant is not.
Why would they have that? In Trek, planets wander about at will. And, say, explode. It doesn't pay to look at worthless records - so why would one even bother to make them in the first place?
We pretty much have the accuracy of Starfleet records down pat from TOS already. The planets present may be listed, but any actual parameter always requires active examination by the heroes in situ.
Nope. The ship wouldn't even enter a system unless Terrell knew there was a candidate planet there. And if he knew that, he'd only scan the candidate planet and then move on - obviously the criteria are hellishly tight, or he would have found what he was looking for already. His mission doesn't allow for him to spend time idly scanning around.
He still might. But Kirk never does. In all of TOS, Kirk never notices things such as, oh, planets exploding and going missing... Just watch "Doomsday Machine", where his cue to start looking around is when debris from an ex-planet literally starts bumping onto his starship! These folks may be explorers, but they aren't surveyors. And the Reliant is not a science vessel, in any bit of dialogue ever aired.
Had CA VI not exploded, would Terrell have noticed Khan? Supposedly the Genesis test doesn't harm bystanders, so Terrell would have little obligation to check whether there were any. OTOH, he might scan for Klingon spies, and spot Khan that way. At which point he might refer to records regarding the planet he just scanned, and we'd find out for good whether Kirk had been square with Starfleet there. As the events actually transpire, tho, Terrell never gets a chance to look at any records (least of all relating to CA V), so we don't know.
Timo Saloniemi
At the edge of the Ceti Alpha system, the Reliant is met by ships of Ceti Alpha Khanate. Taken by surprise and outnumbered the Reliant falls. With access to the latest in Federation technology, Khan upgrades his fleet. Years later the Federation core worlds, the Klingons and the Romulans are attacked by the Khanate's warp fleet.
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Can we all agree that the Reliant's sensors needed a little more attention? Mr. Beach??
I think Khan and his supermen would have been mostly content on that world. Obviously they would have started fighting amongst themselves but Khan would have won and brought his world order! 
And unless a Starship ever stopped there by accident I doubt the Federation would have ever heard anymore from them for at least two or three centuries until their descendants began making noises about their territory and things! 
JB
And unless a Starship ever stopped there by accident I doubt the Federation would have ever heard anymore from them for at least two or three centuries until their descendants began making noises about their territory and things! JB
In the TOS era "Vanguard" series of books you find out exactly why Alpha Ceti 6 exploded (as well as 10 other planets) and how that ties in with the Genesis Project. You also find out why the Defiant gets caught in an interphasic rift. They did like trying to tie in loose plot points in those books...
Yeah...no thanks. Novels are novels and not necessarily what happened.
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I know that, it's not canon at all. I just found it interesting/amusing how they managed to explaiin it.
I really like how some novels extrapolate from things, fill in parts or take some hanging threads further, but some just try too hard and everybody knows everybody and it all ties together so tightly that the galaxy is a very small place.
If you'll forgive the Star Wars reference but in Cracked magazine a parody made in 1983, right after ROTJ, said among other things that C3PO and Luke were brothers and then it turns out to be true in the prequels.
If you'll forgive the Star Wars reference but in Cracked magazine a parody made in 1983, right after ROTJ, said among other things that C3PO and Luke were brothers and then it turns out to be true in the prequels.
So you never went out at night and had someone point out a very bright dot of light and say that it was Venus, or Mars, or Jupiter?
The planets in Earth's solar system which are visible to the unaided human eye from Earth are Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, plus Mercury part of the time and even sometimes Uranus. A lot of people have the hobby of spotting the planets at night and following their movements against the background of the stars. And a lot of people have the hobby of watching the stars and also planets at night through telescopes. Considering that the augments were supposed to have superior intellect it seems probable that some of them had a scientific interest in the other planets in their new solar system.
If Ceti Alpha VI happened to be above the horizon at the time it exploded Khan's people could have seen a brilliant flash of light in the sky. And if it wasn't above the horizon when it exploded it would rise above the horizon eventually, and it should have been even more visible than before the explosion. The planet should have been replaced by a much larger and expanding cloud of fragments and vapor, which should reflect the light from Ceti Alpha, and also many parts of the cloud should have been glowing with visible light from their heat. The sudden increase in brightness might make the supermen examine it with any telescopes they had.
The expanding cloud of debris from Ceti Alpha VI would eventually become large enough to appear as a visible disc as seen with the unaided eye from Ceti Alpha V, which would certainly make it impossible for any of the supermen to deny that Ceti Alpha VI had exploded and would definitely make them use any telescopes they had to examine the cloud.
A question for the astrophysicists here.
If Mars exploded would it devastated the Earth and knock it out of its orbit?
What if it exploded on the other side of the Sun?
If Mars exploded would it devastated the Earth and knock it out of its orbit?
What if it exploded on the other side of the Sun?
Well, it would depend how it was exploded. Firstly Mars isn't going to explode just by itself, you'd have to detonate some sort of device on or inside it or smack it with something either very big or going very fast (or invoke some sort of "Negative Space Wedgie" as TV Tropes is fond of calling them). An event capable of just shattering the planet into debris would cause the debris field to slowly spread out along the former planet's orbit. It might even re-coalesce back into a planetary body but otherwise all you'd eventually end up with is a second asteroid field. A few pieces of debris might have sufficient velocity to start falling in-system, but space is big, even with Earth's gravity well there's only a small chance we'd be hit by anything.
Something that literally makes the planet blow apart violently however will throw the whole mass of the planet right out into the Solar System. Some bits would head outwards, but the big boys, Jupiter and Saturn are out there, they'll capture a lot of it or slingshot it out of the system completely, some wouldn't get intercepted, would slow and start arcing back in towards the sun. This would join the stuff already headed inwards and then the inner worlds are in the firing line. With this much stuff heading in we'd likely have a problem. Even being on the other side of the sun wouldn't help, might save us from a direct shot immediately post-explosion but a lot of the debris headed inwards will take up elliptical orbits that take them in system, then back out as far as the former orbit of Mars, massively increasing the population of Earth Crossing Asteroids. The chances of us suffering the effects of a catastrophic asteroid strike have just shot up from the "within millennia" range to "within years if not months".
The phrase "Stop the planet, I want to get off!" springs to mind.
All this talk of "the shock of the explosion" I'm afraid is back in "Negative Space Wedgie" territory. It's space. What shockwaves travel through space? If you're going to invent something like that then you may as well throw realistic astrophysics out the window and just have whatever result you want to achieve. Which is exactly what they did on WoK. Gravitationally there's going to be a bit of an upset, but I doubt it'll be much more than a small amount of orbital perturbation, a bit of a wobble, but that'll settle down again after a bit.
In truth I'm a museum curator (dammit) not an astrophysicist, but my degree was in geology, with supplemental astronomy, so I have a bit of planetology by general osmosis, not totally talking out of my ass (I hope).
In some circles, there is talk of electromagnetic interactions between planetary plasmaspheres (inner magnetospheres) of differing charges when said magnetospheres come into contact with each other if said objects are not on steady stabilized orbits. Such an interaction could very easily scar and char a class M planet into what we see in the movie - IE, the difference between Earth and Mars.
Unless lower atmospheric charged particle interactions would actually create a secondary barrier and neutralise the energentic bombardment. Which is what a lot of scientists theorised would have actually happened in the film "The Core" if the Van Allen Belts had failed. Nothing like having a really scientifically innacurate film to provoke the scientific community, it's like throwing stones at a wasps nest. Mind you, if Alpha Ceti 6 WAS a trojan with Alpha Ceti 5, then if 6 just shattered and the debris spread out into the same orbit... Then yeah, sucks to be you I guess.
Even if Khan knew the explosion was coming, how do you think he could have stopped it? And who was going to come and rescue him from his paradise? I don't think Jimmy boy left him communication equipment, did he?
JB
JB
