The writers wrote as if Bajor had a population of a small village. It was stupid, stupid, stupid
What is your personal head canon?
- Thread starter AmandaSmith
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I'm not convinced of that, though I can see why you say it.
The Occupation certainly killed a LOT of Bajorans, so a smaller population is a given. We also don't know exactly how large Bajor is... may not be as large as, say, Earth.
But even more importantly, Bajor was strip mined for half a century. If you have minimal resources to take care of your own people, you certainly can't take care of millions of refugees suddenly landing on Bajor.
I definitely can't fault Bajor for prioritizing their own people first, particularly when the Skreeans get an entire planet for themselves.
15 million Bajorans in total. Which, while an undeniably large number, is significantly less than the number of casualties in World War I (~40 million) or World War II (~80 million), and occurred over the span of 50 years.
Star Trek: Star Charts gives Bajor a population of 3.8 billion in 2378.
Bajor is the largest planet in its solar system and has at least five moons, at least one of which is massive enough to retain a breathable atmosphere. It's more likely to be a super-Earth or maybe even a mega-Earth.
I recall them having 5 moons, but I don't remember their population ever being stated on DS9. (Regarding STAR CHARTS... I don't count the books as a source for onscreen evidence.) Even if that 3.8 billion is accurate, considering its the largest planet in the system, that seems like a very small number... especially considering we have over 8 billion people on Earth right now. That tells me there might not be as much land for Bajorans to be on.
And even if there was room, Bajor was being strip mined for over 50 years. Having space for people to live on means nothing if there aren't enough resources for them in that space.
Not quite.
Let's hypothesise that Bajor has a diameter 25% larger than Earth and the same surface gravity. This would mean its mass is around 7.2 × 10²⁴ kg, or about 17% larger than Earth's, with a slightly higher escape velocity only 5% greater than Earth's.
If Bajor has twice Earth's diameter, well within the bounds of a super-Earth, and the same surface gravity its mass would be around 2.4× 10²⁵ kg, or about 75% larger than Earth's, with 1.4 times the escape velocity.
If we go nuts and say Bajor is a mega-Earth and has ten times Earth's diameter with the same surface gravity, its mass would be almost 100 times that of the Earth at around 6 × 10²⁶ kg, while its escape velocity would be over three times that of Earth (35.35km/s versus 11.18km/s), which would contribute to Bajor's apparent ability to capture or retain so many natural satellites.
This comparatively large size and mass for a class-M planet might also explain why the Cardassians viewed it as such a desirable mining target.
Well, yeah... it's a book, by definition it's not onscreen evidence, which is why I called it out as such. In the absence of on-screen evidence though it can be useful in including something that the production team either intended to be the case, or at least signed off on.
The same book gives a population for Earth in the 2370s of 4.2 billion. Clearly overpopulation becomes less of an issue when you have warp drive and dozens of planets in easy reach, and we know many Bajorans fled the occupation to establish refugee colonies, with at least seven known outside of the Bajoran system.
We've seen Bajor from space multiple times on screen and it seems to have plenty of land.
Parts of the planet were stripmined, but certainly not all of it. Again, we've seen Bajor's surface multiple times, both from orbit and on the ground, and a lot of it still seems lushly green even immediately after the occupation in 2369. In Sisko's own words less than six years later, "there are parts of the Eastern Province that are like Eden itself... lush green valleys covered in wild flowers that seem to spring up overnight... hundreds of small, crystal clear ponds interconnected by waterfalls."
Besides, DS9 is hardly large enough to handle the mining output of an entire planet, and it seems to be the only orbital mining station the Cardassians built.
Regarding Trills in "The Host":
Odan dominating the personality of his host is either due to a) a weak-willed Trill paired with a strong-willed host, which perhaps is preferable to a conflict between the two, and may be done to improve a person's character b) a permanent condition which sometimes happens that the Trill were still working to discover a predictor for, preferring a mesh of personalities to one dominating the other c) usually a temporary early condition that can be resolved with therapy and sometimes manifest again in times of emotional or physical upheaval.
Perhaps the ridged Trill were more likely to be dominated by their symbiont's personality than smooth headed ones.
Odan dominating the personality of his host is either due to a) a weak-willed Trill paired with a strong-willed host, which perhaps is preferable to a conflict between the two, and may be done to improve a person's character b) a permanent condition which sometimes happens that the Trill were still working to discover a predictor for, preferring a mesh of personalities to one dominating the other c) usually a temporary early condition that can be resolved with therapy and sometimes manifest again in times of emotional or physical upheaval.
Perhaps the ridged Trill were more likely to be dominated by their symbiont's personality than smooth headed ones.
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Can I just say that the entire concept of an orbital mine has never made any sense to me? Doesn't it make more sense to build your mine on a planet's surface? What is the benefit of having a mining facility in space?
Nobody's saying that Bajor has a surface gravity three times that of Earth. It's a fairly simple calculation to show that Bajor can be substantially larger than Earth but still have Earthlike surface gravity. I show some examples here.
But let's do some more. Let's say that in the picture of Bajor in my above post the moon we can see is Jeraddo, which we know has high enough surface gravity to retain a breathable atmosphere and enable people to walk normally (DS9: "Progress"). Let's therefore assume that this moon is at least the same size as Mars. Let's also assume that this view is effectively orthographic and that the moon is shown to approximately the correct scale against the planet.
This would mean Bajor has a diameter of around 42,500km – around 3.3 times that of Earth. In order for it to have Earth-like gravity at its surface it would therefore have a mass of 6.6 × 10²⁵ kg – or about ten times that of Earth – with an escape velocity of almost double Earth's.
If this were the case, the relative sizes of Bajor, Jeraddo, and Earth are shown below. No wonder the Cardassians saw it as a world ripe with untold resources to plunder, especially given that we're told Cardassia Prime is relatively resource-poor.
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I think this is a situation where actual physics goes out the window in favor of suspension of disbelief. We see people walking on Bajor and Jeraddo just like they're walking on Earth. For that to make any sense logically, Earth, Bajor and Jeraddo should be around the same size with the same gravitational pull. And even if Earth and Bajor are the same size, Jeraddo should not be, because it's only a moon.
I completely agree. If you're not mining asteroids then an orbital mining station makes very little sense.
I repeat again –
Bajor and Earth do NOT need to be the same size to have the same surface gravity.
The calculation is a straightforward implementation of Newton's equation for gravity: g = G M / r². In this case g (gravitational strength at the surface) and G (the gravitational constant) are fixed, and we are free to play around with r (the planetary radius) and M (its mass) accordingly.
We can see a real world example of this in our own solar system – Uranus is both significantly larger and more massive than Earth, but has a lower surface gravity approximately equal to that of Venus.
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Now this....is nerdposting!
I repeat again –
Bajor and Earth do not need to be the same size to have the same surface gravity.
The calculation is a straightforward implementation of Newton's equation for gravity: g = G M / r². In this case g (gravitational strength at the surface) and G (the gravitational constant) are fixed, and we are free to play around with r and M accordingly.
We can see real world examples of this in our own solar system – Uranus is both significantly larger and more massive than Earth, but has a lower surface gravity approximately equal to that of Venus.
But you can't walk on the surface of Uranus, because it has no surface.
I always thought it was an orbital ore processing plant.
But you can't walk on the surface of Uranus, because it has no surface.
That's because it's an ice giant. Although they don't exist in our own solar system we've detected multiple extrasolar "super-Earths" (2-10 Earth masses) and "mega-Earths" (10+ Earth masses), some of which we are confident have high enough densities to be rocky terrestrial worlds rather than gas or ice giants.
Now, this "super-Earth" version of Bajor would necessarily have a much lower density than Earth; and we simply don't know what the lower bound for the density of terrestrial planet might be. Since we know materials unknown on Earth like uridium exist in plentiful quantities on Bajor, and since we know planets that have enormous strata of dilithium and other exotic materials that give them unusual properties exist elsewhere in the Star Trek universe, and we know the Bajoran system itself has some highly unusual and potentially even engineered properties like the wormhole and the Denorios Belt, this is where we can introduce some handwaving. And having a high proportion of exotic or rare materials in its composition would also explain why the Cardassians saw Bajor as such a desirable target.
To guard the station from attack by the Bajoran resistance?
The Cardassians would easily be able to move materials and personnel betrween Bajor and Terok Nor, but the resistance would have a far harder time attacking a station in orbit as opposed to one that's on the surface.
I doubt the Bajoran rebellion had much of an ability to get off the planet's surface at all. (Hell, even after the end of the occupation, Bajor didn't even have warp drive!) Having the ore processing facility be in orbit, would be an easy way to get it out of reach of the rebels.
Of course, as "Civil Defense" showed, there's always a risk of a revolt by the Bajoran slaves themselves, but this would apply no matter WHERE the mines were located. And any Bajoran workers on Terok Nor who tried to revolt - where could they possibly go? That's another advantage to having the mines in space. Cardassia can stop any revolt from both ends - Bajor AND the station.
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