stealing
100 AU from Earth
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
Millennial Falcon? So it's lazy, constantly texting, and disinterested in the world around it whilst constantly mowing lawns?
Yep, one of the things that have confounded astronomers since the exoplanet revolution began is our system's missing super-Earth. Our solar system in no way represents the "norm" out there. Mini-Neptunes are common and its weird that we don't have one. There's a good chance that a super-Earth did form in our system, had a close encounter with Jupiter and was flung out to the edge of the solar system. The orbits of a handful of Kuiper Belt object suggest that's exactly what happened.
The Millennial Falcon can do the Kessel Run in under 100 AU. 
No consensus on whether SuperEarths ever formed in our Solar System.
True, but there is a growing body of research to support the theory.
Perhaps they were right that it was 100 AU and it was orbiting the yet to be discovered Planet X which we know that’s out there.
If that was supposed to be in orbit of Earth where are the strike teams beaming up from the surface to take the station back?I think the easiest explanation is that it was meant to be Earth, and the VFX guys, and presumably those in the approval chain, didn't know how far "100 AU" was - they interpreted it is "somewhere in the visible background", especially given Cornwell's line about her own backyard. So they painted in Earth in the background, causing us to go "huh?"
What's poor is that this wasn't caught before broadcast, but is probably a symptom of the general VFX wobbliness.
I'm sure they'll fix it for the remastered version
Not enough light 100AU from the sun to light up that planet like we saw.
All true. I think its more likely the writers did know what an AU is (come on, who HASN'T played EVE Online by this point) and the VFX team was not coordinating well.
I'm still not convinced it was supposed to be Earth. When Earth is shown in Trek (or any medium, really), highly recognizable landforms are usually featured. I'll concede that the VFX artists likely used a model of Earth but they obscured the hell out it. Either way, a planet that far away shouldn't have looked so "M-Class."
This is undoubtedly true but as was pointed out up thread, the view-window-screen may have artificially enhanced vibrance and brightness (though that doesn't explain the external shot as Disco warps off). In any case, nebulas, deep space, you name it, are far too bright in this show and its predecessors.
All in all, I think this was probably a goof but there is a good real world science-based rationalization that planet is a cloudy mini-Neptune with some terrestrial features visible. I think it would be cool if the producers embraced that if they ever revisit.
And the planet could be artificially lit or illuminated on the ground.
Perhaps, but a bit of a stretch IMO. Personally, I tend to give a lot of leeway when it comes to visual creative license. There's plenty of beauty in the cosmos but the public is used to enhanced photography. I call it the Hubble Effect.
It also gets blamed for the problems its creators caused.
At the same time, though, I think lawman has a point.
We all agree it's valid to say, "Here are some apparently contradictory facts X, Y, and Z we see on-screen. Here is an interesting and economical interpretation that explains away that contradiction. Here is some supporting evidence for why my interpretation might be correct." We do that all the time on little things, like the 100 AU thing, or the old "How did they get to Qo'noS in eight days!?" on Enterprise.
Yet, when somebody (like lawman) argues, "The most economical explanation for the apparent contradiction between X, Y, and Z is that X and Y take place in a different universe from Z; here is some supporting evidence," suddenly folks are all, "Hey, cut that out, the creators said you're wrong in an interview somewhere, so your interpretation is invalid." I think that's an error. It excludes certain interpretations of canon, not based on the on-screen evidence, but because somebody somewhere didn't like it or didn't think of it. Lawman's solution is not necessarily less correct only because it is so drastic.
It works the other direction, too: I once wrote a thing (here) that fit the events of the first Abrams movie into the Prime Timeline. (I never got around to doing the same for the sequels.) It was a playful exercise, but I think there are ways in which my interpretation was superior to the one presented by the producers of Star Trek 2009 -- it solved certain problems with the continuity and with the story itself that people who accepted the producers' interpretation of the movie had a fairly hard time doing. Was it the best interpretation? Maybe not. Were there other valid ones? Certainly. But "The Abrams movies are set in the Prime universe, regardless of what Abrams and Orci say" was definitely in the mix with them.
Some of my favorite Trek books do something similar: they quite clearly go against the original intentions of various writers of various episodes, but they take the on-screen evidence and knit it together into a far more cohesive whole than any individual episode writer could ever have imagined, much less put on screen. The creation of entire new timelines or radical divergence from what we thought we knew from on-screen events are very much on the table in service of creating the best canon interpretation possible. Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock and Forgotten History both come to mind, as do The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh and Q&A, although there have been others.
So let's not take Word of God so seriously that we throw outlandish ideas like, "Maybe Discovery is set in a different universe" out the window. It's outlandish, but it might yet turn out to be the most economical interpretation. It's an argument that should be heard.
Yeah, but those are just our opinions, and what the creators of future episodes/films decide to do about it could be entirely different. That's what annoys me when people say that their opinions as audience members should dictate canon. That's the exact opposite of what the word means. Canon is what the creators do, not what the audience wants. Of course I have plenty of my own theories for how to reconcile things, and I've managed to put quite a lot of them in professionally published Trek novels, but I would never for a second expect the makers of the actual shows and movies to follow my lead (though having my friend Kirsten Beyer on the writing staff makes that a tiny bit more likely now).
The problem is when people try to cast this in terms of "right" and "wrong," as if there were some objective truth to it. That's applying real-world standards to something imaginary, and it just doesn't fit. It's not about what's objectively "correct," because that word makes no sense when applied to a made-up story. It's simply about understanding that you're not the one making up the stories, so your idea of how they should be told is not going to dictate how they actually get told.
Again, it doesn't matter how logical you think an explanation is, because this isn't objectively real. There's nothing to be "proven." There's just whatever the writers make up. The show is in whatever universe they choose it to be in, because they're the ones making it. Individual spectators' opinions to the contrary won't have any effect on what gets written in the future. Like I said, there are still a few fans to this day who refuse to accept that the original movies or TNG or ENT are part of the "real" Trek universe (ask an old-timer about the name "James Dixon"), but nobody listens to them anymore, because the actual shows did treat them all as the same universe. I mean, 17 years ago we were having this exact same debate over whether ENT was in an alternate universe or not, yet both Trek productions since ENT have explicitly referenced it and accepted it as part of canon. And the same will undoubtedly be true for Discovery. It's the nature of franchises like this that everything from the past is fair game for new creators. And whoever creates the next Trek series after this one is going to draw on ideas from everything that came before, including DSC. And the fact that a few fans wanted it to be an alternate universe won't have any impact on that, any more than James Dixon's fanatical insistence that Trek canon ended in 1979 has had any impact on the 600-plus episodes and films we've had since then. All this has happened before, multiple times. There's no reason to think this time will be any different.
Well, umm, I've literally never even heard of EVE Online until this post. But I know what an AU is, because basic science?...
I think you make a valid point — not about "canon" per se, as Christopher points out, but about how to interpret continuity, which is ultimately an intersubjective construct that can and does influence the development of later canon.
However, as much as I hate to turn down kind words, I need to here, because it wasn't me initially positing that DSC is an alternate universe. I'm still in the "cautiously skeptical, but willing to reserve judgment" category. I think the show has some incompatibilities with the TOS era that are unlikely to be explained (at least, not without staggering contrivance), but so far none of them is a complete dealbreaker.
Planet X AKA Nibiru... Kelvin timeline confirmed!!
Absolutely right! So fuck the Lightning Team tooo
