How are the planets named ?

[Christopher]

That's because Brannon Braga thought it was a name made up for the original series and not an actual star name. Yes, the man is that clueless when it comes to grade school science.

I think you're giving grade schools far too much credit. Braga is very, very far from being the only SFTV producer who's profoundly ignorant about science and astronomy; in fact, that's the rule, not the exception. There have been very few TV or movie producers who have made a genuine effort to achieve scientific accuracy in their shows or films.

 

[Nebusj]

Star Trek used the familiar practice of numbering planets after the home star: Rigel VII, Altair VI, Talos IV, etc. The idea being the first planet closest to the home star is number one and from there outward and upward numerically.

Interesting how this differs from how astronomers designate exoplanets discovered, with small case letters instead of numbers and in order of discovery. For example Iota Horologii a. And the a will quite likely not be the planet closest to the star because we haven't perfected a means to detect smaller terrestrial sized worlds at a distance yet.

Mind you, numbering schemes for planets and moons will probably be a string of attempted logical schemes that get mixed with other schemes and imperfectly adjusted. Saturn's moon Titan, for example, is also designated as Saturn VI, for the sixth moon of Saturn. It's not the sixth going outward from the planet or inward -- it's at least the twentieth going outward and fortieth going inward, not counting the rings -- it's just that the index number was frozen in the late 1700s after previously being known as Saturn II and Saturn IV.

(Consequently, by the way, we can't really say with certainty that, say, ``Glonzar III'' is the third planet going outward from the sun.)

 

[Christopher]

^^You know, it'd actually explain a lot if you were right about the numbers not necessarily representing order outward from the primary star. That would help make sense of planets like Rigel XII, Beltane IX, and Cygnet XIV -- planets that would otherwise have to be so far out from their stars as to be frigid balls of ice.

 

[aridas sofia]

^ A long time ago, I thought they might be numbered in the order they were discovered. That would help explain why inhabited, presumably terrestrial planets would have such high numbers append their names. They were small, and took longer to find. But there is something about having concentric, sequential planets numbered 6,3,1,9,5,2,7,4,8 that bothers me.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Most people don't know the names of many stars.

 

[Captain Robert April]

It's one thing for the audience to be ignorant of certain aspects of science. It's quite another for a writer/producer of a science fiction show that, at least used to, have a high reputation for at least trying to be in the ballpark of scientific accuracy.

I think this might be a symptom of the Berman era attitude of "we know how to do Star Trek, we've been doing it for over ten years, we don't need any stinkin' help from outside".

Like Isaac Asimov said way back when, it is impossible to write a science fiction story if you are completely ignorant of science.

 

[Nerys Myk]

SF Producers have always been more concerned with telling a good story rather than giving a science lesson. They may trot out Prof. Genius P Brainiac, PhD when talking about the show to give them Real Science cred. But when they're hammering out a story he's not the guy at the top of the speed dial list.

 

[Ronald Held]

And that is why there are many problems with such stories. A little effort cvould make a big difference in science quality.

 

[Christopher]

It's one thing for the audience to be ignorant of certain aspects of science. It's quite another for a writer/producer of a science fiction show that, at least used to, have a high reputation for at least trying to be in the ballpark of scientific accuracy.

I think this might be a symptom of the Berman era attitude of "we know how to do Star Trek, we've been doing it for over ten years, we don't need any stinkin' help from outside".

It's not about Berman. As I said, this neglect for real science is the standard modus operandi for most SF film and television producers. The exceptions are vanishingly few.

For that matter, even non-genre shows ignore real science constantly -- having people unharmed by nearby explosions, having gas tanks explode with impossible ease, having bullets hurl people fifty feet through the air while the shooters suffer no commensurate recoil, having thunder sound simultaneously with distant lightning, etc. etc. Scientific ignorance is endemic to United States society in general (a society where belief in astrology is more widespread than it was in Europe during the Dark Ages; a society where actual schools get in trouble for teaching as basic a science as evolution).

 

[Nebusj]

It's not about Berman. As I said, this neglect for real science is the standard modus operandi for most SF film and television producers. The exceptions are vanishingly few.

Also science fiction writers. Literary and visual. Also readers.

 

[Christopher]

It's not about Berman. As I said, this neglect for real science is the standard modus operandi for most SF film and television producers. The exceptions are vanishingly few.

Also science fiction writers. Literary and visual. Also readers.

Speaking as a science fiction writer myself, I can assure you that blanket generalization is completely false. There's no single category of SF writers. There are some of us who choose to be less hard-science and more metaphorical or fanciful, but there are plenty of us, myself included, who strive for scientific accuracy, or at least learn science well enough that any divergence is the result of conscious dramatic license rather than the willful ignorance that characterizes so much of mass-media sci-fi. Most hard-SF writers have earned college degrees in various scientific fields (I have a BS in physics myself), and some are even working scientists.

So you're completely, profoundly wrong to suggest that what I said about SF TV/film producers is true of all prose SF writers (a category I personally belong to!) as well. And saying it applies to readers is totally meaningless, because the statement was about neglect for using science in one's creations, not about ignorance of science in general.

 

[Captain Robert April]

The thing is, Star Trek used to be one of those exceptions, where a little thought was expended before tossing any ol' term on screen.

It's kinda like a few years back when we got this new crop of comic book artists that hadn't studied any sort of art besides comic books! Except for the occasional porno mag, judging by the way they drew their female characters.

I can't really say I was surprised by that response from Braga, just very, very disappointed.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I dont think StarTrek was ever an exception. It bent science to the service of plot all the time. Otherwise there would be no Spock.

 

[Christopher]

I dont think StarTrek was ever an exception. It bent science to the service of plot all the time. Otherwise there would be no Spock.

^^It's a matter of degree. Even the hardest hard-SF authors will engage in poetic license if it serves the story. There's a vast difference between informed poetic license and simple ignorance. Gene Roddenberry made a virtually unprecedented effort to make Star Trek as plausible as he could. He consulted with scientists, engineers, and research institutes, solicited their advice on everything. Obviously he took poetic license because he had to, because the show was on a shoestring budget and couldn't avoid contrivances like humanoid aliens and Earth-duplicate cultures. But that's not being stupid or lazy. It's intelligently serving the needs of the story, having the good sense to know that a work of entertainment is not a science dissertation.

Yes, Trek under Roddenberry had a lot of fanciful elements, but at least he made an effort to keep one foot grounded in reality. And that's an entirely valid approach. As in any discipline, sometimes you don't learn the rules in order to follow them slavishly, but to be able to make responsible decisions about when and how to break them. It's very different from the approach of producers who don't even bother to do the research but just make stuff up at random.

(Just for one example, in "Yesterday's Enterprise," produced while Roddenberry was still in charge, the time vortex was explained in terms of "a Kerr loop of superstring material" -- which is based in real physics terminology, although the application of those terms is a bit erroneous. But in later, post-Roddenberry Trek, temporal phenomena were explained with increasing degrees of made-up gibberish like chronitons and, Prophets help us, "anti-time.")

 

[Ronald Held]

What is anti-time?

 

[Michael]

What is anti-time?

This is anti-time.

 

[Warped9]

I dont think StarTrek was ever an exception. It bent science to the service of plot all the time. Otherwise there would be no Spock.

^^It's a matter of degree. Even the hardest hard-SF authors will engage in poetic license if it serves the story. There's a vast difference between informed poetic license and simple ignorance. Gene Roddenberry made a virtually unprecedented effort to make Star Trek as plausible as he could. He consulted with scientists, engineers, and research institutes, solicited their advice on everything. Obviously he took poetic license because he had to, because the show was on a shoestring budget and couldn't avoid contrivances like humanoid aliens and Earth-duplicate cultures. But that's not being stupid or lazy. It's intelligently serving the needs of the story, having the good sense to know that a work of entertainment is not a science dissertation.

Yes, Trek under Roddenberry had a lot of fanciful elements, but at least he made an effort to keep one foot grounded in reality. And that's an entirely valid approach. As in any discipline, sometimes you don't learn the rules in order to follow them slavishly, but to be able to make responsible decisions about when and how to break them. It's very different from the approach of producers who don't even bother to do the research but just make stuff up at random.

(Just for one example, in "Yesterday's Enterprise," produced while Roddenberry was still in charge, the time vortex was explained in terms of "a Kerr loop of superstring material" -- which is based in real physics terminology, although the application of those terms is a bit erroneous. But in later, post-Roddenberry Trek, temporal phenomena were explained with increasing degrees of made-up gibberish like chronitons and, Prophets help us, "anti-time.")

Well said. TOS made mistakes, but I think they were mostly honest ones. And yet they made agenuine effort to get it plausible when possible.

The other thing I love about TOS' approach is they didn't get bogged down with too many details. This not only allowed them to often avoid later embarassment, but it often allowed for some of their ideas to gain more credence as new understandings in real science could rationalize some of what they tried to suggest in the show.

 

[Christopher]

What is anti-time?

Nothing. At least, nothing remotely real or coherent. That's the point.

 

[aridas sofia]

I was willing to forgive gibberish like anti-time and chronitons because I assumed they stemmed not from an ignorance of contemporary physics as much as from an attempt to portray a future understanding of physics as alien to us as our understanding might be to someone from the seventeenth century.

But given the ignorance we saw in other instances, perhaps I was being too generous.

 

[Ronald Held]

There is no reason for such babble when there is an actual scientific explanation that can be used, or slight "stretched".