Star Trek has always made many mentions of many planets, people and activities in the Rigel system. Here's the problem: Rigel is a blue supergiant and such stars only last a few tens of millions of years before going supernova, thus vaporizing anything unfortunate enough to be in the system at the time. That's not even enough time to planets to finish physically forming, let alone cooling off, let alone developing the simplest life, let alone developing intelligent li-....you get the general idea.
My Little Grudge Against Rigel
- Thread starter Defiler-Of-Redshirts
- Start date
The book Star Trek Star Charts posited an imaginary star called "Beta Rigel" that's roughly in the direction of Rigel but closer, so it's consistent with its portrayal in "Broken Bow" as the first star system NX-01 visits. In my Rise of the Federation novels, I've identified STSC's "Beta Rigel" with the real star Tau-3 Eridani, whose position and spectral type are similar to the invented star in the book. And I explained the name by establishing that the indigenous name for the star is Raij'hl. My second book in the series, Tower of Babel, is about the early UFP's efforts to get the Rigelians to join the Federation, and is my attempt to reconcile all the contradictory portrayals of Rigel in Trek over the years. Still, I have no idea why TOS's writers were so enamored of that particular star name.
Anyway, there are a lot of named stars in Trek that are way too big, hot, and short-lived to support life-bearing planets, like Deneb, Vega, Betelgeuse, etc. The problem is, the stars that have names, rather than just catalog numbers, are the ones bright enough to be prominent in the night sky, and the brightest stars are usually the hot, short-lived ones. So when science fiction uses familiar star names, they're usually stars unlikely to have life.
Anyway, there are a lot of named stars in Trek that are way too big, hot, and short-lived to support life-bearing planets, like Deneb, Vega, Betelgeuse, etc. The problem is, the stars that have names, rather than just catalog numbers, are the ones bright enough to be prominent in the night sky, and the brightest stars are usually the hot, short-lived ones. So when science fiction uses familiar star names, they're usually stars unlikely to have life.
Well, when the first Rigel went nova, a new star was built in its place. Some people claim the Rigel stars are cursed, but they are the last best hope for peace.
And isn't it true that a red super giant is in it's last phase of life? The fuel is spent and the star swells into a red super giant.
Yes, any supergiant star hundreds of times larger than our sun is quickly doomed the moment it lights up
I could easily be misremembering this, but I think one of the old FASA books handwaved this by saying that Rigel was stabilized by some ancient instinguishable-from-magic space science. I think the same source might have also said that the planets were artificially created.
Of course, they also said it was the home system of the Orions, which doesn't make much sense either.
Of course, they also said it was the home system of the Orions, which doesn't make much sense either.
That's actually sort of true, since "Rigel" is from the Arabic word for "foot," so several constellations have "foot" stars. Alpha Centauri is also known as Al Rijil or Rigel Kentaurus. There's also Mu Virginis, whose Arabic name is Rijl el Awwa. I would've used that for "Beta Rigel" in my books if it weren't in the wrong place to correspond to the Star Charts system.
Heehee, that star Rigel once told me I look like a dork!
Given that terraforming is an established part of the Trek scene, and that basically everybody in the Milky Way would be interested in doing that, I could well see the appeal of building a dozen Earths around every suitable star. And an energetic star would be more appealing than a dull main sequence one, simply because energy is nice to have. Especially if you don't have to sweat Goldilocks Zones or radiation because you can tailor your Earths to cope.
No need to have a star long-lived enough for planets or life to naturally evolve - nature is such a slouch. And no need to worry about the star possibly going kaboom in a few million years, because getting even ten thousand years out of the planet is good going for a civilization.
Timo Saloniemi
No need to have a star long-lived enough for planets or life to naturally evolve - nature is such a slouch. And no need to worry about the star possibly going kaboom in a few million years, because getting even ten thousand years out of the planet is good going for a civilization.
Timo Saloniemi
I don't get why everybody assumes the Preservers are some immensely ancient race from the dawn of time. The one canonical example of their activity that we know of took place no earlier than the 17th century -- since obviously Native North Americans were not in danger of extinction until Europeans began to colonize in earnest. That makes the Preservers a modern civilization, not an ancient one. They're roughly as far behind us as Picard, Sisko, and Janeway are ahead of us. And there's no reason to assume they were advanced enough to be capable of astronomical engineering on such a scale. I mean, if they were that powerful, why would they stick an endangered population in the middle of a freaking asteroid field and give them only one lousy tractor beam to deal with the problem? If anything, the Preservers barely seem competent, let alone godlike.
Why do you assume the Preservers were attempting to preserve Native North Americans specifically and not just humans?
I'm doing just the opposite of assuming. Assuming means conjecturing facts beyond the evidence. I'm stating that the only actual evidence of Preserver activity is in "The Paradise Syndrome," which unambiguously dates their activity to recent history, only a few centuries back. So when fans imagine they were around thousands or millions of years ago, that is the assumption, because it's unsupported by a shred of actual data.
In fact, it arises from the absence of data. The thing is, when there are no facts available, people tend to fill the gaps with their imaginations, and their imaginations tend to default to the most extreme possibilities. Since we have no information on how long the Preservers were active, people assume they've been around forever. Since we have no information on how advanced they are, people assume they have unlimited, nigh-godlike abilities. It's when you reject assumptions and reason strictly from the actual evidence that you get a very different picture of the Preservers. They were active only a few hundred years ago, therefore they're probably still around now rather than being some long-lost ancient race. They demonstrated no technology beyond space travel, tractor/repulsor beam tech, and memory-wiping tech, none of which is beyond what the 24th-century Federation is capable of. They were apparently pretty damn inept, because their idea of "preserving" the Native Americans was to put them on a planet at great risk of asteroid impact and give them a very inadequate defense system (what if an asteroid came in on the other side of the planet where the obelisk's beam couldn't reach it?). The common fan perception of the Preservers as ancient and all-powerful is not only pure assumption, but it's assumption that's inconsistent with what the actual evidence suggests.
Really, if you think about it, the most likely candidates for the Preservers are the Vians from "The Empath." They're around in the same era of history, within 500 years or so, and they have essentially the exact same agenda, to rescue endangered populations by relocating them to other planets. I'm rather surprised that I'm the only person who ever seems to have noticed the clear parallels. And I think the main reason for that is that people make the basic mistake of failing to realize how recent the Preserver activity in "The Paradise Syndrome" really was.
I don't think you answered my question. You assume the Preservers were saving Native Americans from European aggression. Your only data is that Kirk's Enterprise found a Native American civilization on an alien world.
Why assume the Preservers cared about the Native Americans in particular and weren't just preserving a sample of humanity, period? I was curious what data you had that caused you to be that specific. I never took it that the Preservers were interested in Earth geopolitics and focused on saving a particular genetic subset and culture(s) of Earth.
Why assume the Preservers cared about the Native Americans in particular and weren't just preserving a sample of humanity, period? I was curious what data you had that caused you to be that specific. I never took it that the Preservers were interested in Earth geopolitics and focused on saving a particular genetic subset and culture(s) of Earth.
Again, I'm not "assuming," I'm reasoning. In addition to the fact that those communities would not have been under threat prior to the onset of European colonization (in which the primary threat was disease, which wiped out more than 90% of the indigenous population before the colonists ever even met them), there's the fact that they wouldn't have existed in a recognizable form much before then. The perennial mistake made by European observers of indigenous cultures is to assume that they were static and unchanging, that the way they were when first encountered is the way they had always been for all time. This is wrong -- cultures are dynamic, growing things. Spock claimed the Preserver colony was "a mixture of Navajo, Mohican, and Delaware." The Navajo (Dine) culture as we recognize it did not exist in that form prior to the 1600s. As for the others (more properly called the Mahican and Lenape), Spock might not have been able to recognize elements of their cultures if they'd been taken from a period well before European contact, because there'd be no records of what their cultures at that time had been like.
It's explicit in the episode itself, of course. According to Spock's translation of the obelisk symbols, "It was left by a super-race known as the Preservers. They passed through the galaxy rescuing primitive cultures which were in danger of extinction and seeding them, so to speak, where they could live and grow."
The only time in Earth history when all three of the cultures Spock named would have been in danger of extinction is during the European colonization of the Americas.
I had the impression that the writers wanted to use star names that would be more familiar to the audience. Of course, most of those are the really bright ones, and back in the '60s, much less was known about stars and whether they could support intelligent life-bearing planets. That's why I had to reset my expectations once I started learning about such things (I got into Star Trek and serious astronomy around the same time, spending my noon hours in the school library reading The Concise Atlas of the Universe and studying the Hertsprung-Russell Diagram).
For those who are having trouble reconciling the TOS episodes with modern knowledge (or just your own increased knowledge after watching the episodes): If you've read any of the older SF authors, such as Heinlein or Bradbury, have their stories become unreadable now that we know humans can't live out in the open on Venus and Mars, and that there can't be farms on Jupiter's moons? I just mentally shift them into a category of "this used to be SF; now it's more like alt-universe/fantasy, but it's still a good story". If you make that mental shift with some of the Star Trek episodes, you can still enjoy the story, no matter that it's set in what we now know to be an impossible location (I really had to talk to myself about this, concerning Vega...).
A lot of people mistakenly think that all the stars in a single constellation are grouped closely together, when the truth is that the constellation is just an illusion that humans created because our brains are wired to seek out patterns. It really annoyed me every time someone on Doctor Who announced that Gallifrey is "in the constellation of Kasterborous." From which vantage point, in which galaxy?
If their purpose was to save the Native North Americans from the Europeans, why didn't they save all of them? What made just those few worth saving, rather than all the others, with their wide variety of cultures and customs and histories?
And regarding the speculation that the Preservers (or whoever) had the ability to extend the lifespans of these supergiant stars and prevent them from going supernova, they obviously missed some (Beta Niobe, Yonada's parent star, and numerous others). Keep in mind as well, that when a star is in its late stages, any planets it has will have already undergone profound changes. For our own situation, the Sun may have billions of years left, but life on Earth doesn't. This planet is going to be unlivable a lot sooner than 5 billion years.
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