Should Vulcans be greener?

[FormerLurker]

They have copper in their blood cells, but presumably myoglobin in their muscles for oxygen transfer from those, and protein based tisses that would leave redder muscles as well as the yellowishness from fat deposits, so eh, human looking skin seems fine.

It occurs to me that the yellowish fatty tissue humans have is from eating meat. The Vulcans are all vegetarian, so they'll probably have the white fat of vegetarian humans.

 

[Vger23]

I wish they cast real green people in these roles instead of painting Nimoy, Mark Leonard, and Blalock in greenface. For shame, Hollywood.

 

[johnnybear]

Well thank the stars they got real green skinned women to play The Orion slave girls then, Vger!
JB

 

[MAGolding]

... Question: Why don't Vulcans have darker skin? Answer: Their star gives off less UV than Sol. That is literally the simplest, most obvious possible answer to the question. And it conveniently happens that not only 40 Eri, but every star that's 16 light years from Earth gives off less UV than Sol. Heck, most stars in the galaxy give off less UV than Sol does. Something like 90% of stars are cooler and redder than the Sun. (At least, on the average. M dwarfs would give off a lot of UV in their periodic flares. But the M dwarf 40 Eri C is pretty far away from the A star that Vulcan probably orbits.)

Your statement is not 100 percent correct. According to Wikipedia, the currently accepted distances to Altair is 16.73 plus or minus 0.05 light years. Of course "Amok Time" seems to make it 99.99 percent certain that Altair is not Vulcan's sun.

 

[johnnybear]

Altair must be a system close enough to The Klingon borders to cause enough embarrassment to Qu'Onos by a Starship flotilla attending their ceremonies after a devastating conflict! I'd take that as meaning Vulcan isn't anywhere near the area! Plus look at the distances between Vulcan and Altair VI in the episode!
JB

 

[Christopher]

Your statement is not 100 percent correct. According to Wikipedia, the currently accepted distances to Altair is 16.73 plus or minus 0.05 light years.

Except that 16.73 would round up to 17, not down to 16. A Starfleet engineer like Tucker would certainly know how to round correctly, so if he says "16 light years," then it follows that he means something between 15.5 and 16.49 ly. In fact, he said "16 light years" in "Home" and "over 16 light years" in "Daedalus," so that narrows it down to 16.0-16.49. The only star systems in that distance range are 40 Eridani and the red dwarfs Gliese 832 and EV Lacertae, plus maybe a few known brown dwarfs (depending on the margin of error in their estimated distances).

 

[JRTStarlight]

Vulcans are always greener on the other side of the neutral zone.

 

[MAGolding]

Altair must be a system close enough to The Klingon borders to cause enough embarrassment to Qu'Onos by a Starship flotilla attending their ceremonies after a devastating conflict! I'd take that as meaning Vulcan isn't anywhere near the area! Plus look at the distances between Vulcan and Altair VI in the episode!
JB

Since Vulcan and Altair are both between 16.0 and 17.0 light years from Earth, they must be less than 34.0 light years apart, possibly only 5 to 10 light years. In "Amok Time" Spock says:

SPOCK: Captain, I should like to request a leave of absence on my home planet. On our present course you can divert to Vulcan with a loss of but two point eight light days.

I presume this means that the ship would have to travel 6.8 light days farther if they diverted to Vulcan. Assuming that the Enterprise would make a right angle turn and travel 2.8 light days to get to Vulcan, a few simple calculations can be made.

A light year is the distance light travels in a Julian year of 365.25 days, and thus there are 365.25 light days in a light year.

Spheres around Altair at distances of 5.0 to 34.0 light years would have circumferences of 31.4159 to 213.628 light years or 11474.657 to 78027.67 light days. A second of arc would have length of 0.0088 to 0.0602 light days at those distances, and thus as seen from Altair the star that the Enterprise was traveling from would appear about 46.51 to 318.18 arc seconds from the star of Vulcan. And there are computer programs that can show you what the stars would look like from Altair.

 

[Christopher]

Since Vulcan and Altair are both between 16.0 and 17.0 light years from Earth, they must be less than 34.0 light years apart, possibly only 5 to 10 light years.

The actual distance between 40 Eridani and Altair is about 29.7 light years, based on their Internet Stellar Database coordinates.