Spock's Whoppers

[ZapBrannigan]

@MAGolding has a thread up regarding Spock's claim in "Arena" that Kirk is out there somewhere in a thousand cubic parsecs of space. One deduction leads to another, and next thing you know, Warp 8 is Ludicrous Speed. Like it would make the Milky Way too small for the both of us. So @Finn suggested that Spock wasn't speaking literally. Which means he's as casual with facts as the rest of us when he wants to be.

Right away I think of Spock telling Zarabeth that Vulcan is millions of light years away. Which is preposterous, like that scene in Top Gun (1986) when the fighter pilot tries to pick up a girl in a bar by wildly exaggerating the speed and service ceiling of his F-14. Spock is scamming on her to make his story more impressive.

In "Mudd's Women" Spock refers to Mudd's vessel as "a small Class J cargo ship." If he can specify the exact class, he wouldn't have to tell Kirk that it's small. And that ship promptly suffers engine failure. So I think Class J is just Starfleet slang for Junk. Meaning Spock throws slang around, contra his super-serious Vulcan image. Supporting evidence: in "The Menagerie Part 1" Mendez calls a totally unrelated vessel a "Class J Starship," and that ship suffers a huge engine room failure as well. J is for junk, not a formal class. And Spock is speaking in casual, non-literal terms.

I'll bet he does that a lot in the series. You think you know a person.

 

[Commishsleer]

I think every time Spock calculates something like the odds of us being captured by the Klingons as 87 654.67 to 1 he's just playing with us silly humans. He can't have that level of precision because of the unknown factors.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

In "Mudd's Women" Spock refers to Mudd's vessel as "a small Class J cargo ship." If he can specify the exact class, he wouldn't have to tell Kirk that it's small. And that ship promptly suffers engine failure. So I think Class J is just Starfleet slang for Junk. Meaning Spock throws slang around, contra his super-serious Vulcan image. Supporting evidence: in "The Menagerie Part 1" Mendez calls a totally unrelated vessel a "Class J Starship," and that ship suffers a huge engine room failure as well. J is for junk, not a formal class. And Spock is speaking in casual, non-literal terms.

3>OMGNewCanon<3

 

[Ssosmcin]

@MAGolding
In "Mudd's Women" Spock refers to Mudd's vessel as "a small Class J cargo ship."

"And his engines arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre.....super heating."

 

[Henoch]

Nope.

SPOCK: I endeavour to be accurate.

 

[MAGolding]

.....Right away I think of Spock telling Zarabeth that Vulcan is millions of light years away. Which is preposterous, like that scene in [B][I]Top Gun[/I][/B] (1986) when the fighter pilot tries to pick up a girl in a bar by wildly exaggerating the speed and service ceiling of his F-14. Spock is [B]scamming on her[/B] to make his story more impressive....

The disc of our galaxy is believed to be about 100,000 lightyears in diameter, more or less. Of course Eaarth and Vulcan which is relatively near Earthis abou t 25,000 lighty ears from the center of the galaxy. Thus the farthest possible distances between Vulcan and Sarpeidon within the disc of the galaxy would vary between about 25,000 and 75,000 light years, depending on the direction to Sarpeidon.

If Spock ment Vulcan was a distance that light would travel in millions of Sarpeidon years, how long is a Sarpeidon year?

If the distance has to be at least 1 million Sarpedon light years to count as millions, then a Sarpeidon year would have to be less than 0.025 to 0.075 Earth years - or 9.13125 to 27.39375 Earth days - long..

If the distance has to be at least 2 million Sarpedon light years to count as millions, then a Sarpeidon year would have to be less than 0.0125 to 0.0375 Earth years - or 4.565625 to 13.696875 Earth days - long..

Wikipedia has a list of potentially habitable exoplanets. Those planets orbit within the circumstellar habitable zones of their stars, and thus could be habitable if other factors are right for life.

[URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets[/URL]

If you sort the present list by orbital period, you find that about 20 of those planets have years between 4.06 and 25.6 Earth days long. Thus a planet within the galactic disc of hte Milkly Way Galaxy could have adistance from Vulcan one to two million times teh distance tha tlight would travel during one year of a planet orbiting with such an orbital period.

Of course planets orbiting at such close distances to dim stars might be tidally locked to their stars, with one side always facing the star in eternal light and heat and teh other side facing away from teh star in eternal dark and cold. It is rather uncertain and controversial whether such tidally locked planets could be habitable like sarpeidon. But it is also possible that some factors, such as the gravitational influences of other planets in the system, or a giant collison n the past of Sarpeidon, might give it a faster rotation period.

 

[aridas sofia]

“Situations quite familiar to the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?”

In “Bread and Circuses”, Spock gives some seriously askew figures for deaths from WW1 and WW2. The figure for WW1 could, just possibly, be civilian-only deaths. But that number he gives for WW2 can’t make sense any way you look at it.

 

[mintjulep729]

“Situations quite familiar to the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?”

In “Bread and Circuses”, Spock gives some seriously askew figures for deaths from WW1 and WW2. The figure for WW1 could, just possibly, be civilian-only deaths. But that number he gives for WW2 can’t make sense any way you look at it.

i believe the eleven-million figure references the people who were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. That would tie in with the WW1 number referring to civilian deaths. Perhaps in the far future, we will care more for innocent victims of war.

 

[aridas sofia]

Civilian deaths in WW2 were more like 55 million. Even if he was only talking about “innocent” victims of war, he was off by a factor of five. And even if for some bizarre reason he meant only victims of the Holocaust, that was more like 17 million.

I’ve never seen the script, but I assume it was well researched and accurate and that Nimoy just forgot the numbers and said what came to his mind to keep the scene going.

 

[MAGolding]

Civilian deaths in WW2 were more like 55 million. Even if he was only talking about “innocent” victims of war, he was off by a factor of five. And even if for some bizarre reason he meant only victims of the Holocaust, that was more like 17 million.

I’ve never seen the script, but I assume it was well researched and accurate and that Nimoy just forgot the numbers and said what came to his mind to keep the scene going.

Never assume anything, escpecially when some of the users at this site do a lot of research in Star Trek scripts. Ask them to find out.

I always - well, not always, merely since the late 1970s - believed that Star Trek happens in an alternate universe which diverged from ours some time before it was produced. Whenever the writers and other creators carelessly allow inaccurate historical references, I take it as evidence that Star Trek happens in an alternate universe where the inaccurate version of our history is the accurate version of Star Trek history describing what happened differently in the alternate universe of Star Trek.

Otherwise the Star Trek characters would all seem to be incredibly careless with facts that anyone can look up on the 23rd or 24th century versio of the internet and check. None of the Star Trek characters would seem to care that they could easily be proved to be careless with the facts.

So I find that the credibility of the characters is increased by believing that Star Trek happens in an alternate universe were all the historical mentions which are inaccurate in our universe are accurate.

 

[Mytran]

i believe the eleven-million figure references the people who were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. That would tie in with the WW1 number referring to civilian deaths. Perhaps in the far future, we will care more for innocent victims of war.

This website seems to be a pretty good tally of victims, although I've no idea what data the writers in 1968 would have had access to.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/cont...victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution.

Clearly Spock is focusing on just one group of victims in his statement, possibly to make a point about "slavery, gladiatorial games or despotism".
Interestingly, a Wikipedia article makes the following statement:

"...the Holocaust was "the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators". In addition, 11 million members of other groups were murdered during the "era of the Holocaust"."​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims
It gives this website as a source, which uses the same data as the earlier site:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/cont...victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution

If (for some reason) you ignore Jewish deaths and just focus on reported deaths of "other groups" then you get a figure of 11 million (rounded down)

5,700,000 - Soviet civilians (excluding Jews)
2,950,000 - Soviet prisoners of war (excluding Jewish soldiers)
1,800,000 - Non-Jewish Polish civilians
312,000 - Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
250,000 - People with disabilities living in institutions
250,000 - Roma (Gypsies), lowest estimate
19,000 - Jehovah's Witnesses
TOTAL: 11,263,900

 

[aridas sofia]

“Situations quite familiar to the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?”

In over forty years of stretching Star Trek fiction to the limits of credulity to make it fit, I have never succeeded with this one by any way other than to say, as the other poster said, that their WW2 was not our WW2. I was the guy who twenty years ago wrote about the bum who phasered himself in CotEoF having in our timeline, bumped into Nazi Eugenicist Ernst Rüdin when he was attending the Third International Eugenics Congress in NYC. By doing so, he delayed him just long enough that Rüdin did not get hit by a car as he ostensibly did in the ST reality caused by McCoy. In this way yes, preventing McCoy from saving Keeler did prevent the Nazis from winning WW2, but also altered the character of WW2, and allowed eugenics to continue in a less insidious way than it did having been influenced by Rüdin. From that one bum phasering himself, you get three realities if not more, and in one, a different, much less damaging WW2 but also, a Eugenics War in the 1990s that simply did not, could not have happened in ours. Because, Rüdin was alive in our reality to make eugenics a disgusting tool of war instead of something perhaps equally disturbing, but at least aimed at a different idea of human improvement.

 

[1001001]

How is it we’ve gotten this far without anyone photoshopping Spock at Burger King?

 

[Therin of Andor]

"Rock out with your Spock out" by Ian McLean, on Flickr

 

[Henoch]

How is it we’ve gotten this far without anyone photoshopping Spock at Burger King?

It took me two minutes to finally get the joke until I looked at the title of the thread...Whopper...I get it.
(By the way, I worked in a Burger King while in high school. Cooked up a lot of Whoppers back then. )

 

[mb22]

“Situations quite familiar to the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?”

In over forty years of stretching Star Trek fiction to the limits of credulity to make it fit, I have never succeeded with this one by any way other than to say, as the other poster said, that their WW2 was not our WW2. I was the guy who twenty years ago wrote about the bum who phasered himself in CotEoF having in our timeline, bumped into Nazi Eugenicist Ernst Rüdin when he was attending the Third International Eugenics Congress in NYC. By doing so, he delayed him just long enough that Rüdin did not get hit by a car as he ostensibly did in the ST reality caused by McCoy. In this way yes, preventing McCoy from saving Keeler did prevent the Nazis from winning WW2, but also altered the character of WW2, and allowed eugenics to continue in a less insidious way than it did having been influenced by Rüdin. From that one bum phasering himself, you get three realities if not more, and in one, a different, much less damaging WW2 but also, a Eugenics War in the 1990s that simply did not, could not have happened in ours. Because, Rüdin was alive in our reality to make eugenics a disgusting tool of war instead of something perhaps equally disturbing, but at least aimed at a different idea of human improvement.

Also the Best of Trek (don't recall volume) hypothesis that the bum's death ultimately led to his embittered criminal son murdering police officer Gene Roddenberry years later, hence no Star Trek in that world, and other alterations.

 

[FormerLurker]

How is it we’ve gotten this far without anyone photoshopping Spock at Burger King?

Or at least eating a bag of chocolate covered malted milk balls.

 

[Commishsleer]

Spock says that Vulcans cannot lie which he does many times throughout the series.

 

[Elder Knight]

I recall that someone simply multiplied out all of those million-to-1 Spock Odds against success, and concluded that the Enterprise crew had one chance in several billion of surviving Season One.

 

[GNDN18]