Vulcan years vs. Earth years (Into DARKNESS!)

[jimcat]

Hello everyone,
Quite a long time ago (it was in 2011, when I checked back!) Trekguide.com raised the question of whether it was possible to work out how long a Vulcan year might be, using the available evidence. At the time, I thought I was a few tweaks away from having a finished timeline that would address this very question, and some preliminary ideas about Vulcan itself. I’ve reused the original thread title (and made it a sequel), rather than trying to resuscitate it after all this time. A lot of the ideas raised in that thread have been enormously helpful, and I’ve changed my mind about quite a lot of what I said four years ago, now that I’ve looked at things in more detail.

As it turned out, the few tweaks I had in mind for my timeline turned into a lot of reworking. The end result isn’t very different from what I had before, but it all had to be carefully revisited. There’s a link to it at the bottom of this message, but looking at the website is an “optional extra,” not what this (long) post is about.

I have to stress that although I think it is impossible to work out just one aspect of “Star Trek” chronology in isolation, there are no right answers. At every step, there are decisions to be made. My end result is one option, and there are a lot of alternatives. My particular calculations made it very plain six “Vulcan years” would be very, very close in length to seven Earth years. It might seem coincidental, but it would explain why such notoriously accurate people as Vulcans are content to settle with “seven years” as the average length of time between pon farr, rather than specifying 6.9 or 7.3 Earth years, for example.

So that’s what I’ve gone with. It means that Tuvok hasn’t yet celebrated his 100th Vulcan years birthday in “Fury.” I’ve compiled more detail about the life events of Spock, Tuvok and T’Pol here:
http://atavachron.wikidot.com/calendars:my-vulcan-calendar

The big question is whether I can then construct a “planet Vulcan” that isn’t immediately scientifically impossible, but fits in with as much of the information we have as I can make it. Firstly, I’ve had to assume that my “Vulcan year” isn’t a single orbit of Vulcan around its star. Since I want to put Vulcan in the 40 Eridani star system, there was no plausible way a hot desert planet could have an orbit that lasted so long. The planet would be too far from the star, especially since it has a thin atmosphere, making elaborate “greenhouse” explanations of a high surface temperature unlikely. Instead, I’ve adopted the idea that the Vulcan time unit equivalent to a “year” lasts two orbits. This puts my hypothetical Vulcan much closer in. At that distance, the level of light from the star is a little above the amount Earth gets from the Sun. Not too much to rule out an inhabited planet, but certainly in line with the suggestion of more intense sunlight on Vulcan. (Remember Mister Spock’s extra eyelid?)

I then needed to look at the question of what the view from the surface of Vulcan might look like, based on the Vulcan day being around the same as an Earth day (no mention is ever made of it being remarkably long or short, and the days and nights in stories set on Vulcan seem to match quite closely with a conventional day). I adopted a “Vulcan day” from Geoffrey Mandel’s “U.S.S. Enterprise Officer’s Manual” of 1.113 Earth days, rather than making something up at random.

In the original thread, T’Girl suggested that the clearest evidence for a “sister planet” is the “ice world” in the 2009 “Star Trek” film. After looking at all the evidence, I can only agree, although I didn’t at the time of the original thread. But is it possible for a desert world and an ice planet to share an orbit? To my considerable surprise, I think it is. Once you assume that red planet Vulcan absorbs a lot of the light and heat reaching it from 40 Eridani A, and that the pale ice world is much, much more reflective, then there’s a huge temperature difference. By using the albedo figures for Mars and Venus (although the surface of Venus is very hot, the top of the Venusian clouds are pale, and reflect a lot of light, easily as much as an ice planet might) I calculated that what you might call the “base” or more properly the “blackbody” temperature of my version of Vulcan would come out about 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than Earth. The ice world would be about 95 degrees Celsius (171 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than Earth. Even taking into account the insulating and warming effects of the atmospheres of the planets, there can be a huge difference in average temperature between the two, enough for one to be desert and the other covered completely in ice. My calculations are here:
http://atavachron.wikidot.com/calendars:building-vulcan

I’ve also tried to fill in some plausible numbers for things like gravity for the two worlds, and cobbled together some rough visualisations of what my version of things ought to look like, here:
http://atavachron.wikidot.com/calendars:putting-it-together
(I’m afraid I can’t show the images direct; not enough posts.)

The only thing I’m dubious about is the “little moon” seen in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” In order to stay in orbit around the ice planet, it needs to be very, very close in. Although it’s more of a guess than anything else, I’m not sure that there’s enough room for even a tiny moon to stay in place, without either being caught by the ice planet’s atmosphere with catastrophic results, or being pulled into an unstable orbit by Vulcan, again with usually catastrophic results. In the end, I’ve sort of assumed that it’ll work, because we see it. It’s the bit of the whole set-up I’m least happy with, though.

Thanks for reading through this enormous post. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve found any final answers, because there are just too many variables. It was fun trying to “build a planet,” and I hope that it all doesn’t fall apart once someone who understands the science and maths takes a look at it.

I actually had all this stuff ready to go last month, but it really didn’t feel like the right time.

Best wishes,
Timon

 

[Timo]

The concept of defining the Vulcan year as something other than a single loop around the homestar is quite interesting and well thought out.

I'm not so fond of placing the ice world with the Delta Vega installation on it anywhere near Vulcan, though. The plot problems with that outweigh the benefits of having it within visual range of Vulcan, especially considering that said visuals are part of a mind meld scene where there are plenty of other decidedly "unreal" visual presentations...

On a different note, how about that old concept of having Vulcan be in orbit of a larger planet (rock or gas, the imagery in the original Motion Picture is ambiguous) - possibly locked so that the giant can only be seen from one hemisphere? If that giant apparition in the sky holds deep spiritual meaning for Vulcans, all their important cities might be on that side of the planet, meaning a starship hovering above them would present us with a giant-free view of "planet" Vulcan... The same would hold true even if Vulcan wobbled markedly instead of being perfectly locked - better matching the TAS visuals of the companion sometimes being close to the horizon, sometimes not.

This would still allow for the idea that Vulcan orbits that planet in 1.113 Earth days, creating the Vulcan day. That'd put it pretty close to the motherworld, which is merely welcome from the point of view of, well, the points of view we get at this giant in TMP and TAS "Yesteryear".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Albertese]

I gotta say, that big wall of text was intimidating. And as I usually just a have a few minutes to glance over the BSI skipped it a couple times. I'm glad I finally did read it, though, as it actually was a pretty good read. You both have some interesting ideas, here.

--Alex

 

[T'Girl]

I’ve compiled more detail about the life events of Spock, Tuvok and T’Pol here:
http://atavachron.wikidot.com/calend...ulcan-calendar

Timon

Jimcat, I take it that you created the site "atavachron?" Wonderfully researched, while I don't agree with all your interpretations of information, I am enjoying reading through the timeline, I'm up to the year 2150.

 

[jimcat]

Hello everyone,

Thanks to everyone who’s taken a while to look at this, and to Timo, Albertese and T’Girl for leaving some comments (especially since they’re kind). I sympathise with the “wall of text,” Albertese, so I’ve tried to break things up a bit with some sub-headings, in the hope it’ll make my long posts easier to skim through. I think the idea was really for shorter posts, but this topic doesn’t lend itself to snappy answers. Or I go on too much.

Thanks for the interest in the website, T’Girl. I’m not sure I believe everything in the timeline myself, but I’d rather try and explore my own ideas than just rehash Greg Cox’s version of the Eugenics Wars, for example. It’s an attempt to do something different, although I’m not sure there are any completely new things left to say about “Star Trek.” I hope you find the rest of the timeline interesting, even if you end up disagreeing with it completely.

Timo, rather than just giving a vague reply, I’ve tried to crunch the numbers and get some solid information. I do have to stress that my results aren’t necessarily correct, but I have tried very carefully to make sure that the answers make some sort of sense when I use known values, so I hope that these unknown ones are coming out at least approximately right.

How big is the thing in Vulcan’s sky?

The short answer is HUGE. Going at this a bit more accurately, let’s build on the assumption that a standard 4:3 ratio image covers about 40 degrees horizontally, and 30 degrees vertically. If a widescreen image still shows 30 degrees vertically, then it will cover about 70 degrees horizontally. Based on that, I think the “companion” seen in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” covers about 126 degrees of the sky (!). If you plug in the values for Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, then to fill that much of the sky, Vulcan would have to whip around it in about 3 hours and 20 minutes. If this sounds a bit strange, consider that if the companion filled a full 180 degrees of sky, then the planet would be effectively skimming along the top of the cloud layer (not for very long, though). You must be thinking I’ve drastically overestimated the size of the planet in the sky, but how much smaller would you have it? Let’s use Jupiter as the example again, and insist that Vulcan orbits in 1.113 days. By my calculations, that means that Vulcan would orbit about 24 Earth diameters from Jupiter, and the planet would cover 26 degrees of the sky (still nearly fifty times bigger than the full Moon). Again working backwards, that means that the image in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” covers a field of view about fourteen and a half degrees horizontally, and 6 degrees vertically. The assertion that the companion is really so all-encompassing is based on me printing out a screencap and physically measuring the radius of the circle with a ruler. It came as something of a shock to find that the diameter of the companion is about 1.8 times the width of the picture, especially when you have to try and squeeze in another moon between the two bigger worlds.

Why I did it the way I did

Given the huge variation between what’s in Vulcan’s sky in “Yesteryear” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” I decided to work backwards from scientifically plausible (I hope) elements and then see what I ended up with, rather than arbitrarily choosing any image as “accurate” and building around that, especially when it turned out to be so difficult to get sensible answers. I ended up assuming that the “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” image is a “zoom-in” on Spock, making the companion look massively larger than it would to an observer actually standing on Vulcan’s surface. (It works for me, and seems to be the only thing approaching a practical explanation, whatever you think the companion might be.)

Delta Vega?!

The contrast of an “ice world” and a “desert world” right next to each other really appealed to me in the end, just as an idea. Even more so when I decided it could actually “really” work without changing the laws of physics. One thing that swayed my decision was this comment on page 88 of the IDW comic “Nero”:

“But what makes Delta Vega truly special is its unique orbit around the sun. You’ll have a perfect view of Vulcan.”

Your interpretation is obviously different, but I took that to mean that Spock really is meant to see Vulcan gurgling off down the cosmic plughole with his own eyes. Once you add that to the requirement for some kind of scientific basis for the arrangement, Delta Vega had to be the companion in Vulcan’s sky, as far as I was concerned.

So who’s right?

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, there aren’t any right answers. Just because I can’t get something to work doesn’t make it impossible. Even if I could demonstrate to fifteen decimal places that my answers were the only ones (and I can’t), it still wouldn’t mean anything, if that’s not the way your “Star Trek” works. Which means this hasn’t been an attempt to shoot Timo’s suggestions down in flames, just that I couldn’t get the numbers to work, so I went with something else.

Best wishes,
Timon

 

[Timo]

Hey, thank you for the hard work and not the slightest offense taken!

We could probably postulate a planet that is larger than Jupiter but not significantly more massive. But the other way to go would be to decide that the Romulans in their exodus decided to settle in a star system that was very similar to their native one. In ST:Nemesis, we see that the Romulans live on a planet that gets visited every now and then by a second rocky world, Remus, that orbits the local star just a tad farther out. The arrangement must be precarious, considering that "a tad" is truly extremely small in the opening credits - but it need not be utterly unstable, and we need not take the out-of-scale graphics with their perfectly circular orbits literally.

Perhaps Vulcan gets a regular visitor as well, one that for a day or two fills the sky? That there are occasional third bodies in the mix might be the work of some bygone landscape artist...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jimcat]

Hello Timo,
Thanks for the friendly reply and for making some suggestions (you might have guessed where this is going, though)…


Close encounters, separate orbits

Planets with wobbly orbits were the starting point in my attempts to model Vulcan. I could get my larger/smaller/practically-the-same-size “sister world” to roam around in an orbit that took it close to Vulcan and then off again into the outer reaches of the star system. It would work great for the first few passes, and then it would all go horribly wrong. Either the planets would bang into each other, or the close encounters would get less close. What was worse, the planets were moving apart because both orbits were changing. Vulcan would certainly be a very hot desert world some of the time, but far too hot for water at all, or life. Then it would loop away from the star, presumably for the remains of the baked-to-death inhabitants to be deep-frozen for a few months.


You can’t beat gravity

After trying many variations (Universe Sandbox is a lot of fun, even if you do have to pay for it), I eventually worked out that the gravitational forces will always end up disrupting both planets’ orbits. If the other object is big enough to “fill the sky” on Vulcan (or even if it’s around the size of the full Moon), then you can’t avoid it, and once Vulcan’s orbit around its sun stops being roughly circular, then Vulcan stops being an inhabitable world. (The length of the orbit, and thus the year, also becomes much more variable. Since I was mainly trying to work out a chronology, I really didn’t want that to happen.)


A more complicated shared orbit

I also played around with making the two planets move around each other in a more complicated way, getting closer and further apart. The problem is that one orbit of the two planets around each other (rather than their star) sets the length of day. Bigger orbits take longer, and really close approaches from a planet at a varying distance (but always pretty close) opens up the question of tidal forces (you can sweep those under the carpet if the two planets move in circles around their common centre of gravity). Again, just because I can’t make it work doesn’t even begin to prove that it’s impossible, but my guess is that planets that close together have to be in a very stable configuration to avoid a big cloud of asteroids being the result, rather than two planets. What I can say is that the little moon cannot stay in orbit around either planet for more than a couple of orbits if the distance between the planets varies. It’s very difficult getting the little moon not to fall onto one of the planets almost immediately with the arrangement as I have it.


A zero option?

One serious alternative that I’ve skated over (because it doesn’t involve flashy formulae, or providing an excuse to play with solar system simulators) is to simply declare that the “real” version of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” is the Director’s Cut, and “Yesteryear” happens the way Alan Dean Foster says it does in the “Star Trek Logs.” (If you can’t recall that off-hand, his version is quite specific. Vulcan has no moon, and Little Spock has to watch out for nightfall, because it gets very dark.) And then, the skies of Vulcan are always empty. More to the point, the notes Gene Roddenberry wrote about kohlinahr (although he hadn’t named it yet) as background for the “Phase II” TV series would be applicable. They also depend on Vulcan having no moon, and although there would be a moonless hemisphere in my arrangement, it does make you wonder why Spock is so obviously not on that part of the planet in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” Since stars weigh a lot compared to planets, making Vulcan a single planet with no companions of any description would change the orbit infinitesimally, so the rest of my assumptions wouldn’t need to be revised.


Incidentally, I’m glad you haven’t pointed out some show-stopping (and in retrospect, obvious) flaw with my “two orbits equals one Vulcan year-equivalent” suggestion, or with my supposition that the only real guess we can make based on the available evidence is that some number of Vulcan years might correspond quite closely with seven Earth years.


Best wishes,
Timon

 

[Timo]

Regarding the concept of year specifically, here on Earth this is of relevance and indeed exists to begin with because of seasons. If not for those, and the regular cycle by which they follow each other, the loop around the Sun would be of no major interest to us Earthlings.

If Vulcan year means one full cycle of Vulcan seasons, we are at liberty to invent mechanisms that create such a cycle, perhaps even completely regardless of the orbit around the star. Vulcan might have zero axial tilt yet struggle with tidal forces that largely depend on the effect of another (large but relatively distant) planet orbiting faster or more slowly around the star, say, these marking the completion of a cycle. Or then Vulcan is pulsating internally in some fashion (e.g. a wobbly iron core that still hasn't quite recovered from the jolt the Sargonians gave it when they towed Vulcan from its previous orbit to its current, Vulcanoid-supporting one). Or then there is axial tilt, and the weather system builds up energy with one orbit around the sun and spends the next orbit dumping it back, establishing two kinds of summer and two kinds of winter per each "weather year".

Whether Vulcan really has seasons can be debated - but those would be awfully convenient in explaining why Vulcan looks so different in different episodes featuring the planet. The major changes in coloration would be natural for a planet with lots of dry surface and the potential for major dust storms, but do they represent random weather or stable cycles thereof? If the latter, we might delight in them not following the stardate cycle of times-of-year, although they probably don't follow a six-Earth-years cycle either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

Something "new" occures to me. We see in TMP that Vulcan is volcanic, would it be possible that Vulcan is hot (while a nearby moon is icy) because Vulcan's surface and atmosphere are being heated by Vulcan's core?

On Earth, as you go deeper into the Earth (mine shafts) the temperature keeps increasing.

On Vulcan, more of the interior heat reaches the surface, this combines with the (perhaps) weak energy from the sun that Vulcan receives from that source. Vulcan is "thin skinned."

The icy moon only gets energy from the sun.

 

[Timo]

Regarding the trapping of such internal heat on the surface, we know the Vulcan atmosphere is "thin" in the sense of having less oxygen than sea-level air on Earth. It might be quite thick in greenhouse gases, though...

If so, desert nights on Vulcan might not be quite as cold as on Earth. Freezing isn't part of the night adventures in "Yesteryear" or "The Forge"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

Best wishes,
Timon
__________________
http://atavachron.wikidot.com/start : A stardate-based timeline!

That's a lot of work there and some fascinating reasoning to boot! I'm really not sure about how I feel regarding your New World Calendar theory for Kahn yet (although it is a viable solution), but other stuff (like the 15 years/Chekov solution) is just so simple and believable that I'm surprised it hasn't received wider acclaim already!

I also like how you've managed to incorporate the TOS dates and characters (such as a Cochrane) without ignoring or massively reinterpreting the original material.

Just starting your 24th century entries now...

 

[jimcat]

Hello everyone,
Thanks again, Timo and T’Girl. Those are all very interesting ideas, and I’m not sure my planet-modelling is entirely up to tackling them. All the same, I have the feeling that I’ll be looking at them anyway, even if I do end up deciding that my version of Vulcan works best with no companion worlds at all.


I was deliberately vague about getting from a blackbody temperature to an actual surface temperature, since it’s something that I don’t understand fully, and I’m not sure anyone else does, either. I assumed that Vulcan has a thinner atmosphere all round, based on the not-entirely-plausible “atmosphere-cupping” Vulcan pointy ears explanation in “The Making of Star Trek”, but “oxygen-poor” certainly fits the available evidence just as well, and would be expected on a world like Vulcan (big planet, but little vegetation). My own thought was that the red skies of Vulcan would indicate a lot of dust in the atmosphere that traps heat, since it you’re right, it really obviously doesn’t get all that cold at night.


The only fly in the ointment I can see with making Vulcan “self-heating” is that if the intensity of sunlight is lower on Vulcan, why does Mr. Spock need extra eyelids? It occurred to me that maybe the ice world might be quite bright, and by my guess (and my arrangement of the two worlds) it will be about 3,000 times brighter than the full Moon when it’s full. That’s still only 0.009 times the brightness of the Sun though, so I don’t think it would make extra eyelids essential.


Mytran, I’m really glad you’re enjoying the timeline. It’s something that I’ve been tinkering with for a long time. There are inevitably some bits that don’t work terribly well, with the Eugenics Wars being one of the best examples, although everything that gets overtaken by real events is a problem. The real clincher for me in rearranging things like this was that the “Botany Bay” in “Space Seed” follows rather than precedes the “Ares IV” in “One Small Step.” Your opinion may well be different, and I’m interested to know what you think of my “take” on 24th century “Star Trek.”

Best wishes,
Timon

 

[Timo]

... why does Mr. Spock need extra eyelids?

Oxygen-poor air -> less ozone in the upper atmosphere -> more UV reaching the surface?

We never quite see these things in normal action on full-blooded Vulcans - say, when T'Pol visits her native planet in bright sunlight. But that need not mean much, as even on Spock, the extra lids are not discernible from his normal eyes at a glance. If they are not visible at, hence opaque to, visual wavelengths, perhaps their role indeed is in filtering UV?

This still leaves it a mystery how Spock can be blind when his irises are clearly showing through (at most, his eyes are a bit more bloodshot than usual, and even that is probably due to the closer-up-than-normal photography only). So we might need to assume the inner "lid" indeed is very inner, inside the orb itself, rendering above considerations moot.

Yet it would be satisfactory to think that the extra lid comes to play at high UV intensities, meaning that McCoy was not in error with his exposure of poor Spock to all sorts of intense light: even careful experimentation and narrowing of the spectral range would still have left Spock blind, his eyes and the neural parasites having the exact same type of sensitivity after all.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

Looking at the above after a night's sleep, it doesn't really work too well...

...Okay, probably the "lid" is some decidedly un-lidlike means of reducing the amount of light falling onto the retina, perhaps a "mechanical" constrictor inside the orb, perhaps a "liquid crystal" type substance that turns opaque when needed. Since Spock is a freak, his constrictor might close down way too much, causing blindness, while T'Pol merely sees the desert in slightly darker tones.

The adaptation (artificial modification by those who transplanted the Vulcans?) could still be against excessive UV, even when it comes at the cost of reduced overall vision. There would be opportunities for using full sight indoors and under cover, though, and much of Vulcan life would consist of such opportunities.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jimcat]

Hello Timo,
Thanks for the gentle hint. I was assuming that Vulcan inner eyelids were like a cat’s, opaque and invisible because they only close with the outer eyelids. You’re quite right that Vulcan inner eyelids are much more likely to be transparent (at least to visible light), from the available evidence. The idea that they’re “inner” in the sense of being actually part of the inside of the eye (the iris?) is interesting. I was wondering about some kind of “dark spot” in the middle of an otherwise transparent lid, since if T’Pol can use them as “built-in” sunglasses, they have to do something to cut visible as well as UV light (you’d think).

Your point about a lack of ozone is a good one, and applies however relatively thick or thin the atmosphere is compared to Earth’s. I have to admit that I still prefer that Vulcan gets more light from its star than Earth does at all wavelengths, but that’s just a personal preference, not a requirement.

Overall, I’m beginning to wonder if my “dual planet” arrangement really ticks the boxes as well as I thought it might (which was the main point of posting this in the first place). Back to Universe Sandbox, I think. At the very least, I’m wondering if a Vulcan with no close companions at all, and an ice-world in a separate orbit that doesn’t get too close, can be stable enough to stop everyone on Vulcan being killed by heat or cold. As you’ve pointed out, it would certainly address the issue of “seasons” that I’ve kind of skated over.

Best wishes,
Timon

 

[vulcan redshirt]

Something "new" occures to me. We see in TMP that Vulcan is volcanic, would it be possible that Vulcan is hot (while a nearby moon is icy) because Vulcan's surface and atmosphere are being heated by Vulcan's core?

On Earth, as you go deeper into the Earth (mine shafts) the temperature keeps increasing.

On Vulcan, more of the interior heat reaches the surface, this combines with the (perhaps) weak energy from the sun that Vulcan receives from that source. Vulcan is "thin skinned."

The icy moon only gets energy from the sun.

If we look at that angle (however any world heated by enough volcanic activity to significantly heat its surface would surely be uninhabitable as its atmosphere would be dust filled and contain noxious gases) then given the oft-postulated large body that Vulcan may orbit, that orbiting this larger body (with Vulcan as a moon) would cause tidal heating of Vulcan in the same manner as tidal heating warms Jupiter's moon, Io. The outer Jovian moons are less subject to tidal heating, hence are colder for example Delta Vega.

 

[T'Girl]

however any world heated by enough volcanic activity to significantly heat its surface would surely be uninhabitable

Sorry, but I didn't intend to suggest that volcanic activity was the primary cause of surface heat. I noted the volcanic activity as a indicaton that Vulcan is internally active, my thought was rather that Vulcan's crust was relatively thin (thin skinned), and the mantle was close to the surface.

So the surface itself would be constantly warm, no matter the time of day, or it's axial tilt, or where Vulcan was in it's orbit. How much energy Vulcan received from it's sun would be based on those things.

 

[vulcan redshirt]

My apologies, reading both your comment and mine again, it appears I mis-read yours. I blame a very long couple of days at work.