Vulcan years vs. Earth years

[T'Girl]

I wish to visit the planet Vulcan, thirty years past, the month of Tasmeen.

When Spock spoke to the Guardian and specified a destination date, he gave both a number of years and a month. Now why would he mix Earth years and Vulcan months? Spock could have just as easily have said thirty Earth years followed by (hypothetically) "the month of September." Or whatever the matching month would have been.

However, if he did give a Vulcan month name, doesn't it make a certain amount of sense that the year figure was also in Vulcan indigenous units? In Yesteryear, Spock would seem to be thirty-seven years of age, most likely thirty-seven Vulcan years.

Somewhere I latched on to Spock's age during TOS being approximately fifty Earth years, maybe because it's about half of Sarek's age. I read a series of stories (by Jean Lorran) about Sarek's and Amanda's courtship and marriage, Sarek's first Pon Farr was shortly thereafter, if Spock's first Pon Farr was at a similar age as Sarek's, then Spock is half Sarek's age. Those stories were non-canon of course.

All that would make a Vulcan year about a third longer than a Earth year.

Why are many hung up with Earth-Moon analogues.

I'm hung up on the idea that Vulcan orbits a huge (okay, low density) gas giant, like Jupiter and Saturn, it possesses sixty or more moons, a small number of which are "planet-size," and class M.

If Vulcan is in fact tidal locked, okay. Fiction depicts Vulcans as possessing a lot of stamina, able to go many days without sleep. If the orbital period of Vulcan (it's day) were 250 to 350 hours long, then this for Vulcans is a perfectly normal day.

 

[Timo]

Or whatever the matching month would have been.

Considering that Vulcan has no moon, their definition of "month" might surprise us. A "month" might be two Earth days long (say, Vulcan is the moon doing a two-day orbit around a nearby planet) - or perhaps two Earth decades (Vulcan edges past its companion planet in that amount of time).

In the latter case, Spock would be well within his rights to give a double definition: "30 UFP/Earth years ago, back when it was the epoch of Tasmeen". A bit like "two hundred years ago, in the reign of Queen Victoria"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Just because there is no moon of Vulcan does not mean that short time units than years could not be created. Perhaps they had the equivalent of a zodiac, and based their months on the time their sun was in each constellation.

 

[Timo]

We might argue that whatever the setup with Vulcan and its companion celestial bodies, it's unlike anything else interesting we have seen. Otherwise, somebody would probably have mentioned "Hey, Andor is a moon to a gas giant, just like Vulcan!" or "Hey, Romulus and Remus are twin planets, just like Vulcan!".

The lack of such exclamations could well mean that Vulcan's situation is either mundane (no moon, just an ordinary planet without companions, and ST:TMP was a Kolinahr-induced hallucination that went away with the Director's Cut) or uniquely exotic.

Or then not. But at least that's a possibility to be considered, in light of what we hear our heroes discuss and what we do not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Aahz]

Somewhere I latched on to Spock's age during TOS being approximately fifty Earth years, maybe because it's about half of Sarek's age. I read a series of stories (by Jean Lorran) about Sarek's and Amanda's courtship and marriage, Sarek's first Pon Farr was shortly thereafter, if Spock's first Pon Farr was at a similar age as Sarek's, then Spock is half Sarek's age.

That still disregards Amanda's age in "Journey to Babel." Whether or not they "aged" Jane Wyatt using makeup, she's still not much older than 57 or so. Surely she wasn't 7 years old (or thereabouts) when Spock was born...

 

[Timo]

If he were brought to life by artificial means (as a hybrid might have to be brought), then this wouldn't be impossible at all. Although if Spock were made of genetic material taken from a seven-year-old Amanda, she'd probably be considered Spock's sister rather than his mother...

To be sure, we did see a "conventional" birth scene, or a memory thereof, in ST5. But even assuming that Spock remembers that moment with clarity, we never quite learned that the seemingly-older-than-seven woman there was Amanda. Could have been a random rented womb.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mysterion]

FWIW, the book Star Trek II Biographies tells us that a Vulcan year is 408.04 days, that a day on Vulcan is 24.98 hours, and that the Vulcan year is divided in to quarters called Kareel, Matara, Belaar, and Tasmeen.

Your milage and calendar may vary, of course.

 

[T'Girl]

Just because there is no moon of Vulcan does not mean that short time units than years could not be created. Perhaps they had the equivalent of a zodiac, and based their months on the time their sun was in each constellation.

Prior to Julius Caesar the Roman western world had a year divided into ten months. Our seven day long week is based on religion, not astronomy. So a year divided by a astrological system? Sure.

Somewhere I latched on to Spock's age during TOS being approximately fifty Earth years, maybe because it's about half of Sarek's age.

That still disregards Amanda's age in "Journey to Babel." Whether or not they "aged" Jane Wyatt using makeup, she's still not much older than 57 or so. Surely she wasn't 7 years old (or thereabouts) when Spock was born...

My grandmother Izabel just turn ninety and gets around quite sprightly, my own mother was thirty-nine when she had me (admittedly, I was a "surprise"). So for Amanda to be late seventies through late eighties in Journey to Babel, and to have had Spock a half (Earth) century before isn't that hard to grasp.

Uhura wasn't much younger than that when she was doing naked fan dances atop alien sand dunes.

 

[Ronald Held]

Christopher's use of T'Khut as a basis for the calendar could be reasonable, given that it is an a close solar orbit with respect to Vulcan.

 

[Idran]

Just because there is no moon of Vulcan does not mean that short time units than years could not be created. Perhaps they had the equivalent of a zodiac, and based their months on the time their sun was in each constellation.

Prior to Julius Caesar the Roman western world had a year divided into ten months. Our seven day long week is based on religion, not astronomy. So a year divided by a astrological system? Sure.

Just a minor correction: While the old Roman calendar did have 10 months, the months only consisted of 304 days, and it also had 61 days not assigned to any one month, so in essence it wasn't that far off from the current calendar. Also, it was Numa Pompilius that moved from the 10 month system, not Julius Caesar; changing things into a 355 day calendar with an occasional leap-month in the middle of February to keep things lined up.

It's popular belief that the calendar moved from 10 months to 12 with the addition of July and August, but in fact this change was Numa Pompilius adding January and February to the start of the calendar. Neither Julius nor Augustus Caesar were even responsible for renaming Quintilis and Sextilis. The Roman senate decided to rename Quintilis in Caesar's honor after his death, and Sextilis was renamed after Augustus Caesar again by the Roman senate some 40 years later, around 8 BC.

Caesar's calendar reforms that created the Julian calendar instead were just a rearrangement of the day distribution to remove the intercalary month and replace it with an leap day in February.

 

[T'Girl]

^ Cool.

 

[Captain Robert April]

FWIW, the book Star Trek II Biographies tells us that a Vulcan year is 408.04 days, that a day on Vulcan is 24.98 hours, and that the Vulcan year is divided in to quarters called Kareel, Matara, Belaar, and Tasmeen.

Your milage and calendar may vary, of course.

Upon further reflection, that sounds about right, although I'm still trying to confirm what I saw previously.

It's staggering what didn't make into the previous Concordances.

 

[BlobVanDam]

Somewhere I latched on to Spock's age during TOS being approximately fifty Earth years, maybe because it's about half of Sarek's age. I read a series of stories (by Jean Lorran) about Sarek's and Amanda's courtship and marriage, Sarek's first Pon Farr was shortly thereafter, if Spock's first Pon Farr was at a similar age as Sarek's, then Spock is half Sarek's age.

That still disregards Amanda's age in "Journey to Babel." Whether or not they "aged" Jane Wyatt using makeup, she's still not much older than 57 or so. Surely she wasn't 7 years old (or thereabouts) when Spock was born...

Did they ever give her age? I always just assume that because people are living better in the future and have longer lifespans, that they look younger too. You could say the same about a 50 year old today compared to a 50 year old of 100 years ago. The age difference looked much worse in Trek XI.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Sorry for resurrecting this zombie, but I'm trying to dig up something on this subject (still slogging through those notes, starting to think I'm looking in the wrong file), and a Google search turned up a few things, most of which are useless, but there is a little tidbit from Gene Roddenberry, indicating that a Vulcan year comes out to around 0.91 of one Earth year. Specifically, in the novelization of TMP, he says that nine Vulcan seasons = 2.8 Earth years. In the notes, I saw that a Vulcan year has four months, Tasmeen being one of them. So, figure one Vulcan month is around 80 to 90 days, give or take a week.

As for that big gas giant in the Vulcan sky (which was gone in the Director's Edition of TMP, so it's debatable whether or not to even count it), maybe it would've been more precise for Spock to say, "Vulcan IS a moon, Miss Uhura."

 

[Captain Robert April]

Found it. Turns out I was digging through the wrong file.

From the Concordance notes:

The Vulcan year is .75 of Earth's, or approximately 3/4 as long: 264 days. This could account for Vulcans seeming to live longer than Earthmen. Vulcan civilization is approximately 9000 years old; the Era of Logic 540 years long when the Federation meets Vulcan. The Vulcan day is 26 hours long. The Vulcan year is divided into 66 day quarters: Winter is "Kareel", Spring is "Sikar", Summer is "Belaar", and Fall is "Tasmeen.”

The only thing I'd change about the above is to get the length of the year closer to GR's 0.91 Earth years. 0.75 is just too short.

 

[NSTrekfan]

Here's a link to the Sky & Telescope article about Vulcan being 40 Eridani

http://www.projectrho.com/vulsun.htm

"
In order for 40 Eridani A (Vulcan's sun) to shine in the Vulcan sky at approximately the same magnitude as the Sun does in ours, Vulcan must orbit the star at a distance of 0.56 AU or 52,360,000 mi. (equivalent to a solar orbit about halfway between Mercury and Venus). At this distance, 40 Eridani A would appear from Vulcan as a disk 0.86 arc-degrees in diameter, about 62% larger than the Sun appears to us. "

It doesn't give the orbital period but there's enough info there to work out the period of a planet at the indicated distance.

 

[NSTrekfan]

Found an online orbital period calculator.

http://www.calctool.org/CALC/phys/astronomy/planet_orbit

Taking the info from the link above. we get:
Semi major axis - 0.56 au
Mass of star - 0.75 sol
Period of planet - 0.483813 years or 176.7 earth days

 

[Captain Robert April]

If we shift it more in line with GR's stated idea of a Vulcan year being 0.91 Earth years, and figuring Vulcan's mass as 1.3 Earths, it looks more like this:

Semimajor axis: 0.855 au
Mass of sun: 0.75 sol
Period of planet: 0.912732 years, or 333.381 days

That would make each of Vulcan's four months around 83 days long.

 

[NSTrekfan]

That would also make the planet much colder, especially with the thinner atmosphere. It would only be getting one quarter as much solar radiation as Earth (aprox).

 

[Captain Robert April]

How would it be colder being that much closer to the sun?