About a day or less after I made my comments above, real-world astronomers announced new information underscoring our lack of knowledge about what stars can and can't support habitable life.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/07/1121465588/new-planet-super-earth-life-nasa
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ble-super-earth-planets-have-been-discovered/
In this instance, the element of surprise comes from the fact that the stellar radiation is so high, but astronomers nevertheless think that these planets could be habitable.
Which is a totally different problem from a star being too young to even
have planets yet, at least planets that aren't still molten and subject to constant bombardment.
And yes - before someone jumps in and says so - this isn't Procyon or Canopus (in fact, in an interesting coincidence, the star in question is also in Eridanus from our perspective, just "like Vulcan"). The point is that our concept of habitable life around distant stars is ever-changing. So it's not really so ridiculous to posit that we just might be wrong about what life a star with the properties of some of the better-known, relatively or absolutely brighter, or younger ones can host.
Obviously not, but there are limits. You can't treat knowledge as an all-or-nothing binary. You can't use the uncertainties in what we know as an excuse to throw out
everything. The way it works is that you formulate your model of the world based on what you know, and remain open to changing it
if and when you get new evidence that requires it. You don't throw out a model
before you have a reason to.
Especially if you're a science fiction writer. Our job is to earn the audience's willing suspension of disbelief, which means that
if we include implausible or impossible elements, we have to sell them, to make them feel believable to the audience. And the best way to do that is to surround them with as much plausibility as we can, to use implausibility judiciously rather than just making everything unrealistic. You base your conjectures on the best knowledge available at the moment, as much as possible, and only make breaks from that judiciously, to the extent that's necessary for the story, rather than gratuitously or at random.
A good example is Richard Donner's approach in
Superman: The Movie. That film's advertising tag line was "You will believe a man can fly," and that was because Donner strove to make the film (at least the portions on Earth) as naturalistic and realistically textured as possible, in order to anchor the fantasy element of a man who could fly and thereby make it feel real to even a skeptical audience. He was doing something impossible, but he did it in a setting that felt like the real world, and that made it easier to buy into.
I like the fact that Star Trek used the names of stars that people with basic familiarity with the naked-eye stars in the constellations seen from Earth would. It's just fun to look up at Procyon and wonder how the Andorians are doing.
Sure, I can get that. But there's a fair number of nearby naked-eye stars that are better candidates for life, even if they aren't as bright and flashy. Trek has used a number of them, like Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Epsilon Indi, and the like.
And one person's "unfettered nonsense" and "laziness" as you endearingly said elsewhere in your post is another person's simple enjoyment of entertainment. I just found it interesting that in a discussion of possible life on other planets, you mentioned Epsilon Indi - when the only on-screen reference to that star in Star Trek is as the host to at least one member of a band of ghostly, evil "marauders" who are incorporeal and can control human minds with the aid of suitable hosts. That might lead some to hit the brakes a bit on what is and isn't "unfettered nonsense" about the nature of life on planets orbiting distant stars, but as we both said (effectively), YMMV.
And by taking my words out of context, you entirely miss my point, which is that the occasional implausibility is not a license to make
everything implausible. As I said, Roddenberry wanted Trek to be as plausible as possible, allowing for budgetary, logistical, and artistic reasons for the occasional compromise. That was the creator's goal, and the instances where it fell short of that goal should not be held up as the exemplars of what it should be. Especially not an example from such a piece of crap as "And the Children Shall Lead." I mean, come on. Nobody would hold that up as a model the rest of the franchise should emulate.
There's nothing wrong with franchises that are pure fantasy, like
Star Wars or
Flash Gordon or whatever. But
Star Trek aspired to be plausible. It was practically the
only American science fiction TV franchise from the 1960s-90s that I can say that about. That was part of what made it special. Part of the reason it became an enduring success when so many of its contemporaries failed was because you could tell its creators cared enough to try to make it feel like a believable universe you could imagine yourself inhabiting. So it saddens me that so many people today don't appreciate that about it and see
Star Trek as no different from all the completely fanciful space operas out there.
