Star Trek: Pitch & Guide> Guide part 9–Terminology part 5

It’s a good thing I didn’t try to be funny and call the “terminology” section “technobabble” like I did at this point in the TNG guide. While some of the fake science terms have come up in this section of the guide, not all of it is what we traditionally refer to as technobabble. This is technobabble:

What we’ve actually seen is mostly terms with a hint of technobabble when needed. Technobabble’s job is to make it seem futuristic, learning new science and technology we didn’t have until we went to space, met aliens, and learned how to break the time barrier with a few crystals and explosive materials that could end the universe. As you do. Terminology here has mostly been “we named a thing”. Transporters aren’t real science but they are real in a science fiction universe.

Today we finally finish this section of the guide, but there’s still one more to go before we’re entirely done with this guide and I can give my overall thoughts on all this. So let’s take advantage of the schedule hole and finish the glossary for the original Star Trek.

LIGHT SPEED

186,000 miles per second. or approximately 670,000,000 miles per hour. A “light year” is the distance which would be traveled in one year at that speed–or approximately 5,800,000,000,000 miles.

Whatever happened to “the distance light travels in one year”? It was good enough for my science teachers. Wouldn’t calculating actual light speed travel the job of the science guys and not the writer? We’ve seen before that they have told the writer “don’t worry about it, we have guys to sweat the details like this to fool the public into thinking we know what we’re talking about”. So why be this detailed on this one?

SOLAR SYSTEM

A star (such as our sun) which includes a planet or planets circling that star. In turn, these planets may have satellite bodies circling them, know as “moons.” ASTEROIDS often circle suns, too, or can be found in deep space, and might be generally described as “solar debris” left over in the forming and/or destruction of celestial bodies.

I’m going to let this and the next one go because science class when these writers would be growing up may not have had the space science I got in school in the 1970s and 1980s. NASA’s various trips into space taught us a lot about the stuff outside our atmosphere though we probably could have learned more if they didn’t scuttle the space program. Meanwhile some billionaire starts his own so he can put a luxury sports car into outer space.

GALAXY

Most simply stated, this is a cluster of billions of billions

Who else read that in a Carl Sagan voice? Sorry. I’ll start over.

Most simply stated, this is a cluster of billions of billions of solar systems, such as described above. Our galaxy, the one which includes Earth, is a saucer-shaped “star cluster” (we are seeing a part of it when we look at the “milky way”) and is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter and 12,000 light years in depth at the center.

More sciency stuff that probably didn’t make 1950s schools and thus 1960s TV writers wouldn’t be up on some of this. At least this time it matters to how the writing is approached.

Thus, to patrol only a small part of this gigantic cluster of matter, our starship must be capable of traveling hundreds of times the speed of light. Our galaxy has not yet been fully explored by the Federation’s starships–there are still vast unknown areas even in the sector assigned to the U.S.S. Enterprise.

NOTE: Our starship will never leave our galaxy–by conservative scientific estimate, its uncounted millions of suns and planets include at least several billion planets quite like Earth–more than enough adventures for even an unusually long television run.

Which the original series would not have unless you count the cartoon (I do), the comic, the novels, and some video games. Even in the 24th century shows it took a wormhole to go to another quadrant, while Star Trek would establish the idea of some kind of natural barrier keeping us in our backyard. Few sci-fi shows ever leave their galaxy even in a story that doesn’t include our little blue space rock.

THE UNIVERSE

We won’t pretend to be able to describe this, but, limiting ourselves to the same kind of general explanation above, it is made up of untold billions of billions of galaxies. If the imagination is staggered by the distances between the stars of our galaxy, then the empty space between the galaxies is almost incomprehensible. For this reason alone our starship never visits other galaxies–at even the maximum warp speed of our vessel, it would take thousands of years to even approach our nearest galaxy neighbor.

Even Voyager and Prodigy, shows that take place in a far-off part of space, takes place in the Milky Way galaxy and at maximum warp will take forever to reach the wormhole to Federation space. And that’s a short cut. Now here’s a fun one.

HUMAN

This term or the term “humanity” are used only when referring to man. It includes, of course, any of mankind’s descendants which may have colonized other planets. An alien, which looks human, is generally referred to as a “humanoid biped” or some similar descriptive term. Vulcans are, for example, humanoid bipeds.

Nobody told the Power Rangers that.

The word “humanity” is a fun one when it comes to science fiction shows without human life. The word is usually used by us humans to describe how we treat each other, “humanity/inhumanity” and other variants of humane/inhumane, as well as just a blanket term for the human race. Can that term be used to a “humanoid biped”, and even that is a bit leading towards humans as the default form when supposedly humans only came into being on Earth, at least as far as this guide is concerned. We aren’t the only planet where people look like this. In some cases that’s a make-up issue. If all the other aliens look like humans except for special circumstances we don’t have to spend as much on CG and prosthetics. It’s also easier to relate to them. Sure, the Time Lords of Doctor Who look human but they and the regular natives of Gallifrey look like Earth people on the outside. Then you get into the two hearts and the differences show up. If human wasn’t a normal form, at least externally, it would be harder to interact and go unnoticed without surgery and make-up all the time.

And so we finally finish the terminology section of this guide. This took longer that I thought it would, even with my commentaries on each term. After all, I’m here to analyze the guide based on what we got versus what they set-up. Next time, do your homework. The writer’s guide ends with a Q&A section for some reason, and it might take one or two articles to finally put this guide to rest with this final section.