So, there’s this star out in the galaxy called 40 Eridani A, about 16 light years away in the southern skies. In fact, if you’re reading this and presumably in Australia, you can see it with the naked eye purely by facing upwards when it’s suitably dark.
It’s a smidge younger than our Sun (4 billion years as opposed to 5 billion) but otherwise very similar to Sol, except that it’s part of a triple-star system.
And in 1991 Gene Roddenberry sat down with a bunch of astronomers and mapped out the likeliest location for Vulcan, homeworld of the eponymous species of which Mr Spock is a (half) member, and settled on Eridani A.
Settle down, pointy.
Back then, of course, we didn’t know if there were planets anywhere outside our solar system, much less whether they were Earthlike in size or composition.
But now, thanks to the advances in planet-finding we have developed in the decades since, it’s been confirmed by astronomers that Eridani A has a “super-Earth” orbiting it – a rocky planet about twice the size of ours, located within the “habitable zone” (in other words, the right distance for liquid water to exist on the surface without either boiling away or freezing solid).
So Rodenberry is either a heck of an astronomer, or some sort of soothsayer.
Yes.
Also, this planet is whizzing around the solar far more swiftly than we are – 42 days rather than our more sedate 365 – so New Year’s celebrations are probably a bit less elaborate, rolling around what an Earthling would consider to be every six and a half weeks.
Perfect, in other words, for a race of aliens that don’t like showy celebrations of emotion, right?
Let’s be honest, this means it’s swarming with Vulcans.
Mind you, it might not actually be Vulcan. It might be Eden from the Silicon Dreams series of video games from the 1980s, or Montana from the 2300 AD role playing game, or Richese from Frank Herbert’s the Dune novels.
In fact, for a fairly nondescript star it’s had a weird amount of locations in popular culture. Little did we know…