Star Trek is a deeply unrealistic TV show.
I know, you鈥檙e shocked to find out that the show about tribbles and Vulcans and teleporters is not entirely keeping step with real science.
But as a long-time science fiction and science nerd, it鈥檚 always bothered me how rarely any Star Trek (or Star Wars, or Battlestar Galactica, etc.) series acknowledges just how weird the galaxy is.
You might think that I鈥檓 arguing that there are too many aliens, too many planets with life on them.
Well, no.
I agree that those life forms shouldn鈥檛 be character actors with sculpted latex lumps glued to their foreheads, but life might be abundant in our galaxy. If it is, it鈥檚 likely pretty weird, though.
During the last few decades, we鈥檝e gone from knowing nothing about planets outside our solar system, to detecting more than 5,700 of them.
Most of those we know as grainy little blobs, spotted because of wobbles they cause in the stars they orbit. But more sophisticated telescopes have given us more and more information about these worlds.
Some of them are super-Earths, rocky planets like ours, but much, much larger, with crushing gravity. But they might be candidates for the evolution of life! Probably life that lives low to the ground, not that fast, but life nonetheless.
There are gas giants like Jupiter that have orbiting moons that could be habitable 鈥� like slow-turning Earths, or perhaps frozen, with seas under their ice.
One example I鈥檓 fascinated with is Earth-like planets around red dwarf stars.
Red dwarfs are smaller, cooler, and dimmer than our own sun. They are among the most common types of stars in our galaxy, and a lot of them have planets.
For those planets to be warm enough to harbour liquid water, a key building block of life, they would have to huddle close to the star.
That means that they would become tidally locked 鈥� like our moon, they would stop revolving, and the same side of the planet would face directly at the star.
So this would be a planet with an atmosphere, oceans 鈥� but with one side always bathed in light, the other in perpetual, freezing darkness.
This could lead to a world split between scorching high winds and sun-parched deserts on the day side, and vast glaciers on the night side. In the twilight area on the edge between the two zones there would be a narrow ocean, fed from the melting ice.
Or, with more water, it would be a strange, dark world, perpetually covered in clouds. That would help moderate temperatures 鈥� but there would be a giant, permanent hurricane at the spot facing the star.
It would also be very dark 鈥� red dwarfs give off more heat than light. Plants might evolve to absorb infrared instead of visible light, making them black.
So you鈥檇 have a world of torrential rain and storms, hot but dim as a moonlit night, with swamps and jungles of black-leaved foliage. Animals would navigate with thermal vision, or sonar.
Captain Kirk never went anywhere that cool.
