Could planets from Star Trek TNG really exist?

thanks to curiositystream and nebula for making this video possible to see exclusive content around this video check out my page on nebula the voyages of the starship enterprise d are some of the most iconic pieces of science fiction ever made and star trek the next generation contains some of the greatest episodes of sci-fi tv ever and some stinkers but we don't talk about those it also contains a vast array of planets in total 425 planets feature in the series but of those only 154 are actually shown on screen on screen that's dr hannah wakeford lecturer in astrophysics at the university of bristol in this video hannah and i will go through the planet shown in star trek tng the tv series only mind you not the films to work out which ones could really exist according to the known laws of planetary science i'm not enthusiastic about this plan we've previously done this four planets in star wars the mcu and warhammer 40 000 but this time there's a difference i'm sorry star trek but your planets suck how dare you she's right we're not saying that the planets shown in tng are wrong they're just very samey and boring we've gone through all 154 planets shown in tng and found that there are perhaps 19 that are actually interesting those are the ones that we'll talk about in this video but they'll be representative of most of the other planets there are a couple of reasons for why tng is so unimaginative in the planets it depicts but we'll get to those later we've divided up the planets depicted into four very rough categories terrestrial planets ice giants gas giants and those that are otherwise uncharacterizable we've got a lot of planets to get through armed with all the information from the show and the official sources available online and hannah and his phds it's time to take a voyage among the starts make it so first the series of gas giants that the show depicts despite making up an estimated 30 percent of all planets more massive than saturn discovered so far in the galaxy there are only nine gas giants of approximately saturn size and above shown in all of star trek the next generation that's less than six percent of all planets pentarus three is kind of interesting setting a story on a desert moon of a gas giant not dissimilar to mars but with a breathable atmosphere most of the others seem entirely plausible being similar to our solar system's own jupiter and saturn but the really interesting planets here are detria ii and detria-6 and that's because they collide birth of a new star the enterprise will hold position until the gravitational instability subsides that we can get in for a closer look this is a really cool idea and there's some basis in fact but unfortunately while gas giants and stars are made out of the same material hydrogen and helium the difference is quantity it would take around 80 jupiters coming together into a planet before it would have enough mass to start hydrogen fusion at its core and become a star if a gas giant becomes large enough at about 13 times the mass of jupiter it can become what is called a brown dwarf what some people call a failed star these are actually large enough to fuse deuterium into helium 3 in their cores which is kind of a precursor to hydrogen fusion for at least some of their lives and though they may sometimes look like planets or stars they are a distinct mass transition between the two making up their own category of fascinating astrophysical objects for the two planets in the detria system to combine into a star the larger planet would have to be just on the cusp of having enough mass to start hydrogen fusion and therefore be a brown dwarf rather than a planet which it certainly looks like but there's a problem time if these objects were to collide and form a star and that's a big if assuming there's enough mass between the two the result would not be what's depicted firstly the result would be a puny star maybe a tenth the size of the sun assuming detrio ii is about the size of jupiter which would burn a mere two and a half thousand kelvin less than half the temperature of the sun and secondly more importantly the process would take an age likely tens of thousands of years to start the hydrogen fusion after the collision of the objects not mere hours so both time and mass are against this happening as depicted and sadly that means it's not possible damn you also related to the gas giants are the ice giants there are two of these in the series neptune in our solar system and tethys 3 which appears to be basically neptune again in case you were wondering the difference between ice giants and gas giants is that while gas giants like jupiter and saturn are mostly made of hydrogen and helium ice giants like neptune and uranus while still mostly hydrogen and helium contain a significant amount of heavier compounds like water ammonia and methane like the name suggests some of this will be in the form of ice crystals high in the atmosphere but it's more likely that beneath the clouds on these planets there's actually a planet-wide ocean of supercritical fluid this is a state of matter where material at high temperature and high pressure behaves a bit like a gas and a bit like a liquid tefl3 is described as having a frozen helium core meaning that it would be solid the core of the planet would be under incredible pressure keeping it hot meaning that actually it should be a supercritical fluid so tefl3 couldn't exist as described we'll bang in the only two planets we couldn't otherwise categorize here of which only rousseau 5 was interesting which is where wesley takes his shape-shifter girlfriend on the holodeck in season two's the dofa i'll let wesley explain in a moment the harmonic resonance from the neutrino clouds will become synchronous it's so beautiful this is pretty much technobabble neutrinos are fundamental particles that have no charge pretty much no mass and pass through normal matter like it isn't there and the idea of them causing sound in a vacuum no less is completely wrong rousseau 5 definitely couldn't exist as it's shown i hate this it is revolting more please russo 5 is about as strange as the planets in tng got and you have to give the writers some credit for trying it's nothing compared to say the worlds of the mcu but it's a lot more imaginative than normally depicted in fact every other planet in the series that we haven't mentioned so far is terrestrial meaning earth-like planets it's frankly really boring of course the reason for there being so many earth-like planets is that it made filming the show a whole lot easier star trek was predominantly shot in what's called the 30 mile zone in and around hollywood which as tom scott has made a video about was where union negotiated pay was cheaper being defined as local so a lot of the planets ended up looking very similar but what if that wasn't an issue what if budget and location didn't matter and we could set a story on whatever planet we wanted well that's exactly what we did here's an episode of star trek tng that features an actually interesting scientifically accurate planet illustrated by elizabeth fierkovsky captain's log stardate 4408 7.9 the enterprise is on route from gerald 5 to helya 3 transferring the last known population of critically endangered corporate birds for safe keeping at a breeding center the boy young wesley crusher has volunteered to care for the birds on route we have received a distress call from the federation starbase on crowdfeud 5867h requesting immediate evacuation picardenreiker discussed the upcoming evacuation riker says that a large comet has entered the crow feud system and has a trajectory that will directly impact the science station monitoring the planet's upper atmosphere on arriving at the planet they'll have about half an hour to evacuate federation people and material riker says this won't be enough time to use transporters so volunteers to take their shuttles down to the space station picard agrees make it so he says meanwhile a huge dirty ball of rock and ice bears down on the station next up the earth-like terrestrial planets we've crudely subdivided these based on their color barren planets red planets brown planets gray planets blue planets and green planets compared to other sci-fi universes it's really quite dull but there are some interesting planets in here none of the six barren planets are particularly interesting one of them's just mercury and the rest seem plausible but three of the 20 red planets are pretty cool like for example titanic's b and dalet iv tadly locked planets [Music] tidally locked planets are some of my favorite exoplanets where the rotation period of the planet matches the time taken to orbit its star this results in one side of the planet being baking hot while the other side languishes frozen in darkness this sounds like it should be a rare occurrence but in fact most of the exoplanets we've discovered today have been tidally locked to their stars ditalix b from season one episode conspiracy is actually a pretty great example of a tidally locked planet temperatures reach 180 degrees celsius on the day side and mines were established in the temperate zones between that scorching day side and the frozen night side we've actually observed a similar planet kepler-42d about 170 light years away it's about the size of mars and has a dayside temperature of 180 centigrade though we don't know if this planet has an atmosphere or not italics b could definitely exist though dalheid4 another planet from the dofa is a bit more involved dalid4 rotates only once per revolution one might surmise the two hemispheres have developed disparate cultures which is a major cause of most wars we would expect very different species and civilizations to evolve on either side of the planet where the conditions are completely different in fact the civil war could probably only take place on the terminator because depending on the evolutionary differences it would be hard for them to survive on either side they would never have had to event the light bulb on the day side for example on the night side they might have had large eyes and light skins if vitamin d didn't come in their diet to be tidally locked you'll be very close to your star depending on the mass of the star which you can approximate from its color we could work out how big it would look in the sky there would likely be very fast winds driving the upper atmosphere which would make communication difficult like they said here so in short seems possible the final interesting red planet in the series is onara this basically appears to be earth but red and it's pretty similar to a couple of other planets like relver 7 and moab 4. there's two possibilities with planets like these either the planet is red due to some compound like iron oxide being prevalent in its crust or its star is small and cool outputting a lot of red light that causes the vegetation on the planets to be largely red plants on iaf are green because of chlorophyll a pigment that enables photosynthesis quite why plants evolved to use chlorophyll in this way isn't exactly clear but one theory is that early plants needed to balance absorbing enough energy to survive but not so much energy that they overheated in the process which would denature their delicate proteins it turns out that the intensity of starlight that reaches the earth's surface peaks in the green part of the spectrum and so by being green hence reflecting green light early plants reflected enough energy to prevent overheating if this is correct then plants on a planet around a cooler star emitting more red wavelengths of light would evolve to be red maximizing reflected light while still absorbing enough to photosynthesize either through this mechanism or just boring old iron oxide these red planets seem possible there are four mostly grey terrestrial planets in the series all of which are very boring and seem quite possible are you starting to see why we put off this video for so long but what's minorly more interesting than gray brown there are 27 brownish terrestrial planets in tng and some of these are actually interesting like for example basalis three this is a planet that has its surface ravaged by firestorms every seven years firestorm can take up winds of over 200 kilometers per hour and temperatures as high as 300 degrees c they form when solar flare radiation reacts with high-energy plasma present in the planet's atmosphere this appears to be the result of a seven-year solar cycle without bursts of radiation reacting with plasma that's always present in the planet's upper atmosphere this could potentially happen if say the planet is directly on the equatorial plane of the star not inclined to the plane like for example most comets are or in fact the earth is we certainly see regular cycles of activity from our sun though not as dramatic as this however real solar cycles aren't so sudden they don't roar into life for a brief period and then quiet down completely for several years they're much more gradual and further the amount of energy required to heat the atmosphere as depicted in the show is astronomical and would definitely strip the atmosphere off the planet entirely rather than causing localized firestorms i'm ruling that basales 3 couldn't exist another interesting planet in this category is rana 4. being the home of my name is kevin oxbridge you may remember me from that time i killed all the hush knock everywhere my planet is rather normal looking and of course being a dowd i could make it look however i want the soil is a brownie purple kind of color which i accomplished by making the surface out of metallic rock like glaucophane but weekly i could have made the soil rich in metals that's oxidized in purple colors like hematite anyway i must get going to find a punishment to fit my crime so uh yeah thanks kevin that one's possible tartanin 3 is a planet that seems perpetually dark and dusty and seems to have a thick atmosphere the wiki lists it as being in perpetual twilight which isn't correct twilight is when the sun is below the horizon but still illuminating the sky an atmosphere that was thick in particulates say from lots of volcanic activity or fires or sandstorms would result in a low diffuse light at the surface on the dayside which is what we seem to see what i find a lot more puzzling is what data says about a shuttle heading towards the planet he will reach an atmospheric interface of an altitude of 210 kilometers there isn't really such a thing as an atmospheric interface there is no one boundary between the atmosphere and outer space i actually made a whole video about this a planet's atmosphere exponentially decreases in density with altitude and the start of the vacuum of space really depends on what your definition of vacuum is the most relevant boundary when discussing a craft flying through the atmosphere is the carmen line above which an aircraft is kept aloft more by the centrifugal yes i do mean centrifugal force of its orbit than by any lift provided by the surrounding atmosphere the height of the carbon line is then determined by the density of the atmosphere on earth the common line is at approximately 100 kilometers above the surface so for a common line to be at 210 kilometers in altitude the atmosphere of tartan 3 would have to be incredibly thick i'm assuming it's made of the same stuff as earth's atmosphere mostly nitrogen and oxygen because you know the crew breathe on the planet this would produce a colossal atmospheric pressure at the surface far greater than what we see in the show so for this reason i'm actually going to say that tar challenge 3 doesn't make sense but that's more because of sloppy writing than anything else damn the final planet in this category is boral 2 which is losing its atmosphere the planet's atmosphere is dissipating sir intense plasmonic reactions are destroying it the stratosphere is already breaking down there is very little detail to go on here it sounds like the atmosphere has just decided to peace out and escape to space if i had to guess i'd have to say that the upper atmosphere is being ionized potentially by some extraordinary solar event and this is causing what we call charge exchange escape this is where a fast moving ion captures an electron from a slow-moving atom in the atmosphere which creates a fast-moving atom with no net electric charge and a slow moving ion the fast-moving atom then escapes the gravitational pull of the planet leaving behind the ion if this were to happen on a vast scale with huge sections of the atmosphere being ionized by some cataclysmic burst of solar activity then loss of an entire atmosphere could potentially happen but this is right at the edge of how we understand planetary atmospheres and how they can dissipate on such large scales but going back to our story there's atmospheric shenanigans going on too jordy and ryker are coordinating the rapid evacuation of the science station around crawfowd when they receive word from the enterprise data informs the away team that the comet has experienced some unexpected outgassing as it neared the planet's star the force of steam and other compounds escaping due to solar heating has altered the comet's trajectory to the other side of the planet the space station no longer needs evacuating geordie and riker are joined by the relieved station's head scientist who invites them to stay and observe the comet impact on the other side of the planet well commander jordy says we can stay for a couple of hours these opportunities don't come up very often so they accept she leads them over to a science panel and explains that the atmosphere on crawfowd is interesting the planet itself is an example of a warm neptune tidally locked to its star with its atmosphere being evaporated by its extreme proximity the atmosphere itself contains an interesting mix of silicates iron and magnesium the impact of the comet will produce interesting atmospheric effects that they can monitor here geordi is very interested riker not so much meanwhile wesley is struggling to keep a hold of his coffee at birds they keep following him and trying to escape his quarters when data appears at the door to ask questions about poetry the birds all attempt to leave one dashes through the rapidly closing door wesley chases the bird through the corridors down to engineering and the bird leaps with all of its might attempting to jump directly into the warp core but wesley catches it just in time what were you doing wesley asked the bird you could have been killed back on the science station geordie reicher and the head scientist watch on the station's consoles as the comet impacts into the planet clouds of magnesium silicate billow up from the impact shock waves echo around the planet's atmosphere it's spectacular to watch however something's wrong cloud formation is far stronger than expected the comet penetrated far deeper into the atmosphere than they thought possible the head scientist says going so deep into the atmosphere has kicked up seed particles that generated a colossal front of lightning storms this cascading storm courtesy of the strong planetary jet is now heading for the space station at breakneck speed jordy starts organizing an even hastier evacuation riker squints into commercial [Music] we've been pretty hard in this video on the writers of star trek for being quite unimaginative in what planets they describe and we've already talked about the limitations of budget stopping them from showing anything much more interesting than well california but something else we had to remember is that this show was written in the early 90s at the start of the 90s the existence of planets outside of our solar system orbiting other stars was still very much in the realm of science fiction it was not until the mid-90s that big breakthroughs linking stars and planets was made with the discovery of the first brown dwarf the same year the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star was also discovered however both of these were still something of an oddity not even thought of by the great roddenberry the first planet was a hot jupiter a jupiter-sized world tidally locked to its star where a year takes just five days the first brown dwarf showed methane in its atmosphere something only previously measured in the atmospheres of saturn and its moon titan but it also showed that it was fusing elements at its core so not a planet at all so while tng was made at the dawn of these discoveries we can forgive the writers for thinking they may still be a little too bizarre to frame an episode around being the most similar to earth the most common category of planets on the show was the terrestrial blue planets there are 66 of these of the 156 planets in total and only a couple that are actually interesting one of them was kalon 2. oh no this is a luxar episode son is dying transforming from a yellow dwarf into a red giant if this happened it was expected that the star would destroy or at least irradiate the planet depending on how far away the planet is from its star there are several things that can happen when a star becomes a red giant in a distant orbit a planet doesn't experience much change at all perhaps in the change in the spectrum of the starlight it receives a bit closer in near to where the star will expand the planet will experience a change in orbit this is because the star loses mass in the process of becoming a red giant its outer layers being ejected into space this scenario is what we think will happen to both earth and mars when our sun turns into a red giant about five and a half billion years from now pushed out to more distant orbits closer again to the star and things get decidedly dicier for a planet inside the envelope of a star's expansion a planet will also experience a change in orbit but its atmosphere will likely be stripped away by the strong plasma currents in the outer layers of the star the planet wouldn't be habitable anymore but that's still better than planets that start in very close orbits they would just get absorbed into the star and they're never coming out that's the death of a planet it sounds like the writers are imagining the third scenario here with the planet being absorbed in the star's upper atmosphere in reality the time it takes for a star to become a red giant is on the order of a few hundred million years with most of the action taking place in the final few million years but who has the time to sit around and wait for that to happen so while the scenario is good the timeline is not so i say not possible i'll go check the pattern buffers the planet katan is a similar story to this but a bit further down the line in one of the best episodes of trek captain picard learns how to play the flute gets into tie-dye and sees the dying days of a world caught in the sights of its star going by hannah's categories earlier this appears to be a category 3 planet engulfed by the low-density outer atmosphere of the expanding star we learned that the star actually goes nova subsequently and the events that captain picard sees happened a thousand years ago the nova which in simple terms is when a star explodes is the issue here there are a few possibilities we can rule out what we call an instant supernova which is where the star's core collapses all in one go because the star is yellow and not hot and blue as would be required for this instant supernova far more likely is that instead of just one star picard was actually observing a binary system of a white dwarf and a main sequence star the white dwarf siphoned mass away from the main sequence star to the point where it was ready to explode in a nova this is relying on how few details are supplied in the episode and lots of particular circumstances but if we run a million or so simulations we might be able to make something like the events of katan happen so i'm going to say just about possible [Applause] odette 9 is a bluish planet that we only see briefly at the start of season two and we only bring it up because it's purple and that's kind of cool purple skies seem incredibly sci-fi and alien but could definitely exist an atmosphere with plenty of iodine gas or phosphorus would be purple but those are both highly reactive so wouldn't last in the atmosphere for long however we sometimes see purple skies here on earth typically preceding hurricanes or typhoons when the extreme amount of vertical motion in these storms sucks salt crystals up into the air from the oceans beneath leading to more atmospheric scattering the same process that causes the sky to be blue just a lot more intense perhaps the crew the enterprise just so happens to arrive at odette 9 at a time when the atmosphere was super saturated in this way maybe due to a seasonal cycle something that we hope we don't see on earth anytime soon are the events of penthara 4. right strap in because this one is very convoluted first of all the planet is struck by an asteroid this kicks up a bunch of dust that blocks out the sun so much sunlight is blocked out that irradiance decreases by 80 percent this results in a predicted nuclear winter with global average temperatures expected to plummet by 10 to 12 celsius so the colony on the planet asks the enterprise to draw some holes in the planet to release carbon dioxide that the planet previously didn't want to release to cause a greenhouse effect this works reversing the cooling of effect but the phaser drilling then causes a bunch of tectonic activity including the collapse of the mantle around the boar site so the resulting volcanic activity then causes more materials to be added to the atmosphere which then increases cloud cover causing another nuclear winter so the enterprise ionizes the volcanic material in the atmosphere with a phaser turning it into a plasma which was then absorbed by the enterprise's shields and ejected into space and and in the end the planet's climate stabilizes i think a bunch of geophysical stuff here doesn't make any sense that's nowhere near enough drilling to release enough co2 to counteract the cooling 20 holes drilled into the mantle wouldn't destabilize an entire planet but the main takeaway here is don't with the climate geoengineering is dangerous planet's not possible the final blue planet is atreya 4 which is also experiencing some tectonic problems namely its core solidifying our gravitational field has been affected seismic activity is increased by a factor of three if the cooling continues at this rate a trio will become uninhabitable in 13 months there is precedent for planetary cause to solidify that's what we think might have happened to mars and it could certainly cause tectonic activity by shrinking in size as it solidified putting stress on the mantle and crust but what doesn't make sense is the expected change in gravitational field magnetic field would make much more sense we think that mars lost its planetary magnetic field or magnetosphere when it's core partly solidified the earth's liquid core is what produces our magnetosphere protecting us from the solar wind what also doesn't make sense is how fast the core is solidifying this is a process that would take millions of years and the idea of a planetary course solidifying to the point of destroying the magnetosphere in just a year or two is absolutely out of the question you'll notice that tng does this a lot they compress their time in order to make for exciting stories unfortunately they that comes at the cost of scientific accuracy a tree of four doesn't make sense that just leaves the green terrestrial planets and our final three interesting ones of the 17 in this category and we've saved the best till last these three planets are certainly something first up is theta eight there are three impossibilities in this clip see if you can spot them surface temperature minus 291 degrees celsius winds up to 312 meters per second but i have found indications of debris in an elliptical orbit did you catch them the most obvious is the temperature which geordi says is minus 291 degrees celsius that's below absolute zero and so definitely impossible the other two are more subtle firstly the age of the planet the okudagram here lists its ages 72 billion years which is five times older than the age of the universe so unless there's some major changes in cosmological theory in the next few hundred years that's impossible too the last impossibility is the mass listed as 4.35 trillion tons that sounds like a lot but it's less than one trillionth the mass of the earth it's about the same mass as methane a tiny moon of saturn approximately three kilometers across the fact is that planets are huge the numbers describing their masses are quite literally astronomical a mass on the order of trillions of tons is far far too small to match the planet as depicted i will say one positive thing about the planet though the wind speeds makes sense 312 meters per second is about half the wind speed we see on neptune the strongest winds in our solar system so that's pretty cool oh and there's a hotel and a bubble on the surface and it's one of the weirder episodes overall but yeah this this planet is impossible our penultimate planet is oh no it's subrosa beverly it's all right have trusted me this is possibly the worst episode of the entire series although there are some strong contenders but none of them have dr crusher falling in love with the lamp and it centers on the planet caldos this is a strange planet terraformed and has a weather control system installed to make the entire northern hemisphere look like scotland complete with bad accents just dinner light that candle why not it'll bring the ghost we've touched on the problems of having uniform climates across a planet before in our video on warhammer 40k but caldos is slightly different to say tanith because what makes scotland scottish in terms of its climate i don't mean the fantastic landscapes highly variable food and top drawer people we can classify climates using what's called the kurpen geiger system based on precipitation and temperature in this scotland comes out as f b or temperate oceanic climate for the entire northern hemisphere of caldos to be similarly classified it would need a uniformly temperate temperature and pretty much no difference in rainfall year round as with tanith you'd need to introduce a strong meridional circulation to evenly distribute heat across the planet and you'd also need to introduce a lot of moisture that could be evenly spreading out large locks or diverting water vapour transport from the southern hemisphere which could be an ocean but the fact that they've only done this to one hemisphere makes this so much less likely atmospheric processes are symmetric about the equator so for one hemisphere to be so totally different to the other without orbital shenanigans just doesn't make sense and i know there's a weather manipulation network on caldos but that can't create moisture out of nothing it basically works like magic in the show and for that reason i'm gonna say it couldn't exist if only this episode didn't that just leaves our final planet tagra four and this is really a existential one they've managed to pollute their atmosphere pretty badly it's amazing to think that they go to such lengths to clean the air instead of regulating the emissions that cause the problem what if we let the industrial revolution levels of coal burning continue what if we didn't reduce our reliance on fossil fuels what if we didn't realize that cfcs were destroying the ozone layer what if we let civilization continue to ruin our atmosphere with no resistance well we would be screwed no correct that we're screwed now we would be completely and utterly lost do not pass go do not collect 200 pounds well the planet would survive just look at venus that planet's fine the planet's still there what it is is a life-destroying event not just our lives but the lives of most organisms on the planet far too real star trek take it back the actual content of this episode is far less interesting than the premise it's mostly about a reactor on the planet that strip pollutants from the atmosphere and needs the help of a cube to stabilize it there's obviously parallels here with the earth's own anthropogenic climate change stressing the importance of the issue as john de lancie doesn't actually have q powers to fix everything so we'd need to do it ourselves but to us at least this episode is interesting because it asks what if we only discovered climate change too late you can make a very strong argument that some measure of industrialization is necessary to discover climate change you need certain materials to make measurements of atmospheric pollutants and an extreme concentration of wealth and expertise to derive the underlying theory of radiative forcing perhaps we are lucky that we discovered climate change as early as we did or then again perhaps the inhabitants of tagra4 also discovered the issue early but didn't think it was important enough to fix thank goodness our world would never do something so stupid in short the planet seems eerily possible so in summary of the 19 interesting planets featured in star trek the next generation we think eight are possible leaving 11 in the realms of fiction overall that means that 143 of the 154 planets shown are probably possible which is a pretty great track record but it would be fair to say they play things very safe i would have loved to have seen some more tidy lock planets more ice giants more exotic atmospheres and fewer brown grey blue california-based planets well hannah funny you should mention that and now the conclusion wesley uses his communication badge to tell geordi about the birds trying to throw themselves into the warp court jordy replies that he has bigger problems to deal with right now kid wesley's confused goes to a computer terminal and learns about what's happening down on the planet jordy tells riker that atmospheric disruption from the comet impact has made evacuation by shuttle impossible there's just too much turbulence the storms will be here in under an hour reicher orders the enterprise to start transporting people off the station back on the bridge data tells him that that won't be enough time to evacuate everyone riker replies that he'll be the last person off the station at that moment wesley arrives on the bridge he rushes to tell the captain shut up wesley no no no captain i can save the crew on the station wesley explains the storm is made of magnesium silica particles but in traveling through craft feud's atmosphere they will have picked up some iron if the enterprise shot a beam of highly charged particles near the storm they will generate a strong magnetic field diverting the storm front because of the accumulated iron making the clouds magnetic make it so mr data says picard the enterprise shoots a glowing beam of particles into the atmosphere which already reads off from a terminal that the storms have been successfully diverted away from the station how did you think of that was it was the birds they were being confused by the magnetic field produced by the warp core on the enterprise i think they were trying to migrate so when i learned that the storm front likely contained iron compounds i thought we could do the same thing and divert the clouds with a magnetic field well mr crusher says picard straightening his uniform at least one of my officers isn't bird-brained hannah and i had a lot of fun putting together this episode within the episode as it gave us a chance to depict a type of planet that's common in the universe but never seen on screen if you'd like to hear us talk through the science behind craft feud as well as watch the whole episode without the bits in between that's available over on my nebula page as you've probably heard before nebula is the streaming platform run by a bunch of educational youtubers we all have a say in how the site is run and we all share in the revenue generated by subscription fees in exchange for paying for a subscription to the site not only do you get access to a bunch of exclusive content from your favorite youtubers early access to their videos and a lack of any adverts anywhere in or around those videos you also directly support original content like this without nebula i wouldn't have been able to pay lizzie to do the beautiful illustrations for this episode but that's not all we've teamed up with curiositystream who curate and produce original ultra high quality documentaries if you like this video then you might enjoy destination jupiter about the findings of the juno mission or hack the moon about the engineers behind the apollo program they have a huge range of shows from space to philosophy economics to medieval history and we have a special deal with them sign up to curiositystream at the link below and you also get access to nebula and if you do say by the end of may a 41 discount that works out at less than a dollar a month and for that you get access to top quality documentaries and small indie productions like this one whenever you want as well as directly supporting creators like me that's curiositystream.com simon clark for an absolute bargain thank you curiositystream for sponsoring this video thank you so much for watching the video hannah and i were very reluctant to do this one for reasons that have probably become apparent by now but i certainly hope that we've been able to glean some pearls from the pile of californian planets as always a huge thanks to dr wakeford for helping me out with this video check out the link in the description to her website where she talks about her research but also other outreach activities thanks also must go to trustworthy ginger fusto samwise 2450 gabe and falcon acos from the discord also linked below for their help in categorizing the planets in this video hail claude and of course a huge thank you to lizzy for drawing and animating the episode within this video definitely check out her stuff in the description there's a link to her instagram i cannot get enough of her art style and i docked out so hard when she sent me the art for this episode do let us know what you thought in the comments below both about the original episode but also about the planets we talked about and perhaps didn't talk about did we skip over any gems let us know you know the drill of course if you did enjoy the video please do pop it a like share it if you think might enjoy it and if you'd like to see more like this then you can subscribe but you can also watch the previous videos in this series about star wars the mcu and warhammer 40k thank you again for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 43,493

Keywords: drsimonclark, dr simon clark, simonoxfphys, simonoxphys, planets, exoplanets, star trek, star trek tng, the next generation, TNG

Id: Ykkmlwdgdys

Length: 39min 18sec (2358 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021