Have you ever wondered exactly how deep in space is Deep Space 9?
Or how far away is alpha centauri on an interstellar scale?
And where was the contact from Contact?
This video will show the locations of where these stories take place, relative to the
solar system with real life star position data.
Nerds like me have a sort of obsession with maps, I don't know why.
(and Dyslexia...)
And I am aware that stellar cartography can be "pretty dry stuff".
So I made this moist.
I mean I made it as pretty and interesting as I could.
Like did you know there is a connection between the Greys and Xenomorphs?
So if you want to see where these stories take place in the galaxy, stick around.
This is the Milky Way galaxy.
It is a disc about 100,000 light years across and about one light years thick.
Earth and the solar system are located here about 28,000 light years from the core.
Star Trek's USS Voyager was propelled to around here.
70,000 light years away in the delta quadrant.
And Deep Space 9 is positioned at one end of a wormhole that goes from here to around
here in the gamma quadrant.
From this distance, it’s impossible to differentiate between Sol and DS9, so let's zoom into a
350 lightyear bubble and start with the closest star and move outward to DS9.
In this 350 lightyear bubble there are more than 25,000 stars, and dozens of sci-fi references.
So we’re only going to visit a select few because ain't nobody got time for that.
Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to Sol.
And it’s actually not one star but three.
And the closest one, Proxima Centauri, is only 4.25 lightyears away.
Which is far, yes, but so very close in the scale of the galaxy.
So close that it has captured the imagination and has been the subject of countless numbers
of sci-fi stories.
Here's an incomplete list.
And some impressive failures: -It was the destination of the Robinson family
from Lost in Space until they got lost in space.
-It was also the destination of the ship from the 1997 movie Event Horizon before the experimental
gravity drive took it through literal hell and back without ever getting to Proxima.
Bummer.
But a more relevant reference from this decade, it's the location of Pandora from Avatar.
The lore of the avatar is surprisingly scientifically plausible.
They use Unobtainium, a room temperature superconductor, as a way to contain antimatter in their antimatter
reactors on their interstellar ships, called ISV's (which stands for interstellar vehicles...)
. This, in combination with a laser-beamed light sail allow them to reach 70% the speed
of light and get to Alpha Centauri in only 6 years.
Which is all scientifically plausible.
What they do when they get there is also plausible...
The second closest star to earth is Barnard's Star, another red dwarf just under 6 light
years away, featured in the Rocheworld series by Rober L Forward.
Which has awesome hard sci-fi laser light sail concept.
Where the main sail splits apart, and reflects back onto it to slow it down.
It’s awesome and i want to do a video on it.
The third closest star to Sol.
Wolf 359.
A red dwarf 7.7 lightyears away.
Which is the location of the infamous battle with the Borg from Star Trek: the next generation.
Epsilon Eridani is 10.5 light years away.
Is the location of the Babylon 5 space station.
And just a stones throw further, 40 Eridani, 16 lightyears from sol, is the home to star
to planet Vulcan.
Until it wasn't.
40 Eridani and Tau Ceti are also the setting for another hard sci-fi: Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir, author of The Martian.
If you liked The Martian, I highly recommend reading it.
No spoilers here, but there’s an inspiring implication from Project Hail Mary.
And that is that the distances in our universe are vast, but even with the speed limit of
light, it’s not physically impossible to reach them.
Just a very hard engineering problem.
At some point, even if we don't invent some kind of space bending, physics breaking faster
than light drive, it’s still scientifically plausible to reach the stars in a human lifetime.
And that’s inspiring to me.
Link in the description.
Speaking of inspiring movies, the next stop is the star from the 1997 movie Contact.
Vega.
(We put it right smack in the middle: Vega) 25 light years away, in the movie the signal
comes from Vega, but it is just a relay station.
When she travels through the machine, it opens a wormhole that takes here there as the first
stop in an intergalactic transit system that ends up taking her all the way to the center
of the galaxy.
The book by Carl Sagan in which the movie was based on, goes into more detail on this,
and again I highly recommend giving it a read.
The next up is one of the most famous star systems, even if you don’t know it by name:
Zeta Reticuli. 39 light years away, is home to the Xenomorph from Alien franchise.
Most of the franchise takes place in this system on the moon LV-246 and various other
moons and planets.
Also here in “real life” Zeta Reticuli is purportedly where the "greys" come from
UFO lore.
Bob Lazar claims he was told the flying saucers came from here.
And the star map from the Betty and Barney Hill story purportedly points to here.
And Project Serpio references zeta Reticuli.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
I wonder if the greys and xenomorphs get along.
And our last stop before we get back to Star Trek is Dune.
Caladan and Geidi Prime, the home worlds of House Atredies and House Harkonnen respectively
are located in the real star systems of Delta Pavonis and 36 Ophiuchi.
Both just under 20 light years from Sol.
And Arakkis aka Dune, is 310 light years away, all the way over here in the Canopus system.
And finally we get back to Deep Space 9.
Which does not have a real life named star system, it’s only referenced as being near
the fictional Bajor system.
And there isn't really an official map of star trek.
The closest we can get to canon was this 2002 book Star Trek Star Charts.
Which, using it as a reference puts DS9 here, about 62 light years from sol .
This of course was not a comprehensive list, let me know in the comments what I missed
and if you liked this, like it and subscribe for more science and space animations.
Thanks for watching.