The 37's planet

[Lynx]

"The 37's planet" or "New Earth" is a world that I would have liked to know more about. There were a lot of unanswered questions there.

First of all, according to the readings on Voyager, the atmosphere is charged with trinimbic turbulence. A shuttlecraft could not safely navigate the currents. Not would it be possible to beam anything up or down. So Voyager had to land on the surface.

When the Voyager crew first encounter the inhabitants on the planet, they are wearing some sort of rubber suits. Was it because of the atmosphere being dangerous to the people, allowing them to be without such suits only for a short time, as we saw Amelia Earhart doing later on or was the radiation from the sun dangerous for them?

Later on, John Evansville tells the Voyager crew about the planet. He says that over 300 people were abducted from Earth in 1937 and brought to the planet by the Briori who used them as slaves until those humans revolted and killed the Briori. Then he says that 100 000 people are liveng on the planet at the end of 2371 (the episode takes place at Stardate 48975 which is 22 December 2371) which is not such a big population after more than 300 years. Can severe environmental problems have kept the population down?

Evansville also speaks about "their beautiful cities" which all seeem to be in an area close to each other. Or as Evansville stated: "We live in three beautiful cities only fifty miles from here."

That may be a hint that severe conditions on the planet hve forced them to live in a small area of the planet. Maybe their cities were built underground or under transparent domes.

It would also have been interesting to know which technological level their society had reached. Would it be an advanced technology, somewhat similar to the Feredation in the 24th century and in that case, how much different from Federation technology would it be. I mean, there were no Vulcans around to help them develope as it was on Earth after Zefraim Cochrane invented warp speed. Could the Briori technology have been used in tha development and in what way?

Or were their technology more primitive, slightly improved by Briori technology but more like 20th century technology?

I also wonder what their knowledge was about their near space? Ddi they know about Kazon, Trabe, Vidiians, Talaxians? Obviously they hadn't been visited by any of those races, maybe because of the tricky atmosphere of the planet.

And what would they do if all of a sudden some Kazon sect decided to take the planet or if the Vidiians found the population being perfect for organ harvesting? Had the planet's atmosphere protected them from being discovered or were they living in underground cities or under cloaked domes impossible to detect from space. did they have the technology necessary to wipe out any attacking Kazon or Vidiian fleet?

Which impact did the visit from Voyager have on the people there? What if someone among the population had wanted to join the Voyager crew, just like Neelix and Kes did? What would have happened then. Earhart did turn that offer down but there might have been some other person interested.

A lot of questions which unfortunately never were answered in that interesting episode. Personally I would have liked to see Voyager stay in that area for at least one or two episodes more.

 

[Sophie74656]

This is an episode I normally skip. Nothing about it really grabbed me

 

[Lynx]

This is an episode I normally skip. Nothing about it really grabbed me

You skip Voyager episodes!
No you really managed to surprise me!

 

[Butters]

What I wondered most about that episode is why, when a ship visits from Earth, only about three people could be arsed to come see them off.

Over here we have people travel far and wide, crowds gather at the trackside, just to watch a certain steam engine go past. Surely, a Star Ship, full of humans and Aliens from across the galaxy would have caused a little bit of a buzz.

 

[Sophie74656]

You skip Voyager episodes!
No you really managed to surprise me!

Lol, you skip every episode after season 3

 

[Lynx]

Lol, you skip every episode after season 3

But you are an outspoken fan of the whole series while I never made a secret of the fact that I prefer seasons 1, 2 and 3 because something important is missing in season 4-7.

As for skipping episodes, the only episodes in seasons 1,2 and 3 which I simetimes feel an urgent need to skip are the season 3 episode "Real Life" and the season 1 episode "Emanations" because those episodes are very boring in my opinion.

Not so incredible bad but just boring.

 

[Refuge]

I don't skip this episode. I could watch it for the truck backfire scene, the Voyager landing scene, and the the last scene where Janeway and Chakotay go to the cargo bay and no one is there.

 

[Sophie74656]

But you are an outspoken fan of the whole series while I never made a secret of the fact that I prefer seasons 1, 2 and 3 because something important is missing in season 4-7.

As for skipping episodes, the only episodes in seasons 1,2 and 3 which I simetimes feel an urgent need to skip are the season 3 episode "Real Life" and the season 1 episode "Emanations" because those episodes are very boring in my opinion.

Not so incredible bad but just boring.

Well i did start a thread about skipping episodes with a list of episodes i regularly skip

 

[Lynx]

I don't skip this episode. I could watch it for the truck backfire scene, the Voyager landing scene, and the the last scene where Janeway and Chakotay go to the cargo bay and no one is there.

The scene with Janeway and Chakotay enters the cargo Bay and there's no one there who wants to leave the ship is one of Voyager's best moments!

 

[Timo]

"The 37's planet" or "New Earth" is a world that I would have liked to know more about. There were a lot of unanswered questions there.

Way more than when this concept was revisited in ENT "North Star". OTOH, way less than in the original TOS concept "Paradise Syndrome"....

First of all, according to the readings on Voyager, the atmosphere is charged with trinimbic turbulence. A shuttlecraft could not safely navigate the currents. Not would it be possible to beam anything up or down. So Voyager had to land on the surface.

Which was weird overkill - the episode could have played out much the same with the ship orbiting and the heroes surveying by transporter or shuttle. Difficult to see how high winds would stop transporters, too. But I'd have been happy with "ion storms" instead of "trinimbic"...

When the Voyager crew first encounter the inhabitants on the planet, they are wearing some sort of rubber suits. Was it because of the atmosphere being dangerous to the people, allowing them to be without such suits only for a short time, as we saw Amelia Earhart doing later on or was the radiation from the sun dangerous for them?

More probably, the suits with their helmets are what the Briori wore for combat, so the local militia would don this armor as well, when marching against unknown intruders from outer space. It may protect against phasers on stun or whatever (which is just about the best that physical armor has ever achieved against Trek weaponry).

If the planet posed actual environmental risks to human beings, our heroes would surely have mentioned them, or acted on them somehow.

Later on, John Evansville tells the Voyager crew about the planet. He says that over 300 people were abducted from Earth in 1937 and brought to the planet by the Briori who used them as slaves until those humans revolted and killed the Briori. Then he says that 100 000 people are liveng on the planet at the end of 2371 (the episode takes place at Stardate 48975 which is 22 December 2371) which is not such a big population after more than 300 years. Can severe environmental problems have kept the population down?

Or the total failure to travel across great distances. After all, how would they hope to achieve that? Did they even have horses?

It depends on what they started out with. If it was just the slave barracks and whatever mining tools they had been working with, one would expect the population to crash and burn after reaching 500, from all the disease and hunger implicit in fighting the wilderness without antibiotics or industrially purified water. If there were hovercars to spare, though, then the population might indeed spread out and find healthy ways to live, dispersed to little self-sustaining communities.

But cities with 33,000 people aren't healthy. It takes major industries and advanced technology to keep those going. And if the folks had those, it sort of follows they had more know-how and resources than the 20th century Earth they left behind did.

It would also have been interesting to know which technological level their society had reached. Would it be an advanced technology, somewhat similar to the Feredation in the 24th century and in that case, how much different from Federation technology would it be.

Probably not - less than a million people wouldn't have a great number of inventors and innovators. Earth invented basically nothing in any given stretch of 300 years when only 100,000 people were in communication with each other...

But there might have been some Briori stuff they could have deciphered, to gain insight that would allow them to invent at least a few things.

Evansville says "nothing is left" of the Briori ship. And perhaps there's no transportation tech, which is why only three people are available to investigate the UFO for a major power base only 50 miles away - they were there already, guarding the Shrine, or something, and would take a day or two to reach or even contact their settlement.

Or were their technology more primitive, slightly improved by Briori technology but more like 20th century technology?

They'd need advanced medicine to sustain an urban lifestyle, but perhaps they got that from their former masters who would have had at least some interest in keeping the slaves alive and in working condition.

If there was plenty of advanced tech to go by, why is the SOS still being sent by Earhart's primitive radio?

I also wonder what their knowledge was about their near space? Ddi they know about Kazon, Trabe, Vidiians, Talaxians? Obviously they hadn't been visited by any of those races, maybe because of the tricky atmosphere of the planet.

If Earhart's radio is the best they have, then their sensor tech is probably zip, too. Otherwise, there would be synergies, and the alien sensors would be their primary means of sending the SOS.

Evansville originally thinks the big UFO with its biped spacemen is the Briori, suggesting he isn't aware of any alternatives...

did they have the technology necessary to wipe out any attacking Kazon or Vidiian fleet?

Well, if they couldn't wipe out Chakotay...

We never saw the cities. They "oddly" reminded our heroes of home, and the heroes politely spoke of progress. But I'm sort of envisioning a thoroughly agrarian and safely stagnated society here, surviving exactly because it has stopped doing the classic 20th century expansion before it killed 'em all. There might be alien medicine at work, or local factors to help out the city life. But the planet would obviously be a paradise for the average 20th century man or woman, unlikely to remain unconquered by small bands of brave settlers, unless something favored sticking together in the three cities. And lack of transportation would be the easy answer, while needing to stick close to a "watering hole" of some sort (a Briori autodoc or whatever) is a dramatically more interesting alternative.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SpyOne]

I was originally going to disagree with you about 100,000 seeminb too small, but I ran the numbers and I agree.
Assuming abundant resources at least to the point that farming produces food, guestimating an average family has five kids, starting from 300, you hit 183105 in seven generations. That's not total population, that's just the seventh generation. And that's about 150 years in.
Absent some lkmiting factor, in three hundred years three hundred people will become millions.

 

[at Quark's]

Hmmm... wouldn't 300 be too small a base though to prevent inbreeding to begin with? I think I read somewhere the minimum would be around a thousand ...

 

[Lynx]

Way more than when this concept was revisited in ENT "North Star". OTOH, way less than in the original TOS concept "Paradise Syndrome"....



Which was weird overkill - the episode could have played out much the same with the ship orbiting and the heroes surveying by transporter or shuttle. Difficult to see how high winds would stop transporters, too. But I'd have been happy with "ion storms" instead of "trinimbic"...



More probably, the suits with their helmets are what the Briori wore for combat, so the local militia would don this armor as well, when marching against unknown intruders from outer space. It may protect against phasers on stun or whatever (which is just about the best that physical armor has ever achieved against Trek weaponry).

If the planet posed actual environmental risks to human beings, our heroes would surely have mentioned them, or acted on them somehow.



Or the total failure to travel across great distances. After all, how would they hope to achieve that? Did they even have horses?

It depends on what they started out with. If it was just the slave barracks and whatever mining tools they had been working with, one would expect the population to crash and burn after reaching 500, from all the disease and hunger implicit in fighting the wilderness without antibiotics or industrially purified water. If there were hovercars to spare, though, then the population might indeed spread out and find healthy ways to live, dispersed to little self-sustaining communities.

But cities with 33,000 people aren't healthy. It takes major industries and advanced technology to keep those going. And if the folks had those, it sort of follows they had more know-how and resources than the 20th century Earth they left behind did.



Probably not - less than a million people wouldn't have a great number of inventors and innovators. Earth invented basically nothing in any given stretch of 300 years when only 100,000 people were in communication with each other...

But there might have been some Briori stuff they could have deciphered, to gain insight that would allow them to invent at least a few things.

Evansville says "nothing is left" of the Briori ship. And perhaps there's no transportation tech, which is why only three people are available to investigate the UFO for a major power base only 50 miles away - they were there already, guarding the Shrine, or something, and would take a day or two to reach or even contact their settlement.



They'd need advanced medicine to sustain an urban lifestyle, but perhaps they got that from their former masters who would have had at least some interest in keeping the slaves alive and in working condition.

If there was plenty of advanced tech to go by, why is the SOS still being sent by Earhart's primitive radio?



If Earhart's radio is the best they have, then their sensor tech is probably zip, too. Otherwise, there would be synergies, and the alien sensors would be their primary means of sending the SOS.

Evansville originally thinks the big UFO with its biped spacemen is the Briori, suggesting he isn't aware of any alternatives...



Well, if they couldn't wipe out Chakotay...

We never saw the cities. They "oddly" reminded our heroes of home, and the heroes politely spoke of progress. But I'm sort of envisioning a thoroughly agrarian and safely stagnated society here, surviving exactly because it has stopped doing the classic 20th century expansion before it killed 'em all. There might be alien medicine at work, or local factors to help out the city life. But the planet would obviously be a paradise for the average 20th century man or woman, unlikely to remain unconquered by small bands of brave settlers, unless something favored sticking together in the three cities. And lack of transportation would be the easy answer, while needing to stick close to a "watering hole" of some sort (a Briori autodoc or whatever) is a dramatically more interesting alternative.

Timo Saloniemi

Very good comments to all that I had mentioned.

Obviously they were low-tech compared to the Federation and even the Kazon and the Vidiians and I guess that my theories about cities under domes and such might have been wishful thinking from me.

Obviously I did screw up when it came to the population of the planet as well. OK, Math isn't my best subject....

I did actually suggest once that there should have been an entire season during which most of the Kazon and Vidiian episodes should have taken place, a season in which the Voyager crew could have helped the people on this world to start soenthing like a new Federation in the Delta Quadrant.

But after a recent rewatch of that episode, after some thinking about how this planet could be, thoughts which led me to write my original post and after reading your cooments, I've realized that the planet wasn't so developed that something like that would have been possible.

Let's just hope that neither the Kazon nor the Vidiians did find this planet.

However, it could also have been interesting to see the reaction of the Starfleet hotshots when Janeway informed them that there is a planet in the Delta Quadrant inhabited by descendants to people who were abducted in the 20th century and that Amelia Earhart was one of them and she's still alive. Talk about headline news.

Not to mention the debates on Spacebook, the 23th century Faceboook.

 

[Timo]

Interesting as such - I really wonder whether this would be major news. After "North Star" and "Paradise Syndrome" and all, I mean. Starfleet would have little reason to suppress knowledge of the ENT and TOS abductions, in the VOY era at least. OTOH, it might feel the need to suppress knowledge of Earhart, in order to protect the privacy of the person. Much like Kirk opted to protect Zephram Cochrane, although he probably never even told his Starfleet superiors.

Then again, people from bygone days being resurrected in the 24th century is a relatively common occurrence, too, and perhaps always was. Cryogenics for dead bodies may have been a 1990s fad as stated, but cryogenics for living people seem to have survived till the 2210s at least. And if people got reintroduced to history by more exotic means such as time travel, Starfleet or the rest of the government might suppress knowledge of those dangerous means but still allow the people to make their triumphant return, perhaps under the guise of those cryogenic means of preservation.

(What does one need to make headlines in the late 24th century? "I had a baby with an alien" or "I was abducted to outer space" clearly won't cut it, regardless of the amount of, uh, analyzing and other probing involved. "I used to be a great historical figure in my previous life" is sort of meh, too - difficult to best Flint there. And direct, personal and well-documented meetings with accredited gods are at best sort of embarrassing.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[arch101]

Interesting as such - I really wonder whether this would be major news. After "North Star" and "Paradise Syndrome" and all, I mean. Starfleet would have little reason to suppress knowledge of the ENT and TOS abductions, in the VOY era at least. OTOH, it might feel the need to suppress knowledge of Earhart, in order to protect the privacy of the person. Much like Kirk opted to protect Zephram Cochrane, although he probably never even told his Starfleet superiors.

Then again, people from bygone days being resurrected in the 24th century is a relatively common occurrence, too, and perhaps always was. Cryogenics for dead bodies may have been a 1990s fad as stated, but cryogenics for living people seem to have survived till the 2210s at least. And if people got reintroduced to history by more exotic means such as time travel, Starfleet or the rest of the government might suppress knowledge of those dangerous means but still allow the people to make their triumphant return, perhaps under the guise of those cryogenic means of preservation.

(What does one need to make headlines in the late 24th century? "I had a baby with an alien" or "I was abducted to outer space" clearly won't cut it, regardless of the amount of, uh, analyzing and other probing involved. "I used to be a great historical figure in my previous life" is sort of meh, too - difficult to best Flint there. And direct, personal and well-documented meetings with accredited gods are at best sort of embarrassing.)

Timo Saloniemi

Kinda makes you want to see Starfleet Command’s reaction to Enterprise D flight recorder visuals of Mark Twain touring the ship.

 

[Timo]

...Of course, with the proliferation of holotech, the going rate of "evidence of our very eyes" may be plummeting in the Trek universe.

Who knows, perhaps this is why our TOS heroes never really used visual records to solve a mystery? CCTV should have readily told whodunnit in "Conscience of the King" or "Elaan of Troyius", say; visual identification should have shortened the plots of said "Conscience" or "Space Seed" or "Mudd's Women" and so forth; and tricorder home videos from landing parties and lost colonies and whatnot should have been studied in detail. But not if those can't be trusted, and not just because every alien worth the wrinkled forehead can create convincing illusions, but because the Starfleet officers themselves use convincing illusions instead of classic mirrors for adjusting their uniforms in the morning.

In light of that, it's rather tragicomic that "Court Martial" hinges on everybody putting faith on the truthfulness of visual recordings. But perhaps that's just a classic case of the courts being badly behind the times when it comes to technology?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Lynx]

Kinda makes you want to see Starfleet Command’s reaction to Enterprise D flight recorder visuals of Mark Twain touring the ship.

I don't think that they would have bothered that much.
Sort of "Ah, they were travelling back in time, ran into old Mr.Twain and did show him the ship and since history wasn't altered, who cares."

But I do think that Amelia Erahart and a human civilization on the other side of the galaxy would have caused at least a minor stir among the population of Earth.

 

[Tracy Trek]

I don't think that they would have bothered that much.
Sort of "Ah, they were travelling back in time, ran into old Mr.Twain and did show him the ship and since history wasn't altered, who cares."

But I do think that Amelia Erahart and a human civilization on the other side of the galaxy would have caused at least a minor stir among the population of Earth.

I would hope so. But no one but the captain knew who she was. I would have at least thought that 20th century history buff Tom would have known.

 

[RedAlert]

Maybe, in a few years, the people of the planet would found the 13 colonies, and they cross the galaxy to find the planet if their ancestors.

That sounds like a great story...

 

[Sophie74656]

Maybe, in a few years, the people of the planet would found the 13 colonies, and they cross the galaxy to find the planet if their ancestors.

That sounds like a great story...

Yes, this sounds super interesting!