²³⁶⁷

So far, faraway; spaceman.

The beginning monologue from the first episode of the original series. It boldly began here.

Congratulations, Mr Stewart, you’re a Knight!

In an interview with BBC Worldwide, Patrick Stewart tells us Gene Roddenberry’s thoughts on hiring a bald actor to play Captain Jean-Luc Picard. At the first Star Trek: The Next Generation press conference…

Reporter: It doesn’t make any sense, you’ve got a bald actor playing this part [Picard]. Surely, by the 24th century, they will have found a cure for male pattern baldness.
Roddenberry: No, by the 24th century, no one will care.

Janet’s Star Trek Voyager Site — A website that’s straight out of the NINETIES, but has a pretty awesome collection Star Trek maps. Including, as shown above, a detailed map of each year of Voyager’s journey, an explanation of the Star Trek planet-classing system, and tons more. Cheeeeck it out!

Mars is just too small. It’s basically half the diameter of Earth, features about one third the gravity and has 28% the surface area. That’s a little less than just the land part of Earth, and Earth is covered 71 percent by water. Mars is so small that its tiny 0.376g gravitation field and vastly inferior magnetic field couldn’t even keep the sun’s solar winds from gently blowing the Martian atmosphere right off into space. If we really want to find a planet to go crazy about, maybe terraform and colonize, why would we downgrade? No wonder the original Martians ditched their planet for ours.

Second problem: Mars is starting to look a little too much like Star Wars desert planet, Tatooine. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to share anything with any Tusken Raiders.