Stardate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stardate is a dating convention used in the fictional Star Trek universe. Stardate was invented by Star Trek's creators partly as a way to establish the events in the series as taking place far into the future without tying the episodes down to a particular date. Although the events of the Star Trek universe would soon be pinned down to future dates that are sufficiently specific for most practical purposes, efforts to establish a relationship between calendar dates and stardates have not yet succeeded because the relationship is not simple. The prequel series, Enterprise, does not use stardates, instead using the common Gregorian calendar for log entries.
Few explanations have seriously tried to delve into the reasoning behind stardates or bothered to explain all the data points. For example, Franz Joseph, the author of The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual and Star Trek Blueprints, adopted the convention of writing a Gregorian calendar date in the superficial form of a stardate, so that, for example, "stardate 9802.13" represents February 13, 1998. Aside from the name and appearance, this is clearly unrelated to the stardates used in Star Trek. As such, most of those explanations are mere creative inventions that give little reason to be universally accepted.
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[edit] Observed stardate properties
| Examples of stardate decrease with time |
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Lwaxana Troi's diary in Dark Page (TNG episode), recorded in the 2330s, had a stardate of 30620.1. The date of the Khitomer Massacre as observed onscreen in Sins of the Father (TNG episode), however, was 23859.7. The Khitomer Massacre took place in 2346. |
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In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Spock's death occurred on stardate 8128, yet the previous movie began on stardate 8130 (see external link below). |
Stardates generally increase with time, although locally they have been observed to increase with time at different rates, both within particular episodes as well as between. There are several cases where future stardates have a lower number than past stardates even when lower stardates are clearly in the future, not just in an episode aired later. The occasional decrease with time was more prevalent during the original series than during Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), in which stardates increased more consistently.
The vast majority of observed log entry stardates is rounded to a single decimal. The decimal is usually omitted in conversations. There are a couple of instances where stardates are given to more than a single decimal.
Stardates are used by Starfleet personnel and Federation civilians alike. [citation needed]
Stardates do not replace clock time. Clock time is still commonly used and often shown next to a stardate on displays.
[edit] Relationship to the Gregorian calendar
Stardates almost always replace explicit Gregorian dates such as July 6, 2367. The Gregorian calendar is still used, however, as evidenced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Conundrum" where crew biographies are given in Gregorian years, and in a number of Star Trek: Voyager episodes. The Gregorian calendar is always used for references to time before the 23rd century. It is clear that in 2150s, Gregorian dates still were used in the same context as stardates.
The Gregorian calendar is always used for timespans. References to days, months, and years are clearly Gregorian, as are references to hours, minutes or seconds.
[edit] Relationship to Relativity
A popular myth is that variances in stardates can be explained by relativistic effects. This myth is inconsistent with physics. According to the theory of relativity one cannot use a global system of time measurement, unless one chooses one specific inertial system. In the latter case, relativistic effects are explicitly ignored. Even if it were possible, the time variances, in a universe with ships traveling distances of several light years routinely, would have to be far greater, in the order of years; the stardate variations observed of a few days in most cases. Also, warp travel circumvents the effects of time dilation.
[edit] Backstage information
[edit] The Original Series
Gene Roddenberry created stardates as an abstract idea without any thought to actual implementation, choosing to leave the idea up to the imaginations of the viewers.
There is a clear note in the Star Trek: Phase II writer's guide reproduced in the Making of Phase II book instructing the writers to pick any four digits for the stardate. Reports[citation needed] say it was copied from the original series writer's guide.
As a result, little thought was given to the numbers used in stardates for episodes, except that the numbers for the dates generally increased. But so little care was exercised with the dates that sometimes episode stardates actually overlapped. When pressed for an explanation, Roddenberry said:
This time system adjusts for shifts in relative time which occur due to the vessel's speed and space warp capability. It has little relationship to Earth's time as we know it. One hour aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise at different times may equal as little as three Earth hours. The stardates specified in the log entry must be computed against the speed of the vessel, the space warp, and its position within our galaxy, in order to give a meaningful reading.[citation needed]
Roddenberry admitted that he did not really understand this, and would rather forget about the whole thing:
I'm not quite sure what I meant by that explanation, but a lot of people have indicated it makes sense. If so, I've been lucky again, and I'd just as soon forget the whole thing before I'm asked any further questions about it.[citation needed]
[edit] The Next Generation
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, a slightly more systematic system of stardates was used. They were 5-digit numbers, initially starting with 4 (symbolically to represent the 24th century), and followed by the season number. Within these thousand-unit ranges, sub-ranges were allocated to writers of episodes to use. After the first season, these increased monotonically between episodes. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager the same system was kept, incrementing to 48xxx in what would have been TNG season 8, and wrapping round to 50xxx and beyond in season 10.
In this era each television season is deemed to occupy a year of time in the Star Trek universe. This keeps the fictional universe running at the same rate as the real world, so characters age at the same rate as their actors. Thus, in this system, 1000 stardate units is just about an Earth year. It is also generally assumed that the stardate system is aligned such that a stardate divisible by 1000 is close to the start of a year in the Gregorian calendar.
Within a single episode, TNG writers have most commonly increased stardates at the rate of one unit per Earth day, contradicting the 1000 units per year used on the larger scale. Although closer to a usable system than they were in the original series, stardates remain inconsistent and often arbitrary. For example, Ronald D. Moore flatly said that stardates do not make sense and shouldn't be examined closely.
[edit] External links
- Stardate article at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki.
- The Stardate FAQ which primarily develops one particular theory of stardates which has gained some currency
- Determining Calendar Dates From Stardates which has calculations and calculators based upon information from the television series and movies
- Goofs for Star Trek III, an IMDb page which lists several observed errors in Star Trek III, including one error related to stardates, one to Gregorian dates and one to timespans (minutes).
