Ceti Alpha V
From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference.
| Ceti Alpha V | |
|---|---|
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| Class: | M (2156) / H (2285) |
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Ceti Alpha V was the fifth of at least six planets in the Ceti Alpha system, and was "barely Class M" prior to 2268. It was located a considerable distance from the Delphic Expanse and the planet Denobula. (ENT: "Twilight")
In 2267, Khan Noonien Singh and his Augment followers were resettled on this planet by the USS Enterprise. At the time it was a habitable, but untamed, world. (TOS: "Space Seed")
Only six months later, Ceti Alpha VI exploded, shifting Ceti Alpha V's orbit and turning it into a desert-like world, dominated by craylon gas and high-velocity winds. The planet became incapable of supporting life, with the only remaining known indigenous lifeform being the Ceti eel.
In 2285, the USS Reliant visited the planet as part of Project Genesis. Mistaking it for Ceti Alpha VI, Captain Clark Terrell and XO Commander Pavel Chekov beamed down to the surface, only to be taken prisoner by Khan and his surviving followers. Khan then hijacked the Reliant, and stranded its crew on the planet's surface. The crew were later recovered by the USS Enterprise, following Khan's death at the Battle of the Mutara Nebula. (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
In an alternate timeline, this planet was the refuge for the last 6,000 members of the Human race in the 2150s and 2160s, survivors of the devastating Xindi attacks on Earth and its colonies, as it was far from the Delphic Expanse. The colony's location was kept secret for a great deal of time, but a Yridian discovered it by tailing Doctor Phlox, thus allowing the Xindi to attack. (ENT: "Twilight")
- The writers have joked on the audio commentary that if it wasn't bad enough the Xindi killed off almost all of Humanity, a hundred years from "Twilight", Ceti Alpha V would have been destroyed as well.
 Ceti Alpha V in 2285 |
 Commander Pavel Chekov and Captain Clark Terrell on Ceti Alpha V in 2285 |
[edit] Background
There has been no real explanation given in Trek of how the loss of one planet in a star system could affect others to the degree shown. Some people have postulated that Ceti Alpha V and VI were binary planets, and that the sudden loss of one could possibly cause massive ecological effects on the other. It would also explain why the Reliant would have looked at that orbital distance for the planet. Others have suggested that all planets affect each other gravitationally, and the loss of one would necessarily affect the others. (Scientists have proven that the Earth-Moon gravitational combination prevents Venus from spiraling in towards our own Sun.) Still others have speculated that the "explosion" had a large subspace component which magnified the gravitational effects.
Yet another possibility is that both Ceti Alpha V and Ceti Alpha VI had varying orbits similar to Neptune and Pluto in our own system, with the planets crossing in and out of each other's orbits. This would explain why Reliant could confuse Ceti Alpha V with Ceti Alpha VI. In this scenario, the unstable orbit between the two planets resulted in one planet's destruction. Still, it is odd that the Reliant didn't notice the sudden change in planet count in the system, something that should have sparked an investigation and thus might have prevented Khan from being freed.
[edit] Apocrypha
The spin-off novel To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh explicitly addresses the above issues. Spock postulates that Ceti Alpha VI's destruction and the environmental impacts on Ceti Alpha V had another, shared cause (possibly a small black hole passing through the system), while apparently the miscounting resulted from the Reliant's crew counting inward, finding the outermost planet (and mistaking the remains of Ceti Alpha VI for part of an outer asteroid belt).
