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July 25, 2006
"Over a billion years, we foolish molecules forget who we are and where we came from. In desparate acts of ego, we give ourselves names, fight over lines on maps, and pretend that our light is better than everyone else's."
Complexity visualized. Pretty pretty graphics. I like the "perfectly balanced" tree's fractal spirals... via
For the lazy sci-fi author, 3D star maps. via
"Hard" SF writers and interstellar game designers need reasonably accurate 3-D starmaps in order to set the stage. This webpage is a feeble attempt to assist those who lack the knowledge (or inclination) to do the work themselves. You don't have any excuse now, I've done most of the work for you! If nothing else, grab the maps!
Via that last link, an obsessively complete investigation into the location of Babylon 5 and the astrographical extent of the Shadow War in the Milky Way galaxy.
So, does this settle the issue? Well, there are still problems.
We have seen in several shows – most notably in Interludes and Examinations – that Babylon 5 and Epsilon 3 orbit a star which is yellow-white in appearance. Indeed, the star looks a whole lot like our sun.
Epsilon Eridani is a K2 star, basically orange to orange-red in color. Like our sun, if one looked directly at it, the star would appear white, but it would have an orangish corona. The star we've seen in the show is white with a yellow-white corona.
Bob Donahue points out that Epsilon Eridani is only about one billion years old, and thus probably too young for interesting life to have evolved. So far, this isn't a problem – there's no reason to believe that any of the races we've seen in the Great Machine on Epsilon 3 are native to the planet.
Epsilon Eridani is 10.67 light-years from the earth (according to the 1991 Gliese list; see appendix for sources). This is certainly much closer than the 25 or 35 light-years mentioned earlier. It also contradicts some more recent data: in Face of the Enemy, Lise Hampton Edgars tells Garibaldi that she didn't want a relationship with someone who was "18 light-years away". Of course, she may simply have forgotten B5's true distance in her annoyance with Garibaldi.
So we seem to have a few possible options:
• We can accept that Babylon 5 is in the Epsilon Eridani system. It seems odd that the newscaster would refer to this as the Epsilon Eridani "sector", and we have to assume that the star's color is not shown correctly. Nearly all stars in the show are shown as "yellow"; this may simply be artistic license (like sound in space, or the fact that space in Babylon 5 seems more often blue or purple than it is black.
• Perhaps B5 is in the "Epsilon Eridani Sector", a huge region of space. This seems odd, since Epsilon Eridani is fairly insignificant as stars go; it seems odd to name a "sector" after it.
• Perhaps sectors are small. Then B5 is very close to Epsilon Eridani. There are only two star-systems under six light-years from E Eridani:
One is Tau Ceti, 5.3 light-years from Epsilon Eridani, and 11.40 LY from Earth. It is G8 (yellow or orange-yellow). This would be a good candidate. But Tau Ceti is as bright, as close, and as well-known as E Eridani. Why not refer to it by name, instead of assigning it to E Eridani's "sector"?
The other is UV Ceti, 5.2 LY from Epsilon Eridani, and 8.57 LY from Earth. The UV Ceti system contains a pair of M5 red dwarfs. But there are at least two problems here: UV Ceti is only 2.9 LY from Tau Ceti – so shouldn't it be in the "Tau Ceti sector"? The other is that red dwarfs are small, cold, and don't look like the star we see on TV.
There could be an undiscovered star a few light-years past Epsilon Eridani. Seriously! Some of those red stars are tiny. But we're talking about a real M9 here, and orbiting this thing wouldn't feel much warmer than orbiting Jupiter.
• I've included an appendix with lots of interesting and relevant stars, so you can invent your own hypotheses. I have a feeling that JMS is gonna stick with Epsilon Eridani, so we will just have to ignore the numbers he quotes for distance, and hope that Ted Turner colorizes the star in some future Special Edition.
Also via the 3D star maps page, a revelation: real star maps look exactly like the star maps in Escape Velocity.
Posted by Jon Rubin at July 25, 2006 11:28 PM
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