Stardate
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Stardates are a means of specifying absolute dates in the fictional Star Trek universe. They usually replace Gregorian calendar dates. One of the stated out-of-universe reasons for stardates was the need to establish the events in the series as taking place far into the future without tying the episodes down to a particular date. The in-universe behavior of stardates is much less transparent than that of any known calendar because out-of-universe writers chose the numbers more or less at random, depending on the era of Star Trek in question.
Few explanations have seriously tried to justify stardates or attempt to remain consistent with all the evidence from the shows. Most of those explanations are mere creative inventions that give little reason to be universally accepted. 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.
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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). |
Stardate numbers generally increase with time, although locally they increase with time at different rates, both within particular episodes as well as between. Some future stardates are lower than past stardates. The occasional decrease with time was more prevalent during the original series than during Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), in which stardates increased with time more consistently. Stardates are rarely specified to more than a single decimal. The decimal following a stardate is usually omitted in conversation. Stardates do not replace clock time, which is still commonly used and often shown next to stardates on displays.
[edit] Relationship to the Gregorian calendar
Stardates almost always replace explicit Gregorian dates such as July 6, 2367. They are used in the same fashion as Gregorian dates to identify a unique point in time. There is no evidence of special stardate units to replace the Gregorian units that are still used. Even the explicit Gregorian dates are still used, as evidenced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Conundrum" where crew biographies are given in Gregorian years. Stardates are not being retroactively applied to the past: the Gregorian calendar is used to describe centuries in general (i.e., "a time traveler from the 29th century")and always used for references to time before the 23rd century.
[edit] The purpose of stardates
The in-universe reason for the complexity observed in stardates is currently unclear, although it is possible to eliminate common misconceptions. Stardates are too complex mathematically to be the calendar of an Earth-like planet adhering to known laws of physics. They also are too complex to be the calendar of non-relativistic spacefarers adhering to known laws of physics. Since Star Trek: Enterprise, we also know that stardates are too complex even for the environment of warp and impulse travel at that time—which does not fall into the category of known laws of physics—because the Gregorian calendar is used there as a matter of course, without exhibiting the complex properties observed in stardates.
[edit] Backstage information
[edit] The Original Series
Gene Roddenberry created stardates as an abstract idea without much thought to actual implementation, choosing to leave the idea up to the imaginations of the viewers. There is a clear note in the original Star Trek writer's guide instructing the writers to pick any four digits for the stardate, but to try to ensure that they increase within episodes once a day with noon at .5. The corresponding notes in the TNG guides included a note about the second digit standing for the season and the increase within the season from 000 to 999, but they still retained the once-a-day rule of increase within the episodes.
When pressed for an explanation, Roddenberry said the following for Stephen Whitfield's book "The Making of Star Trek":
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 USS 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.
Roddenberry admitted that he did not really understand this, and would rather forget about the whole thing (from Whitfield's book):
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.
[edit] The Next Generation and beyond
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, a slightly more systematic system of stardates was used. They were 5-digit numbers, initially starting with four (symbolically to represent the 24th century), and followed by the season number. Within these thousand-unit ranges, subranges 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 (or actually the first season of Voyager), and wrapping round to 50xxx and beyond in season 10. The last season of Voyager takes place in stardates 54xxx.x .
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, Ron Moore has said flatly 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).
