PRIORITY ONE MESSAGES for TNC TNG s7e15 “Lower Decks”

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at 900 miles an hour. It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned, The sun that is the source of all our power. Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, Are moving at a million miles a day, In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour, Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way. Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars; It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side; It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick, But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide. We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point, We go 'round every two hundred million years; And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe.

Oh, and for a sense of overall scale, the whole galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. Earth is about 26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. And the disk of the galaxy is about 1,000 light years thick.

Andy asked about where Earth etc is within the Federation, so I thought I’d try to get into it. But this is way longer than my usual posts, so don’t feel like you have to read it all on pod. Some parts of canon say Earth is exactly on the line between the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. I think that’s based on the actual galactic coordinate system that astronomers use today, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense that we’d adopt Earth as the galactic Prime Meridian, when we were late to the party. But most of canon says Earth is in the Alpha Quadrant, so some sources say we’re CLOSE to the boundary but on the Alpha side. (Within 90 light years, because Kronos is in the Beta Quadrant and less than 90 light years from Earth.) The other founding members of the Federation are all 11-16 light years from Earth. Vulcan and Tellar even have real stars that they supposedly orbit. (I found a few options listed for Andoria, so I guess they couldn’t decide.) You would think that the Federation might grow uniformly outward from there, but I guess you can’t choose where you grew up. Earth may be closer to the Klingon border, so the Federation expanded more in the other direction because that space was open. Two other distances to Earth that I found were: - DS9 is about 50-60 light years away. The trip takes a week or two. - The Federation colony on Caldos IV (Sub Rosa!) is 200 light years away.

This is an episode that legitimately upset me because I ended up falling in love with Ensign Seto. It is an expertly crafted episode of manipulation by the writers. I am angry at them for the way they ended it they did their job so well lol And yes, Lavelle is Riker 2.0

Alex Jahans (Dyah-hans)