Planet Vulcan - Blog Posts
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THE BIG VULCAN BIOLOGY POST (aka Vulcan is a Hell Planet)
DISCLAIMER: I am not a biologist, astrophysicist, neurologist, animal psychologist or literally anything that would qualify me to talk about this with 100% confidence. This is the result of dozens of headcanons and obsessive deep dive research. I don’t want this post to be three miles long, so after I address the planetary stuff I will oblige y’all with a Read More.
Adsfasdkfjhaslkdfh I’ve been working on this post for almost a month SO HERE WE GO!
First of all, Vulcan (aka T’Khasi) is a HELL PLANET, which is part of the reason they’re so badass, I say this for the following reasons:
No moon(s) (natural satellites)
Sodium (Salt) is so rare on the planet that Vulcan’s oceans are freshwater
It’s a “Super-Earth” (as in big chonkin’ planet of similar composition to earth in the “goldilocks region”)
Let’s do this.
“Vulcan has no moon Ms. Uhura.”
-Spock, The Man Trap
Tons of things change about our planet if there was no moon:
Much darker nights (no moonlight)
Much lower sea levels since there is no gravity from the moon to pull it upward.
Lower and weaker tides because the water is pulled by the sun instead of the moon, and it depends on how large the Vulcan solar system’s sun is for how big the waves are.
Stronger winds from faster planet rotation.
Depending on whether the axis of the planet would straighten or tilt further without the moon’s pull, combined with the faster rotation would lead to more severe seasons (strong tilt) or no seasons at all (no tilt)
The first factor may lead to Vulcan eyes being very catlike even if they aren’t nocturnal (I think they’re crepesucular but we’ll get into that later). Which given the likely nature of their blood and their herbivorous eating habits they probably aren’t. The sky would still be so dark that our human eyes couldn’t even see our hands in front of us, being blind when the sun goes down could be a death sentence. Alternatively, if they didn’t develop strong night vision that may be one of the reasons why they have such strong senses of hearing.
The stronger winds, faster rotation, and stronger (or nonexistent) seasons come from the lack of resistance and friction that stronger tides and the moon’s pull create on our planet. I suspect that Vulcan is larger, or at least denser than Earth, but I’ve been informed that according to the TMP novelization that it does rotate faster. I also think that Vulcan’s tilt is on the more extreme end to get the hostile extremes like storms and heat that we see on Vulcan.
If you look at this image of Vulcan, water covers way less of the planet’s surface than Earth. I don’t think this is necessarily because Vulcan has less water, but that it isn’t spread as far because of the lack of moon, and the fact that the oceans are freshwater, I’ll get into that shortly.
“My ancestors spawned from a different ocean than yours.”
-Spock, The Man Trap
In the Star Trek: The Original Series (third) pilot The Man Trap, there is a creature that kills its victims by draining their bodies completely of salt. Spock encounters the creature but does not die, implying his (and Vulcans overall) body contains little to no salt. His justification is that his species did not evolve from a salinized ocean.
What does it mean to have oceans with no salt?
This has to mean that sodium is a very rare mineral on Vulcan, as the reason our oceans are so salinized is due to erosion of minerals by rainfall, carried from river to ocean. Salt in the ocean is also generated by submarine volcanic activity, which means either that the volcanoes on Vulcan (which we definitely know exist) somehow don’t produce salt, or the vast majority of the submarine volcanoes have been inactive for millions if not billions of years. The active volcanoes on Vulcan must be very far inland and/or Vulcan has almost no rivers, which given how hot the planet is, wouldn’t actually be too much of a stretch of the imagination.
Which means every single lifeform on T’Khasi, including Vulcans, evolved biosystems that exist without (or with very little) salt content. Any salt that exists would likely be deep beneath the planet’s surface, and within volcanoes.
No saltwater has a ton of consequences:
Plants (like underwater algae) are rarer and may not photosynthesize the same way Earth plants do, meaning less oxygen and more carbon dioxide, which means more greenhouse effect, which means higher temperatures.
The lack of salt would also mean less diverse plant life (at least as humans know it) and given the lack of visible rivers and vast swaths of desert on Vulcan, we can safely say vegetation must be hardier and infrequent.
Lower sea levels as the oceans would have lower density due to lack of salt.
Little to no water convection, which salt is crucial for on Earth. Which means warm ocean water doesn’t move to cold regions and vice versa. Creating extremes, the equator being obscenely hot, and polar waters freezing at the poles more extensively.
Lack of convection means more frequent and stronger storms like hurricanes.
If you thought the lack of a moon made Vulcan inhospitable, compound it with the low sodium factor and you’ve got a planet of even more severe extremes than before. The heat, and the decrease of plant diversity definitely explain why the vast majority of Vulcan is rocky desert, even being near the water poses more extreme dangers than it would on earth due to the increased frequency of hurricanes.
“Mr. Spock is much stronger than an ordinary human being.”
-Kirk, This Side of Paradise
I am almost 100% sure that Vulcan is either bigger or denser than Earth. Which would explain why Vulcans are so much stronger than Humans and other species that exist on similar gravity worlds.
Effects of a high-gravity planet or “Super-Earth” include:
Everything is shorter or has very strong foundations, plants, animals, structures, and people.
More “Armageddon” class asteroids would hit the planet (like the one that killed the dinosaurs and created the Gulf of Mexico)
Larger liquid mantle under the planet’s surface, higher pressure under the surface as well.
Weaker magnetic field due to lack of convection in the planet’s core (not to be confused with the mantle interacting with the planet’s crust). Which means a weaker atmosphere, lower magnetism in surface metals, and increased vulnerability to solar flares.
More volcanically and seismically active due the the increase in the mantle’s size and generated heat, more earthquakes, and more volcanic eruptions.
Would have to have a smaller sun but be closer in orbit to it than earth.
Extremely deep oceans, potentially with water under so much pressure at the bottom that it becomes solid like ice. Luckily Vulcan is not an ocean world, because the pressure would block the planet’s core from interacting with the atmosphere, which would prevent life as we know it from happening.
There is plenty of evidence for this on so many levels. We never see any plant life similar to trees on Vulcan. Nor animals significantly larger than Vulcans, the ones that are bigger are much more muscular. Vulcan’s sky is more red than blue because of the lack of oxygen molecules for the light from the sun to filter as blue. I actually headcanon that Spock is unusually tall for a Vulcan because of his human heritage (Leonard Nimoy was around 6ft tall) , and may have had heart and muscle problems in his teens and early adulthood while on Vulcan.
Perhaps Vulcans are the result of many more extinction level events than we are, contributing to their hardiness. Perhaps they are, evolutionarily, not too much older than we are, and had more incentive to develop extraterrestrial technology than we have, so that they could repel Armageddon Class meteors and defend their planet against Solar Flares? Space travel being born out of self-preservation rather than curiosity. Which would absolutely account for their attitudes in the beginning of Star Trek: Enterprise.
It could be that Vulcans still maintain a semi-nomadic lifestyle even today because their planet is so incredibly volatile. Unsentimental and utilitarian in anything less than the most sacred of architecture long before they adopted the teachings of Surak. Their own survival more valuable than any structure that would inevitably be damaged or destroyed by their planet’s harsh environment.
In summary, Vulcan is a Nightmare Planet because:
So, so many much natural disasters, like, so many, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, twisters, just, so many more than Earth.
Water is relegated to specific locations in the world rather than spread across it due to lack of flow and lower sea levels.
Extreme temperature changes, intense heat, intense cold, hard to breathe, stronger gravity.
Due to the planet’s hostility, there is a smaller diversity of life than we have here on earth, which means fewer and hardier food sources that, like Vulcans, are very difficult to kill.
So… How do they handle it? What features have they developed to adapt and thrive in such an inhospitable place?
First thing is first, lets talk about
BLOOD
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