RTAC #9: The Star Will Aid in… · 11:22am Apr 8th, 2016
In an earlier post in this series, I have studied the canon regarding the features of Equestrian celestial mechanics, and concluded that Equestria has to be a ridiculously small, spherical planet in a geocentric system with an artificial, manually controlled sun and moon.
Now riddle me this: Why do ponies think of other planets at all?
Let’s do some more canon welding.
1. Notice how nopony asks Rainbow what she’s supposed to be, but Twilight’s Star Swirl is obscure.
There is very little doubt that life on other planets is a subject of pony fiction, if not pony reality. I cite the pegasus filly in Luna Eclipsed, who is wearing a spacesuit helmet for Nightmare Night as the earliest appearance. That appearance could, in theory, be reinterpreted as a racing helmet, but it gets even more blatant in Scare Master, where Rainbow Dash is wearing a very obvious spacesuit.1 The kite shaped like a rocket in The Gift of Maud Pie just continues a long standing trend, and there are probably lots of other references to space that I don’t remember offhand.
Secondary canon, likewise, follows the trend and makes it even more obvious, with a poster for “Star Trot II”, (Friendship is Magic #11) Discord playing Star Trek TNG with the CMC in Friends Forever #2 and other small incidents.
So where are all those other planets?
Twilight’s statement in Owl’s Well That Ends Well, “You know that really old big blue book on stars, moons, planets, the universe…?” would be rather inconclusive, but Spike supports it with “You can already name all the planets and stars, ’cause you’re super smart and astronomically awesome!” – which implies more than one planet is observable from Equestria’s Earth.
But there’s an interesting snag: Ponies can’t know that stars exist!
2. Journal of the Two Sisters, which says that at least once, all adult unicorns have suffered disability from controlling celestial objects.
If, as previously discussed, Equestria’s sun is a tiny ball of magic – and as far as I can tell, for ponies this isn’t just a theory, but empirical fact, which, for a time, an entire third of adult population was intimately acquainted with,2 – there is no reason to imagine stars are anything but pinholes in a celestial sphere, especially if the planet itself does not rotate, so the things don’t even move.
The biggest obstacle for ponies to have any knowledge of other stars is stellar parallax. In our solar system, this has been the primary tool for determining distances to nearby stars and getting a guess at more distant ones. The distances involved are so high, that parallax is only detectable using some fairly advanced equipment, which humans could not produce until XIX century, but if the pony Earth does not move, they don’t have parallax at all. The idea that other stars aren’t just pictures would be far more difficult to come by in the first place, and becoming the basis of well-developed popular fiction would be pretty much impossible.
There is basically only one way to reconcile this that I can think of, and this is by suggesting that ponies do observe stellar parallax, and possibly, even easier than we do, because pony Earth is orbiting an otherwise invisible, very distant object with luminosity so low, that it does not register as much of a star. This would permit them to detect stellar positions by accumulating star catalogs merely through observing the stars over a much longer orbital period of, say, 200 years, on a much higher orbit than our Earth, even if they could not observe the light reflected off other planets. Since they have their own source of light and heat, it becomes no problem to orbit as far up as they need for this to happen.
A particularly good candidate is a neutron star, most of which are non-luminous in visible range, but it would have to be one without significant gamma emissions, for obvious reasons. Another notable possibility is a white dwarf. The less luminous their actual star is, the more difficult other planets in the planetary system would be to detect.
Maybe that’s what “Celestial Era” mentioned in Testing Testing 1-2-3 actually means – a measurement of time based on the Earth’s orbital period?
Wow, if Equestria is orbiting a neutron star, perhaps millions of years ago this was the star that caused life to develop in Equestria, and when it began dying powerful ancient magic users created an artificial sun to replace it.
Alternatively: When Starswirl the Bearded visited other dimensions and raided all their stuff with Celestia, he brought back some books on science fiction that were released to the general public and inspired a love of the idea of life on other planets.
3869168
That's about the only alternative remaining, indeed. I wonder, what particular books would that be, though? To even understand most fiction of that kind, you usually have to already know at least some concepts, they rely on a wide body of knowledge that is explicitly part of their genre, accumulated over decades -- Star Wars never explains the word "galaxy," it doesn't need to do that, or mention why it could be far, far away, and neither did most of the 30s SF...
3869373 That's a good point. And even if the books did explain everything really clearly (like Starswirl also brought a bunch of astronomy books back) its hard to imagine the public getting super excited about this if they have zero starting familiarity with the concept.
Well, in Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto (A.D. 1516) Astolfo goes to the moon on a flaming chariot. Considering Equestrians have the concept of Celestial bodies (hehe) and that you can go there (or be exiled there), I think the conceptual step of other worlds we can't see from here is not too difficult to grasp.
It will probably declined in a bit of a different way and their astronomy will be mostly educated guessing, but that has never stopped popular fiction before.
3873737
The moon, sure. If you take into account the comics, which I do, getting to the moon is actually practical and can be accomplished in a number of ways, you don't even need a rocket to do it, two princesses and a rope are enough. :) That still offers you no reason to think stars are anything but a painting on the inside of a sphere.
The problem is imagining other celestial bodies even exist, unimaginably distant -- you need a micrometer to measure how far the closest ones are! -- and that conceptual step is much wider. And I suspect that in a geocentric planetary system with a tiny sun, other planets in the same system would be pretty much invisible at night...
It's also a pretty safe bet that Orlando Furioso being contemporary with Copernicus and his work on heliocentrism, (also first published in 1514) is not a coincidence, but a result of common causes, primarily, accumulation of observational evidence and rising importance of astronomy in navigation.
Hmm, you are probably right about the difference in conceptual frameworks here. Thinking again about it we (as in the human species) knew about other planets for quite a long time.
I never read the comics, so probably my knowledge of the canon is a bit more limited. I may retread on things that have been abundantly explained.
[Edited out this section: it was basically your Idea with the neutron star but on a longer time scale]
I assume that the sun is small and quite near the planet, considering they can move it really fast through the sky.
Maybe the stars are not quite so far away. What if all the suns are small magic-powered balls of fire orbiting planets? If all the suns are small then we can probably observe their relative movement quite easily. That could mean that the next celestial body is only a few dozen AUs away, and can be revealed by it eclipsing its sun. In that case the idea of other planets could even be an ancient one.
Obviously this hypothesis requires us to throw most of our physics out of the window, but it could be coherent with what we've seen in the show.
3873855
I'm building on what I worked out in a prior post, here, so it mostly depends on whether you accept the arguments therein or not. :) Whichever way you spin it, pony cosmology is quite crazy.
Your idea that the pony planet is not an isolated artifact, and is surrounded by similar geocentric oddities is very clever, though... I've never seen it done in fiction at all, even.
3873945
I may need to read the past posts then.
If the stars are all clustered together at a short distance then at least the Equestrian Space program can work with a pressurized tin can, a long rope and the cooperation of Princess Luna. You anchor the rope on the moon, let the capsule trail behind it and let go once you are on the right vector to the nearest planet. If it is far away you ask for small burst of speed from the princess. And now that I'm thinking about it I can see a story there.
I may need to do a bit of back-of-the envelope calculations...
3873966
Wait, do they expect there's a princess at the destination to catch the tin can too?... :) If they aren't sure, ponied space exploration will need to wait until they can catch a few cans thrown in return...
3873977
Well, if the Sun and the Moon don't move without princesses and they see the target Sun move then they can presume that there are other princesses too. And the power of friendship will do the rest.
If on the other hand they don't encounter those exact conditions, well, an Adventure is horrible things happening amidst discomfort to good ponies.
Unwarranted assumption. It is not known to move periodically w/r/t its "sun", but it can certainly otherwise be in motion…
Puppeteer migration, go!no, wait, we need Terra the Alicorn for that, probably.…let's be proper about this and let the Earth ponies move the Earth.
"That's one small stomp for a pony…"
Thunder echoes across the plains where the extended Apple family has gathered from magic-channeling hoofbeats.
"…and one giant leap for ponykind!"
:luna: "Sister, I feel as though there is a disturbance in the orbital force…"
Can one calculate parallax if the pony planet is just a rock hurtling through space unattached to a solar system?
4829818
Yes, with a minor caveat: It would be impossible to do repeat measurements to increase precision, since the planet is never in the same place twice.
But the primary difference between a rogue-planet-Pony-Earth and transneptunian-style-Pony-Earth is that repeatable events, like meteor showers, which are mentioned multiple times in primary and secondary canon, would be impossible, or would have to be interpreted as something entirely different.
hrmm, that's a bugger. Pony planetary system is wyrd
In A Rockhoof and a Hard Place, when they're on the boat with the Hippogriff Navy, Rockhoof attempts to navigate through thick fog using a constellation he was familiar with 1,000 years ago. However, they end up crashing into the rocks, and Twilight states that "stars move over time," explaining Rockhoof's blunder.
Make of that what you will.
3873984
... Have you read "The Maretian"? :-)
Or: what happens when there is nothing to catch you but the planet itself.
5725584
I've read it and it is a fantastic example of adventures being something wonderful to read about when they happen to somebody (somepony?) else.