STAR TREK: TOS “The Way To Eden” (1969)
STAR TREK: SNW “The Broken Circle” (2023)
I believe I may owe you a debt of gratitude, Captain. Although for precisely what, I do not know.
this very early trek fanzine has some fascinating stuff in it
holy hell did people love spock
SPOCK: Modeling Orbital Scenarios around Other Stars
In addition to being a rather well-known character on television, SPOCK also stands for something else, a software model its creators label Stability of Planetary Orbital Configurations Klassifier. SPOCK is handy computer code indeed, determining the long-term stability of planetary configurations at a pace some 100,000 times faster than any previous method. Thus machine learning continues to set a fast pace in assisting our research into exoplanets.
At the heart of the process is the need to figure out how planetary systems are organized. After all, after the initial carnage of early impacts, migration and possible ejection from a stellar system, a planet generally settles into an orbital configuration that will keep it stable for billions of years. SPOCK is all about quickly screening out those configurations that might lead to collisions, which means working out the motions of multiple interacting planets over vast timeframes. To say this is computationally demanding is to greatly understate the problem.
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