The Ups and Downs of Space

A galaxy-eye view of the cosmos

I was doomscrolling through Youtube a while back and came across a video wondering why spaceships in Star Trek and Star Wars always arrive in the proper upright orientation. If there’s no up or down in space, then shouldn’t these ships kind of lose their right-side-upness at some point in their travels? And yet, they always show up on the scene just as upright as everyone else.

While I know this is just a cinematic convention for the sake of congruent storytelling and the ‘rule of cool’, the fact is, ships actually would show up in a reliable orientation. What those of us who’ve never been to space fail to realize is that there’s no such thing as a random starfield. The endless background of pinpoint lights we see in every single space show is essentially a fiction. What we’d really see is the galaxy in all its glory all around us.

How do I know? (After all, I do identify as a never-spacer.) I know because of a brilliant space sim called Space Engine, developed by the jaw-droppingly dedicated Vladimir Romanyuk. This genius referred to industry-standard astronomical data and charts to place all our known celestial bodies where they actually belong in the sky. So the sim gives you an interactive, travel-able planetarium that’s properly plotted, positioned and populated according to our best current data.

Once you open the sim and get into the cosmos, you immediately realize there’s no escaping the view of the galaxy. You’re inside the thing, after all. You can’t get away from it. The nebulific embrace of gas clouds and uncountable stars enwraps you in its hug no matter where in the galaxy you go.

If we lived in the Star Trek era, we wouldn’t be able to travel far enough yet to even get a different view of the galactic core. It would look the same from every vantage point, and we would quickly identify reference points that would help us navigate. Not only that, but there’s no guessing about which way is up. Those of us from Earth’s northern hemisphere would always see the north-facing side of the galaxy as true north for our ships, and everyone from the southern hemisphere would see the south-facing side as theirs. No confusion. No randomness. All very clear and inescapable.

While wandering around Mr. Romanyuk’s sim I became familiar enough with my neighborhood view of the galactic core that I could often dead-reckon my way to the proximity of my favorite star systems without referring to the nav system. It’s that reliable.

In fact, it even got me wondering if our initial attempts at traveling to local star systems will leave us spectacularly bored simply because the view remains so much the same. No matter how close to c we might get, it’s not going to be fast enough to reveal new sides of the galaxy in the span of time it takes to sit in Ten-Forward and philosophically forget about our prune juice. There’d be almost no sense of movement at all, just that same overwhelming, unchanging view for years and even decades on end — possibly centuries. it might be enough to drive a person mad.

But space madness aside, there is most definitely a frame of reference for galactic travel, and there’d be no confusion about whether there’s an up or down. The galaxy itself makes damn sure of that.

Now, can we please talk about renaming the thing something besides ‘Milky Way’?

I mean, srsly.

–­Orr out