Hi again! I feel like it was such good luck that I found this podcast a few days ago, and now, a new episode’s already out. 😀

While I enjoyed listening to the entirety of the podcast, the part that stuck out to me, strangely enough, was the first section about Spock’s temperature and Vulcan as a desert planet.

An idea thankfully less prominent now, but by no means disappeared, is that groups of people from hotter climates tend to be more lazy and more violent. It’s no accident that those groups of people are on the whole classified as non-white. This “climate theory” has been used historically as a justification underlying everything from enslavement to genocide to imperial conquest going back centuries, and has also been used to explain political instability and corruption in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia today. Just a simple google search will show you that people still push forward the idea that hotter temperatures foster violence in individuals and societies.

To preface this, I think this kind of climate theory is pretty bogus.

You both made me realize how interesting it is that Star Trek made Vulcans, the most well known aliens in the show and a stand in, in many ways, for racial diversity, from a desert planet. After all, Vulcans are portrayed as highly rational and intelligent, advancing and unifying their planet far more quickly than Humans. We see this especially in Enterprise, but there are hints of it in TOS.

On the surface, Vulcan being a desert planet looks like a subversion of the “climate theory”. After all, the hot temperatures of their planet did not stop them from achieving a unified society and exploring the universe.

However, we know Vulcans are at their core ultra-violent and unable to control their emotions without daily meditation and a lifetime of education and training.

If the choice of a desert planet was intentional, and given the academic and political climate of the 60’s, I lean toward it being so, I’m not sure the writers saw the implications of their choice to the fullest extent.

It links the Vulcan race to hot temperatures, and then to their internal struggle for control. Consider that only through fighting daily against their natural, intensely emotional inclinations have Vulcans been able to achieve so much in universe. In that way, it actually serves to reinforce the climate theory instead of undermine it.

You guys also mentioned Romulans as “hot-blooded”. In this way, Vulcans represent the success story, while Romulans a failure. Romulans chose to embrace their emotional nature (I’m pretty sure they’re implied to have evolved on the same planet as Vulcans) and are shown to be an enemy to the Federation’s utopia.

Or, you know, the writers did it cause a volcano-y desert landscape is just flat out interesting to imagine, so maybe I’m thinking a little too much about this. And its not as though TOS is exactly subtle with their metaphors. Still, intentional or not, I think it means something that we still think a desert planet is a strange homeworld for Vulcans. Sorry for the rambling comment, you both just got me thinking.

Thanks again for an awesome podcast. I can’t wait for more!