Miri (planet)

Miri (planet)

Miri's homeworld was so known because it was the home of Miri, one of the Onlies, who resided there.

Although located hundreds of lightyears from Earth, this unnamed planet, the third in its system, was a prime example of Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development. The planet appeared to be an exact duplicate of the planet Earth in composition, but the Human population died of a bacteriological experiment gone awry during the 20th century.

The planet was discovered by the USS Enterprise in 2266, where it was discovered that most of the planet's population – all but a small group of children – had been annihilated by a virus that had been accidentally created by life prolongation experiments conducted on the planet some centuries before. (TOS: "Miri")

Background

The planet was never given a name in the episode.

In the original version of this episode, this planet lacked any cloud cover or weather patterns; apparently the producers were unaware of Earth's appearance from space or simply chose to spare the expense of detailing an ordinary topographic globe for filming. In the 2006 remastered version of "Miri," several new shots of the planet were incorporated into the episode, this time featuring more realistic atmospheric conditions.

The reference work The Worlds of the Federation by Shane Johnson confirms the indigenous name of the planet as Earth, but the world was subsequently called Onlies by the Federation. The star it orbits had the designation UFC 347601. Not only the planet, but also the entire solar system was an exact duplicate of the Sol system. After its discovery, the Federation began to colonize the planet. Scientists explained the planets existence by the theory that at some point in the distant past the Sol system moved through a massive tear in the space-time continuum, resulting in replication in the subatomic level. Theologians of the "Judeo-Christian" faiths considered it to be a simultaneous creation by God.

According to Star Trek: Star Charts, this other Earth was commonly referred to as Miri or FGC-347601 III, and was located in the Beta Quadrant. The planet became a Federation protectorate after its discovery. New York was its capital city. The planet only had a population of 13.1 million. It was believed to be a terraformed duplicate created by the Preservers.

Apocrypha

In his first volume of Star Trek episode adaptations, James Blish ignored the "duplicate Earth" premise of the television episode, and instead wrote that Miri's planet is the fourth planet orbiting the star 70 Ophiucus, and is a beautiful Earth-like planet having one large and two smaller continents connected by islands. Ophiucus IV (or Ophiucus 4 – Blish never names the planet) is located between twelve to fifteen light years from Earth and had been the first planet outside Earth’s solar system to be colonized, in this case by refugees from the so-called "Cold Peace" in the early 2100s, which according to Blish was about 500 years before the events in "Miri." These colonists were isolationists who violently repelled the first attempt to contact them by a later expedition from Earth, and so no further contact was attempted. As it turned out, the Ophiucus system was in a "backwater" part of the galaxy bypassed in subsequent years of Earth-based space exploration, and so the belligerent colony was easily ignored and almost forgotten. Around 300 years before the events shown in "Miri", scientists on Ophiucus IV developed the experimental life-prolongation project that resulted in the deaths of every adult on the planet. Despite their close proximity, the distress signal sent by the colony didn’t reach Earth because Ophiucus IV stood between Earth and the center of the Milky Way, whose radiation created interstellar static that drowned out the SOS signal the colony had directed towards Earth.

According to the novel The Cry of the Onlies, this planet was called Juram V. The William Shatner novel Preserver featured a return to this planet – referred to in the novel as Site 2713, which was revealed to have been duplicated from Earth on a subatomic level by the Preservers.

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