Miri's homeworld was so known because it was the home of Miri, one of the Onlies, who resided there. This M-class planet was a spheroid-shaped body with a circumference of 24,874 miles, a mass of 6×1021, a mean density of 5.517, and an atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen.
Although located hundreds of light years 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 microbiological 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. The reason is unknown and could have been because the producers were unaware of Earth's appearance from space, they wanted to make the similarity to Earth visually unmistakable to the audience, or they 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 and cloud cover.
Miri (FGC-347601 III) was located in the Beta Quadrant. This Class M planet's official name was Earth. It was established as a protectorate of the Federation in 2266. The capital was New York City, and the dominant species were the humanoid Onlies. In 2378, 13.1 million Onlies lived on this planet. Scientists theorized that this world was a terraformed duplicate of Earth created by the Preservers. The adult population was killed by a viral experiment, circa 1966 AD. (Star Trek: Star Charts, pg. 54)
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 was the fourth planet orbiting the star 70 Ophiucus. He described it as a beautiful Earth-like planet having one large and two smaller continents connected by islands. Ophiucus IV (or Ophiucus 4 – Blish never named the planet) was 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. According to Blish, this was about five hundred 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 three hundred 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 failed to 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.
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. Johnson identified the pathogen of the disease that had destroyed the entire adult population as, in quotation of the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual, a filterable virus, order 2250-67A.
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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