Vulcans: Logic, Biology and the First Contact of 2063 Explained

Vulcan has a real address, which is unusual for a planet invented for a television budget. Spock first appeared in "The Man Trap," the first Star Trek episode broadcast, on September 8, 1966, and his home world was a hot, red, high-gravity desert planet of thin air and old cities that the original series showed twice; its star was fixed later, first by a 1980 star atlas and then by Gene Roddenberry himself, who wrote to Sky & Telescope in 1991, with the astronomers Sallie Baliunas, Robert Donahue and George Nassiopoulos, to say that 40 Eridani A was the star he had in mind. It is an orange dwarf 16.3 light-years away, older than the Sun and stable, with a white dwarf and a red dwarf as distant companions, and a planet in its habitable zone would receive a light not far from Vulcan's. Star Trek: Enterprise confirmed the location on screen in 2004.

The planet's history is a story about temper. The series establishes that Vulcans were once violent to the point of near-extinction, warring clans with a passion the writers describe as more intense than any human's, and that a philosopher named Surak, about two thousand years before the series, taught the discipline of logic and the mastery of emotion as the only way the species could survive itself; the reforms are called the Time of Awakening, and the Vulcans who refused them and left became the Romulans. Every Vulcan on screen is the product of that choice, and the tension the character of Spock was built on, a half-human trying to be more Vulcan than the Vulcans, is the tension of the whole species.

Vulcans are humans built for a harder planet. They are stronger, by the series' rule about three times as strong, with a heart placed low in the torso where a human liver would be, an inner eyelid against the desert glare, pointed ears, upswept brows and copper-based green blood; they live about 200 years and sleep less than humans, and they cannot easily lie, not for want of ability but because the discipline forbids it. Their telepathy is touch-based: the mind meld, first shown in "Dagger of the Mind" (1966), joins two minds through the fingertips on the face, and the nerve pinch, which Leonard Nimoy invented on set in place of a punch he thought Spock would not throw, is the same touch used as a weapon.

Pon farr is the species' concession that the discipline has a cost. Every seven years an adult Vulcan enters a mating drive that logic cannot govern, and must mate, fight or die; "Amok Time" (1967), the episode that introduced it, sends Spock home to Vulcan to be married and ends with him fighting Kirk in a ritual duel. The katra, the Vulcan soul, can be transferred at death to another mind for safekeeping, which is how Star Trek III (1984) brought Spock back. The salute, fingers parted between the middle and ring, was Nimoy's, borrowed from the blessing gesture of the kohanim he had seen as a child in a Boston synagogue.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) gave the franchise its founding date. Zefram Cochrane, a drunk engineer living in a Montana missile silo in the ruins of a Third World War, launches a converted nuclear missile with a warp drive on April 5, 2063; a Vulcan survey ship passing the solar system detects the warp signature, turns, and lands that night in the woods beside the silo, where a hooded Vulcan steps out and raises the salute. The Vulcans had known about Earth and left it alone; the rule they follow, and later teach to Starfleet as the Prime Directive, is that a species is ready for contact when it has built a warp drive and not before.

The years after contact are the subject of Enterprise (2001–2005), which shows the Vulcans as cautious, paternal and often maddening guardians who hold humanity back from deep space for ninety years, and shows humans as the reckless younger species who leave anyway. The relationship is the franchise's picture of first contact done right: a species that watched, waited for a sign of readiness, and then came in peace with something to teach, and a species that took the gift and complained about the terms.

The Vulcans are what the contactees said they met. The Nordic aliens of the 1950s accounts, tall, calm, human-looking beings from a more advanced world who arrived with a warning about atomic weapons and an offer of guidance, are the Vulcans of First Contact to the detail, down to the landing in a quiet place before a single witness; George Adamski's Orthon, met in the desert in 1952, even declined to speak and communicated by gesture. Roddenberry, writing in the 1960s, was drawing on the same well the contactees drew on, the benevolent visitor of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the Vulcans are that visitor given a planet, a philosophy and a temper it had to overcome.

The warp-signature rule is the franchise's answer to a real question. Why, if advanced species exist, have they not contacted us? The SETI version of the answer is that they may be waiting for a signal we have not yet sent; the CE-5 protocols propose that the signal is meditation; Star Trek proposes that it is a working engine. All three assume a watching, patient, essentially kind neighbour, which is the Vulcan, and the Klingons exist in the same franchise to remind the audience what the other kind of neighbour would be.