Captain’s Log, Stardate 43125.8. We have entered a spectacular binary star system in the Kavis Alpha sector on a most critical mission of astrophysical research. Our eminent guest, Dr. Paul Stubbs, will attempt to study the decay of neutronium expelled at relativistic speeds from a massive stellar explosion which will occur here in a matter of hours.
– Captain Picard

In Star Trek, stardates are used as the absolute time on spaceships in the Star Trek Series. They usually are numbers with a single decimal point, and keep the date, having replaced the Gregorian calendar used in our personal lives. What is today’s stardate?

You could use an online Stardate calculator, but stardates are an inconsistant and chaotic place… as proven by the fact that every calculator gives you a different result. The exact mechanism of stardates differs widely between each Star Trek show, differs within a show, jumps wildly in a single week, but crawls over a given year, sometimes even goes backwards, and seems to have little relationship with time on Earth.

However, the stardate was not developed entirely arbitrarily… well, not at first.

Stardates from Star Trek: The Original Series

In The Original Series (TOS) — Captain Kirk’s Star Trek — stardates were arbitrary and used to deflect a connection to a definable year at which humans are supposed to be at Star Trek’s level of development. With the arbitrary wiggle-room in dates, the scifi series can be more real. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, states that:

In the beginning, I invented the term “star date” simply to keep from tying ourselves down to 2265 A.D., or should it be 2312 A.D.? I wanted us well into the future but without arguing approximately which century this or that would have been invented or superseded. When we began making episodes, we would use a star date such as 2317 one week, and then a week later when we made the next episode we would move the star date up to 2942, and so on.

However, the interesting airing procedure of Star Trek led to problems with the increasing stardate, which had to be explained by Roddenberry based on an in-universe answer:

Unfortunately, however, the episodes are not aired in the same order in which we filmed them. So we began to get complaints from the viewers, asking, “How come one week the star date is 2891, the next week it’s 2337, and then the week after it’s 3414?”

In answering these questions, I came up with the statement that “this time system adjusts for shifts in relative time which occur due to the vessel’s speed and space warp capability. [...] The star dates specified in the log entry must be computed against the speed of the vessel, the space warp, and its position within our galaxy, in order to give a meaningful reading.” Therefore star date would be one thing at one point in the galaxy and something else again at another point in the galaxy.

I’m not quite sure what I meant by that explanation, but a lot of people have indicated it makes sense. If so, I’ve been lucky again, and I’d just as soon forget the whole thing before I’m asked any further questions about it.

So, based on this, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get a TOS stardate to directly correspond to Earth’s location, speed, and time. TOS stardates differ wildly anyway — even though Roddenberry suggested increasing stardates, no writers knew how much to increase by, so the actual stardates on the show range from 1312.4 in the first episode to use a stardate, to 5928.5 in “Turnabout Intruder”, the last filmed episode.

Star Trek: The Next Generation of Stardates

In the next serial, Star Trek: The Next Generation, writers were told to use stardates in a far more precise fashion, and stardates – for the first time – had a mechanism of which one could potentially take a contemporary 21st century Earth date and transfer it to a Star Trek 24th century stardate.

The stardate is a five-digit number.
It starts with a “4″, indicating that the date takes place in the 24th century.
The second digit is the season number in which the episode takes place. “1″ for ST:TNG Season 1, etc.

Then at the third digit is where all hell breaks loose on stardates once again, and we lose all hope of figuring out what time it is.

Chris DeYoung, a writer, notes that:

The additional three digits will progress unevenly during the course of the season from 000 to 999. The digit preceding the decimal point counts days, and the digit after the decimal point counts one tenth of a day.

Since a Star Trek season takes place over one year, we technically have 1000 stardate units per year, which is a lot of “days”, given DeYoung’s explanation, we have a little over 2.7 units per Earth day. It’s also fairly unlikely that certain days have more stardate units than other days, as these are a futuristic Metric-system-loving people.

Voyager, and Startime Flowing Backward

It’s pretty clear that the first digit representing the 24th century was only a cute mechanism for determining where to start, but not a way to create a date. This is proven by dates in the 23rd century not starting with “3″, and dates in Star Trek: Voyager, which uses the same stardate system (the show was even aired concurrently with TNG) having five-digit stardates starting with “5″.

Assuming the 1000 stardate units to a year holds true, then a century would require a change of 100,000 stardate units, so it’s unlikely we can use the 24th century stardate to represent dates in other centuries.

Furthermore, incidents show startime to flow weirdly. The TNG episode “Dark Page” refers to events in the 2330s decade, and one of these events has a stardate 30620.1. A completely different event, the Khitomer Massacre takes place in the year 2346, btu the TNG episode “Sins of the Father” gives the stardate of that event to be 23859.7. We flow a decade into the future, but lose over 7000 stardate units.

Using Events to Get the Stardate

Only two episodes in Star Trek history narrow down a stardate to anything more precise than a year, and only one episode narrows down a stardate to a precise day. That episode is the Voyager episode “Homestead,” in which the crew celebrates the 315th anniversary of “First Contact Day”.

The movie “Star Trek: First Contact” shows humans making first contact with Vulcans on April 5, 2063. That makes the events of “Homestead” take place on April 5, 2378. The very day after that anniversery, Janeway gives a Captain’s Log of Stardate 54868.6 at the end of Voyager’s final season. We now know that April 6, 2378 is the stardate 54868.

From this correspondence, we can work to determine all the other dates. We don’t have any other direct data points to compare to, but we can at least check with the best we got.

Data’s Day

The episode “Data’s Day” takes place during the Hindu Festival of Lights, which is a real-life five-day celebration called Diwali. It starts on the New Moon ending the month of Asvina on the Hindu calendar, which typically is the date of the New Moon in India nearest to Halloween.

In 2009, Diwali was celebrated between October 17 and 22. In 2010, it will be celebrated between November 5 and 10. In 2011, October 21 through 26.

In the episode, the stardate 44390.1 was given in a Captain’s Log, said to take place during one of the days of the celebration. The stardate 44390.1 is 10,477.9 units before stardate 54868, which we found to be April 6, 2378. If the 1000 units per year is still true and consistent, the events of the Hindu Lights Festival fall 10.4779 years before the events of Voyager’s First Contact celebration. 10.4779 years is 10 years, 174 days, so that places the Lights Festival events on October 17, 2367.

October 17 is the exact date the festival was celebrated on in 2009, so I’d say we have a hit.

Checking our Years

Now that we know our stardate calculation seems to get accurate days, let’s see if it gets accurate years. The Voyager episodes “Future’s End”, “Caretaker”, “Eye of the Needle”, and “The 37′s” all place the following stardates in the year 2371: Stardate 48315.6, Stardate 48579.4, and Stardate 48975.1.

The differences between these stardates and April 6, 2378 (Stardate 54868) are a difference of 6552.4 units for Stardate 48315.6, a difference of 6288.6 units for Stardate 48579.4, and a difference of 5892.9 units for Stardate 48975.1.

6552.4 units is 6 years, 202 days. That places the events of Stardate 48315.6 at September 18, 2371, which is in the correct year.
6288.6 units is 6 years, 105 days. That places the events of Stardate 48579.4 at December 23, 2371, which is in the correct year.
5892.9 units is 5 years, 326 days. That places the events of Stardate 48975.1 at May 16, 2372, which is at least five months off.

The only other year-to-stardate episode we have is The Next Generation episode “The Neutral Zone”, which gave the calendar year as 2364 and a corresponding Stardate of 41986.0.

41986.0 is 12,882 units before April 6, 2378 (Stardate 54868), which is a difference of 12 years, 322 days. This places the events of Stardate 41986.0 at May 22, 2365, which is also at least five months off.

Finding Year 0, And Then Today’s Stardate

Assuming April 6, 2378 is truly Stardate 54868, Stardate 00000 took place 54 years, 317 days before. This places Stardate 00000.0 on June 7, 2323. Any date before then would presumably use negative numbers, or use some sort of BY0 (Before Year 0) suffix.

Today (the day this article will be posted) is February 8, 2010. That’s a difference of 313 years, 3 months, 30 days, which is 313250 stardate units. Our experimental calculations show a deviation of about 5 months, which is an additional 417 stardate units.

Therefore, today’s Stardate is -312833 plus or minus 417.

Postscript and Bonus Material

If there are to be future parts of this article, they may outline how to find the Stardate using the system from The Original Series, in a similar fashion to this article.

However, if you want the easiest method of calculating Stardates, just use the method in J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek film — the stardate is the year, followed by a decimal point, followed by the amount of days that have passed in the year. Therefore the stated “Stardate 2258.42″ refers to the 42nd day of the year 2258. This is proven further by the fact that Future Spock mentions having traveled back in time from 129 years in the future, which he refers to as Stardate 2387.

In an interview with co-writer Bob Orci at TrekMovie.com, Orci reveals that the decimal points start from .1 and continue up to .365. Not very metric.

Today’s stardate usin the Orci-Abrams system is 2010.39.

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