"It's Ensign Boimler. But people here aren't in Starfleet and back home people sometimes drop the rank when socializing anyway, especially if they're the same rank."
They haven't earned the full friend "Boims" nickname yet but all his friendly acquaintances that are other ensigns call him by last name. Might as well make it so everyone else feels comfortable with that at the start.
Also, command track gets training on dealing with civilians because sometimes conflict brings you into contact: you don't earn trust and respect by getting snitty with civilians about your rank and title. It's better to relate to them as just a person.
He doesn't act surprised when Dan says they haven't been to space where he's from. That could be from any number of things: year he's from, alternate timeline where space travel didn't happen, alternate timeline where the government did it in secret, etc.
The corner of his mouth does quirk up a little at the mention of doing things in analog, even though he doesn't look up from the circles he's drawing.
"I definitely have a feeling I might need help with something if it gets real analog so I may take you up on it."
The only thing he really knows how to do in a somewhat past-times traditional way is viticulture and God help him if the multiverse needs him to do farmboy vineyard shit to save the day.
Time for some science.
"Okay, so I used a lot of toy balls because a lot of the shapes of different cosmic phenomenon are spheres or oblate spheroids - slightly oblong spheres. The sizes aren't 100% accurate because I'd have to find a lot of hugely differently sized things. So just imagine they're stand-ins."
Where does he even start?
Oh yeah, the beginning of time.
"So billions of years ago the universe formed in an explosion of energy, heat, and matter. It was called the Big Bang, it was the start of time and space, blah blah blah. Before you ask, we have no idea what caused it and we have no idea if anything came before." A shrug of one shoulder. "It's one of the great mysteries of the universe. There was nothing and then, suddenly, everything."
That part isn't the most explainable even in his time, even if they know far more about the formation of the universe shortly after the Big Bang.
"So around the beginning, everything was this big molten soup of energy and superheated gasses and molten matter. And then it started to condense in a lot of places. Just by coincidence some of it was thicker in some places and thinner in others. But the thing with mass is when an object is big enough - way bigger than we are - it tugs on the invisible fabric of reality - spacetime - and that's what creates gravity. That's why when you jump, you come back down. Earth is so big it gives off a strong field of gravity that holds things close to it. Like...magnetism?"
He probably knows about magnets, right?
"It's not the same type of field, but it's a similar thing of an object giving off an invisible force."
He waves the marker around in a twirly gesture.
"The clumps of mass started to become big enough to give off gravity and that pulled in even more molten rock and it made all that matter tighten together into spheres, like if you squeezed a bunch of loose clay together in your hands. So the solar system is the local cluster of spheres that formed at the beginning of time, Earth and the other objects in the same system, the planets and the moons."
He points to the basketball at the center of everything.
"The Sun is at the center of it all. That's our local star. Everything else, the Earth, the other planets, fields of asteroids, all of it, rotates in circles around the Sun."
Well, not circles given the sun is moving too but that's definitely not a lesson 1 kind of thing.
no subject
They haven't earned the full friend "Boims" nickname yet but all his friendly acquaintances that are other ensigns call him by last name. Might as well make it so everyone else feels comfortable with that at the start.
Also, command track gets training on dealing with civilians because sometimes conflict brings you into contact: you don't earn trust and respect by getting snitty with civilians about your rank and title. It's better to relate to them as just a person.
He doesn't act surprised when Dan says they haven't been to space where he's from. That could be from any number of things: year he's from, alternate timeline where space travel didn't happen, alternate timeline where the government did it in secret, etc.
The corner of his mouth does quirk up a little at the mention of doing things in analog, even though he doesn't look up from the circles he's drawing.
"I definitely have a feeling I might need help with something if it gets real analog so I may take you up on it."
The only thing he really knows how to do in a somewhat past-times traditional way is viticulture and God help him if the multiverse needs him to do farmboy vineyard shit to save the day.
Time for some science.
"Okay, so I used a lot of toy balls because a lot of the shapes of different cosmic phenomenon are spheres or oblate spheroids - slightly oblong spheres. The sizes aren't 100% accurate because I'd have to find a lot of hugely differently sized things. So just imagine they're stand-ins."
Where does he even start?
Oh yeah, the beginning of time.
"So billions of years ago the universe formed in an explosion of energy, heat, and matter. It was called the Big Bang, it was the start of time and space, blah blah blah. Before you ask, we have no idea what caused it and we have no idea if anything came before." A shrug of one shoulder. "It's one of the great mysteries of the universe. There was nothing and then, suddenly, everything."
That part isn't the most explainable even in his time, even if they know far more about the formation of the universe shortly after the Big Bang.
"So around the beginning, everything was this big molten soup of energy and superheated gasses and molten matter. And then it started to condense in a lot of places. Just by coincidence some of it was thicker in some places and thinner in others. But the thing with mass is when an object is big enough - way bigger than we are - it tugs on the invisible fabric of reality - spacetime - and that's what creates gravity. That's why when you jump, you come back down. Earth is so big it gives off a strong field of gravity that holds things close to it. Like...magnetism?"
He probably knows about magnets, right?
"It's not the same type of field, but it's a similar thing of an object giving off an invisible force."
He waves the marker around in a twirly gesture.
"The clumps of mass started to become big enough to give off gravity and that pulled in even more molten rock and it made all that matter tighten together into spheres, like if you squeezed a bunch of loose clay together in your hands. So the solar system is the local cluster of spheres that formed at the beginning of time, Earth and the other objects in the same system, the planets and the moons."
He points to the basketball at the center of everything.
"The Sun is at the center of it all. That's our local star. Everything else, the Earth, the other planets, fields of asteroids, all of it, rotates in circles around the Sun."
Well, not circles given the sun is moving too but that's definitely not a lesson 1 kind of thing.