Vulcans Are Hot, and Also Very Warm.
This not-so-little piece of nerdery was spawned very late last night, during a discussion of whether or not Vulcans would be colder than humans as it says in the (purely fanmade) Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual. I have always stood very firmly on the side of warmer Vulcans, and decided that it it couldn’t hurt to organize my ideas and put them into a single place for others to discuss, as well as a few visual aids because, really, learning is a lot more fun with pictures.
And moving on~
-
On a first glance, and without preconceived ideas, it does make sense that Vulcans would be “cold” due to their desert planet. After all, reptiles are cold-blooded, why wouldn’t Vulcans be the same?
We’ll start with that big point, because it’s clearly the best argument.
Let’s look at a Vulcan, shall we?
Yum.
Now it’s easy to spot both the similarities and the differences between Mr. Spock here and a human being, and there are certainly enough non visual differences mentioned in the original series to prove the fact that Vulcans are not just humans with pointy ears.
“Well this isn’t right at all!”
However, even with those differences, it’s a lot easier to compare Vulcans to humans than to reptiles. Even advanced reptiles, you know like:
Which brings us to another very important point. Earth’s deserts aren’t only inhabited by cold-blooded reptiles and cactuses.. Cacti. It’s also filled with little dudes like:
and
None of which are (obviously) forked-tongued little bastards that sneak into your pillow cases. And yet they manage to get by just fine. How do they do it? Evolution! These little dudes have evolved so that they can live in hot climates without scales and fangs (or freaky scorpion tales for that matter) without going extinct due to a poor choice in living space.
Who’s to say that Vulcans aren’t a similar case? I mean, why would they resemble humans so much and then be reptilian like in one sense? Furthermore, given the amount of attention put on how hot the planet is in multiple episodes, wouldn’t they have dropped a quick “which is why Vulcans are cooler than us” line to tip off the audience to that little fact?
Otherwise, it’s perfectly (wait for it) logical to assume that they’re like humans who have chosen to live in the desert and other hot places. Because those do exist, you know.
That huge chunk taken out of the way, there’s also that matter of what TOS hammered into our heads about a billion times.
Vulcan is really. Freakin’. Toasty. Scorching, one might say. It is in fact so hot that there’s a phrase about it. “Hot as Vulcan”.
If one takes that at face value, one might assume that means it’s hot, but when you take the obvious reference (hot as hell) you’d have to assume that it’s really hot. It’s hot as hell.
In the future, humans think Vulcan is so hot, they equate it to hell.
Why is this important? Well on top of just being plain ol’ hilarious, it’s important to drive this home before making a point. You see, even reptiles only have to be a certain amount of degrees cooler than their surroundings.
No one bleeding ice here, I see.
Which means that even if they were reptile-like in this sense, due to the sheer temperature of Vulcan alone, there’s no saying that Vulcans would be colder than humans.
Reptiles themselves aren’t that much cooler to the touch, are they? Now imagine reptiles from hell. Yeah, probably not that cold at all.
Basically, regardless of which direction you take the “colder” hypothesis in, it ends in favor of the “warmer” argument.
As for the sweating thing, well, kinda hard to see them sweating in temperatures below their homeplanet’s HOWEVER.
His brow is clearly starting to gather sweat.
On a very final note, I’d like to mention that the “medical journal”, so frequently referenced to during Vulcan Physiology debates, refers to Starfleet as Star Fleet.
