10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek (2009)

First things first. Many websites and wikis describe the star that destroyed Romulus as the “Hobus Supernova,” but that stems from a four-issue comic book tie-in titled "Countdown," and is neither in the shooting script nor the finished film. In short: Hobus is bogus.

All Spock Prime tells Kirk is that in the future “a star will explode, and threaten to destroy the galaxy.”

Yeah … about that…

Supernovae are a big deal — emphasis on B I G — but even the biggest supergiant stars only have so much mass and energy to throw around when they go kaboom, all of which becomes more diffuse the farther it gets from the source. Such an explosion could affect planets within a few hundred light years at most, many years or centuries later, since what a supernova flings out is limited by the speed of light. And, since our galaxy is estimated to be 100 thousand light-years across, no way, no how, does a single supernova threaten the entirety. Even if this event threatened the civilizations of the known galaxy, precision-minded Spock Prime would never characterize it as a threat to the galaxy: he’d calculate the number of endangered worlds to three decimal places. Hyperbole is illogical... and dumb.

Anyway, while Spock Prime used the "Red Matter" to successfully create a black hole to Hoover up the supernova, the reality is you can't put smoke back in a bottle. Even a black hole can't claw back the radiation released, which has zoomed off at light speed and ain't making a U-turn. No undo there.

The movie doesn't identify the star that went supernova as Romulus' sun (Star Trek Picard did, but that's another matter), but it seems likely given the visuals. If so, then the only way Spock could have saved the planet is to Red Matter the star before it could 'splode and cook Romulus with radiation. That would leave the planet with no sun and no heat, but time to rescue the population, assuming the Romulans have lots of power to stay warm, keep the lights on, and sufficient food in reserves or being delivered.

(Math fun! A fleet of a thousand ships, each one capable of moving ten thousand people per trip, and each round trip taking one week, would require 11 and half years to evacuate six billion people.)