Seven spends a lot of time in the Astrometrics lab. Does astronomy interest you?

The Astrometrics Lab was always a challenge to work in, because you’re supposed to see this huge arcing view screen, with all of these elaborate graphics and things like that, which, of course, are not there, because we’re working in front of a green screen.

Because we did this well before the design with the graphics were going to be, [we would sit] down with the directors and the producers and the post production people and try to figure out… "Well, we think this is going to be a dot over here, and we think this is going to be a big swirl that’s going to be roughly over here." We never knew exactly what we were looking at, so it was always a treat to watch the episode and see what we were actually reacting to because it always looked really good.

From a reality standpoint, how can you not be fascinated by astronomy and space? It’s so vast. It’s so incomprehensibly huge. I think it’s a conceited point of view to think that we’re the only life out there, when there is that much of it. I mean, for example, Voyager takes place in the Delta quadrant, thousands, millions of light years from home, right? It would take us seventy-something years to get home, travelling at Warp Nine, or whatever we’re travelling at. And that’s still in our galaxy, that’s still in the Milky Way. We haven’t even got out of the Milky Way yet and it’s that big. So, how can we think that there’s no other life anywhere else?

There are so many solar systems and so many planets. I think there’s fifty thousand planets they found out there that have, potentially, Earth’s environment. The same distance from their sun and possibly the same atmosphere and things like that. So, I think it would be wonderful within our lifetime if we could explore deep space but, sadly, that’s not going to happen.