One good idea for a thesis would be an explanation of how time moves and is kept track of in StarTrek. I find the stardates very confusing. Part of this can be chalked up to relativity. Time is passing at different rates for every ship within the Federation Starfleet. Yet, somehow, everyone within the Federation has to resynchronize to some common time or the ships would never know when to meet.
In the original series, stardates ran from 1512.2 to 5928.5.
By time "Star Trek: The Next Generation" starts, stardates are in the 41000+ range with the second digit indicating the season, which doesn't necessarily have to correspond to a year within the show. In fact, an Earth year must be somewhere around 800 to 1000 units per year.
I think they changed the length of a second, as well. It actually makes sense if humanity no longer is constrained to one planet. The idea of leap years becomes very inconvenient, so it becomes easier to extend the length of a second so a day is still 86400 seconds long, but each year is 365.25 days long.
Still, an exact explanation of how stardates work would make the entire series of Star Trek TV shows and movies easier to understand.
