Is someone not doing their math homework?

Space operas often use well known stars as settings. That has been done for many decades.

Bu there are some flaws in that practice. There are fewer than 10,000 stars whose apparent magnitudes as seen from Earth are bright enough to be visible to people with really good eyesight from places with really good views of the night sky.

So there are less than 10,000 stars that have been given one or more proper names, such as Keid, by various earth cultures, or Bayer designations like Omicron 2 Eridani (which happens to be Keid), or Flamsteed designations like 40 Eridani (which happens to be Keid and Omicron 2 Eridani), the probable star of Vulcan in Star Trek.

And there are thousands and millions of other stars which have been given catalog numbers like Wolf 359 or Kruger 60 or Ross 154 or Lalande 21185 or BD + 36 degree 2147 or 2 MASS J154043.42-510135.7.

But there are hundreds of billions of star systems in our galaxy.

If there is a galactic civilization spanning the entire galaxy, the odds that any particular person will come from Antares or Rigel or Deneb or Canopus or Gamma Trianguli or any other star with a present day proper name on Earth are very small.

But maybe the named stars are the 10,000 stars closest to Earth and if a space traveling civilization is limited to nearby regions of space a high proportion of stars within it's volume might have familiar names like Spica or Vega or Altair or Betelguese. No.

In our area of the galaxy there are about 0.004 stars per cubic light year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_density

The volume of a sphere is four thirds times pi times the radius cubed.

Thus a sphere with a radius of 10 light years should have a volume of 4,188.79 cubic light years and 16.75516 stars.

And there are 10 star systems with 15 individual stars and brown dwarfs within 10 light years of Earth. Some of those are well known in science fiction because they are among the closest to the Sun, but only two, Alpha Centauri, and Sirius, would be well known if they weren't measured to be so close to Earth.

A sphere with a radius of 100 light years has a volume of 4,188,790 cubic light years and about 16,755.16 stars.

The Wikipedia list of the brightest stars at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars

Lists dozens of the stars that appear the brightest as seen from Earth, the stars whose names are most familiar. It lists 31 within one hundred light years of Earth. Or about 0.0018501 of the total.

A sphere with a radius of 200 light years should have about 134,041.28 stars. The list has 48 stars in that volume, or about 0.000358 of the total.

A sphere with a radius of 400 light years should have about 1,072,330.2 stars. The list has 63 stars in that volume, or about 0.000058 7 of the total.

A sphere with a radius of 1,000 light years has a volume of 1,188.790 cubic light years and about 16,755,160 stars. The list has 87 stars in that volume, or about 0.0000051 of the total.

Since there are 93 stars on that list and almost 10,000 stars visible to the naked eye on Earth that might have names, we might deduce that named stars could be a hundred times as common as stars on the list of brightest stars. So they might be as much as 0.18501 of the stars within 100 light years of Earth instead of 0.0018501, for example. But still not a majority.

The list of Stars and Planetary Systems in Fiction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_planetary_systems_in_fiction

lists 150 real star systems from science fiction stories, though no doubt more could be added to the list. But this list no doubt includes almost all the famous stars often mentioned in space operas, which are clearly a tiny minority among the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy.

Scientists used to accept the idea that the Earth was only a few thousand years old according to the Bible. In the 18th century geologists found evidence that geologic formations were produced over millions of years. By the mid 19th century some geologists believed that the Earth was a million million (1,000,000,000,000) years old.

The Earth is now believed to be about 4,500,000,000 years old.

Astronomers calculated that the Sun could burn chemically for only a few thousand years. Later Astronomers calculated that the sun could shine for only a few million years through gravitational contraction. But geologists dared to claim Earth was impossibly hundreds of millions of years old, several times the possible life span of the Sun. Nobody in those days imagined that super powerful aliens might have taken Earth from its original star when it was dying and moved it to the Sun, so it was a scientific paradox for decades.

And so I have read that there was actually physical violence between an astronomer and a geologist at a scientific meeting because of that paradox.

In the late 1930s physicists began to understand the nuclear fusion that powers stars. As more and more research was done and more and more advanced computers became available for scientific calculations, astrophysicists began to calculate and predict the life cycles of stars.

And thus they began to understand that most famous and well known stars are not suitable for having habitable planets and/or intelligent native life. Many of them are O, B, and A class stars that evolve too rapidly and remain on the main sequence for too short a time to have habitable planets or native intelligent life. Many others are red giant class K or M stars that have ended their main sequence periods and are in a temporary (just a few hundred million years) swollen up stage before becoming white dwarfs.

And some science fiction writers began to catch on. Robert A. Heinlein in his juvenile novels Starman Jones (1953) and Time For the Stars (1956) mentioned that main sequence stars of class G were the most suitable for having habitable planets.

Stephen H. Dole wrote Habitable Planets for Man (1964, 2007) for the Rand Corporation to estimate how common habitable planets might be. And one of his main points was that habitable planets would orbit main sequence class G stars (with a few class F and class K stars) in most cases.

And I can't help thinking it is a shame that nobody thought of buying copies and sending them to the offices of Star Trek and Babylon Five and to the headquarters of the Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of America.

I remember a short story in Analog magazine set on an Earth colony planet. Strange things happened when someone played an alien instrument called the "Demon Flute" because it was found in alien ruins on a planet of Algol, the Demon Star. Four habitable planets are named in the story, including Earth, the colony planet setting, the planet of Algol, and a colony planet orbiting Vega. Thus of the four stars, the Sun is the right type to have a habitable planet, Vega and Algol are not, and the fourth is unknown.

So most of the famous stars mentioned in space operas are not suitable for having habitable planets or native intelligent lifeforms.

In The Star King (1964) the first of the Demon Princes novels by Jack Vance, the Rigel Concourse is a planetary system of 26 habitable planets orbiting Rigel. The vengeance seeking protagonist Kirth Gersen makes his headquarters there in the first novels before moving to planets in the Vega system in later novels.

I suspect that Vance learned that Rigel would be too short lived to develop habitable planets naturally, so he moved the protagonist's headquarters to the Vega system, since Vega is a much longer lived star than Rigel. Though he only reduced the problem, not eliminated it, since Vega also would not last long enough to have habitable planets.

The Wikipedia article on the Demon Princes series says:

The Rigel Concourse: a system of 26 planets orbiting Rigel, which were moved into the system in antiquity by a vanished alien race.

Captain's log, stardate 5121.5, orbiting the second planet in the Minarian star system. This star has long given evidence of entering a nova phase, and six months ago, a research station was established to make close-up studies of the star as its end approaches. Minara is now entering a critical period, and the Enterprise has been ordered to evacuate the station before the planet becomes uninhabitable. Yet our attempts to contact the station's personnel have been, so far, unsuccessful.

KIRK: Who are you? Why did you bring us here?
LAL: We are Vians. Do not interfere.

SPOCK: What purpose can be served by the death of our friend, except to bring you pleasure? Surely beings as advanced as yourselves know that your star system will soon be extinct. Your sun will nova.
THANN: We know.
SPOCK: Then you also know that the millions of inhabitants on its planets are doomed.
LAL: That is why we are here.
KIRK: This arena of death that you have devised for your pleasure. Will it prevent this catastrophe?
LAL: No, it will not, but it may save Gem's planet. Of all the planets of Minara, we have the power to transport the inhabitants of only one to safety.
THANN: If Gem's planet is the one that will be saved, we must make certain beyond any doubt whatsoever they are worthy of survival