[Ghostavo]

There still remains a problem with all that... atmosphere?

They made the Hubble for a reason...

And how are they going to analise their blood... they can't see what color is their blood from afar!

[Tiara]

Originally posted by Ghostavo
There still remains a problem with all that... atmosphere?

Wtf is your point with this

They made the Hubble for a reason...

Scanners employing subspace >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Hubble

And how are they going to analise their blood... they can't see what color is their blood from afar!

Ok, one more time:

They AREN'T analyzing their blood. They are analyzing the METALS in their blood.

[Tiara]

Ow, and it's called science FICTION for a reason But it's mostly explainable using common sense.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Tiara

Why do people make such a big deal out of this? It's pretty simple. Each individual/species has a heat signature, unique compound in their blood or other distinguishable features. Even today we have simple scanners that can detect individuals from a great distance. A few hundred years from now this wouldn't be special AT ALL.

Cause some of us understand science

Sure you can design sensors that can find a heat source from hundreds of meters away but that is a case of trying to pick up one heat source when the surrounding area is cold. They won't work in a crowd of people for the simple reason that the heat from everyone else will swamp out the heat of the person you're looking for.

The human body puts out IR and very weak EM effects from the electrical impulses the nerves use. That's it. The idea that a sensor on board a ship in orbit around a planet could pick those up is ludicrous.


Lets take a look at what these sensors would have to be able to do.

Passive Sensors

Right these are the ones that will detect the signals given off by the person on the ground. What would these sensors have to be able to do?

1. The sensor must recieve all the IR signals from planet. I think we can rule out the electrical signals from the human's body. While a very sensitive detector might pick them up in close proximity there's no amount of refinement you can do to pick up such a weak EM field  from orbit. So we're talking about IR only.

2. The sensor must somehow match this IR signal to one on record. The Sensor must be able to compensate for any effects caused by the subject's status at the time. The sensor must somehow be able to compensate for variations in heat due to the subject being in a cold or hot enviroment, due to him exercising or standing still/sleeping and due to him being injured or even in a coma.

3. It's no good simply detecting the signal. The sensor must be able to pinpoint the source of the signal even when in orbit around a planet. That means that once the signal is detected the sensor must be able to work out the exact angle at which the IR signal entered the detector. There can be no margin of error on this as a very tiny variation on this will mean that you miss the Captain and end up beaming up something kilometers away from his loacation.

4. The sensor must somehow overcome the fact that it's about to be flooded with an almost infinitely large amount of data. Think that the transporters have a hard job trying to deal with all the data required to stick someone back together? This is harder. There is a lot more data to be sifted through here because unlike the transported we're doing a search not just reading back from a pattern buffer.

Okay. How feisable is all that? I'm a chemist not a physicist but to me it's looking pretty unlikely.

 How on Earth are you going to identify an IR pattern from all the other patterns? IR is simply photons af a certain wavelegth. They don't carry information telling you where they came from. So how are you going to be able to tell which signals came from where? We're also ignoring the problems caused by interferance and absorbtion of the IR signal. Diffferent atmospheres and surroundings result in different values for all of these. The captain in a cave is going to put out less IR than the captain on top of a mountain due to the distance and material the IR is going to have to travel through to get to the ship.
 There is no way that you're going to be able to tell that the IR signal from any location belongs to any particular race let alone scan a planet looking for someone belonging to that race.


Active Sensors

Now we're on more fantastical grounds. Its harder to tell what we'll be able to detect using active sensors in the future but we can still take a guess.

1. Any active sensor has to send a signal that blankets the entire planet and picks up the reflections.

2. The form of radiation used must be completely harmless or else the Enterprise will find iteself attacked all over the place for using it.

3. The form of radiation must return a different signal depending on what it hits.

4. The sensor must be able to deal with the huge amount of data it's going to get back from pinging every single molecule on the planet below them.  (I suspect this is actually even more data than the IR sensor had to deal with).

Quite frankly this is looking just as silly as monitoring IR.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Tiara
Ok, one more time:

They AREN'T analyzing their blood. They are analyzing the METALS in their blood.

Can't be done.

I can name several analytical techniques you could use to identify an unknown metal. They all require a sample of the mixture containing the metal.

Admittedly most of my analytical training consisted of work on organic molecules rather than inorganic metals but even if there is a method of detecting metals that isn't invasive that I'm missing it would require stimulating the metal with some form of radiation and listening to the echos.

The problem is that every single atom of the metal on the planet would respond in the same way. So how do you tell that someone was human or mearly a vulcan standing with an iron containing mineral behind him?

Tiara you simply aren't grasping the level of difficulty involved in this.

[an0n]

You're all/both wrong.

It's stupid to assume they could do it as easily as they do, but they could still do it.

So STFU or I'm gonna get some stamps, boxes and lumps of tricycloacetone peroxide putty and blow you both into itty-bitty pieces.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by an0n
It's stupid to assume they could do it as easily as they do, but they could still do it.

Either back up that assertion or I'll assume you're talking out of your arse about a subject you couldn't hope to understand.

[an0n]

You can assume whatever the **** you please. You're still wrong and I don't need to justify my assertions to you.

[karajorma]

No I'm not. You're wrong and haven't got the balls to risk me proving it.

[an0n]

You realise there's an entire field of science that completely blows your protestations outta the water, right?

Spectrometry (methinks, you know what I mean anyway).

And they're already working on **** to filter out atmospheric noise from images.

[Tiara]

Kara, before you sprout your so called 'knowledge' around, do some research.

I didn't say they did it like that I just gave a few options on how they COULD be doing it.

[Flipside]

Well, I don't know much about science as such, but if NASA can identify new molecules in Nebulae in the centre of the galaxy now, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that not only is it technologically possible to identify and locate individuals through some kind of radiative 'signiature', such as blood metal charge etc, but that Governments are pouring every penny they can spare into reseraching it

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Flipside
Well, I don't know much about science as such, but if NASA can identify new molecules in Nebulae in the centre of the galaxy now, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that not only is it technologically possible to identify and locate individuals through some kind of radiative 'signiature', such as blood metal charge etc, but that Governments are pouring every penny they can spare into reseraching it

That's done by spectroscopy. The atoms and molecules in those nebulae absorb different wavelegths of light. By seeing which particular bands are missing it's easy to tell what compounds are present in the nebula.

Spectroscopy works because

1. Nebulae are pretty simple consisting of mostly simple gases.

2. The light from nebula is relatively strong (so nice strong bands can be observed).

3. The astronomer focuses his equipment on just the nebula.

Believe me I thought of spectroscopy when I was saying why Star Trek scanners wouldn't work. It and related techniques wouldn't be able to cope with a complicated mixture of different elements. Whenever we had to do some form of spectroscopy in the lab we had to make sure our compounds were pure because a mixture would simply result in a completely black spectrum as all the light would be absorbed by all the different chemicals present.

The biggest problem I have with sensors is not detecting the signal from light years away. It's seperating the signal from every other signal that is being generated near it.

An attempt at spectroscopy on Earth would pick up the chemicals that make up Earth because they'd simply swamp out any other chemical.

Originally posted by Tiara
Kara, before you sprout your so called 'knowledge' around, do some research.

I did a degree in analytical chemistry. I've written essays on detection methods and their flaws. How much more research do you need before you're happy?

[Tiara]

Originally posted by karajorma
I did a degree in analytical chemistry. I've written essays on detection methods and their flaws. How much more research do you need before you're happy?

You are making one fatal mistake. You assume that only modern science applies to these scanners.

You totally forget about subspace scanning. You totally forget about the centennia of advancement these scanners have been through. You are forgetting that also alien technology has been included.

Take all these things into account (or even only that there have been about 300-400 years of advancement) and it really isn't that hard to see scanners that can pick up individual biosigns.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Tiara

You are making one fatal mistake. You assume that only modern science applies to these scanners.

You totally forget about subspace scanning. You totally forget about the centennia of advancement these scanners have been through. You are forgetting that also alien technology has been included.

Take all these things into account (or even only that there have been about 300-400 years of advancement) and it really isn't that hard to see scanners that can pick up individual biosigns.

I'm not forgetting about any of those things at all. If anyone is forgetting them it's you since you originally claimed they did it through heat sources and analysing the blood.

Subspace scanning isn't magic you know. Reread everything I said about active sensors it's almost all equally applicable to subspace scanning.

You must have some way of picking out an individual out of all of the other signals a subspace scan would produce.  Doing that would require more computing power than the transporters ever use but I don't remember ever hearing that sensors do. You're going to get a signal back from every single atom in the entire planet you're scanning. That's just too much data.

[redsniper]

I think this whole argument is silly.

[karajorma]

No. It's vitally important and must be preserved for all time

[ionia23]

Oh dear god tell me this isn't happening.

I remember when I started working at Intuit, I went outside for a cigarette and listened to two overweight trek-geeks nearly come to blows over an argument of "Who Would Win In A Fight - The Empire or the Federation".

The answer of course is......

[Tiara]

I'm a Trekkie but the Empire would win with it's thousands of SDs and the spunk soaked ICS.

I'm not forgetting about any of those things at all. If anyone is forgetting them it's you since you originally claimed they did it through heat sources and analysing the blood.

Subspace scanning isn't magic you know. Reread everything I said about active sensors it's almost all equally applicable to subspace scanning.

You must have some way of picking out an individual out of all of the other signals a subspace scan would produce. Doing that would require more computing power than the transporters ever use but I don't remember ever hearing that sensors do. You're going to get a signal back from every single atom in the entire planet you're scanning. That's just too much data.

First of all, those were just a FEW example (note the 'etc etc' part).

And now you claim to know everything about subspace. Subspace is a totally different layer of space. Normal physics do not apply. We know exactly **** about subspace besides the fact that its used for precise and long distance scanning, communication and transport. Don't go and claim to know about subspace and saying its almost the same as active scanning because you don't know.

Too much data? Eh, must I remind you that the computer is capable of scanning, analyzing, etc etc of entire solar systems and telling what particle goes where. What atam goes where, etc etc?

Again, it;s science fiction. But in Trek obviously it IS most definately possible.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Tiara
And now you claim to know everything about subspace. Subspace is a totally different layer of space. Normal physics do not apply. We know exactly **** about subspace besides the fact that its used for precise and long distance scanning, communication and transport. Don't go and claim to know about subspace and saying its almost the same as active scanning because you don't know.

Too much data? Eh, must I remind you that the computer is capable of scanning, analyzing, etc etc of entire solar systems and telling what particle goes where. What atam goes where, etc etc?

Again, it;s science fiction. But in Trek obviously it IS most definately possible.

Oh come on.

I never said that I know everything about subspace but you obviously are if you're saying that everything in Trek is possible. The whole way they use subspace is hypothetical so how you can claim it's all real is beyond me. Quite often it contradicts current scientific thinking.

And as for the data thing it's not just a case of storing the data. The computer has to be able to then search and compare that against the record and tell what species the data it's scanning is.  


And you're telling me that all this makes more sense than the way B5 handles its sensors?