In Star Trek, they can scan a ship and see if anyone is on it by “life signs”. If people are on it they will detect them. They can also detect difference between species, so they can tell if those are Klingons or Vulcans onboard.
So what exactly are these “life signs” of which they speak?
It seems if it was a pulse or something like that, there would be no way to detect it from another spaceship. Any ideas?
And yes, I realize this is Star Trek, but I think we should try to think of how these things work before resorting to magitechnology.
Strinka, first of all this post should probably be in Cafe Society rather than in GQ. Maybe some kind mod will stroll by and beam it over there.
In StarTrek the staff was deliberately vague on much of the technology used, mainly so that the audience wouldn’t get too distracted by gadgets and forget to concentrate on the plot, but also because they didn’t have a clue either. They just worked on the assumption that sometime in the next 300 years someone would invent something to do what the plot needed.
If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that it would involve some combination of highly directional radar/sonar/infrared/sensitive microphones that could detect and measure movement, breathing, general size, body heat, etc. But that would just be a guess.
It would be very difficult to do with a passive scan. I doubt a spaceship hull would transmit infra-red, so thermal imaging would be unlikely to work. Sound obviously doesn’t travel in space, so pulse and respiration sounds would be undetectable. And bodies don’t generate any significant amount of EM radiation – certainly not enough to be detectable at a distance.
So you’d have to perform an active scan of some kind. The least invasive would be to bounce a laser beam off the hull and try to detect vibrations caused by heartbeats or breathing. That seems … unlikely to succeed. Spaceships in the Star Trek universe are built pretty solidly. That leaves something like a radar or particle emitter that would generate a signal that could penetrate a metal hull, bounce off living tissue, and return. It’s conceivable that something like that could be devised although it’s anyone’s guess whether it could detect something as subtle as a heartbeat at great distances without cooking the subject in the process.
Of course, if you allow the existence of teleporter technology, you could always teleport sensors directly into the ship being probed which would greatly reduce although not eliminate the technical difficulties.
In the future, scanners have the ability to detect body warmth (infrared does that now), magnetic resonance imaging, and maybe some kind of sentient spectratography, all from long range. Body warmth is a good indicator of life. If you burn stuff the light spectrum indicates what chemicals are in it, so Fe=human, Cu=Vulcan, and our instruments are so sensitive we can detect trace emissions off of live and dead organisms. And MRIs show if there’s any brain activity. That’s how Beta-Zoids work, they see brain activity the way some insects see beyond the human range of the light spectrum.
There. That’s sufficiently goofy enough for science fiction. I willing to bet there is a Star Trek trivia book take gives an explanation for the tricorders, phasers, warp drives, and anything else in the universe. Try your nearest bookstore.
Imagine the following conversation happening in 1905:
“If I were in one building, how could I hear a conversation going in in a building across the street?”
“The least invasive would be to bounce a laser beam off the window and try to detect vibrations caused by talking.”
“That seems. . .unlikely to succeed. Buildings are built pretty solidly.”
Yet that’s what can be done today. Built pretty solidly doesn’t mean zero vibrations.
I’ve seen ads for what someone’s billing as a “tricorder.” This is not some toy, but a device which can do some of the things that a ST tricorder can do.
IIRC, every living animal has a very weak electrical field which is generated by their body. No doubt with enough power, one could build a detector capable of picking up this field.
Those are only good for detecting cows.
Ahem.
One oversight that’s always kind of annoyed me is when the landing party loses their communicators and can’t talk to the ship for hours on end. It never occurs to anyone on the Enterprise to beam down more communicators. I can understand why they might not want to beam down high-tech blindly, but usually Spock is a member of the landing party and it can’t be that hard to locate the only Vulcan in the area and beam a communicator directly to his location, with some kind of biometric lock on it so only he could use it.
Well, a window is not a starship hull. There’s a difference between 1/8 inch of optically flat glass and a starship hull plate that can shrug off a phaser hit. Can you bounce a laser off the wall of a building and get anything?
Well, since it’s Star Trek, all you have to do is find the magical phase that penetrates the hull. If you’re entirely ignorant of even basic physics, it’s astounding the things you can do with technology.
Actually, unless a planet were shielded, then it should be easy to be able to scan a planet with things like radar, infrared, spectrometers, etc. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to pick out an individual with that equipment, but you would be able to detect things which are commonly believed to be signatures of life.
Start Trek scanners are amazing. Not only can they pick up subspace signatures of propulsion and weapons, they can find DNA sequences from orbit and memory ingrams of sentient creatures!
In TOS’ A Piece of the Action, it was established that most of the big pieces of Trek technology were all linked. By leaving their communicator on the planet, it was worried that they had given them a leg up on tech evolution.
Apparantly, warp speed travel, transporting, subspace communications, replicators, holodecks, and possibly several other basics of treknology, are all inter-related in the Trek Universe. So, life sign scanning probably makes use of some previously unknown to non warpers technology. Suspension of belief and all that, right?
