As someone who has watched more Star Trek than is probably healthy, there’s a recurring scenario that has always raised a lot of awkward questions in my mind.
Anyone who’s watched a handful of episodes will be familiar with the “Scanning for life-forms. We are reading life signs for nine Humans and a Klingon” kind of scene.
Sometimes the crew will be scanning for the life signs onboard a spaceship of some sort, other times they’ll be scanning an entire planet.
So what sort of thing are they supposed to be scanning for? What overt signs do we emit that would be detectable over a large distance? If scanning a planet from orbit with the goal of detecting human/humanoid life, how are they meant to be able to distinguish between Human life or Klingon life and say, orangutans or penguins?
Are there any real life equivalent technologies that could even come close to performing the function that the Star Trek ones do? If so what are they & how do they work? I’m guessing that there isn’t much in the way of current technology that performs anything close to accuracy, range and convenience of the scanners in the Star Trek universe, otherwise I’m sure searching for survivors amid the ruins of a collapsed building wouldn’t be the difficult, dangerous and harrowing ordeal that it currently is. I wonder how much scientific or commercial interest there would be in developing this sort of technology…?
I realise that giving accurate, factual answers (which is as far as I can tell, is the noble purpose of this forum) when it comes to Star Trek technology might be somewhat “tricky”, but as we all know, there are some Trek ideas and gadgets that have turned out to be quite close to how the real world has developed. I used to be a (somewhat secretly) proud owner of a “Technology of Star Trek” type book, but sadly I no longer own it, nor did I ever look up an answer to this question when I had it to hand - perhaps a Trekkie Doper who reads this owns such a manual and could have a quick peek to see if this is mentioned in it?
I’m genuinely interested to see what kind of answers come up in repsonse (and I’m hoping there will be answers beyond - “It’s pure fiction and will never be real”).
Many thanks in advance and apologies to those who have no love for Star Trek, and who started rolling their eyes as soon as they read the title to this thread. Sorry!
Well, the most straightforward technique is to use an infrared camera. Humans are generally warmer than their environment and show as bright spots in the infrared. This could be done from orbit, though since there’s not much utility I don’t believe there are any current satellites with enough resolution (there are lots of relatively low-res cameras for weather and other environmental sciences).
With enough resolution, you could also detect a heartbeat. There are smartphone apps today that use the camera to detect your heart rate via subtle changes in your skintone. With a good enough camera, this could be done from orbit as well (and might even work better in the infrared).
Considering that hand-held tricorders can tell if somthing has moved through an outdoor area within several hours based on the movement of air molecules (TNG episode involving Lore, I believe - one of the most immersion-breaking scenes I ever witnessed in TNG. I can only suspend so much disbelief…), starship sensors should have no problem detecting electrical impulses from nervous systems and matching them to a known database. If electrical interference from the planet is a problem, a few seconds of scanning should filter that out, leaving other “natural” sources easy to detect and lock on to. If it’s an unknown life-form, an educated guess could probably be made by a closest known match.
One possiblity would be movement, or rather patterns of movement. Living things tend to have parts that move in ways inanimate objects don’t, like the regular pulsing of the heart. I know that there’s been work done on detecting human heartbeats through walls with Doppler radar.
Bodies also have an active electromagnetic field; some water dwelling predators hunt by detecting the electrical impulses produced by flexing muscles. Trek tech could no doubt detect that with ease.
I think they use active sensors a lot, the equivalent of radar; in fact they’d have to given that they scan for things light years away sometimes.
Obviously, you then transmit the data to the holodesk, which then creates a virtual representation of the universe and substracts all the locations which don’t have life signs.
This naturally tells you where they are, what they look like, how their genetics work, and whether or not they ate a gluten-free breakfast, and can be done from light-years away. Obviously.
Aren’t there episodes where the Enterprise or another ship realizes that they are being scanned? This would sort of imply that active scanning is being used.
That is actually possible. Odour molecules will easily hang around outdoors for a few hours, as any dog will tell you. Every molecule oscillates (ie moves) in a very specific way in a magnetic, which is the whole basis of NMR analysis. So long as the tricorder can act as a highly sensitive NMR device that can detect the resonance caused by the planetary magnetic field, then it can plausibly tell if somthing has moved through an outdoor area within several hours based on the movement of air molecules.
There are all sorts of other fanwankery explanations, depending on exactly how it was phrased. But the concept isn’t any more unbelievable than anything else in Star Trek
Star Trek has verifiable psionics – telepathy, “empathy”, who knows what all else. Some races are all telepathic, but we’ve seen some human telepaths too (e.g., Diana Muldaur in TOS).
Just assume they’re scanning for whatever carrier waves psionics operate on, as all instances we’ve seen seem wholly confined to sentient lifeforms.
In the first episode broadcast (although not the first filmed) The Man Trap, they try to locate someone on the surface of a planet, looking from the Enterprise, and Kirk says that they “ought to be able to detect a burning match” on the surface. This really stuck in my mind when I was watching that first-ever exposure to Star Trek, and strongly suggested that at least one of their detectors was some sort of infrared camera.
Star Trek, of course, always kept it vague what they were using to scan for various things, especially for “life forms”. They wanted to establish that they had eliminated this area as having the person or thing they were looking for, and move on with the plot. But the use of this method, terminologym, and dialog also helped establish that they were in sa future where they had new technologies, perhaps using science and applications unknown to (then) current science and perhaps unimaginable to them. It’s a way to set your mood and milieu without directly stating it and making too much of a point, and science fiction writers do it all the time.
Use it sparingly and it’s effective. Use it too often, and you have your characters spouting tons of gobbledegook that convinces the Muggles that science fiction fans are just dweebs. STNG did a little too much of it, IMHO.
In any event, you can make a parlor game of trying to imagine new technologies that might be used as sensors, ranging from improvements on existing stuff (detection of probable waste products based on computer modelling of probable biology for that planet) to wilder stuff (detection of brain waves, sensing of some sort of “field” produced by biological entities, energy signatures of some sort emitted by chemical reactions in living things, picking up telepathy) to the downtight “woo” (Auras)
As people have pointed out on these Boards, sometimes science and engineering catch up with such ‘predictions". H.G. Wells gives a possible explanation for the Nartian Heat Rays in his War of the Worlds, but it doesn’t match the way real lasers – the present-day equivalent everyone sees as the fulfillment of that prediction – actually work. But they can perform the same kind of things. wells’ story demanded a non-human, non-terrestrial weapon that acted on different prociples, and so he described one. The actual mechanism was secondary to the plot.
Don’t forget they can also tell if the life signs are normal or “weak.” So not only can they tell there are six humans on the other ship, they can tell if one of them is very sick or unconscious.
I assume that the sensors can “detect” several different things at once. Infrared, to detect body heat.
Generation of biologically produced electrical impulses.
Respiration. Movement. Mass of object.
Sopposedly, they can even identify the types of atoms and molecules present.
Like a game of 20 questions, the scanners can isolate those things that fit a certain set of desired parameters, (although it may require some operator input: Chekov looking for Spock on a Romulan D7 battlecruiser in “The Enterprise Incident” remarks that weeding out a Vulcan from the Romulans was a slow process), and leave a list of “positive hits” that the operator can then focus his/her attention on.
Comparing these results with known parameters for a race in question can help make the operator reach a conclusion that some of these folks are “weak” or dead, etc.
Interferance (enviornmental or deliberate) can lead to more vague reports. (“I detect life signs, ma’am, but I can’t tell if they’re human or borg.”)
I imagine that 300 years from now, heartbeats will be detectable from space using some grossly amplified form of EKG. From that point, identifying the species the heartbeat belongs to is not much of a stretch.
Of course, in the case of species without hearts or a circulatory system, that’s a different story.
