Tiny little life forms! (Love that clip.)
The Ronco Life Form Detector.©
Also detects Julienne fries.
Did anyone else notice how lame the “life form detectors” are on the Reliant in “Star Trek II” ? This is my biggest nitpick about that movie (still the best ST movie made).
The Reliant is supposed to be scanning Seti-Alpha 6 to ensure there are no life forms, as a testing site for the Genesis device. Chekov says some sensor has “picked up something”, but it could be some “particle caught in a matrix”, and they go down to investigate.
When they land, however, not only do they encounter Khan and the survivors of the Botany Bay. But also the “only indigenious” creatures - the little “lizard insects” whose larvae are put into Chekov’s and the captain’s ears !
So these scanners missed not only this whole colony of humans ! (to which the scanners would likely be MOST concerned/calibrated to detect), but also the little “lizard insects” !
I literally laughed out loud. Thank you for that. I can’t even stop giggling as I type this reply. The Julienne fries bit really did me in.
Wasn’t there a storm interfering or something? Maybe a wizard did it.
Apparently they have this capability on the International Space Station now.
As for the details of distinguishing one species of humanoid from another, the first example I recall offhand was a close-up medical scan ("…heartbeat all wrong… body temperature is… Jim, this man is a Klingon!"). Being able to do it from orbit is just a question of scale (bigger sensor arrays versus greater distances and a layer of atmosphere).
The Reliant thought they were surveying Ceti Alpha VI, which all the earlier surveys have listed as uninhabited and uninhabitable. Ceti Alpha V was marginally inhabitable, which is why Khan and company were marooned there. Reliant’s was the first visit since the stranding, and so they did not know that Ceti Alpha VI had gone 'splodey and shifted CE V’s orbit to an even less comforatble zone.
The scanners were set to find a minimally self-replicating path of ooze, probably not calibrated to flag anything more complex than a bacterium. When they went over Khan’s compound (with its pet Ceti Eels) the sensors Blipped and returned nonsense, since they were not “focussed” for motile animal lives.
Bravo! That is some first-class fan-wanking.
Alternatively:
Khan and his people are enemies of the Federation. The shift in their planets orbit has effectively broken the quarantine, and they’ve been actively plotting their escape and revenge.
When the Reliant comes out of warp, Khan’s jury rigged sensors recognize it as a Federation ship, and his people activate some kind jamming field to hide the fact that there are humans on the planet, so the Federation can’t update the quarantine to cover the planet’s new position. This jamming explains why Chekov couldn’t get a clear reading, and was writing his readings off as a glitch.
Presumably, they’ve been waiting for a non-Federation ship to come by, so they could hail them and act like innocent marooned space travelers, until they were in a position to take over the ship.
These aren’t the life-forms you’re looking for.
In the TNG episode in which Picard thinks he’s found his long-lost son, the Enterprise-D’s sensors are so good they can count, from orbit, the several dozen people on the planet, AND determine their genders. Those are some damn fine sensors!
Or some damn fine genitals.
“The Hunted” was on tonight, the episode featuring the alien super-soldier who had broken out of prison. One of his more notable traits – one that more or less allowed him to run around the Enterprise as if he owned the place – was that his life signs didn’t register on scans. The explanation was that part of the super-soldier process involved putting something in him that shielded electrical impulses. At least, that was how scans worked that week.
Respiration ( would they be able to notice carbon dioxide emissions?) electrical impulses from organs etc
It’s also quite probable that the characters themselves don’t know how the scanners work. Oh, they know the functionality: If you push this button here, the scanners will tell you whether there’s life, and this display here will tell you some of the information about it, and the scanners can be fooled by the presence of this sort of unobtainium deposits on a planet. But they don’t necessarily know the mechanism.
For a real-world comparison, I used to hang out with a bunch of solar physicists. One of the sorts of data they worked with on a daily basis was magnetograms: You have an image of the Sun, and on that image, you have the line-of-sight component of the surface magnetic field at each point (strength, and whether it’s toward you or away from you). How do you get such images? Why, from the magnetogram instrument on the satellite, of course. But how does the magnetogram work? Most of them didn’t know that, and those who did had to search their memory for it. They knew what they needed to know, and were hazy on most of the rest.
Note also that Chekov felt he needed to go outside to beam up, even though he knew that seconds might have counted. I surmise that the storage containers, and, to a lesser degree, all the jingly jewelry the Khanians (Khanites?) were wearing blocked or disrupted scanning technology, because they didn’t want to be found.
The scanner generally only tends to find the sentient life forms on a planet. It could be covered in plants and animals, but so long as there are no humanoids capable of speaking english via the universal translator, the planet has no life signs. (Could be why they didn’t pick up Khan’s ear worms.)
I’ll agree with that, at least for TOS and DS9 (Everybody on TNG and its dark cousin VOY seemed to know everything about everything.) I’d expect that Spock & Chekov actually knew exactly what the life sensors were looking for and could use them in ways more meaningful than just following the computer prompts; that Sulu might have been able to do so for plants but not for animals; and that Kirk, Scott, & Uhura, when using the sensors, were just following prompts.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Spock explicitly grants that Uhura knows more about the comm system than he does; it’s obvious that Sulu knows more about flying than anybody; Scott knows more about the engines; etc.