Technology in the 'verse

POSTED BY: zeke023
UPDATED: Friday, October 31, 2003 03:24
VIEWED: 21912
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THEGN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 8:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
THEIGN,
wait - let me think this out. If a radio signal can travel an AU in 8 minutes (give or take) - then it could travel the length of our whole solar system in less than an hour.

No - admitidly, I don't know much about the sizes of solar systems outside of our own - however, how can you explain being anywhere within a soloar system and not being able to contact a planet, or another ship between planets, within a few hours (that was the time right?)

My calculations say that it would take 5.2 hours for a radio transmission to go from the sun to Pluto (if Pluto is 5 billion km away).

Now my math might be a little off - but even if it is - the real question here is:

Can you feasibly design a solar system where you can have so many habitable and teraformable worlds as appear in the show where you could not send a radio signal to a single other habitable world within a few hours?
(keep in mind that ships will be traveling on the shortest courses between habitable worlds at any given time)

Hold on; let me tackle each of these individually.

It would take about 5.2 hours for a radio transmission to go from the sun to Pluto, but an AU is not the distance from the sun to Pluto, rather the mean distance from the sun to Earth. 1 AU = 149,597,870.691 kilometers.

If you want my interpretation for why the signal would have been so far away that they couldn't contact anyone, I would say, (if you want to keep with Joss' original plan and say that it is a single system) that they might have been traveling between the two star systems of the binary system. OR perhaps they were moving along a highly eccentric trajectory. Space around the sun is curved, so nothing, not even light, can travel in a straight line through curved space. In other words, you can't easily go directly from one planet to another, you must curve along the gravity of the sun and other planets. Now I remember someone saying something about [paraphrase] taking the long way around to avoid Alliance radar? Does anyone remember that? Possibly, they might curved way out, like a comet, and come back in to their destination. That probably the best explanation I can give you.

As far as having hundreds of terraformed worlds in the life-zone of a star, I've already said that I don't believe it's possible, but more importantly, I also don't believe it's necessary.

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 8:32 PM

Dude : 8 minuts for one AU.
5.2 hours for 39.5 AU (earth to Pluto).

To make this single system theory work you need to account for the following:

1 - a large chunk of space roughly between two habbitable worlds that is more than about 80 AU apart. Big enough that you can be moving under forward inertia for several hours and still be 80 AU away from a habitable world or outpost or other ship.

2 - a direct travel line (obviously not straight for aforementioned reasons) that would take only 18 to go from start to destination.

3 - not break the speed of light - which I'm guessing is the reason for this single system theory.

-Zeke

ZEKE023

Thursday, June 5, 2003 8:53 PM

quote from Joss:

"Another part of the whole frontier thing was knowing that I was going to be shooting in Southern California, and that if we tried to build weird space worlds every week,...we won't be going back to Earth. But every planet is Earth. That's the one giant technological advancement that we luckily made," he says, tongue-in-cheek. "They found a galaxy with a bunch of planets, a bunch of moons, and were able to terraform all of them, so that you know there are no planets that look very bizarre. They've all been turned into little wannabe Earths."

We know that they are in another galaxy. Does that answer any questions?

THEGN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 9:11 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Not only this, but the ship would have to be constantly traveling closer to its destination based on its inertia when the engine gave out. (Ships can't stop moving in space without thrusting in the opposite direction - except in Star Trek Nemisis).

I just want to point out what I mentioned earlier about highly eccentric trajectories. There really is no reason that they would have to be traveling toward their destination. They could feasible have been traveling away from their destination when the engines went out. If they had set their course by that time, (with the addition of Wash to the table I believe they had) then their trajectory would have essentially been set, and baring unforeseen occurrence, they would have eventually come upon their destination without engines, albeit at a highly eccentric orbit, and initially away from their destination.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
It would be possible with enough messing abbot to make a planet as distant from the sun as Pluto habitable, why someone would go through the trouble of messing about that much is beyond me, but it could be done.

Not in any way terraformed, it wouldn't.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
The distance would of course be relative to the strength and the frequency of the signal, and of course the amount of background.

It would be relative to the intensity, not the frequency.

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
Dude : 8 minuts for one AU.
5.2 hours for 39.5 AU (earth to Pluto).

To make this single system theory work you need to account for the following:

1 - a large chunk of space roughly between two habbitable worlds that is more than about 80 AU apart. Big enough that you can be moving under forward inertia for several hours and still be 80 AU away from a habitable world or outpost or other ship.

2 - a direct travel line (obviously not straight for aforementioned reasons) that would take only 18 to go from start to destination.

3 - not break the speed of light - which I'm guessing is the reason for this single system theory.

All of which are possible if you assume a highly eccentric trajectory.

Quote:
Originally posted by zeke023:
We know that they are in another galaxy. Does that answer any questions?

No. It just immensely complicates things. I'm not entirely confident in Joss' knowledge of astrophysics.

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 9:50 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
It would be possible with enough messing abbot to make a planet as distant from the sun as Pluto habitable, why someone would go through the trouble of messing about that much is beyond me, but it could be done.
Not in any way terraformed, it wouldn't.

If certain theories (multiple, from sources of varying credibility, I have more important things to do then look them up) about the percent of heat that can be maintained inside of an atmosphere are correct then a planet that distant from it's source of heat could support life. Plants are a larger problem, they require light, and are the very center of an ecosystem. Genetic engineering might be able to make plants which process light more efficiently, but it is still doubtful that it would be enough.

Quote:
Originally posted by Thegn:
Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
The distance would of course be relative to the strength and the frequency of the signal, and of course the amount of background.
It would be relative to the intensity, not the frequency.

You forget yourself, the frequency determines the background noise that can interfere with it, and that is very important when determining the distance at which something is intelligible. Probably should have been clearer on that point, I was trying to emphasis the background “noise” by saying it as itself an pointing out that the frequency was a factor, which is only because of background noise.

THEGN

Thursday, June 5, 2003 11:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
If certain theories (multiple, from sources of varying credibility, I have more important things to do then look them up) about the percent of heat that can be maintained inside of an atmosphere are correct then a planet that distant from it's source of heat could support life. Plants are a larger problem, they require light, and are the very center of an ecosystem. Genetic engineering might be able to make plants which process light more efficiently, but it is still doubtful that it would be enough.

Pluto is, by current measurements, a chunk of ice smaller then the moon. It is too small to hold an atmosphere dense enough to create a warming scenario. It is too far away from the sun to receive a significant amount of heating, and has a dead core of ice. Apart from invoking god powers I can't think of any credible theories of warming Pluto.

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
You forget yourself, the frequency determines the background noise that can interfere with it, and that is very important when determining the distance at which something is intelligible. Probably should have been clearer on that point, I was trying to emphasis the background “noise” by saying it as itself an pointing out that the frequency was a factor, which is only because of background noise.

Most EMI is going to come from man-made sources, so the frequency is not likely to matter as much as you might think. The only significant amount of natural EMI will be the sun, and above 30MHz that will be negligible. Even still, FFT can be used to extract the signal under most circumstances. Under normal operating conditions, choice of frequency is going to be case dependent for tuning purposes. The intensity will be your only knowable factor for increases signal transmission. In other words there is no one frequency; it just depends on the case.

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, June 5, 2003 11:39 PM

Ok there we go, that’s why you didn't get it. I wasn't saying that Pluto could be teraformed. What I said was that a planet as far as Pluto could be. Once again this is based on a wide variety of theories, and these particular theories are, you’ll love this, impossible to prove or disprove unless we plan on messing with the atmosphere of an entire planet somewhere. Even then the data would have to be extrapolated (which can be an error in itself) because Pluto is incapable of having that kind of an atmosphere. The point of this was to say that the life zone of a star could be significantly increased, if these people are right.

There is still the problem of plants of course.

THEGN

Friday, June 6, 2003 12:32 AM

I guess that all depends on the definition of 'terraform,' doesn't? Most definitions require that at least a terraformed planet should be habitable. How to you make a planet devoid of sunlight habitable?

I'd like to see these "wide variety of theories" that you're basing this on, or are these conveniently unavailable also?

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Friday, June 6, 2003 1:03 AM

Not going to get into this with you again, but don't you read? I said I wasn't going to look them up, I don't keep a database on my computer of very scientific paper I've ever read. Regardless, Pluto is not without light, it just has very, very small amounts of it. And although heat can be affected the basic starting of (almost) all fuel in nature is photosynthesis, and this can’t be done without a decent supply of life, so either you would need to have all food imported, or make your own light, or find a replacement for photosynthesis. The last would be the most convenient, but it would be the hardest to pull off. Ceritainly there are some things on earth that live off of different systems than photosynthesis, bacteria around hot vents deep in the ocean where light cant reach are one example. I don’t think that this could become prevalent enough to become the origin of biological energy on a planet.

But where it started from, heat. Heat is the important thing here, there are ways to make enough light for a planet, of course it wouldn’t hurt if you had a whole different planet’s resources to use up to do it. But heat, there is a problem, first off you wouldn’t have full spectrum lighting, because if you did you wouldn’t need to heat the place, but the power for that would make the power for “normal” planetary lighting seem like it was a single turbine in a brook.

Global warming that you hear so much about is really fun stuff, it’s kind of like a temperature control, the more crap you have in the air, the less heat escapes, the less crap the more heat escapes. In theory this could be increased to the point where there was almost negligible heat lost. Note the IN THOERY, and this is only in some theories. Now it wouldn’t get that way with what we have on Earth, you would need to introduce new and improved greenhouse gasses. The heat lost will be partially (very small part) replaced by the distant sun, and something like say geothermal power could make up the balance.

The atmosphere would be full of regulating gasses, and you would have to run test consistently to make sure the amount was being maintained. Also there would need to be an initial rather large heating to get it all started. This piles one wild unprovable theory on another, but I’m not the one who did it to begin with so I say, considering we accept unpowered artificial gravity, why not accept these until the scientists who disagree, whom I’m sure Thegn sides with, prove it wrong.

The reason it’s unproveable? Well the size of the atmosphere to test it is hard to get your hands on, I only know of one and don’t plan on messing with it. Further new gasses would need to be created, or a way to increase the heat retention of old ones. It goes on, I think the theories are pretty radical, and not in a surfer kind of way, but I side with Hawking on this, hell I side with Hawking on a lot, if you cant be sure one way or the other then you can’t dismiss it off hand.

WULFHAWK

Friday, June 6, 2003 4:23 AM

The mutual array of egotistical ignorence here is impressive, to say the least.

We, humanity, don't know the total knowledge of the universe yet, but you guys are willing to waste a thread playing like you do. Couldn't you take this little scrap to emails or sumthin?

Thanks.

tanstaafl

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