The Firefly/Serenity Solar System
POSTED BY: FraserBW
UPDATED: Tuesday, March 7, 2006 10:55
VIEWED: 27197
PAGE 7 of 11
Again, inverse square law. The power of a signal is spread over the wave front which propagates in all directions. This means that doubling the distance from the transmitter reduces the intensity to a quarter. Line of sight and atmospheric attenuation also reduce or restrict propagation or intensity, but even in space radio signals will decay.
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Qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum.
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Quote:
Originally posted by StarPilotGrainger:
Okay, perhaps I was wrong about that - as I said, I'm no expert. I thought Earthbound radio ranges tended to have more to do with the curvature of the Earth and atmospheric conditions you obviously wouldn't find in space, I had no idea that, in space, they dropped off so quickly, but I'll take your word for it.
Your right it is somewhat to do with the Earths curvature but there's also signal decay, Atmospheric effects also enhance this signal decay. Hell during winter I can't get a signal on my Wireless network in the adjacent room. In summer it's fine.
As Finn said it's the Inverse Square Law in space, which crops up a lot...
There's also a lot of EM interference within a solar system, that would degrade the signal.
Quote:
Originally posted by RocketJock:
Sorry, but demonstratably FTL comm does exist in the 'Verse. Following the slaughter on Haven, the Operative talks to Mal in real time, without a noticable time lag and without knowing his location. If they were communicating along the EM band, the Operative would have to be damn close to Mal. The exact time lag would give him distance, and simple triangulation would nail down position. QED.
That doesn't necessarrilly follow. You and I could have a realtime conversation right now without either of us knowing where the other was. I'd always assumed most communication was done over the Cortex, which would mean Mal would send a signal to the nearest repeater station, and then pass that along the line to the Operative. You can be 100,000 miles away from each other without noticing a real lag in communications. Assuming some wiggle room to allow the fact that Joss couldn't show a delay in that conversation and keep the audience interest, the Operative could of been well out of 'sensor' range.
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On the comm tech, again with artificial gravity you can create gravity waves- which would propagate instantly, no C involved.
A inertialess drive would be about the only way to move those city shaped Alliance cruisers too. No way to evenly apply thrust to those.
Factoid- it took the fans a decade to get Spock & Kirk & all back on the screen.
The 1966-9 series was nominated for 4 Emmys, with another 5 wins & 6 nominations. (Fans at the time also felt the show was suppressed.)
The 1979 movie was nominated for 3 Oscars and got another 2 wins & 15 nominations.
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Actually there's some belief that Gravity propogates at c. We can't test this because we have no way of changing local gravity.
We can discount an inertialess drive for the Alliance Cruiser too, since we plainly see thoes huge Newtonian engines sticking out the backend.
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Cit- Actually Niven covered all this in Protector in some detail. And gravity doesn't propagate, its a change in spacetime curvature. As far as the inertialess drive, having no inertia (lowering the apparent mass) doesn't provide any thrust by itself. You still need to push somehow. The shear stress involved in turning such a structure in any reasonable time would be impossible without antigrav, which we know they have.
Occam's Razor- one simple answer for all the observetd phenomena...
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Quote:
Originally posted by aahhaaa:
Actually Niven covered all this in Protector in some detail.
Do you mean Larry Niven's Protector book? I haven't read it but as far as I know it's not a 'hard science' book. I was referring to current Theoretical Physics discussions, the topic of the speed of Gravity is far from dead.
Yes Gravity under Relativity is a warping of spacetime. The contention is what causes this warping, now there's now limit on how fast a warp in spacetime can travel, because it never breaks the local limit of c, thus never breaking Special Relativity (General Relativity allows objects to move between two points at a velocity greater than c). However we don't know what causes this warping, it could very well be a special particle or wave, which would be limited to c within the local frame, in order to not break Special Relativity.
The only way to know for sure, experimentally, would be to create a gravity well and measure the time it takes for distant objects within the effect radius to react. Whether the reaction is instantaneous or occurs with a delay consistent with c.
My understanding of the Inertialess drive was that you meant drives such as Gravity Drives, or to a lesser extent the alcubierre warp. Gravity Drives function by extending a gravity field beyond the ship in it's direction of travel. the Alcubierre warp functions by warping spacetime to form a bubble that moves, leaving the craft and it's local spacetime standing still, while conceptually the universe moves around the craft.
Beyond that, yeah, all the ships of the verse have at least some sort of inertial dampening technology, possibly in the form of manipulatable gravity fields, otherwise River and the rest of the crew really would have 'melted' into Serenity when Wash executed that crazy Ivan.
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Cit- Niven was considered THE hard SF guy for a while... PROTECTOR started with the premise that humans are an immature form of an advanced creature.
The story continued in the RINGWORLD series, you might enjoy it!:]
Later, he & Jerry Pournelle wrote 'The Mote in God's Eye', considered by many to contain the best developed alien race ever written.
anyway... gedankenexperiment:
If you can easily manipulate gravity, you can make miniature black holes (they don't last, but you can make'em). By banging mass into them, you could make gravity waves. Modulating the bangs, you get a gravity signal-carrier.
Would appreciate a link to what you've been reading- as I understood it last I looked, the change in curvature doesn't propagate, it just is, as a property of of the distant spacetime.
Then again, there's all that chaos underlying string theory...:]
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Quote:
Originally posted by aahhaaa:
Occam's Razor- one simple answer for all the observetd phenomena...
It was all a dream.
-
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the incorrect one.
For example I was once on a Robotics team, and there we made a robot (go figure) like any good robot it could go forward and back, turn, stack boxes, operate without an operator for short periods provided a preprogrammed function was selected, push several times its weight, and attach itself to a surface with industrial strength suction cups so nothing could move it. Such is the life of a robot.
Anyone observing this robot who believed in Occam’s Razor would immediately be forced to assume that it was a thinking being. All of the things it did could be perfectly explained by the Robot thinking, and (by the same argument that rules out an immaterial soul) one would reject (via the Razor) the absurd idea that somewhere, unknown and unseen, was a human operator.
It does not change the fact that there was a human operator. It is just that a human operator need not be introduced into the picture to explain the phenomenon, but one does need to be introduced to create the phenomenon.
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I haven't really come across Niven's work, I'll try and give it a look thanks.
But the reason I say gravity travels at the speed of light is because General Relativity actually suggests it.
I have however found this which maybe of interest. It describes an experiment to measure the speed of Gravity, and seems to rule out it being instantaneous. They actually calculate it based on Gravity lensing:
http://www.csa2.com/discoveryguides/gravity/overview.php
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Chris- don't quite get your point here... agreeing or disagreeing?:]
They clearly have artificial gravity tech- feet stay on the floor when the drive is off, they walk normally on Alliance cruisers, etc. Apparently little planetoids & moons can hold an atmo, too.
We're talking about a movie justification, like beaming up- not reality, just want the willing suspension of disbelief.
All I'm saying is one easy explanation could cover it all and simplify the storyline!
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