In RL you can detect biological life from as far away as you can detect light and the planet it's associated with. So yes it's entirely consistent with reality.
the FSS, watching paint dry....
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In RL you can detect biological life from as far away as you can detect light and the planet it's associated with. So yes it's entirely consistent with reality.
Kind of. I don't mind as long as it's explained by the technobabble. So if the FSS is detecting & presenting a bunch of detected gravity wells or whatever I'll accept it can do that through a body, but that I can't use my optical telescope to zoom in on it. But whatever handwavium the old ADS used was fine too, I don't see it as an issue that it could scan/see through stuff.
If I were to express a preference, then yes, none of the systems should detect stuff that's obscured by other stuff, but as you say that's always been an inconsistency & will probably continue to be.
Sources please
Far away yes, but through stuff?
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I must have missed the announcement from NASA about life being discovered outside the solar system.
You'd have thought they'd have made a big deal about it.
Sometime between now and 3304, probably around the time they invented faster-than-light travel
You do realize you are arguing against your own precious DSS as well, right? It was the same "magical technology" as the FSS, just at closer range.
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We can detect it from the EM emissions, we haven't yet IRL. Ziljan will know the proper terminology, spectrographic analysis or something. I'm not an expert, okay?
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Sometime between now and 3304, probably around the time they invented faster-than-light travel
You do realize you are arguing against your own precious DSS as well, right? It was the same "magical technology" as the FSS, just at closer range.
I'm aware
MY ideal exploration flow looks like this:
1. 'Honk' provides regions where gravity wells are present
2. Fly to gravity wells to resolve into planetary objects (range of old long-range engineered DSS)
3. Target planetary object and approach to generate composition/temperature information
4. Enter orbital pattern to surface map and detect hotspots for anomalies
5. Land and locate anomalies using the SRV
Each stage of the process provides more information and more reward.
That would make me feel like I'd actually explored a system, rather than just surveying/mapping it.
We can detect it from the EM emissions, we haven't yet IRL. Ziljan will know the proper terminology, spectrographic analysis or something. I'm not an expert, okay?
We can detect 3 pumpkins on an iceball by their EM emissions?
We can, with current IRL technology detect stuff like methane in an atmosphere that may be indicative of life. We can't tell that it's a pumpkin. I'm not an expert in xenobiology sorry, I can only confirm that detecting signs of life it is a thing. No point looking for life if you have no way to detect it, right?
And as Old Duck says, there is no more or less handwavium with the new process as there was with the old, which didn't detect life at all. It's future tech, handwavium.
Copied from a parallel conversation I'm having with Old Duck in a different thread:
This is basic spectroscopy. You can detect the presence of life by the existence of unstable chemicals (from respiration/metabolism) that otherwise quickly breakdown if not replenished on a regular basis, hence if found indicate a strong likelihood of the presence of life.
On an airless planet?
I haven't seen that other thread yet, so I'll answer in this thread, LOL. Yes, actually, I can argue for advanced tech and manual intervention. Here are some RL examples:
1) If SETI discovers an interesting signal, it will set off an alarm, but humans like Jodie Foster need to manually verify if it's alien life or not.
2) NASA has a program that crowdsources the search for exoplanets, because they have found people discover things missed by the computer.
3) We have the technology to automate the launching of weapons from drones, but we purposefully do not because we want a human in that loop.
The whole "If the tech is advanced it WILL be automated" argument spells your own demise as an explorer, because it would be way cheaper for Stellar Cartography to just blanket the galaxy with probes than it is to pay pilots to manually fly spaceships and manually explore solar systems.
Would be easier on a planet with atmosphere because the signal would be spread out over the planet's surface, but since our instruments are sensitive enough to detect minute signals and even apparently neutrinos, then sure, why not on multiple spread out tiny signals as well.
Preciesly, I knew we could figure out the atmospheric composition of planets but that does not equate to finding life.
Okay, for the sake of argument I'll accept that a human is necessary to be involved. However, that leads to gameplay more like the ADS where the technology generates a probability of something being an ELW but it's up to the human to confirm it.
If the technology is fallible and requires human intervention then the FSS should produce false-positives and false-negatives, rather than being 100% correct all the time. As Ziljan has explained we can infer the presence of biological life by various methods, but we still don't know until we confirm it with direct inspection.
It's not just explorers who'd be made redundant by advanced tech - traders and miners would be out of a job too.
But I'M not the one using 'future tech' as an excuse for the FSS being OP.
We could map systems very clearly from other system, using a start in-between as a lens... Think i have heard to the detail of seeing building on a planet. Just about focal length and gravity lenses. So, scrap the FSS , i wanna fly around a start at say 500 au, and map all the systems within range! mwhahaha
(not to be confused with galaxy lensing... cant find the paper on star lensing, maybe i dreamt it
)found this.. will have to do
[video=youtube;Hjaj-Ig9jBs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjaj-Ig9jBs[/video]
i bet you are really
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