NaffNaff's theory on Faster Than Light travel and crime solving.

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Okay, I've just thought this after wondering what I'd be able to use the Endeavor telescope for if I got one - but it might just work:

Once mankind has Faster Than Light technology (or can put a something really far away and control it instantly) we can solve crimes with nothing more than a big-ass telescope.

Imagine this:
A crime occurs - lets not be specific and just call it Crime X as not to get involved in any major controversy by raking up things that have happened or by accidentally predicting something like The Simpsons have done so many times it looks like Matt Groening is a time traveler.

So Crime X has happened and people have theories but no one knows for sure what happened... well, no one but the criminals who committed the crime but they are probably dead, executed by whoever got them to commit the crime in the first place.

So, really bad thing, no one knows how it happened exactly they just know it happened. Cue the good ship Clouseau, the police forces Faster Than Light ship with a big ass telescope strapped to its back. We know where the crime happened, and probably about when it happened too.

So you just fly Clouseau out far enough from earth and watch with the telescope waiting for those light rays to reach it. The inspectors line the 'scope up with where it went down and watch the event unfold, and then where the perpetrators went. If the crime ended at that scene, the recording of the event would give enough clues as to where they should aim the telescope at next and fly a little further out and record some more... Before too long Crime X is solved and the crew of Clouseau come home covered in glory!

Doesn't have to be a FTL ship either - Mars is about 21 minutes away by radio (depending on where it is in its orbit), which means it's 21 mins away by light too. If we had a big enough telescope sat on Mars we could see back in time 21 minutes - if we could come up with Quantum Communications to cover that distance instantly we would be able to tell the operators where on the planet to keep an eye on.

I, NaffNaffBobFace, have solved crime.

Unless its cloudy.

 

[Graf_Orlock]

Also possible: aim the scope at a nude beach or even better at our glorious leader's pool and travel AT the speed of light to keep the image freeze-framed for your voyeuristic needs.... it's like the internet only a billion times more expensive to use?

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Also possible: aim the scope at a nude beach or even better at our glorious leader's pool and travel AT the speed of light to keep the image freeze-framed for your voyeuristic needs.... it's like the internet only a billion times more expensive to use?

They'd probably put their clothes back on if the clouds part, though.

As for cost, at one time the internet was a billion times more expensive to use - it could only be operated by the military and universities. Now you get it for free in coffee shops. It's only a matter of time before everyone has easy cheap access to this sort of perception time-travel.

Heck, fly far enough out with a big enough telescope to find out how they actually built the Pyramids, or the Nazca lines, or what killed off the Dinosaurs... no more mysteries.

Unless it's cloudy.

 

[Graf_Orlock]

Heck, fly far enough out with a big enough telescope to find out how they actually built the Pyramids, or the Nazca lines, or what killed off the Dinosaurs... no more mysteries.

 

[Bambooza]

They'd probably put their clothes back on if the clouds part, though.

As for cost, at one time the internet was a billion times more expensive to use - it could only be operated by the military and universities. Now you get it for free in coffee shops. It's only a matter of time before everyone has easy cheap access to this sort of perception time-travel.

Heck, fly far enough out with a big enough telescope to find out how they actually built the Pyramids, or the Nazca lines, or what killed off the Dinosaurs... no more mysteries.

Unless it's cloudy.

Or under trees or in cars, houses, caves... The other issue is the size of the lens.

Resolving power is limited by the wavelength of light used (lambda) and the aperture of the telescope on the satellite (D).

Θ=1.22λD


Combine that with the minimum altitude of the satellite (h), to get the minimum feature size resolvable on the ground (I'll call it x), while looking straight down.

x=1.22λhD


To put it into perspective the James Webb Space Telescope has a mirror that is 6 meters and a resolution of ~ 10 cm if it was put into a typical spy satellite orbit around the earth (240 miles).


Which means this gal relaxing on a clear sunny day outside

would look like this to the satellite.

 

[Sraika]

that's fucking genius, naff
you should get a promotion

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Or under trees or in cars, houses, caves... The other issue is the size of the lens.

Resolving power is limited by the wavelength of light used (lambda) and the aperture of the telescope on the satellite (D).

Θ=1.22λD


Combine that with the minimum altitude of the satellite (h), to get the minimum feature size resolvable on the ground (I'll call it x), while looking straight down.

x=1.22λhD


To put it into perspective the James Webb Space Telescope has a mirror that is 6 meters and a resolution of ~ 10 cm if it was put into a typical spy satellite orbit around the earth (240 miles).


Which means this gal relaxing on a clear sunny day outside

would look like this to the satellite.

"Or under trees or in cars, houses, caves..."

I thought of that, you might not be able to see the crime itself but you would be able to see the perpetrators and where they came from. Enough to get clues to go on. Even if they tunneled out of the place, the telescope would only have to be pointed at where the tunnel comes out and then go from there.

"Lots of science stuff with the Half-Life λ symbol in it."

Yes.

Erm...

In that case, an array: As space is really big we'd be able to send out a bunch of ships, so the good ship Clouseau with an assistant craft Kato, which would be the ship that arranges the array over the span of a few tens of light-seconds while Clouseau does the final analysis (Kato doing all the actual work with Clouseau getting the glory for it).

And the resolving power of lenses may not be an issue if we get imaginative and invent some imaging tech that doesn't rely on things as simplistic as lenses and Bayer filtered silicon sensors. I mean at the moment we are basing our imaging technology on nature - lenses in the eye, retina as the sensor... this is still light detection on what is basically a biologically visual level... It is not outside of the realms of possibility at these universal Macro scales there is a much better way of imaging that doesn't use optical sensing at all, just photon detection and software re-stitching of what was picked up.

The black hole image recently captured, for instance, is a simulation based off the most likely outcome of analysis of petabytes of data detected by an array of radio telescopes all over the planet. No one telescope got a single reliable image. No one telescope got even 5% of a single reliable image, they all took tonnes of data and that was fed into software... What we see in that image it's not an actual picture of the black hole "as it looked", in the sense that we would know of a picture as being something that looks like the thing that was captured, it's an amalgamation built from petabytes of analysed data from loads of different telescopes, but as far as we can tell from tests performed on things the software was tested on, it is accurate and can be relied on to provide a trustworthy image.

View: https://youtu.be/UGL_OL3OrCE?t=1217

Now imagine this technology 200 years into the future. Remember, 200 years ago it was 1819 - photography hadn't even been invented then and look where we are now

"If man realises technology is within reach, he achieves it - like it's damned near instinctive."
Motoko Kusanagi - Ghost in the shell,1995.

 

[Printimus]

Okay, I've just thought this after wondering what I'd be able to use the Endeavor telescope for if I got one - but it might just work:

Once mankind has Faster Than Light technology (or can put a something really far away and control it instantly) we can solve crimes with nothing more than a big-ass telescope.

Imagine this:
A crime occurs - lets not be specific and just call it Crime X as not to get involved in any major controversy by raking up things that have happened or by accidentally predicting something like The Simpsons have done so many times it looks like Matt Groening is a time traveler.

So Crime X has happened and people have theories but no one knows for sure what happened... well, no one but the criminals who committed the crime but they are probably dead, executed by whoever got them to commit the crime in the first place.

So, really bad thing, no one knows how it happened exactly they just know it happened. Cue the good ship Clouseau, the police forces Faster Than Light ship with a big ass telescope strapped to its back. We know where the crime happened, and probably about when it happened too.

So you just fly Clouseau out far enough from earth and watch with the telescope waiting for those light rays to reach it. The inspectors line the 'scope up with where it went down and watch the event unfold, and then where the perpetrators went. If the crime ended at that scene, the recording of the event would give enough clues as to where they should aim the telescope at next and fly a little further out and record some more... Before too long Crime X is solved and the crew of Clouseau come home covered in glory!

Doesn't have to be a FTL ship either - Mars is about 21 minutes away by radio (depending on where it is in its orbit), which means it's 21 mins away by light too. If we had a big enough telescope sat on Mars we could see back in time 21 minutes - if we could come up with Quantum Communications to cover that distance instantly we would be able to tell the operators where on the planet to keep an eye on.

I, NaffNaffBobFace, have solved crime.

Unless its cloudy.

with a chance of meatballs

 

[August]

What if the perpetrators wore mirrors strapped to their heads like reflective sombreros?

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

What if the perpetrators wore mirrors strapped to their heads like reflective sombreros?

You could fly out a little further and watch them back in time before they put them on. Hell, you fly out a few more hours and could watch them from where they set off from. You could fly a bit further and see what they had for breakfast as long as they ate al-fresco. You could fly a bit further and see them the day before going to the store for milk, which would now be sat in their fridge going bad as you had arrested them and slammed them in jail.

As long as it wasn't cloudy.

 

[Printimus]

What if the perpetrators wore mirrors strapped to their heads like reflective sombreros?

Disco sombrero!

 

[Bambooza]

You could fly out a little further and watch them back in time before they put them on. Hell, you fly out a few more hours and could watch them from where they set off from. You could fly a bit further and see what they had for breakfast as long as they ate al-fresco. You could fly a bit further and see them the day before going to the store for milk, which would now be sat in their fridge going bad as you had arrested them and slammed them in jail.

As long as it wasn't cloudy.

Or cheaper we can just put cameras everywhere. Oh wait, we are already doing that.


But back to your idea of space-based photon receivers (not just within the visible spectrum), you'll see that the photons of your suspect spread out quickly. Even to look back an hour with infrared wave as the wave we are attempting to capture we would need a mirror the size of

D = 1.22 L/θ
L = 6 um Avg infrared ( 6 X 1/1,000,000) = 0.000006 meters

s/R = θ
R = 1080000000000 (meters light travels in one hour)
s = 0.1 meter (10 cm resolution keeping with the 10cm resolution used earlier but in this case using infrared wavelengths which are longer)


It gives us a telescope with a mirror 79,056,000 meters in size. (Earths diameter is 12,742,000 meters, Uranus diameter is 50,724,000 meters)

So we are talking about a telescope array bigger than a gas giant to get an infrared image of 10 cm resolution which would still be difficult to make any sort of distinction between anyone else and only be able to look backwards 1 hour.

While it is possible to place lots of smaller telescopes in a grid pattern we would need to be careful as the number of photons leaving the target would be few at this point and we wouldn't want to miss much of them.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Or cheaper we can just put cameras everywhere. Oh wait, we are already doing that.


But back to your idea of space-based photon receivers (not just within the visible spectrum), you'll see that the photons of your suspect spread out quickly. Even to look back an hour with infrared wave as the wave we are attempting to capture we would need a mirror the size of

D = 1.22 L/θ
L = 6 um Avg infrared ( 6 X 1/1,000,000) = 0.000006 meters

s/R = θ
R = 1080000000000 (meters light travels in one hour)
s = 0.1 meter (10 cm resolution keeping with the 10cm resolution used earlier but in this case using infrared wavelengths which are longer)


It gives us a telescope with a mirror 79,056,000 meters in size. (Earths diameter is 12,742,000 meters, Uranus diameter is 50,724,000 meters)

So we are talking about a telescope array bigger than a gas giant to get an infrared image of 10 cm resolution which would still be difficult to make any sort of distinction between anyone else and only be able to look backwards 1 hour.

While it is possible to place lots of smaller telescopes in a grid pattern we would need to be careful as the number of photons leaving the target would be few at this point and we wouldn't want to miss much of them.

So plan B, put cameras everywhere :-)

 

[August]

The thing that we should all take-away from this thread is that Naff Naff is a pervy bugger.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

The thing that we should all take-away from this thread is that Naff Naff is a pervy bugger.

Not quite how I remember it going down, but i don't have an FTL ship to be able to fly far enough away to look back in time and check.

 

[littlej0e]

I thought of that, you might not be able to see the crime itself but you would be able to see the perpetrators and where they came from. Enough to get clues to go on. Even if they tunneled out of the place, the telescope would only have to be pointed at where the tunnel comes out and then go from there.



Yes.

Erm...

In that case, an array: As space is really big we'd be able to send out a bunch of ships, so the good ship Clouseau with an assistant craft Kato, which would be the ship that arranges the array over the span of a few tens of light-seconds while Clouseau does the final analysis (Kato doing all the actual work with Clouseau getting the glory for it).

And the resolving power of lenses may not be an issue if we get imaginative and invent some imaging tech that doesn't rely on things as simplistic as lenses and Bayer filtered silicon sensors. I mean at the moment we are basing our imaging technology on nature - lenses in the eye, retina as the sensor... this is still light detection on what is basically a biologically visual level... It is not outside of the realms of possibility at these universal Macro scales there is a much better way of imaging that doesn't use optical sensing at all, just photon detection and software re-stitching of what was picked up.

The black hole image recently captured, for instance, is a simulation based off the most likely outcome of analysis of petabytes of data detected by an array of radio telescopes all over the planet. No one telescope got a single reliable image. No one telescope got even 5% of a single reliable image, they all took tonnes of data and that was fed into software... What we see in that image it's not an actual picture of the black hole "as it looked", in the sense that we would know of a picture as being something that looks like the thing that was captured, it's an amalgamation built from petabytes of analysed data from loads of different telescopes, but as far as we can tell from tests performed on things the software was tested on, it is accurate and can be relied on to provide a trustworthy image.

View: https://youtu.be/UGL_OL3OrCE?t=1217

Now imagine this technology 200 years into the future. Remember, 200 years ago it was 1819 - photography hadn't even been invented then and look where we are now

"If man realises technology is within reach, he achieves it - like it's damned near instinctive."
Motoko Kusanagi - Ghost in the shell,1995.

NafNaf, you're a genius...

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

NafNaf, you're a genius...

If only it were possible within the laws of physics.

 

[Bambooza]

If only it were possible within the laws of physics.

Damn those laws. I say we rewrite them to suit our needs and how we think they should work.

 

[Sraika]

So plan B, put cameras everywhere :-)

space cameras!

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

space cameras!

On the end of telescope arrays light-days from earth!