Timeline for At what minimal technological level would the inhabitants of a binary planet system need to be to communicate with each other effectively?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 16, 2017 at 1:33 | vote | accept | Zak | ||
| Jun 2, 2017 at 21:03 | comment | added | Cereza | @TSar True. Once the factors necessary are in place, it can be shaped to fit the scenario as needed. But oh wow does this present some interesting mental exercises. Another thing that occurs to me is, there's a 50/50 chance one or both of the locked sides of the planets could be completely under water due to the constant tidal pull from each others' gravity. For that matter, what're the tides and oceans going to be like in this configuration? Hmm ... | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 20:55 | comment | added | Mermaker | @Cereza exactly. By that point, this star system will look whatever they OP need it to be - the universe is that varied! Your observations, however, are in-point and a 100% correct. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 20:47 | comment | added | Cereza | @TSar Yeah, another star would certainly throw new variables into the mix, wouldn't it? And binary or trinary star systems are actually far more common than solitary ones, it turns out. So at that point, our variables are how many stars are in this system, what're their orbital periods, what're the orbital periods (and thus rotational periods) of the twin planets as they orbit their shared centre of gravity, and what kind of star(s) do they have? | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 20:45 | comment | added | Cereza | The moon is roughly a quarter the size of the earth (ballpark figure), and at its distance, can block out the sun almost entirely over a region the size of the US on earth for the most part. Another entity the size of earth at that distance, would cast a major shadow when it transited the sun, which it would do predictably when the side in question of world A faces the parent star. Obviously, when it faces in an obtuse angle in relation to that sun, light would hit that locked face from an angle. The question is, what would that light's quality be? If it's our sun, it'd be like sunset. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 20:44 | comment | added | Mermaker | @Cereza It depends on how they rotate around the sun, but you are right that for the tidally locked zones, you'll have a daily eclipse. That could be fixed if you throw another star in the mix, however! Let's get more extreme! | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 20:39 | comment | added | Cereza | @Tsar Fair enough, about the twilight zone issue. I still have to think the areas of each world facing one another are going to be somewhat sun-starved. When facing the sun, the opposing world would eclipse it, and vice versa. Obviously, they wouldn't be in total eternal darkness like a "ribbon world" is, but I'd think the best those areas would get would be akin to dusk or early dawn levels of light. Again, though, that depends on the star just as much as the planets themselves doesn't it? | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 20:19 | comment | added | Mermaker | @Cereza keep in mind those worlds are tidally locked to each other (like the earth and the moon), and not towards their sun. There isn't a "twilight zone" to speak of - those only exists if you are tidally locked towards a sun. In a sense, we are talking here about a earth-moon arrangement where the moon is actually a clone of Earth. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 18:40 | comment | added | Cereza | Take into account how language, especially transmitted, written language evolved here. It didn't form as the modern (or well-known ancient) writing systems we're familiar with offhand. It started as pictographs representing concrete ideas, which then came to represent concepts that sounded similar in the language in question, and so on. So, establishing a way to transmit basic ideas first could just evolve on its own into a standard language for them both, independent of the natively-spoken languages of either world after enough time. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 18:33 | comment | added | Cereza | One solution for initial contact, to establish the intelligible code, would be to use visuals alongside the flashes of light. This would require an intuition that I admit is slightly inspired by modern imaging - "pixels" of a sort. Black and white panels of a large enough scale the telescopes could see them. make rudimentary images of things both planets definitely have. Trees, general animal shapes, buildings etc, and start flashing code alongside them to establish a basic vocabulary that can be built on for abstractions later. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 18:29 | comment | added | Zak | comment part 2: Sure they could figure out that each of the communications from different places with different people with different ideas on how to communicate, and maybe deduce that the same is happening to them, but that doesn't help them narrow down a unified communications system without a way to more narrowly target where their communications go so that they can figure it out. imagine if 10 people peaking 10 different languages started trying to talk to each other, but 5 of them can only see/hear the other five 5 and those 5 can only see them in return. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 18:22 | comment | added | Zak | yeah, it was the "to establish the initial communication - to develop a mutually intelligible code" part that I was having trouble with in my head, sense not only would this be hard to do between two species, but the earlier such contact is established, the more factions each world will have and the more "mixed signals" they'd be sending to each other with no idea that these other factions from their own world are "saying" to the other, as well as the confusing mess of the different alien attepts at communication. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 18:15 | comment | added | Amadeus | dang, my answer too. I think the mariner semaphore system with reflected sunlight would work; basically louvers one can manually shut and open with a handle, to blink. They used Morse code, but the two "characters" in Morse code (long on, short on) can be used to represent counting, relay prime numbers, and then eventually pictures (like the movie Contact imdb.com/title/tt0118884 ). They would need tech about like 2000 years ago, Archimedes could have figured all this out. Decent mathematics and geometry, stuff I took in the 7th grade. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 17:58 | comment | added | Cereza | Yeah, that's true. Of course, it depends on the type of star, and the dynamic with the planets. Tidally-locked would mean it may be more work to channel the parent star's light a lot of the time. But at the same time, perhaps not. The other problem with tidally-locked worlds, of course, is that many in the academic community suspect only the day/night terminator, the "twilight zone" would be very easy to live in, especially for a pre-industrial culture. I agree, we need more information on how this binary system works, to say anything more concrete. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 17:56 | comment | added | Draco18s no longer trusts SE | I read the question and was trying to boil down what I'd need and came up with something not too far off from "fire and a large mirror." You might even be able to dispense with the "fire" by using the parent star's light at the right time of day. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 17:56 | review | First posts | |||
| Jun 2, 2017 at 18:04 | |||||
| Jun 2, 2017 at 17:52 | history | answered | Cereza | CC BY-SA 3.0 |