How Do You Determine Age?
- Thread starter hux
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Your usage suggests that you're only theorizing how the process might play out if the UT was an implant at that time. Am I taking your meaning correctly? Forgive me if it seems I'm asking for an explanation using the exact same wording as you did, but it's very late, I'm punchy, and what the hell. it's Christmas.
The thing is, the human brain is already extremely good at dealing with the fundamental issue of lipsynch - that of ignoring imperfection. For exmalpe, youhav no dififctuly redagin tihs setnecne. It doesn't even slow down your comprehension much. Quite possibly, most of the magic of the UT is in gently clouding your thought processes (doable today with a couple of copper coils and a battery if you like off switches and don't like chemicals) so that bad lipsynch looks good.
Only if we assume that there is only one Romulan language.
If there are several, the Romulans themselves would have been comprehending the words of each other via UT, and would notice nothing amiss with Troi using a UT for output (or using English for output, or Betazoidian, or whatever).
Then again, STXI does suggest that Romulans (at least in the part of the population that interacts with Feds) only speak one language, even if on a couple of dialects. Might go naturally with their rather totalitarian image.
Timo Saloniemi
Only if we assume that there is only one Romulan language.
If there are several, the Romulans themselves would have been comprehending the words of each other via UT, and would notice nothing amiss with Troi using a UT for output (or using English for output, or Betazoidian, or whatever).
Then again, STXI does suggest that Romulans (at least in the part of the population that interacts with Feds) only speak one language, even if on a couple of dialects. Might go naturally with their rather totalitarian image.
Timo Saloniemi
Even hypervelocity stars in the milky way only travel at about 1000kps, and that's above escape velocity, so relativity makes no practical difference for galactic civilisations. For ships travelling between stars, it seems that high sublight speeds that don't employ warp drive are very rare (partly because of relativity)
That might be a matter of figuring out what your age is on your "internal clock."
Regarding the 1000 stardates equals a year thing:
I postulate that one "stardate," say, stardate 1213.0 to stardate 1214.0 equals 8 hours on Earth. The idea being that stardates would have initially been a mechanism for Starfleet to use to coordinate fleet actions and rendezvous, et cetera. Since HQ is on Earth, Earth hours are the basis. So, with eight hour shifts being usual on starships, a stardate is, nominally, one shift. However, due to ship's moving at relativistic speeds here and there, and moving at different speeds depending on their position in the galaxy, and around given gravitational bodies, local time for ships can vary a lot, ship to ship. But everyone is running the same stardate clock, so everyone is on the same page for overall scheduling.
Stardate 1213.0 is 48 minutes after stardate 1212.9 (at least on Earth).
Stardate 1213.0 is 333 days and 8 hours after stardate 1113.0 (again, on Earth).
So, 1000 stardates would be a little less than a full year, but close enough to map onto television seasons. And as far as time lapsed for individual crewmen, may well be more than a year on Earth depending on relativistic velocities experienced during that time.
Your mileage may vary.
--Alex
I postulate that one "stardate," say, stardate 1213.0 to stardate 1214.0 equals 8 hours on Earth. The idea being that stardates would have initially been a mechanism for Starfleet to use to coordinate fleet actions and rendezvous, et cetera. Since HQ is on Earth, Earth hours are the basis. So, with eight hour shifts being usual on starships, a stardate is, nominally, one shift. However, due to ship's moving at relativistic speeds here and there, and moving at different speeds depending on their position in the galaxy, and around given gravitational bodies, local time for ships can vary a lot, ship to ship. But everyone is running the same stardate clock, so everyone is on the same page for overall scheduling.
Stardate 1213.0 is 48 minutes after stardate 1212.9 (at least on Earth).
Stardate 1213.0 is 333 days and 8 hours after stardate 1113.0 (again, on Earth).
So, 1000 stardates would be a little less than a full year, but close enough to map onto television seasons. And as far as time lapsed for individual crewmen, may well be more than a year on Earth depending on relativistic velocities experienced during that time.
Your mileage may vary.
--Alex
Those same relativistic velocities could render it much, much less than a year, also.
Assuming an Earth year, yes. But the thing is, long timespans (dozens of years) have not been established in stardate terms. The longest we ever cover is either seven years within TNG, DS9 and VOY, respectively, or then fifteen years when merging all these. But merging VOY isn't problem-free and there actually seems to be a year's divergence with just those fifteen years. And mention of a "past" stardate (such as in "Dark Page") never matches the 1000 SD / Earth year scenario.
We might be better off assuming 1000 SD is a year, but not an Earth year, not exactly. But that wouldn't help much even with the above issues.
In general, 1000 SD/yr is a good approximation, but trying to narrow it down to 1 SD / ?? is probably counterproductive. Remember how our heroes dictate logs down to the precision of one decimal point, even though it's established that generally they don't actually know what time it is! That is, they spend extended periods without consulting the Federation Timebase Beacons, and supposedly just shrug off any discrepancies if "Clues" is any indication. So the idea that stardates would coordinate across the UFP or the Fleet sounds a bit hollow.
As for determining the age of a person, not only can UFP science determine how long a person has been alive just by scanning him today - it can also determine the actual timepoint when he was born even if he has since time-traveled! As per ENT "The Expanse", there seems to be some sort of a marker, similar to today's carbon dating isotopes but independent of biology, that has been ticking since the beginning of the universe and keeps on ticking, and if that marker in Exhibit A reads lower than in the surroundings, Exhibit A has traveled to the past; if higher, supposedly it has traveled to the future. Combining this marker with the futuro-science that divines biological age should make it impossible for anybody to fake his age, or to be unaware of it.
Timo Saloniemi
We might be better off assuming 1000 SD is a year, but not an Earth year, not exactly. But that wouldn't help much even with the above issues.
In general, 1000 SD/yr is a good approximation, but trying to narrow it down to 1 SD / ?? is probably counterproductive. Remember how our heroes dictate logs down to the precision of one decimal point, even though it's established that generally they don't actually know what time it is! That is, they spend extended periods without consulting the Federation Timebase Beacons, and supposedly just shrug off any discrepancies if "Clues" is any indication. So the idea that stardates would coordinate across the UFP or the Fleet sounds a bit hollow.
As for determining the age of a person, not only can UFP science determine how long a person has been alive just by scanning him today - it can also determine the actual timepoint when he was born even if he has since time-traveled! As per ENT "The Expanse", there seems to be some sort of a marker, similar to today's carbon dating isotopes but independent of biology, that has been ticking since the beginning of the universe and keeps on ticking, and if that marker in Exhibit A reads lower than in the surroundings, Exhibit A has traveled to the past; if higher, supposedly it has traveled to the future. Combining this marker with the futuro-science that divines biological age should make it impossible for anybody to fake his age, or to be unaware of it.
Timo Saloniemi
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