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Possibly the biggest difference between detecting a ship in space as opposed to on Earth

is that there is no horizon to hide behind, except perhaps for a black hole's event horizon. was Event Horizon. Probably one of the most popular tropes in science fiction is the idea of the stealth or cloaked

enemy vessel, station, or even planet.

For today's sci-fi Sunday I thought we would explain why stealthy

in space is considered so difficult to achieve and discuss a few of the possible workarounds

to each hurdle to hiding things. As always, this will be a detailed discussion of the topic,

so if you can slip past your housemates I noticed, go discreetly grab a drink and a snack

and settle in for a while with us.

I want to emphasize though that under known science the burden is high for achieving stealth

and a lot of the workarounds will qualify as what we call Clark Tech, technologies so advanced

they are indistinguishable from magic, and probably technologies that will be fictional

for a very long time, and maybe

forever.

With that in mind, it is a good choice for a sci-fi Sunday, since we tend to relax how

stringently we stick to known physics compared to our regular Thursday episodes.

We probably need to start by asking what we mean by stealth.

We are talking about hiding a spaceship from physical detection from an opponent with roughly

...