I like space - Space Telephone Networks and how to start stories. · 9:51pm Jun 18th, 2018
I've been thinking about space phone networks. There's a long standing scifi concept known as an ansible. That name was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin int he 60s, but the idea for such a device is much older.
The basic idea of an ansible is it's a "radio" type device that can send signals FTL, in fact, it transmits instantly. I've never bought into this idea because the science seems suspect and it degrades narrative drama. The suspect science is that outside of quantum entanglement, we don't have any mechanism for instant communication, and even QEC has some bugbears to slay if we ever want to use it as an actual means of communication. It may prove impossible to do because physics. We don't know yet.
Narrativly, instant communications is a problem too. If the big bad stole a Doomsday MaGuffin, and ships can't travel instantly, but signals can, Hero McGoodguy can just call the friendly federation and have them waiting with a whole battlefleet to stop the badguy. Yawn. It's more fun when ships are faster than phones. But there would still be space phones, and they would need to work well enough. Let's fix the ansible.
Everyone assumes that because they are FTL communication devices they have infinite range and are always lag-free. I call bull on that if your ansible isn't using QEC because if your ansible can send a signal at 4.37C it will still take two years to get a reply from someone at Alpha Centari. One year for your "hello!" to get there, and one for their "hi!" to get back. Remember, space, is, big. This means that the ansible speed has to be RIDICULOUSLY fast, but it cant be infinitely fast or you cheapen narrative drama and prevent the necessity for spaceship chases and heroic pursuits of the big bad by the little guy. Also you know QEC may not work. There must be some limit. What if the ansible's transmission speed is something like 3,000C? Let's say that's a hard physics limit. No FTL communications can go faster than that, period, no matter what.
A signal traveling at 3,000C would be able to cross the milkyway in a mere... 33.33 YEARS! That's how big space is. But this would allow us to have seemingly lag-free communications for small space-faring empires, and even a few big ones! See, your space phone at this speed could make a call to your friend a parsec away (that's 3.26 light years) and he'd get your call in 9.52 hours... Humm, okay, that's not fast enough for a space phone of any real use in interstellar settings. We need more speed!
Lets say the hard physics limit on your ansible's transmissions is 8,000,000C (Warp 7.8 according to TNG, apparently.). At this speed if we sent our friend a parsec away a dickpic he would get it in 12.852 seconds, and you would receive a picture of him flipping you off in 25.704 seconds. This is a much more acceptable lag time, especially since if they were a mere light year away, that lag time would be a mere 3.94 seconds. Which means if you were at the sun and wanting to talk to a ship in the Oort cloud you would have a signal lag time between 3.1 and 12.6 seconds depending on where in the Oort Cloud they are. This means that within the part of a star system anyone is likely to be you'd be able to have nearly instant communications, but even as soon as you hit the fringes of a star system you'd get some lag starting. Seems good to me!
As for signals crossing the entire galixy, you'd be able to send a message from one side to the other in 4.56 days. This means as long as you remembered to send your mom a Mother's Day card a mere 5 days in advance, she would get your digital card no matter where you were in the Galaxy that mother's day. This permits fairly large galactic empires and even a galactic internet. A cool one, with local networks based around certain star systems who've clustered up into networks. Basically you would have "LANs" consisting of a given star system and all its contents. Any objects within a parsec's radius from your star would be your WAN, and you could have a fairly usable internet consisting of everything within the entire galaxy.
Sure, you'd have to hop on Space Google and request information from outside your WAN possibly days in advance but that adds to the charm of a narrative story. Getting a letter back from your penpal on 94 Ceti 10 hours or so after you hit send sounds charming and cool. And 94 Ceti is only 73 LY away. If they were REALY far away, well it would take a week to get there and a week to get back. Like the good old days of writing physical letters to your friend in Japan, only you could get back video :3 Space would seem big, mysterious, and exotic, but also accessible. That's what would make the galaxy worth exploring. ESPECIALLY if your ships were able to go faster than your phone.
But there's more to space phone networks than signal speed. On Earth you need to worry about the signal's quality too. There's the curvature of the earth, the atmospheric conditions, weather patterns (especially thunder storms), all of these things can degrade your signal. Signal strength is just as important as signal speed. What's more, radio signals have a maximum usable distance.
I'll bet you didn't know that. I sure as heck didn't for some time. As it turns out, depending on the size of the antennae, power used in transmission, and tight-beamed vs wide broadcast, your radio signal will carry information for a certain maximum distance, but after that point be too degraded for information encoded in that signal to be understood as anything. The data turns into random noise.
For example, a single 100 m transmitter/receiver combination, with a transmission power of 105 W, could function at a distance of 500 light years. After that, it would just be some weird hissing odd signal you picked up. Probably some cosmic body emitting a radio pulse. That happens a lot, actually.
Another ting to remember, that distance is like, the LABORATORY conditions. They dont take into account interference from cosmic dust, cosmic radiation and so on. That's merely how long an dhow far a radio signal would keep its encoded information in the best of possible cases. There is no reason to assume any other waveform in any other medium would work differently since a radio signal is simply us rippling that wave in a particular way and hoping that pattern holds. This means our ansibles will need some signal boosters scattered around the galaxy to make sure their signals can actually reach the other side of the galaxy with usable information intact within them. After all, one dropped packet could mean having to wait another 10 days to get your data. Screw that! Bring on the signal boosters.
Now that our ansible network requires signal boosters we have the opportunity for some fun. See, those boosters will get put in some odd places by necessity. After all if you need a booster 50 LY spinwards from Tau Seti V so you wont have problems talking to the Space UN, you put a booster 50 LY spinwards from Tau Seti V no matter where that may be. In other words, if you really needed a "cell tower" in a star system housing a primitive civilization, you'd put one there.
Putting a space internet relay in a primitive civ's star system wouldn't be a real problem. Odds are good they are pre-space flight, and even if they are not, sticking a small satellite in orbit around their star, or way out around their star's oort cloud would make it invisible. Especially if ansible communications are not detectable via normal radio receivers. Heck, maybe you would stick a receiver in any star system housing a primitive civilization and even make it easy to find. After all there's no point making First Contact with a race that can't even talk to you on the phone. Diling up to Space AOL would be a good way to tell if a species was ready for First Contact, because they would be making contact with you.
Maybe that means you're a bit cheeky and stick the ansible relay on the surface of their moon. After all that would still be a real pain to find, and the real test is accessing and using the thing. But... Well... About radios.
What if it takes a good deal of power to send ansible signals? So much that if you're within lag-free or low-lag radio communications distance you just use a radio wave? If that's true then your ansible's signal relays would have a radio receiver too, that way you could interface with it remotely when nearby for maintenance, or even have people close to a relay send signals to it with radio which are converted into ansible signals for transmission out to other stars or distant planets. If that's the case, one of those primitives who'se got nothing better to do than do really weird things to their Ham Radio just might be able to send a signal to your signal booster.
It's a long shot, but if that signal they sent was modulated just right they could, by pure chance, successfully connect to your relay. Odds are good this wouldn't be a government or a corporation/org. Those guys make big radios for big things and as a result do not tinker with their radios in weird ways. Not even when looking for alien life with radio telescopes. No, the only person who might decide to see what happens if you use a piece of crystallized drain cleaner to modulate your radio signal, and thereby get your encryption code modulation just right by pure luck is some individual dork with a Ham Radio who likes to tinker with it in frankly bizarre ways. Of course the odds of this are incredibly low, so low you wouldn't worry about it when installing your signal booster. After all, why worry about a 1:1,000,000,000,000,000 chance?
Well... If there are 1,000,000,000,000 ansibles out there, each with their own code the odds of contacting a specific one by pure luck via screwing with a radio randomly might be 1:1,000,000,000,000, but the odds of contacting any given one of them well... That's going to be much more probable. How probable? Well, maybe, just maybe, to the point where given a few million star systems with primitive cultures and ansible relays, a few hundred weirdos with radios just might have gotten to bother some space megacorp's help desk a few times. That's still not a problem a space-civ would worry about. It's just more spam-calls. Add them to your block list and move on.
But what if you were a ship capatain? The only person crewing your small ship. On a mission that took you between the stars, sometimes going days without seeing another person. What if suddenly, in the middle of a lonely patch of space your phone rang and an alien said hello?
In other words, in your univerce with a proper space phone network, that crazy mare your friend knows who insists she has an alien penpal just might not be crazy. Of course, you still wouldn't believe her. Not till their penpal lands to say hi and drop off some souvenirs from Procyon III.
How's that for a story set up, guys?
I'd have a better idea of what to say about this if it wasn't basically 90 degrees F outside. Or around 32 C for those of you using metric.
4884975 TLDR; space telephone networks = slight chance weirdos living in non-starfaring civilizations could get an alien penpal.
Here's how to build a cheep AC unit. I made one, and they work pretty well!
Ooooooooo, does this mean mean your upcoming story is going to be built around your "ancient FTL communications network that non-FTL civilizations are using" idea?
Curious, and with many implications. I like it!
What kind of souvenirs would those be, though?
Thanks for the cool blog post!
4884986 Yes, though by this point xenos can make new ones and have repaired/expanded the network. There are nations with FTL ships out there which sell ships to pre ftl civilizations with their drives made inaccessable/self destruct if you try to reverce engineer them. FTL travel is a premium currency.
4884991Hover bed. The bed dosnt hover, it hoers you. Prefect comfort!
And then there's the fun when you have FTL ships but not FTL comms to go with them.
Ever read any of the books from this author? (I've mainly just read the first set of books listed in that universe, and Cyteen and Regenesis from the second set listed, to be honest. Though I've been considering getting some others from the second set, and maybe looking into the third set listed as well.)
That author actually has an interesting version of FTL, especially since you can't leave FTL just anywhere, you need a big enough mass nearby to dump down to normal speeds again. Miscalculate your jump and miss that, and... Well, let's just say that you'd be in for a very bad time. Forever.
4885072 Yeah that's a fun setting idea, but so is "Space AOL is a thing". I flipped a coin XD As for FTL fun... I prefer limited jump numbers to most other methods of making FTL dangerous.
Imagine your drive has to be refueled between uses. You get say 2-3 hops with a standard ship, 5-6 with a vessel meant for operating on its own in remote places. Now imagine that your navigation is done via looking for stars gravity wells and the further away that star is the harder it is for your nav computer to get the angle right. The longer your jump, the bigger odds you wind up in interstellar space and need to jump again, wasting fuel. Each jump become more and more intense as you explore, because that last jump could take you all the way back to a fueling station, but what if you miss? If you miss on that last jump, well... I hope you're okay with dying in the void.
4885107
Well, the ships do need some sort of fuel (Trying to remember what exactly, I want to say that hydrogen or water or something are somehow involved? Apparently the stations collect it with some sort of big scoop or something IIRC.) And while it's *possible* to chain multiple jumps in a row, it can be pretty hard on the crew to do it. Not to mention the effect that sort of thing has on the whole mass/velocity/vector calculations used to end up where you're trying to go. (As opposed to dropping out of jump interface coincident with the large mass you need to use to haul down with (basically a telefrag), or to missing entirely and your ship pretty much sailing out into forever at a constantly increasing speed (also bad)... Also sounds like chaining jumps really tight and starting a new one already at near-c from dropping out of the last one leaves you with even less room for error before you accrue too much energy to successfully dump down out of jump interface at your destination.)
Though it sounds like in either FTL setup, that whole mass/distance/vector calculation is the important bit between you and a very bad forever.
I have NO IDEA what I just read.
All I know is that I would be maximum cheeky in any possible circumstance, so moon it would be. Hell, carve something dumb onto the other side of their moon for shits and giggles, see if they notice.
Ha, that sound amazing, the best of penpals, the furthest of distances.
Please add in fake space AOL when you write it. It's too good not to use.
I don't agree that instant communication always destroys the narritive, but it does force the narrative to deeply involve it as the most important technoligy like in Vatta's War, Eclipse Phase, or Enders Game.
After glazing over the scientific paper part (Damn it Meep I'm a mage, not a physicist) and jumping down to the story idea, I would say that yes I would very much like to see such an idea come to pass.
4885483 It's not that it distroies the narrative, it's that it makes you tell a different kind of narrative. I've got a certain idea that I wanna do :3
4885107
I REALLY like the sounds of this idea. I wonder if the ponies find the probe, or if they set it up...? Or perhaps it's not actually a fanfic; it sounds interesting no matter what.
Still, there are other ways of handling ansibles:
I suggest you go take a look at Troy Rising (Live Free or Die, Citadel, and The Hot Gate are the books so far; b-ok.org may have something) or the universe of Schlock Mercenary (webcomic, go google it) (the universe is almost shared, actually; Ringo got permission to use it, and it's only somewhat non-canon) for ideas on engines and power systems. Their method of contacting new civs is a ... bit more obvious ... however.
The engines convert mass to energy, but need He3 as a buffer. Their internet is effectively instant, but it still allows for plenty of cool stuff. In this case, they have essentially open-sourced even their military stuff, so they can just look up info they need on Earth's enemies, or for how they can build epic ships (there is a literal Death Star by book 2, and it causes SAN damage to one of their enemy scientists when he figures out just what they used as a drive!) just by thinking big and slightly crazy. But, since the galaxy is set up more like the UN than an actual functional government, they can't really do anything more than wish Earth luck.
It makes for a great bootstrap for the story and tech levels, and yet it also still allows the story to be fascinating.
4885860 That sounds like a cool set up! I really like it :3 and dont worry I'm going to be beginning work on something involving this concept tonight.
4885656
Ah, I getcha, can't wait, you set a little hook in my brain that's telling me to "Check Fimfic nows, Meep doing Sci-fi soonish."
Combined with the EP live game I'm barely scraping together, I feel adequate amount of sci-fi is back in my life.
Sounds like good ideas for me.