Communication in the Commonwealth

[Periculi]

George, I have been wondering-

Does the CW have an ansible?

Is the technology level of earth space in transcendence using FTL or instantaneous communication?

Do they transmit through the stargates?

Do they have a star system or multi-star system internet equivalent?

Or do you view the star systems as isolated in this regard and dependent on starships to bring the latest news and rumors to the colonies?

[schilcote]

Perhaps they use messages in vacum-sealed bottles.

[george moromisato]

George, I have been wondering-

Does the CW have an ansible?

Is the technology level of earth space in transcendence using FTL or instantaneous communication?

Do they transmit through the stargates?

Do they have a star system or multi-star system internet equivalent?

Or do you view the star systems as isolated in this regard and dependent on starships to bring the latest news and rumors to the colonies?

In this time-period (2400's) humans do NOT have the technology for FTL anything. The stargates (and alien jumpdrive) are all they've got (and they don't know how those work). All interstellar communications is via messenger ships passing through stargates.

The alien races of the galaxy (e.g., Iocrym) DO have FTL technology, but even that is not instantaneous (e.g., it takes non-zero time to pass through a stargate--time proportional to distance). Comms is the same way--FLT but not instantaneous.

Domina and Oracus do have instantaneous communication, but only when they communicate with a sentient being.

[Atarlost]

So no internet as we know it, but Email and Usenet were originally designed for batch communication and would be quite able to pigyback on mail ships. Probably every merchant ship carries a few petabytes of memory reserved for Emails and usenet replication. The cost of this memory is probably trivial in the Transcendence era.

[Periculi]

Cool, thanks George.

[hex]

Probably every merchant ship carries a few petabytes of memory reserved for Emails and usenet replication.

Sort of the definition on untrusted 3rd party's though, communication would be vulnerable to Ship-in-the-middle attacks

[Atarlost]

Only if you only sent once. And sending only once is stupid in a setting with significant piracy. The latency is too long and transmission loss to common for receipt acknowledgment so you send each message several times, say on the first 10 or 20 ships that pass through. You can handle lots of overhead because while your latency is apalling your data rate is phenomenal.

Then there's encryption. One time pads can be distributed by official couriers. Even quantum computers can't break that kind of encryption.

[Periculi]

Until someone comes along and says - 'Why don't we set up a high-powered comm station on each side of the stargate (probably look like those little cw beacons) and rock a com-bot back and forth through the gate to update the system more often.' These would, of course, be controlled by the CW for the most part.

[Fossaman]

Until someone comes along and says - 'Why don't we set up a high-powered comm station on each side of the stargate (probably look like those little cw beacons) and rock a com-bot back and forth through the gate to update the system more often.' These would, of course, be controlled by the CW for the most part.

Exactly right. Once you do that you're looking at speed of light communications plus stargate lag, and that's it. But once you get into territory with pirates and whatnot, that's not really a viable option.

[Atarlost]

It's also still way too much latency for a viable internet. I think you'd still wind up with Email and Usenet and the local network. Occasionally in something like the St. Kat's commercial cluster you'd have a inter-station network, but the latency would be barely tolerable.

[Periculi]

In reality it would probably end up being a cluster of private corp and state comm network sats and equipment deployed around the gates in the heavier population zones like a space junkyard - all kinds of entities would insist on their rights to interlink star systems and the average joe would be faced with half a bazillion rate schedules, service contracts and continually increasing fees for distance of info requested or sent.

Pilots would have to be extra careful gating into a system such as St. K's for fear of damaging a comm sat array that drifted into the shipping lanes and facing the inevitable millions of credits in fees and liability for interrupting communication...

[schilcote]

Heh, this is why I gave the Stephinians SPAAD (FTL communications system based on a principle in quantum physics) technology.

[Aury]

FTL quantum entanglement communication ^^
It's not too hard to make entangled particles, that's already been done (of course, the hard part is keeping them stable and turning them into an economical communications device, but its not too hard.

[george moromisato]

FTL quantum entanglement communication ^^
It's not too hard to make entangled particles, that's already been done (of course, the hard part is keeping them stable and turning them into an economical communications device, but its not too hard.

Actually, I don't believe it is possible to create FTL communications with quantum entanglement. Here is one explanation of that (which I will not pretend to understand)

http://everything2.com/title/quantum%25 ... munication

Basically, it looks like quantum entanglement cannot convey information (since the state to which the particles collapse is random). You will need to send some other information along (via a normal communications method) in order to use quantum entanglement.

[Atarlost]

The gist of the problem is that if you manipulate either member of an entangled pair you collapse the entanglement. They're really nothing but a fancier and less robust one time pad cypher.