[…] that no one at BioWare reads this blog. If they did, they would know that I already came up with a clever idea for galaxy wide internet based around Ansibles. In case you are to lazy to read that article let me re-iterate it […]

Perhaps there are ways to communicate at the speed of light across vast distances. Apparently physicists have recently discovered how to “teleport energy. Maybe this can be explained away by the consistent histories theory, and the research hasn’t been published in a peer reviewed journal, so take it with a lump of salt.

@ Tino:

Heh… Does that mean my torrents would start seeding before I even started downloading them? Or that online games would have negative lag?

@ Alphast:

That sounds like it could work. See, I’m quite confident that we would eventually figure out a way to extend the internet across interstellar space if we would put our minds to it. :)

I like the idea, but I suppose there is a way to turn around the no-cloning impossibility. As explained in the Wikipedia article, it is possible to produce imperfect cloning. Now, imagine that your bandwidth is four times better than in the books. With each quarter of the bandwidth, you get an approximation of your data packet. Then you interpolate the original packet out of the 4 approximations. You would be able to approximate the message content (which is binary) to such an extent that it would become intelligible. You would get loss of data, of course, but that is already the case with TCP-IP right?

If I remember correctly, any form of faster-than-light communication + special relativity makes it possible to send messages back in time. So I wouldn’t worry too much about the limited bandwidth since it is combined with awesome negative ping times :D

(Basically it would work by 1) accelerating to close to the speed of light 2) use the device to send the message in that high-speed reference frame 3) quickly deaccelerate again before you have traveled any relevant distance. Everything2 has a long confusing article about this, http://tr.im/Dbm8 )

Also, LOL – the IP to Country plugin is detecting my blackberry as having a Canadian IP.

Note: I never been to Canada. Heh!

@ jambarama:

Well… Its low bandwidth because Le Guin said so. I tried to keep it close to the original idea.

As long as we’re inventing principles of physics to create this technology, why does it have to be low bandwidth? I mean, why can’t “simultaneity” just be a high bandwidth principle? If we can use the no-cloning principle once, we should be able to do it thousands of time in rapid succession, or to particles with lots of information? The idea is clever though, it’d be kind of like the first galaxy-wide multicast protocol.