Something a bit different - Communicating without satelites

[Anders Ämting]

This is strictly speaking more of a sci-fi setting, but I thought I'd ask for some input here anyway.

Basically, I'm sketching up a society on a planet surrounded by a system of war-satelites that automatically shoot down any object that tries to leave the planet. Stuff like airplanes are fine but once you get to the equivalent of low Earth orbit you take a death-ray to the face.

The planet itself has a single continent, Pangea-style, with a pleasant and firtile enviroment and plenty of resources. The human population are descendant of some fairly advanced colonists, but a few generations back they came out of a post-apocalypse scenario where their old culture was nearly destroyed. Since then they have managed to rebuild their society but have lost most of their history and knowledge.

Technologically they are a bit ahead of modern Earth, with stuff like nanotech and advanced robotics, but they have never had a successful space program and any satelites they tried to put in orbit were vaporized by the ones already there. Likewise, they have so far never found a way to disable the war-satelites, which were constructed with technology even more advanced then their own.

I'm currently trying to figure out how communication and media distribution might look like under these circumstances. Obviously they wouldn't have for example TV broadcasts via satelite or stuff like GPS, but since their tech is so advanced otherwise, they may have figure out way around some of these limitations. I admit I'm not that good at this, so any input you guys have to offer is welcome.

 

[Forsta-Phoenix]

Well most communication lines on earth are currently pumped through undersea cables, one recently got buggered on the coast of east africa, here's the Wiki Link: Submarine communications cable and here is a link to the current cables we have laid out:Map of Underseas cables

also there are overland cables too, last year a copper theif in the caucasus managed to plunge Armenia (might be another country) into an internet darkspot, so having massive information networks will still be very possible, and short range communications such as mobile phones will still be possible as these sattelites don't kill tall things.

As for GPS I think the most important thing is that the emmiters stay in the same place, the technology works by the sattelites sending out a 'ping' and then your device listens for these pings and then triangulates it's position from that (fun fact: the algorithm to work out the position has to take into account general relativity due to the speed the sattelites move) so I can't see why a system couldn't be developed either in high atmosphere or on top of massive masts provided it took into account the unpredictable nature of the weather, but this is fiction so you can have leeway.

Hope that helped a bit!

 

[zizban]

You could do the old fashioned way: bounce radio signals off the ionosphere. That's how it was done until the 60's.

 

[Drakhov]

You could do the old fashioned way: bounce radio signals off the ionosphere. That's how it was done until the 60's.

Or if you wanted to be a little more techno - balloons

 

[Steerpike]

Fiber optic cables.

 

[Devor]

The biggest point to having a satellite in orbit is line of sight. They can't send stuff through the Earth. Being in orbit, they require a relatively small number of satellites to get a good view of the planet. If you bring them lower, say by affixing them to a tall tower, they would still work exactly the same way. You'd just need many, many more of them, and having more of them would slow down communications (of course, slow is relative; if it's set in the future, they might still work much faster than ours. On the other hand, we'd assume the volume being transmitted would go up as well.).

Otherwise, fiber optic cables. I'd imagine some combination of the two, where "satellite towers" are connected by cables to offset interference.

 

[ThinkerX]

In my semi remote corner of the world, boring old network television is relayed through tall towers every fifty or a hundred miles. Likewise, cell phone signals (ok, more like every ten or twenty miles for them). I don't really see a problem here.

 

[Steerpike]

Maybe something creative with tesla coils?

 

[Anders Ämting]

Thanks for the input, you all. It's a great help.

I don't really see a problem here.

Well, I didn't exactly expect this to be an actual problem. I mean, I can write the story regardless. But like I said, I'm not used to taking these things into consideration, so I wanted to make sure there wasn't something vital I was overlooking.

 

[Drakhov]

Maybe something creative with tesla coils?

Some sort of rail / coil gun maybe - put a message inside a metal case and 'fire' it through a magnetic accelerator (similar to the pneumatic / vacuum tubes they used for this purpose before phones were as widespread as they are now).

 

[Anders Ämting]

Some sort of rail / coil gun maybe - put a message inside a metal case and 'fire' it through a magnetic accelerator (similar to the pneumatic / vacuum tubes they used for this purpose before phones were as widespread as they are now).

I'm pretty sure they at least have phones, probably even cellphones or something equivalent. Just no satelite phones.

Maybe I should rephrase the question: Are there any technological fields where satelites are actually required, as opposed to merely convenient?

 

[Devor]

Maybe I should rephrase the question: Are there any technological fields where satelites are actually required, as opposed to merely convenient?

The only thing I can think of is surveillance. Real time mapping. Google Earth kind of stuff.

International communications could have hiccups in that cable cords can be cut and towers torn down, so a nation could isolate themselves much more than they could today.

 

[Helen]

There's a phenomena in physics called ENTANGLEMENT.

Here's a link: Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Anders Ämting]

There's a phenomena in physics called ENTANGLEMENT.

Here's a link: Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I've heard about this, though if you have a suggestion for how to aply it, I'd ask you to extrapolate a bit.

 

[myrddin173]

There's a phenomena in physics called ENTANGLEMENT.

Here's a link: Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think Phillip Pullman used this to explain the communication stones the tiny people in his His Dark Materials series use.

 

[Saigonnus]

In an advanced society, you'd think they'd have some sort of way of transporting matter (like star trek), but if that isn't feasible, simple radio transmitters and recievers that use arrays of crystals could read/send "vibrations" through the atmosphere. It might even work well enough for communication to a lunar colony; just might take a bit to get an answer over distance. We send radio waves outside of the planet's ionosphere to world's we may think are populated and though it takes a while, it eventually would get there.

 

[Anders Ämting]

In an advanced society, you'd think they'd have some sort of way of transporting matter (like star trek),

I think teleportation may be a bit too advanced for these people.

And, well, inventing teleportation just to use it as a communications device kinda seems like overkill.

but if that isn't feasible, simple radio transmitters and recievers that use arrays of crystals could read/send "vibrations" through the atmosphere. It might even work well enough for communication to a lunar colony; just might take a bit to get an answer over distance. We send radio waves outside of the planet's ionosphere to world's we may think are populated and though it takes a while, it eventually would get there.

Well, it's not like they could actually get to their moon anyway.

 

[Saigonnus]

Wasn't really sure on the technology level in question; exactly what's available or not. Just trying to give options that perhaps you hadn't considered. Crystals are used in a few sci-fi novels often times as carriers for sound (crystal singer from Anne McCaffrey for example) and theoretically could be used in a communications device of some type.