Thursday, August 15, 2013

Communication through space

I have to assume that communication through space will have to be limited by the speed of light (unless black holes will somehow provide "warp points" to send data faster through space, or shortcut it I suppose).

I was thinking about if we took a space craft and gave it a bunch of little beacons whose job is to simply transmit any message that it receives to any other beacon it can reach. We could put a time stamp on it (using our Absolute Time we have calculated), and each beacon when it see's it can determine if it's forwarded it on or not. This is all cool and stuff, but if we assume that we're restricted to even radio waves for speed (not light), we could conceivably send something out that is constantly transmitting, eventually due to distances and these restrictions, when we receive things from it will begin to distance themselves. Imagine listening to transmissions from years in the past that are being heard for the first time? Imagine if someone took off from earth, and once they were say a distance of 50 earth years transmission time (so we get their transmission 50 years after transmission), we start hearing a new form of music, or hearing about discoveries. We would literally be listening to echoes from the past. New discoveries from the craft could be getting transmitted to us and we would be discovering them years in the future. I for one find this facinating.


No comments:

Post a Comment