An Internet To Span A Galaxy

Wouldn’t it be great to surf to a website and find out about any planet, Star or literally anything else in the galaxy? Just think of all the forums, chat and possibilities for communication that a galaxy wide Internet would give us.

Could this be done? It would need a rather long cable.  I am in a rural area in the UK and therefore can only get 512K. I wonder what sort of speeds you would get to Alpha  Centauri? Obviously cables aren’t really that practical especially if ET is flying around in his spaceship and hangs himself on one.

Planetary Internet

If we used wireless Internet like we do on the earth the main restriction would be the speed of light and the vastness of space. As we all know a light-year is a unit of length, equal to just under ten trillion kilometres.  Alpha Centauri is about 4.37 ly away so you can see this would take a rather long time at the speed of light (300 000 kilometres per second). It’s not exactly instantaneous communication which is what we are after for an Internet similar to ours otherwise it’ll probably be called e-mail or should I say galactic mail.

It isn’t possible to travel faster than light or should I say that’s what’s believed at the moment but a speed faster than light can be observed as is shown in this report. Another discussion on faster than light things is here.

So it may be possible to communicate one-day faster than light, so I think anyway, and therefore the obvious use would be an internet spanning the Galaxy and the universe. A book that uses faster than light Communications  (by what is called ultra wave) is the Hugo award winning book A Fire Upon the Deep

A relatively easy way to get information from the Galaxy is to send, small , self replicating research probes to other stars . Once there, they build copies of themselves and continue to explore outwards , relaying a steady stream of information back on Earth. These self replicating probes also known as Von Neumann machines, are named after their inventor John Von Neumann. The beauty of this idea is once you manage to construct the first self replicating machine the rest is automatic. The probes would expand into space geometrically , spreading rapidly to fill the whole universe. Once established , this network could be used for communication. The trouble with this network would be that the information would be out of date and it wouldn’t really be quite like an Internet.

Connecting Worlds

So if we pushed all the problems to one side what would this Internet spanning stars be like? spam could be absolutely astronomical and Google would have to get its act together quite quickly. Perhaps we wouldn’t use Google and there would be a much larger search engine already in place like Galaxgle. Then there would be viruses as well or perhaps the rest of the universe doesn’t have quite such a problem as we get here on earth or perhaps it’s worse.

Of course there would always be the criminal element but perhaps anti-virus technology, as I would expect it to, would have increased to cope with these threats. There must be some good things to come from this new star spanning Internet?

Information would be the main benefit to everybody. But what about intergalactic eBay? It is mind-boggling to think of the things that could be on sale but I wouldn’t like to pick up things that were for pick up only. The spaceship category could be quite interesting but I expect as always it would be a bit boring and some of the big battle cruisers would probably not be on sale due to being an offensive item or some similar rule. I expect there would be vintage and collectable ships though.

I get a bit dizzy when I think about all the possibilities of the things for sale on the intergalactic eBay. Treasures from distant planets, perhaps planets themselves but hopefully not any planet disintegration devices or death stars.

Porn is a different matter and I can’t imagine what a six armed four legged alien would be doing to a human.

I do however hope that they have a questions and answer website.  I would like to ask what is the answer to life the universe and everything as I just can’t put my finger on it.

quantum communication between the stars