Microblog Posts

The digital-mindedness has consumed you. They obviously just beam the video in analog to the hull of the other ship, projector-style.

The best part of the movie Independence Day was when the protagonist connects his laptop to the alien ship and see onscreen that they use TCP/IPv4

What are the odds???!

https://xkcd.com/927/

I know most of you know the reference already, this is for members of today's lucky 10,000

If the only legacy of humanity is XKCD comics I am ok with it

And even then they shouldn’t be able to communicate at all. The Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky plays with that a lot.

The only reason the space faring civilisations are able to open communication channels with each other is that they all originate from earth and their technology is at least partly based on what the once mighty humans have left behind.

Which leads to this hilarious chapter in which, after finally being able to communicate with the foreign ships, our characters receive just a pattern of wildly dancing colours and they’re all like wtf? I guess that’s what you get for trying to speak to an octopus.

What it means is folks like Uhura and Sato were the most hypercompetent crew members on the whole damn ship, figuring out protocols compatibility on-the-fly.

In the expanse books and show there is a lag the further away the signal is going, instant if close. Sometimes minutes, sometimes hours. They'll just be video chatting then you'll reply to what someone say, wait 30 seconds for them to recieve it then they start speaking and you have to then wait 30 seconds to get their reply.

In space, everything is so far away, that you can get away with no encryption what so ever when communicating between 2 ships in close proximity.

I like the theory of the mathematically obvious RTC protocol, since that would also serve as a sufficient filter for newer races to determine if they are technologically advanced enough. Could they successfully dial in without assistance? Cool let's start chatting now and begin integration with the federation (plus leaves the opportunity of a plot for an almost-ready race that was given illegal assistance, and maybe it's revealed that one of the dominant races was also given illegal assistance when they first dialed in)

Since the invention of radio, Earth has been broadcasting signals out into the universe. The very first signals were extremely basic. AM basically takes vibration and slaps a carrier wave on it. Over time, signals got more complicated, but if you understood how the first signals worked, you could probably guess what changes happened to create the new format. An alien wanting to communicate with earthlings could probably go and sample everything Earth has broadcast over the decades and learn how that new and improved protocol works.

Or comms with a new civilization could start with some exchange of voyager-style basic info about the species, then negotiate an AM signal, then use that to negotiate a more complex signal, until you build up a complex and data-dense signal that both ships are able to encode and decode.

Also, a lot of the complexity of modern signals comes from compression and encryption. Compression because you want to get as much signal as possible through a crowded transmission medium. Encryption because you don't want unauthorized people to access the data. In a ship-to-ship encounter in space you might not need to worry about those two things. You can use immense bandwidth because there's nobody else using that section of space so there's no need to restrict your transmission, and you want to communicate so you'll remove all the encryption that would prevent that.

Sci-fi media always sets unrealistically high expectations for system interoperability.

Try piping an opus bitstream to ChatGPT

Well, I'm sure in the future they would have better tools than either of these.