4 ms·
The idea of buffering data by transmitting it somewhere far, bouncing it off a moon or whatnot, and using that distance of radio waves as your memory is my favo
by Waterluvian 2y ago
The idea of buffering data by transmitting it somewhere far, bouncing it off a moon or whatnot, and using that distance of radio waves as your memory is my favourite thing ever.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoThere's a great sci-fi short story (well, two, I guess) that I can recommend based on this - although, knowing what you said is a slight spoiler for them.
- Waterluvian 2y agoPlease do!!
- wizzwizz4 2y agoOne of them is https://qntm.org/transi https://qntm.org/transi. I don't know about the other.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoThat's one of the ones I was thinking of! Another one is "The Hundred Light Year Diary", by Greg Egan.
- OscarCunningham 2y agoIn Conway's Game of Life, the first self-constructing machine used this principle. It has two construction arms, and the recipe for them to create new copies of themselves is encoded in gliders and bounced back-and-forth between them. This turned out to be much simpler than building any kind of storage device. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Gemini https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Gemini
- NortySpock 2y agoSort of like a really, really long delay-line memory tube, it's just mostly-vacuum instead of mostly-mercury... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
- rbanffy 2y agoOTOH, you’d be building one of the largest computers in the solar system. Count me in.
- canadianfella 2y ago[dead]
- calaphos 2y agoUsed to be a common thing for storing analog signals in the past :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
- geonaut 2y ago+1 this is discussed in the Andrew Hodges Turing biography (and no doubt many other books)
- causality0 2y agoDelay-line memory used this concept in a variety of ways, such as by bouncing slow sound waves around a chamber and by transmitting twists along a long coiled wire.
- amelius 2y agoExcept access times are not so good, generally.
- colanderman 2y agoUnfortunately due to free-space path loss limiting the Shannon-Hartley channel capacity, the total amount of information storable using this method asymptotically approaches zero for large distances. For reference, the combined formulas are C=d×B×log_2(1+(Dc÷4πdf)²×S÷N)÷c. And lim->∞ d×ln(1+1÷d²) unfortunately = 0. (Curiously, attempting to store more information by increasing bandwidth -- and thus center frequency -- suffers the same limitation.) (Wolfram Alpha isn't forthcoming yet with a closed-form solution for the optimal distance...)
- trhway 2y agoOne of the things preventing us from seeing dinosaur images reflected back to us from the objects at 33Mly+
- b112 2y agoThis presumes current antenna, so "currently prevents" would be more accurate. Yes, things spread over distance. However, building quintillions of tiny sensors and spewing them across immense distances, and using it as a spread-array sensor net would enable capture that might otherwise elude us. This is why I don't like "prevent" as a term here, even though I 100% get your reason for using it. 300 years ago, some might have cited innumerable reasons why the distance to the moon "prevents" us from ever getting there! After all, it would take a ship+sail centuries to cross the void, everyone would be dead!
- justsomehnguy 2y agoThe soft limit is the size of a solar system, a practical one is the furthest and the biggest body in it, so... Jupiter/Saturn?