Holographic Communication

In the early 20th century armies used search lights to find airplanes in the sky. They sometimes fitted shutters on these lights and used them for Morse-code. The light was pointed at the sky, sometimes at clouds. That enable transmitting “blinky-messages” beyond line of sight over significant distances. Armies eventually abandoned this method of communication for radios.

But there might be cause to bring this idea back. Science has advanced quite a lot in the last 100 years and we can use light to make tiny low power plasma bubbles in the air that emit brief light pulses. Enabling over the horizon optical communication with minimal to no infrastructure costs.

Why this matters now

The systems we have are not resilient. We are about to enter a period of turbulent geopolitical power-struggle. The communication systems are not robust enough for what lies ahead. It’s too easy to cut the ocean-cables (that happened recently and even though only a few cables got cut it caused noticeable outages for over a hundred million people. The satellite constellation internet has proven to be easily jammed by electromagnetic interference (that too happened recently). Sophisticated rockets are proliferating and satellites are gradually loosing their above-harm’s-way status. All the large data centers are easy military targets, the military weapons to destroy those cost 10000x less than rebuilding a data center. Any kinetic war will cripple digital infrastructure hosted on these. But there’s more, the large data centers also funneled the internet cables into vulnerable bottle-necks, where old fashioned saboteur spy operations might get at it, so the land cables have become less resilient too.

But I’m not just worried about collateral infrastructure damage that results from fights between nation states. All that vulnerable stuff, might become a lever for power, where society gets blackmailed by the people who can destroy the information-pipes. Like in the feudal days where the feudal lord could block roads and threaten to destroy trade connections, unless every trader payed a toll. Information-pipes might become subject to that kind of thing.

The little plasma balls floating in the air giving of faint light pulses suffer no such weaknesses, they can’t be cut, or exploded by missiles, nor can anybody put a toll on them. Queue the Firefly theme song. The transmitters on the ground are cheap to make, and very expensive to destroy. That scores high on resiliency.

I’m not saying we should throw away the current internet infrastructure, just add something as resilient as holographic comm-links in the mix, and then attacks against the rest will have less effect, and become less likely. The economic dimension is favorable as well, it will break open the existing cartel structures, that have formed around natural monopolies, and lower the barrier to entry a lot and micro-data centers will become viable.

Beyond Fragile Cables

Imagine projecting a tiny holographic blinking dot of light in the sky to transmit information and a photodetector+optic to receive information.

A communication link is configured in 3D space. -The upside is that the available volume of sky is functionally unlimited, and you never again have to deal with network-collisions and interference from communication signals of others. -The Downside, it requires a good deal of precision in mechanical systems, so it’ll be fiddly for a while. Picture using Binoculars to look at a firefly floating high up in the sky, you need to get up-down, left-right and focal distance just right to see it. There is a technology upgrade path to a solid-state chip version, that works similarly to matrix array antennas, It needs Terra-hertz switching logic, which requires photon-based micro-controller (it exists but it’s very bleeding edge)

The range can be tremendous, there is enough gas molecules in the stratosphere to make this work. It will enable hops over the ocean with a small number of relay buoys.

The military might want this technology because

• it’s harder to triangulate the origin of a transmission (you need to intersect the light-beam, to find the source), relay-transmitter-stations, soldiers, planes and ships will suffer fewer attacks from signal homing weapons, making it very robust.
• it’s very hard to jam, (you need to flood the sky with very thick smoke, usually associated with forest-fires and volcano eruptions)

Consumers might want this technology because

• the patent for making plasma bubbles ran out, so lots of companies would be competing on price and quality.
• no natural monopolies, same benefit as above.
• might be a fun hobby toy for radio-enthusiast type people.

Technically this seems very feasible, but the current political climate for communications-tech is a minefield. I’m a little light on theory, will a different communication technology change the political climate, or does political climate need to improve to make a new technology happen ?