I was reading a book, The Victorian Internet, which talked about how connected the Victorian era was, with wires stretching everywhere above the roads. It’s probably exaggerated, but it got me thinking. There are many ways to engage in en masse interconnectivity. Computers, of course, are one of them, but we also have had, for example, messenger pigeons, drones we can send to different places, search dogs with an interconnected sniff system (I forgot what that was called), etc.
Suppose you had a civilization. Maybe it’s on a planet whose environment interferes with the capabilities of a classic internet, or maybe it’s a normal fantasy setting where the classic internet is cursed. However, the civilization still needs some kind of apparatus of interconnectivity. What’s the best/closest thing you can think of as a replacement for the internet without it being the internet as we know it?
Telegraphs have existed long before internet ever did. And heliographs predate those by a fair bit.
And then there’s the Hydraulic Telegraph from 2400 years ago.
I was reading a book, The Victorian Internet, which talked about how connected the Victorian era was, with wires stretching everywhere above the roads. It’s probably exaggerated,
Why do you think that would be exaggerated? Just curious to know.
Suppose you had a civilization. Maybe it’s on a planet whose environment interferes with the capabilities of a classic internet,
Don’t mix the Internet (which is the willingness to interconnect people through some communication means) and the technology by which it’s achieved.
I mean, if people on that planet can even think of ‘an Internet’ like ours they
- must at least have devised a way to build their own type of computers (and those needs power and some kind of wiring in order to work) and digital data storage.
- must have thought about connecting those computers together in order to do things faster/simpler or remotely and in a decentralized way (that’s how the Internet was created: to be decentralized, not in order to exchange cat pictures ;))
If they can’t imagine anything like our computers, then they probably can’t imagine ‘an Internet’ anymore than say a pre-Bell human being could wish to use a smartphone with 5G connectivity. They may be dreaming of some sort of ‘portable means of communication’, sure, and many scifi writers did back then, but it would not be something as specific as the Internet and that would be, well, scifi.
So, considering they have some kind of computing machine already and that they can devise the idea of connecting them together, they should be able to develop their existing technologies (and the protocols to use them) to communicate farther and farther away (how long was the first ever phone line?).
If they don’t have that, they probably don’t need global means of communications yet.
Keep in mind it was not that long ago that most news people would read in their lifetime was local only—beside wars, major crisis news were local. There was no constant need to share cat pictures with people living on the other side of the planet either, or to cry out loud in front of one’s phone camera about whatever personal drama one’s going through. Drama were already a thing back then, as well as sharing cat pictures (and porn, btw) but we did it with our friends or our family (maybe not porn) or at best within some community members who, back when traveling the world was not obvious nor cheap to do, were all local to us. So why would one need a planetary Internet to begin with?
What you call the Internet is very recent tech—first email ever sent is 1971 (54 years old), TikTok is around 2016 (9 years old), Facebook was created in 2004 (21 years old), Apple in 1976 (49 years old) and Google is 27 years old (1998), the first ‘smartphone’ (iPhone 1, is from 2007. There were mobile phones before that but it was the iPhone that changed the deal), and so on. I’m older than all of them and I had been communicating with people all over the world before they appeared. And I’m not even that old. In fact, our entire species have been communicating for a few thousands years already.
The desire to communicate, to create a network of connections between people has not changed much, the tools (and the cost of using them) changed dramatically, obviously.
As well as the type of content we consider worth exchanging (which would be an interesting discussion in itself).
I never sent much cat pictures through snail mail back in the days, nor talked much about my outrage regarding anything because snail mail was slow (and outrage never lasts much) and was costly when done overseas and so were phone calls (and so was taking film pictures, btw) and I’d rather focus that time and money on things I considered worth it—ie, useful/interesting to both my correspondent and I.
Thinking about it, maybe your hypothetical internet-less alien civilization is much happier (and healthier) than we are today with our constant dramas and low, low effort contents that make up the essential of our Internet? Just wondering, obviously.
edit: typos
Cuba might be a good place to look for a real world example of this. They had the concepts of “SNET” and “el paquete semanal” that were solutions to poor internet penetration, expensive internet costs (pay per MB), and heavy restrictions on that internet.
El paquete semanal is a weekly payload of the latest movies, TV episodes, manga, comics, etc. that gets brought into the country and spread by sneakernet.
SNET is widespread guerilla LAN networking to the point where Cuba had a well populated private WoW server. Also solved some of the Internet cost issues because you could game and share content locally without paying for every little MB.
As of 2020, SNET is now “illegal” and those existing networks are being absorbed into their ISP.
Oh damn. Am I really so old now that people can’t imagine a world without Internet?
I was born six months before Google was founded. I am now 25.
I’m the same age as MTV.
My point is, there are adults older than me who have never lived in a time where the internet wasn’t a thing
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld has The Clacks, a network of semaphore towers that can transmit messages, later including encoded images, across the disc.
Ah, what you’re describing here is Plato’s cave; a place underground so deep that you cannot see the stars. The starry sky, of course, is a metaphor for the internet, or for universal knowledge.
I think in such a world where there can be no internet, there can be no energy either. Because just like the internet, energy requires a straight line to travel along. But the internet could only not exist, if such straight lines were impossible, like in a very wrapped space (i.e. Jungle). In this case, Information could only be exchanged within small neighbourhoods, leading to the fragmentation of the space.
Plato, of course, provides a solution: You have to get out of the cave first, before you can reach enlightenment. In real life, such a thing is equivalent so “lifting yourself out of the swamp you have surrounded yourself with, and let go of earthly affections”. In a jungle, you could rise above the trees, to have a direct line of sight to the sky. Then, you can communicate. This idea is often expressed in the form of an arrow, which you shoot up at its origin, rising it above the trees and obstacles, only for it to travel in a straight line and come down somewhere else. So basically, the internet is arrows of information being exchanged.
Does that give you some ideas?
Ham Radio?
this sounds more like you can’t have computers. I mean once you have computers its sorta impossible not to have something that is the internet all but in name.
No, i disagree. Imagine a jungle, you might have a computer, but you can’t lay out cables due to lack of free space/straight lines. You would have to run the cables in such convoluted directions, that they might end up running in circles. Or the roots of the trees might hinder the cables, or destroy them over time.
The internet transports information. Roads transport goods and people. Both require straight lines from origin to destination, otherwise they’re inefficient.
see you don’t need the cables though. any communication medium will do. strobing lights, subsonci pulses, as long as the computer has input and output capability it can technically use any communication medium we use and by using it in a digital manner an mimic the internet.
Technically, the internet has multiple layers and only the lowest ones are dependent on the physical network implementation—you could totally send network packets via messenger pigeon and still have it be a valid part of the internet. But I think the scenario you most likely have in mind is one where we don’t have wired or wireless networks, and/or we don’t have computers to function as endpoints. And the goal is to have some kind of long-distance user-to-user exchange of non-sensory data (i.e., not just telephones or broadcast media.)
One solution might be to shine lasers on a distant object, like the moon: everyone has a designated signaling target on the object, and you could send them data by shining a pattern of light on their target.
One solution might be to shine lasers on a distant object, like the moon:
The moon is 1.26 light seconds away. That’s a 2520 ms ping.
OSI Model gang represent!
Also, I’m sure you already know this, but RFC 1149 (IP over Avian Carriers) was actually tested by Bergen Linux User Group. They successfully sent packets several kilometers.
Psionics like telepathy, perfect recall, and mind control. Be sure to have low rank psychics blasting telepathic ads constantly to everyone in range and noble psi-warriors hunting them down. All public gatherings require significant mental shields or risk subtle mental manipulations culminating in mindless zombies under control by nefarious villains posing as merchants and politicians.
Warhammer 40k has entered the chat….
Where people with psychic abilities are grabbed immediately upon discovery when they are young and trained to use their ability to send messages across the stars.
Or in some more dark scenarios drained to a husk of their life force to keep the Golden Throne operating.
You mean like The Postman?
Low cost newsletter publishing with a network of delivery mechanisms from vacuum tube’s, to pigeons and weasels, to street urchins.
the Brazilverse
sneakernet of course
All you need is something reliable that sends and receives data.
Game of Thrones/ASOIF used ravens.
You could use specially trained rats in underground tunnels.
Relays of lights or fires in hill tops is always an option, as is smoke signals.
Lasers or spotlights projected on clouds could work. Or the dark of the moon. If everyone just agreed to a patch of lunar dust and projected binary flashes there, encrypted to respond to others, a crazy flashing dot covered moon would be the equivalent or a public internet.
Or same concept with blimps.
