- Walkie Talkie
First read of the subject may cause your eyes to glaze over and scream NERD! You are probably right but bare with me and I think you’ll find this interesting. All these three things are interrelated. When I was seven or eight years old the thought of a pair of walkie talkies with their near magical ability to communicate over vast distances (Up to 1/4 mile the ad said!) made me giddy with excitement and amazement. I remember when I finally got my first pair. Being an only child there is a very limited amount of enjoyment one can have. My parents were in their 40’s or nearly so, when I was born so getting Mom or Dad interested in playing with an eight year old on a walkie talkie had a very limited appeal to them.
I made do, with listening and ever so often someone my age would visit and we’d play with them. Fast forward five years and I was again interested in radio communication. This time with the CB (Citizen Band) radio. For $100 I got a base station, and my Dad and I install a antenna on a thirty foot pole. It was great fun and I was able to talk to people 20 or 30 miles away. Usually only 5 miles. I moved on from CB to Amateur Radio (HAM) and the distance I could communicate with someone grew to world wide. I had a great interest in electronics and many of the sciences.
- Sonar FS-23
Fast forward 20 years. Microsoft comes out with Windows 95 and it just got a little easier to get on this thing called the Internet. What an idea it was a world wide web. Anything seemed possible. All you needed was the right program and more communication speed. Words, sounds them images were able to be seen by thousands of people all over the world near instantly. Jumping ahead another 15 years here we are. The Internet touches our lives even if we do not have a computer. Smart phones are common place. iPhone allows people to write apps, applications (programs), that make this phone do many different things. The same is true for the Android that I have. Newer to the Smart phone scene but similar in how you can develop specialized programs for it.
One such program is Marvel. Marvel is a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) client. It allows you to “talk” from your phone, or your computer, to a server running a piece of software called Ventrilo. Ventrilo has been out for several years and was made popular by Internet gamers before the ability to speak to others in the on line game you were playing was common place. The Ventrilo software is free and only requires a simple computer system with a connection to the Internet. My Android phone also has a connection to the Internet so with the Marvel software I am able to connect to a Ventrilo server and speak with up to 8 people.
Not only is this very reminiscent of talking on the CB to people on a specific channel, the ability to move around and carry on this conversation with a small hand held device is much like the walkie talkie that I found so amazing at a very young age.
The main difference (other than the almost insane amount of technology that is necessary to accomplish this) is the distance I am able to communicate. Plus I can communicate clearly and nearly 99.9% of the time! I have world wide communications with anyone that connects to the server!
I didn’t have to buy a specialized piece of equipment like a CB, a walkie talkie, a computer, etc… I just use my phone. So we are now seeing the beginning of soft machines. Machines that can be molded into many different tools, devices, toys.
As our technology increases, and keep in mind that I have seen the technology change from a child to a middle aged adult, so does the ability of this technology to be detected. For example. Back in the days of CB I would transmit a signal from the ground to the sky. The radio frequency signal went everywhere, including to outer space. Our television signals were broadcast in the tens of thousands of watts, streaming audio and video to our T.V. antennas then continuing at the speed of light far out into our galaxy. This signals could be picked up by another civilization if they were smart enough and interested enough to look for it. As we humans considered the possibility of life elsewhere we started using our technology to listen for signals from other civilizations. To this date we have not found any signal that could be confirm of extraterrestrial intelligent origin.
I believe the reason for this isn’t that they are not there, it’s because we have a very short time in the technology development of a civilization to be able to detect them. Their technology should change as ours has. Perhaps slower, or faster, but it is doubtful that they would be blasting radio signals into outer space for thousands, or hundreds of years. Just like us their technology would take less and less power and it would be focused to such a point that they could communicate with people all over their planet, or perhaps even nearby planets in their own solar system.
Personally I believe there is a yet to be discovered method of communication that is faster than light and will enable us to connect with other civilizations light years away. When we develop this technology I believe we will connect to this “network” and a new node coming on line this grand Internet. The new node will be called Earth.