Questions tagged [communication]
For questions relating to the exchange of ideas and information between beings.
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What would justify the use of homing pigeons in a world where sending digital messages is a viable option? [duplicate]
The setting is a post-scarcity civilization, where a galactic government exists, but due to the limitations on faster-than-light travel, each world is relatively self-governed.
I want a city on one of ...
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How are sapient crows utilized if there are phones for communicating?
A shaman society secret to normal humans, in the late 2000s era where phones and the internet exist: why and how would they still put to work their black feathery friends?
They were crucial before all ...
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Why might there be no communication between continents for centuries after a civilization collapse?
Centuries ago, the world was locked in a three-way cold war scenario between three large empires with nukes. The tech level was roughly equivalent to 2000's technology in our world. Runaway climate ...
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The Wheeler-Feynman Handshake as a mechanism for determining a fictional universal length constant enabling an ansible-like link
I'm writing a science fiction story set in a future where aliens have made contact with us and established interstellar trade.
I'm trying to invent a fairly believable universal standard unit of ...
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How detailed would these medieval era reports be?
I have no idea how to start researching this, so I'm going to here, where there are people who are much smarter than me. So I'm writing a story set in the medieval time period. In my story, there is a ...
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How Would a Spacefaring Civilization Using No Electricity Communicate?
I'm working on a civilization who was born out of a century-long interstellar war with an AI. So they had previously developed electrical and digital technology but now they're avoiding using any of ...
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How fast will information travel through my chain of command?
In the story I'm writing, there is a lot of medieval warfare. I want to know how well information and commands would be able to travel through my armies (clarification: by how well, I mean stuff like ...
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Why might a repressive order allow for flamboyant newscasters?
Thanks in advance and sorry if this isn't within the scope of the forum, I'm new but I've lurked so I totally get it if this doesn't really fit.
Anyway, let's get into it. Setting is a far-future ...
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Earth, Mirrored-Earth and aliens finding their location [closed]
There is our Earth. In a nearby galaxy there is Mirrored-Earth, much like our planet, with the exception that humans there are flipped left-right wise - so e.g. their hearts are mostly on the right ...
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How to spread a taboo white paper at a large scale in a Renaissance-level, medium magic world?
Context
In my world, magic has been granted to mortals by their gods.
As a result, the Church heavily regulates it, and the only legal spellcasters are clerics and clergymen. Magic use is heavily ...
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How to stop empires with non-electrical communication from collapsing?
Background: If we look at the past (especially in countries from the early C.E.), a lot of empires collapsed for many different reasons. These reasons are mainly (not exclusively!) going to be an ...
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How much information can humans transfer in five seconds? [closed]
Two persons can see and talk to each other a handful of seconds. How much information can they convey?
The gods host "hunger games". A huge TV-show where the universe watches a few thousands ...
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Is "too few people left" a credible explanation for a global knowledge loss of this magnitude?
My setting is what I would call "post-post-apocalyptic", meaning that our civilization doesn't exist anymore, but the collapse has happened in a past distant enough that people aren't really ...
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Could you use radio waves to hide communications in a tech advanced, future setting?
You're on a space station, and it uses all the hi-tech communications we're used to today - the best wifi/local networks, as well as something I call hypercom (hand waving), using hyperspace to send ...
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How are militaries supposed to communicate if they completely shut down wireless communication because the other side can intercept all of them?
This is a story where two militaries are intensely fighting on extremely mountainous terrain, but both of them has developed technologies that is capable of intercepting a great range of signals; from ...
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How do we replace printing by automated writing?
It is the year 1800 technology-level. In this world, no one uses any kind of printing technology (moveable type, typewriters, block printing, lithography, etc). People still write, and need to ...
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If two spaceships are traveling closely to the speed of light in different directions, how can they communicate?
Supposed we have two spaceships at a speed close to lightspeed relative to each other, what would communication look like, for example with a laser beam, taking special relativity into consideration?
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How do we create an interstellar communications system?
In my science fiction project, humans have settled in a new Galaxy, known as the Novan Cloud. In order to communicate information to other alien races humans require, alongside superluminal travel, (a ...
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Could a pure sign language society be as advanced as a speaking society?
I remember reading about how a lot of the early paleolithic societies and proto-human species like Neanderthals and Homo Erectus used sign languages before spoken languages. It made me wonder how a ...
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Are there radio systems that allow people to talk simultaneously?
I'm currently writing a story set in a post apocalypse. It would be based in the current year . This story takes place from the perspective on one person who is speaking to a group of people, all in ...
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Most practical method for a secret demographic to get its news?
My story is set in 1998 and is about a secret 1-in-1000 minority demographic of the human race that are all actually magical beings like vampires and werewolves and merfolk. They secretly live amongst ...
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What Would Be the Most Practical Way for a Pre-industrial Civilization to Communicate With a Sentient Race of Bees?
I am currently writing a story about the very unique relationship between a sentient race of bees and humanity. Humans, through bartering and trade, have grown to have a close relationship with these ...
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Would residents of a 17th century, snowed-in Alpine valley be able to maintain contact? Pigeons? Couriers?
It's the early modern period. A few Alpine villages, maybe a little town or two, get temporarily cut off from the rest of the world due to heavy snowfall. How can they communicate with the outside? ...
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What would social media look like in a setting where communication wasn't instant, and where content quality might be deliberately downgraded?
It's the near future, humanity has discovered a new element in the asteroid field that allows faster than light travel and communication through a brute force methods that's largely handwaved away at ...
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Optical telegraph that can be seen as far as 90 km. How?
You see, I have this world that has the same planetary characteristics as Earth, and the people of the Snoopish Empire are building an optical telegraph net.
The only problem they have is that their ...
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Why would a language have three rhotic phonemes?
In my world, there is a mammalian species from the Homo genus called "ogres" (their scientific name is Homo obesus) (they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens) (Homo obesus means "...
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They made first contact and sent us engine plans, but how can we possibly build it?
First Contact
This is a prequel to a relativistic interstellar trade scheme I am currently building on.
An alien culture has sent a signal with design plans for solving an advanced anti-matter engine, ...
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What's a good excuse for getting back to cables instead of wireless?
Similar to how some sci-fi fashions excuses for going back to swords instead of lasers, I'm looking for something that fosters are more cable-bound society – disrupting wireless communication on the ...
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Only 35 random people from disappeared Earth population are alive at any one time, how long before "new" babies are born?
Based on: If everyone in the world disappeared except 35 random people, how long would it take for one of them to realize they're not alone?
Everyone suddenly disappears from Earth except 35 ...
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Replace pens by typewriters
It is 1950. I am a rich and crazy entrepreneur, who wants to replace pens with typewriters. I can try to influence (or lobby) any government in the world. I want my typewriter to be cheaper than pens, ...
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How can a wizard make a deal with a demon without interacting face-to-face? [closed]
Remember Bob the Wizard from this question? Well, Joe's annoyed him one too many times. However, he can't kill him the normal way, so he's decided he's going to hire a demon to kill him.
Bob knows all ...
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Non-sphericity of "omnidirectional" signals? [closed]
Short version: If an omnidirectional signal is being sent from one side of an object that causes appreciable attenuation does it result in an egg shaped detection envelop or something stranger?
Long ...
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Are the railroad and the telegraph inseparable inventions?
In my world, I'm trying to come up with reasons why trains are the fastest method of communication, and that brings into question:
Are the railroad and the telegraph inseparable? They both came into ...
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What would a website look like in a magic thought-based internet?
What would a website look like in a magic thought-based internet?
After getting some really interesting answers on this question, I decided to make a magic "internet", with a lot of similar ...
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Would clickbait work inside someone's brain? Click here to find out!
Let's assume that there is a magic that can push information directly into people's brains. However, that magic has some limitations:
It can only "push" single sentences of 15 words or less
...
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How would an inter-planetary [not inter-stellar] recycling/scavenging team know when ships have crashed?
In my world, there is a certain group of 'scavengers' — people who go around and pick out valuable (and salvageable, of course) objects from ships that have crashed [onto the surface of a moon/planet],...
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Controlling the late-medieval world with just a network of agents and instant communication
The World Controlling Agency
I have long had a concept about a world-spanning NGO; an organisation with the power to start and end wars, and whose CEO any monarch would kneel to rather than risk their ...
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Rapidly building a world-spanning communication infrastructure
In 2028, all the major telecommunications companies unified. "We already have to work tightly together in order to maintain cross-continent communication systems, and we can reduce costs if we ...
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Communications in a vacuum
We have a human, magically protected so they can function in a vacuum. How will they be able to communicate? (The closest equivalent of suit radios--except they aren't wearing a suit.)
I would think ...
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How to interpolate between the physical, material universe with relativistic reference frames and a spiritual objective reference frame?
I'm new here and I assume that it might be weird to have souls in a science-fiction question but hear me out. While souls in my setting do have some magical unexplainable supernatural properties, it ...
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How would basic telegraphs affect how ancient societies are governed? [closed]
At this point the only power source available are Galvanic cells, & the only other use found for them is light bulbs. Aside from the basic electricity everything is at the same level of technology ...
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What EM band would be least noticed if I started globally broadcasting white noise on it?
Suppose I created a private network of peer-to-peer cellphones and started handing phones out to people globally. Now, these phones don't have to use the common cell phone bands of the EM spectrum... ...
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Would floating messages down a river be an effective means of mail?
Suppose there was a country with a mountain or mountain range that is the source of a few major rivers. Would floating messages down the rivers (to settlements or post offices on the river) be an ...
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How would a robot make noise and speak without built in speakers?
A common trope with technologically advanced races is the lack of a need for speech. Machine races that self optimise usually forgo spoken languages all together, instead opting for completely ...
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How do dragons communicate? [closed]
Dragons are giant intelligent monitor lizards. They are intelligent enough to communicate in a human-like manner. They can hiss, but can't make anymore complex sounds. They are also quadrupedal, and ...
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How to write martial/magic arts manuals so they can be deciphered and practised in a distant future?
TL;DR
This question is about an information encoding method/system. The text below describes the types of information that need to be encoded and lists limitations existing in the world I am building. ...
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How would radios impact pre-modern society?
Suppose that radios (or magic with a similar effect) were available during the Medieval or Renaissance era. They're too expensive to give to every soldier or install in every town, but a knight might ...
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Use of Sound in a Radio and Electric Communication Enabled Species
Alright, so I was bouncing ideas off the wall about how the society of a species (maybe genetically modified humans?) with biological radio communication and electric field communication would look ...
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What type of lullabies would a D&D-style dragon sing to their eggs - particularly ice dragons? [closed]
D&D style dragons come out of the egg knowing languages meaning that they had to learn it somewhere. I'm not interested in that. What I want to know is, that assuming Dragon lullabies are like ...
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Range of radio with no ionosphere
Given a planet otherwise similar to Earth, but which has (for reasons outside the scope of this question) no ionosphere, what would be the effective range of radio communication?
I understand radio ...
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