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"To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Instantaneous Communication | ||
| Communication over interplanetary distances faster than radio signals. |
An early description of the idea that communication over tens of millions of miles can happen instantaneously, in this case, from Mars to Earth with no time delay.
| I know there are many puzzling questions that scientists will think of, not the least of which is how the Martian is able to so closely control his robot when there is a vast gulf of millions of miles between them. Light takes an appreciable time to cross that distance. How then could the robots dodge the bombs in that aerial attack, when the very impulse from Mars, if it traveled at the speed of light (which is the fastest thing we know of) would take minutes to get here? X intimates, although it is not clear to me, that his controlling impulses, and the return impulses (of eyesight and hearing), travel instantaneously by means of some bizarre higher physics of which earthly science knows nothing. |
| Technovelgy from The Robot Aliens,
by Eando Binder. Published by Wonder Stories in 1935 Additional resources -
|
Compare to ultrawave from Triplanetary by EE 'Doc Smith, as well as these explicitly faster than light communication technovelgies:
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
