From: Alejandro Dubrovsky (s328940@student.uq.edu.au)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 00:53:00 MDT
On Sat, 2003-04-26 at 05:58, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> They have better things to do. I just read Egan's "The Plank Dive"
> last night. Didn't understand much of the black hole stuff but
> thought the transmission of a human "entity" in an exabyte of
> information was great.
>
> Previously I had thought this would be impossible. An exabyte
> is 10^18 bytes which is a zettabit (10^21 bits). To even begin
> thinking about this one has to learn how to modulate a carrier
> of X-rays (10^18 Hz) to Gamma-rays (10^20 Hz) to carry a zettabit.
> That did not look like an easy task to do in a short period
> of time (SciFi authors get to ignore some of these more complicated
> details with a little hand-waving).
>
I don't think there's a need for such high frequencies. You don't have
to carry the whole thing in one band. Just parallelise, and use a 100 x
100 array of your off-the-shelf terabit/second transmitters (nicely
spaced apart on a 10km on a side square so that they can be resolved
individually on the other side by the huge parabollic space mirror) and
you can do the whole thing in about 15 minutes (btw, you mangled the
conversion. 1 exabyte = 10^18 bytes < 10^19 bits (i think you were
thinking in powers of 2))
alejandro
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