In the interests of full disclosure, I should say this is a hair different from my last hypothetical thread; I’m brainstorming for a story rather than simply playing.
The story in question is a fantasy about a world which, though visitors from our world might think filled with magic, actually has quite different technology because of some differences in natural laws. In particular, there is no long-range communication in this world–or, I should say, no such communication which is faster than the speed of travel. For reasons I will frankly handwave, radio waves (whether broadcast over the air or sent through wires) cannot carrry information more than, say, 10 miles in this world; beyond that limit, noise overwhelms the signal. A similar limitation prevents wired transmissions over 10 miles.
Nevertheless, this world does have technology comparable to ours, and in some ways much better. In particular, their computers are far superior.
What technological innovations might such a world see?
I agree. The principle that networks can pass things along between powerful nodes with no long range communications has turned up again and again in places that aren’t obviously copying from each other, so I think it’s implausible that a culture could have powerful computing and short range communications and not long range communications.
If long-range communications is merely difficult (low data rate, for example), but computers are powerful, you’ll end up with monster encoders and decoders in every transceiver.
For example, your phone will analyse what you’re saying, deduce the tiny muscle signals required to produce it (or something even more basic), and send those instructions in an abbreviated form to the receiver, possibly at a rate of only a few tens of bits per second. The receiver will have a model of your vocal tract, and will resynthesise your voice from physical principles.
After my post, I spent the rest of yesterday trying to take the premise seriously.
I think you’d have an internet-like network that works more like a brain than our own internet does.
For our own internet relies on the packaging and transmitting of discrete messages from point to point, while In this alternative world, that would be very slow–especially if you’re unlucky enough to want information from half a world away. An alternative to this model would need to be developed, if possible.
Given the transmission limits, each node in the network is much more like a neuron–able to immediately contact only certain other nodes–than it is like a universal tranciever. And neural networks encode information in the pattern of activity, rather than explicitly at the nodes. This, I think, is part of what makes brains flexible, and the information in them in some sense “spread out.” But if the information is “spread out” in this way, then perhaps the information in a “neural net”-like internet could be more easily available from a wider range of locations than would be information in a “normal” internet in a world like the one you describe.
And neural networks seem well suited to pattern matching, if done right, which suggests an internet able not only to store information but to get an idea of where it is going to need to go before it needs to go there, and also suggests an internet not only able to store and retrieve information, but in many ways to cognitively process it, which could be quite useful for the end-users if done right.
As to the premise, I figure you can just postulate that in this world (universe?), there’s a force or a kind of radiation which interacts with stuff more and more strongly as the stuff moves more and more quickly (or energetically?) and which has the effect of destroying information in the stuff, probably simply by introducing noise. This could work out to there being a practically unbreakable rule that the info in transmissions can not be recovered at a certain distance if the transmissions travelled at high speed, relay stations or no relay stations. Because no relay station can reliably recover lost information–at most it can just amplify what information (or non-information) it does have.
Since this relies on long-range tramsmissions for the most part, I’d look at some substitute like ladar (LAser Detection And Ranging), coupled with siad superior computing power to make up the difference.
Things like jamming, detection, avoiding detection, could be quite different than in our world.
So is it always foggy there too? Because you’d have laser communications over line of sight otherwise. I think we need a fuller discussion of your premises for disallowing distance communication. The only ones I could think of that would prevent any kind of long distance communication would be deliberate jamming on pretty much every level, or a world that’s in someway discontinuous and difficult to traverse (think Shadows in the Amber series).
But if you must go with the premise, you’d probably have robot vehicles or runners carrying communications. They’d be carrying highly compressed data, so each one could be fairly small and fast – maybe robotic hounds or bees. Or hounds that when they got to their destination shot bees from their mouths.
For face to face communications – if they were important but you couldn’t go yourself, you could generate a computer holographic simulacrum of yourself, package it up, mail it to the recipient, a conversation would ensue with you finding out the results days or weeks later.
