I was reading a book, The Victorian Internet, which talked about how connected the Victorian era was, with wires stretching everywhere above the roads. It’s probably exaggerated, but it got me thinking. There are many ways to engage in en masse interconnectivity. Computers, of course, are one of them, but we also have had, for example, messenger pigeons, drones we can send to different places, search dogs with an interconnected sniff system (I forgot what that was called), etc.
Suppose you had a civilization. Maybe it’s on a planet whose environment interferes with the capabilities of a classic internet, or maybe it’s a normal fantasy setting where the classic internet is cursed. However, the civilization still needs some kind of apparatus of interconnectivity. What’s the best/closest thing you can think of as a replacement for the internet without it being the internet as we know it?
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld has The Clacks, a network of semaphore towers that can transmit messages, later including encoded images, across the disc.
Oh damn. Am I really so old now that people can’t imagine a world without Internet?
Cuba might be a good place to look for a real world example of this. They had the concepts of “SNET” and “el paquete semanal” that were solutions to poor internet penetration, expensive internet costs (pay per MB), and heavy restrictions on that internet.
El paquete semanal is a weekly payload of the latest movies, TV episodes, manga, comics, etc. that gets brought into the country and spread by sneakernet.
SNET is widespread guerilla LAN networking to the point where Cuba had a well populated private WoW server. Also solved some of the Internet cost issues because you could game and share content locally without paying for every little MB.
As of 2020, SNET is now “illegal” and those existing networks are being absorbed into their ISP.
All you need is something reliable that sends and receives data.
Game of Thrones/ASOIF used ravens.
You could use specially trained rats in underground tunnels.
Relays of lights or fires in hill tops is always an option, as is smoke signals.
Lasers or spotlights projected on clouds could work. Or the dark of the moon. If everyone just agreed to a patch of lunar dust and projected binary flashes there, encrypted to respond to others, a crazy flashing dot covered moon would be the equivalent or a public internet.
Or same concept with blimps.
Telegraphs have existed long before internet ever did. And heliographs predate those by a fair bit.
And then there’s the Hydraulic Telegraph from 2400 years ago.
Technically, the internet has multiple layers and only the lowest ones are dependent on the physical network implementation—you could totally send network packets via messenger pigeon and still have it be a valid part of the internet. But I think the scenario you most likely have in mind is one where we don’t have wired or wireless networks, and/or we don’t have computers to function as endpoints. And the goal is to have some kind of long-distance user-to-user exchange of non-sensory data (i.e., not just telephones or broadcast media.)
One solution might be to shine lasers on a distant object, like the moon: everyone has a designated signaling target on the object, and you could send them data by shining a pattern of light on their target.
OSI Model gang represent!
Also, I’m sure you already know this, but RFC 1149 (IP over Avian Carriers) was actually tested by Bergen Linux User Group. They successfully sent packets several kilometers.
One solution might be to shine lasers on a distant object, like the moon:
The moon is 1.26 light seconds away. That’s a 2520 ms ping.
sneakernet of course
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