Ansible

Ansibles are wormhole-based devices capable of relaying information from point to point instantaneously, circumventing the restriction of light speed. The ansible network allows access to all kinds of data, from fun and frivolous social media platforms (of which there are many kinds) to interstellar cartography critical to navigation. Distress signals are also dispersed through a specific ansible sub-network linking all active and registered space vessels, stations, and dispatchers. The term ansible is a shortened form of "answerable," being lifted from the fiction works of Ursula K. Le Guin and applied to the device to honor her memory.

Physical Basis
Mechanism
Relativity Compliance

Physical Basis

Ansible transmission mechanisms operate on the basis of photonic wormholes: an array of stable entangled singularities, each roughly the size of a helium atom, that allow the passage of photons between remote points in space. Using a process similar to the creation of warp drive event horizons, a standing wave pattern of extremely high energy density plasma is created in a vacuum chamber. The diffraction pattern creates pockets of negative energy that disturb the quantum foam of spacetime enough to generate stable wormholes on a nanoscopic scale. When the wormholes are opened up, photons are passed through and entangled, establishing a connection that can then be used to transmit information. An added bonus of this direct, stable link is a total lack of environmental interference.

Invention

The slightly varying forms of ansible were discovered by each sophont species independently, with the exception of humans teaching the Calypsians and skae the principles of wormhole technology.

Mechanism

Ansible communications are either direct or networked. If both ends of an attempted communication have a direct wormhole connection to each other's ansible arrays, they can communicate with each other directly. Since a direct ansible link is an end-to-end laser transmission through the wormhole with no transmission through outside space, it is virtually impossible to intercept (except on either endpoint, of course) and ideally suffers little to no signal degradation, interference, or delay.
More commonly, to communicate with a given party, a user is required to use a network connection. The user sends a message by conventional means to an ansible switchboard hub, which is shunted around the switchboard system until it reaches a hub with a direct ansible or conventional link to the other party and is sent to them. This is a more vulnerable method of information transit, as there is an in-between where messages can be intercepted. It also introduces more lag to the process, ranging between a few seconds to several hours depending on how close the two parties are to their nearest ansible switchboards.

Regulation

The prevalence of ultra-high-energy technologies, especially those that manipulate spacetime itself like ansibles and warp drives, in modern civilization presents a serious danger if misused or neglected. To mitigate this, the Coalition maintains an agency which closely monitors the usage of spacetime-manipulation tech: the Singularity Regulation Commission.

Relativity Compliance

Ansibles are a circumvention, rather than a violation, of the theory of relativity. While they comply with the theory broadly, the complications form a bizarre combination of wavelength shift and frame dragging- which is to say, even if an observer is receiving near-instantaneous data through an ansible wormhole where one end is moving at relativistic velocity, that observer cannot converse with a user on the other end of the wormhole connection in absolute "real-time" because the computers on either end have to process the information either down or up in speed to match the local τ (time dilation) factor. For example, if an ansible video-chat between a planet and a starship moving at 0.5c was displayed without frame correction: to the observer planetside, the half-light astronaut would appear to be lagging significantly; to the astronaut, the planet-bound person would be moving and speaking much too fast.
This frame lag occurs in all cases, but in most of them (planet to planet, system to system, ships within the system, etc) all frames are moving at very similar relative speeds and thus there is so little disparity to correct for that it does not create issues. When communicating with relativistic starships, on the other hand, ansible frame lag ranges from several seconds to upwards of three hours, which results in less-than-real-time communication.

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Ansible

Contents

Physical Basis

Invention

Mechanism

Regulation

Relativity Compliance

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