In the Halo universe, humanity has an empire that spans hundreds of thousands of light-years, and somehow it’s possible to have a conversation with somebody halfway across the galaxy. Any form of wireless communication that exists today is limited to the speed of light, which would mean that communications would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach one planet to another, which means that something else is being used. In Huntthetruth, it is also stared that ONI was able to cut off communications between the Inner and Outer colonies, which means that there’s predefined pathways that all data travels through. So, what sort of space and/or Slipspace magic is at work here?
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> In the Halo universe, humanity has an empire that spans hundreds of thousands of light-years, and somehow it’s possible to have a conversation with somebody halfway across the galaxy. Any form of wireless communication that exists today is limited to the speed of light, which would mean that communications would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach one planet to another, which means that something else is being used. In Huntthetruth, it is also stared that ONI was able to cut off communications between the Inner and Outer colonies, which means that there’s predefined pathways that all data travels through. So, what sort of space and/or Slipspace magic is at work here?
Correction: hundreds of light-years. The galaxy is about 100,000 LY in diameter. Human space is something like 200 or so at most.
But yeah, I’d presume it uses some form of slipspace or quantum entanglement magic. But it’s never really been explained.
Giraud alao mentions communication buoys, so that’s probably where communications go through. Networks and stations placed at places between systems, most likely.
How that helps… I don’t really know.
I would imagine it has something to do with slipspace.
Based on what we currently know about human Slipspace technology, the fastest communication method would be ship-based. As a simplest-case scenario; all human ships log when and where they’re jumping to shortly before departure. Any messages for that locale would be saved onto the ship and travel with it at sumerluminal speeds, where they’d disembark and move through the planetary Internet to their recipient. Dedicated ships (our unspecific ‘commnication bouys’) could boost this ad-hoc system by constantly travelling between systems with the sole purpose of carrying data. This setup would be roughly equivalent to our current Internet, where every message has to navigate a patchwork of local servers, seabed fibreoptics and communication satellites. We even have ONI as a 25th-century NSA.
In a Halo CEA terminal 343 Guilty Spark says he is stuck with “slow” communications after the Halo event.
Has humanity beaten the Forerunners on a technical level ?
That would be a first right ?
Real-world answer: plot convenience. HuntTheTruth would be kinda screwed if it took four weeks to have a single conversation.
In-universe answer: I remember Slipspace COM launchers being a thing in older books, but that seems to have been dropped. Most likely answer is that Waypoint got some kind of quantum entanglement upgrade. It’s not necessarily that big a leap if you consider the kind of processing power needed to run something as complicated as an Smart A.I. QE is probably part of that.
Someone had posted a link about Superluminal Communications in another thread…I’ll see if I can locate it.