>>12986>We already have internet everywhere on the Earth's surface and parts of the solar system. And it seems to work just fineThe systems we have are not resilient. We are about to enter a period of turbulent geopolitical power-struggle. The communication systems are not robust enough for what lies ahead. It's too easy to cut the ocean-cables (that happened recently and even though only a few cables got cut it caused noticeable outages for over a hundred million people. The satellite constellation internet has proven to be easily jammed by electromagnetic interference (that too happened recently). Sophisticated rockets are proliferating and satellites are gradually loosing their
above-harm's-way status.
All the large data centers are easy military targets, the military weapons to destroy those cost 10000x less than rebuilding a data center. Any kinetic war will cripple digital infrastructure hosted on these. But there's more, the large data centers also funneled the internet cables into vulnerable bottle-necks, where old fashioned saboteur spy operations might get at it, so the land cables have become less resilient too.
But I'm not just worried about collateral infrastructure damage that results from fights between nation states. All that vulnerable stuff, might become a lever for power, where society gets blackmailed by the people who can destroy the information-pipes. Like in the feudal days where the feudal lord could block roads and threaten to destroy trade connections, unless every trader payed a toll. Information-pipes might become subject to that kind of thing.
The little plasma balls floating in the air giving of faint light pulses suffer no such weaknesses, they can't be cut, or exploded by missiles, nor can anybody put a toll on them.
Queue the Firefly theme song. The transmitters on the ground are cheap to make, and very expensive to destroy. That scores high on resiliency.
I'm not saying we should throw away the current internet infrastructure, just add something as resilient as holographic comm-links in the mix, and then attacks against the rest will have less effect, and become less likely. The economic dimension is favorable as well, it will break open the existing cartel structures, that have formed around natural monopolies, and lower the barrier to entry a lot and micro-data centers will become viable.
>I can't think of why you want some weird light pollution as your communications medium.Light pollution isn't an issue, normal street and building lights cause so much light pollution already that the little plasma points will not matter. These things will not be visible to the naked eye unless you're in arms reach.
You could also re-use the same holo-comm technology as positioning beacons and make cheap GPS with sub-millimeter precision.
>Good holograms for entertainment would be cool though.That's a more advanced application of this technology. Holo-comm-links only need one or perhaps a handful of plasma balls to work. While holo-image-projections that use those as voxels(3d pixels) need perhaps a hundred million.