Could an Internet even work in Star Wars?

[Maximum77]

Star Wars citizens have access to the Holonet all over different parts of the galaxy. However, the Holonet is not at all like our modern day internet. It is mainly used to transmit data and news between government. It does NOT have individual users who upload videos or have social media profiles. That being said. Could something like an Internet work on a galactic scale or would the bandwidth not be strong enough?

[veti]

"The Internet", as an architecture and an idea, is not married to any particular means of transmission. If it's possible to share information at effectively-instantaneous speeds, then you could in theory build something very like our Internet on that tech.

I think the galactic govt is just too sensible, sorry I mean "repressive", to allow it.

[factotum]

It's unclear just how fast interstellar communication is in Star Wars. It's definitely faster than hyperspace travel, because the news of the Falcon's escape from Mos Eisley had already reached the Death Star when the ship itself arrived, but in order to make an effective Internet work galaxy-wide comms would have to be near enough instantaneous over any distance, which I think unlikely. If FTL comms are *not* instantaneous then nothing exactly like our Internet could exist, because you'd request a piece of data and you might get it minutes, hours or even days later!

[Lvl 2 Expert]

It's unclear just how fast interstellar communication is in Star Wars. It's definitely faster than hyperspace travel, because the news of the Falcon's escape from Mos Eisley had already reached the Death Star when the ship itself arrived, but in order to make an effective Internet work galaxy-wide comms would have to be near enough instantaneous over any distance, which I think unlikely. If FTL comms are *not* instantaneous then nothing exactly like our Internet could exist, because you'd request a piece of data and you might get it minutes, hours or even days later!

But you could have more local hubs that keep each other updated. So one planet/solar system/local group/however big an area their communication speeds allow has the present day Earth internet, except they also get to see what people posted on nearby internets a few hours after it was posted. They are going to need some sort of redaction system so they don't need to read a thousand different Wikipedia articles on the same subject to get all the details, and I don't think the Star Wars universe would use an AI for that (everyone knows AI is better used to power a robot that pulls a hovercart), but it could work without if you filter far off internets through nearer ones. So we read what our neighbors put on Wikipedia, and if they have anything we missed we edit ours to match, passing that info on to the next set of neighbors. It will slow down the data transmission speed a lot, which is why the main characters typically use direct messaging or even couriers for classified matters. The proces is also very vulnerable to corruption of information, with just a few percent of systems having substantial populations actively hating on the jedi the whole galaxyweb could start looking like dark side propaganda. Then again, that would explain how those guys keep rising to and staying in power.

[Lord Raziere]

Yes, in the sense that it would cover the local planet just as well our internet.

But a galaxy net? probably not. the most sensible solution is simply that every internet is a "planet-net" and that transferring information between planet nets has to work with different considerations in mind. with FTL travel, and things like smugglers and such, physical copies of information and data chips on planets outside a solar system become very valuable and I wager a strange kind of info-market for out of system information would spring up. ships might go around collecting information that people in other solar systems might find valuable and sell them as traveling book sellers in a way. the buyers then copy the information into the local planet-net. of course what information people find valuable can vary with the planet, the people's culture, and so on, so the price of this or that copy of information or piece of media from out of system probably aren't fixed, and would involve haggling and such. there is so much that could happen with that kind of thing.

[Mechalich]

HoloNet communication in Star Wars is effectively instantaneous, but it is extremely important to recognize that highly specialized infrastructure is necessary to make this possible. The HoloNet relies on the use of hyperspace to make FTL communication possible, and as a result all of the communication and routing equipment has to be located in hyperspace for it to work. These is extremely expensive and requires and immense amount of active maintenance because the topology of hyperspace is constantly in flux due to stellar motion and events like supernovae and gamma ray bursts. The maintenance of the HoloNet was one of the larger portions of the Republic's overall budget. This limit was combined with costly end-user technologies needed to access information that was being beamed through hyperspace.

The result of this massive expense is that HoloNet bandwidth was highly limited and nothing resembling the principle of net neutrality ever developed. Bandwidth was reserved for critical government priorities and private use was subject to increasingly extreme prices the more bandwidth any given use demanded. Live HoloNet calls, for example, are noted in several Legends sources as being almost ruinously expensive.

It's also important to recognize that the Star Wars economy is not limited by the same factors as modern economies. It's a resource limited economy, where the highly advanced industries such as starship production, droid manufacturing, and the like are dependent upon super-rare fantastical materials that are either very difficult to find or incredibly demanding to synthesize. Labor, due to a combination of droids and a vast galactic population, is nearly limitless by contrast. This is has many commonalities with medieval fantasy worlds, which were often resource limited or had severe bottlenecks in certain resources, but had comparatively abundant labor. It's worth noting that such a structural situation has a tendency to value material resources over people - a starship is more valuable than a pilot, a comparison made explicitly in ANH - which the Force works to counter-balance.

[Seppl]

Regarding transmission delays: There are already plans how to handle large delays in a computer network because people are thinking about internet on Mars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet
At interstellar distances these delays would be of the order of years or millennia, making even this approach infeasible in the real world, but in Star Wars, with magic FTL communication, it could look a lot like the network described above.

[OracleofWuffing]

I know it would be kind of silly, and even more prone to corruption in even more ways than a "regular" internet would be, but uh... What's the bandwidth of force telepathy? I know that limits the internet to really powerful jedis, but at the same time you don't need to lay down tubes and force ghosts don't need a server room.

[Blackhawk748]

Local Holonet is probably somewhat like our own internet. There's probably chat room equivalents and forums of sorts, it just seems that the Galaxy never created social media. Or maybe they did, thought it sucked and didn't do it anymore.

In any event, the reason that the Holonet is significantly more restrictive than one would first think has been pointed out above. It's pretty much High-Speed communication for governments, News media, and military conversations. However, it was more open during the Old Republic and so calls were cheaper. During the Empire's reign, you couldn't actually use it, pretty much at all, unless you were somewhere in the Imperial Power Structure. This, of course, improved under the New Republic, later the Galactic Alliance, and while the price was rather steep, you could actually use it if necessary.

I would imagine it would have gone down in price more if the Yuuzhan Vong didn't happen.

[Mechalich]

Local Holonet is probably somewhat like our own internet. There's probably chat room equivalents and forums of sorts, it just seems that the Galaxy never created social media. Or maybe they did, thought it sucked and didn't do it anymore.

Rebels strongly suggest that relatively advanced planets - specifically Lothal, which hosted major imperial production facilities - had a fairly advanced set of internal networks and that anyone on planet could access them even from remote areas - the Ghost regularly connects to messages while parked out in the middle of nowhere. The use of these networks, and to a lesser extent the wider HoloNet, for business purposes is well established. The Ghost's crew makes several HoloNet calls to arrange for jobs or to unload merchandise (they specifically call Lando off-planet at one point) and there must be enough similar traffic that the Empire can't monitor everything despite distinctly wanting to capture this group of fugitives.

What we don't see is the use of networking technologies for leisure practices or cultural communication, but we see very little of this in Star Wars in general. This is part of a much more larger framework in that we see very little of ordinary daily life in Star Wars as a whole. Almost all characters in Star Wars are involved in either military operations, criminal activities, or high-level politics. Characters who are just 'working people' are both rare and tend to be found on planets that are technological backwaters - the krill farmers of Sorgan seen in The Mandalorian for instance. We have relatively little understanding of what everyday life is like. For many years (possibly still true) the best example of the everyday economy of Star Wars was the Lars' moisture farm on Tatooine.

There is very literal understanding of leisure activities in Star Wars. The best source is actually The Phantom Menace, which includes references to sports racing, gambling, and shows a number of visual arts performances in the parade scene at the end, but for the most part this is a drastically under-detailed area. Though, in fairness to Star Wars this sort of thing is extremely common in space opera. Where the question of 'what do the people who don't spend all their time trying to kill other people' often has a very limited set of answers.

[Blackhawk748]

Rebels strongly suggest that relatively advanced planets - specifically Lothal, which hosted major imperial production facilities - had a fairly advanced set of internal networks and that anyone on planet could access them even from remote areas - the Ghost regularly connects to messages while parked out in the middle of nowhere. The use of these networks, and to a lesser extent the wider HoloNet, for business purposes is well established. The Ghost's crew makes several HoloNet calls to arrange for jobs or to unload merchandise (they specifically call Lando off-planet at one point) and there must be enough similar traffic that the Empire can't monitor everything despite distinctly wanting to capture this group of fugitives.

I may be misremembering, but the Empire heavily restricted various parts of the Holonet, mostly the realtime stuff. Now that is, of course, Legends and may or may not still be cannon under Disney, but I do recall that certain transceivers and such were outright banned off military vessels. It's in the SAGA core book that I have misplaced somewhere around my house. I may find it tomorrow.

There is very literal understanding of leisure activities in Star Wars. The best source is actually The Phantom Menace, which includes references to sports racing, gambling, and shows a number of visual arts performances in the parade scene at the end, but for the most part this is a drastically under-detailed area. Though, in fairness to Star Wars this sort of thing is extremely common in space opera. Where the question of 'what do the people who don't spend all their time trying to kill other people' often has a very limited set of answers.

I think it gets touched on lightly in a few books, but ya, Slice of Life is not something Star Wars excels at. Which is a shame, cuz it would be neat. Hell, the closest I know is the novel Death Star and thats several people being on said monster Space Station, so thats all colored by that.

[Gnoman]

In theory, any intrasystem interplanetary internet using lightspeed datalinks could be built with a large "cache" on each planet of the most commonly accessed data kept up-to-date automatically. For most users, this would translate to large areas of the net working just like you were on the same planet, with an occasional long ping when you need less-common pages that are hosted on a different planet.


With FTL radio (or even just FTL starships), you could extend this between stars. The only difference is that you'd have a ping of hours/days instead of minutes with slow FTL radio, and weeks with FTL ships (assuming that a large percentage of merchant ships or government vessels are carrying the data packets with their computers, or the internet company had dedicated update ships).

[Mechalich]

In theory, any intrasystem interplanetary internet using lightspeed datalinks could be built with a large "cache" on each planet of the most commonly accessed data kept up-to-date automatically. For most users, this would translate to large areas of the net working just like you were on the same planet, with an occasional long ping when you need less-common pages that are hosted on a different planet.


With FTL radio (or even just FTL starships), you could extend this between stars. The only difference is that you'd have a ping of hours/days instead of minutes with slow FTL radio, and weeks with FTL ships (assuming that a large percentage of merchant ships or government vessels are carrying the data packets with their computers, or the internet company had dedicated update ships).

This actually exists in Star Wars - or at least Legends - it's just that the most commonly accessed data is the massive piles of astrogation information needed to properly calculate hyperspace jumps. I believe it's The Essential Atlas that discusses this in the most detail, but generally every time a ship arrives in a new system the ping the local transceiver and download the latest update to their charts. This is necessary because nothing in space is fixed, all the stars and other objects are in fact moving about at fairly high speeds relative to each other, so constant adjustment is required.

This was at least partly re-canonized in Rebels when a point is made about the difference between charted and uncharted systems during the episode where they go searching for the Lasat homeworld and have to use a Force-based plot device to get around a navigational hazard.

I think it gets touched on lightly in a few books, but ya, Slice of Life is not something Star Wars excels at. Which is a shame, cuz it would be neat. Hell, the closest I know is the novel Death Star and thats several people being on said monster Space Station, so thats all colored by that.

Partly it's that no one can really agree on what sort of effects transformational technologies - most notably droids - have on Star Wars society and as result no one knows what 'ordinary labor' really looks like in Star Wars. Its vaguely implied that a lot of organic sapients spend most of their time supervising droid subordinates, the starship mechanics on Tatooine shown in Episode 5 of The Mandalorian clearly has this sort of setup for her work, but no one really knows. 'Primitive' populations are regularly shown farming essentially by hand with minimal tools on remote worlds but the life experience of the bulk of the population in the much more advanced Core and Colonies is a total blank.

[Kaptin Keen]

Isn't quantum entanglement actually instantaneous? I'd imagine in a world where they've figured out FTL, having instant communications via quantum entanglement would by easy.

[Douglas]

Isn't quantum entanglement actually instantaneous? I'd imagine in a world where they've figured out FTL, having instant communications via quantum entanglement would by easy.

Despite what popular scifi stories often say, quantum entanglement cannot be used for communication. It can guarantee that both ends get the same value, but neither end has any influence over what that value will turn out to be. Both ends will know that the other got the same value, but this fact is useless until something produced from that value makes the trip the normal way.

What it can be used for is establishing a randomized shared secret for encryption of other messages sent through other channels because that is an application that cares only about the value being the same, not about what it is.

[Kaptin Keen]

It feels like you could easily do .. I mean .. anything, really. You don't need any particular value, you could just morse. But what do I know. Here's the real point:

If they can figure out how to make hyperdrives, I'm sure quantum entanglement isn't going to be impossible for them. At least, there would be zero valid reasons why one is easy and the other is not.

[Anymage]

If they can figure out how to make hyperdrives, I'm sure quantum entanglement isn't going to be impossible for them. At least, there would be zero valid reasons why one is easy and the other is not.

If a given writer wanted to use quantum entanglement to justify larger scale communication networks, it would clash with established canon (see everything said here about the holonet) but would be acceptable technobabble if they really wanted to do it. The SW universe has hyperspace and the force and plenty of other little places that run counter to the established physics of our universe, it isn't exactly hard sci-fi.

If we were doing hard sci-fi, quantum entanglement won't allow the exchange of any information. It's like a pair of magic dice where if you roll them both at the same time you're guaranteed the same result. If you roll a 6 you know that the other guy has a 6 too, but you can't force any particular result and trying to destroys the magic. Knowing what random numbers the other guy has but not being able to influence them or in any way make them nonrandom does not make for a communication protocol.

[Douglas]

It feels like you could easily do .. I mean .. anything, really. You don't need any particular value, you could just morse. But what do I know.

That would be like trying to send a morse code message where your only way of entering the message is to repeatedly flip a fair coin, with heads sending a dash and tails sending a dot. And you can't control the timing either, because if the recipient checks his end of the communicator early, he'll see the entire - purely random - sequence of dots and dashes even before you've started sending it.

Or, to summarize it, the morse code message you want to send IS the value in question.

[Mechalich]

Quantum Entanglement is irrelevant to Star Wars anyway. The HoloNet can provide real-time live visual communication between people on opposite ends of the known galaxy (yes it is possible to get beyond the reach of the HoloNet). It's an available resource if you really need it.

The HoloNet in Star Wars provides most of what the people living in the galaxy consider the essential functions of interstellar communication. It's true that those don't map to the needs of the 21st century internet on Earth, but the interstellar society of Star Wars isn't anything like that of 21st Century Earth's advanced economies so that shouldn't be surprising.

The interstellar culture of Star Wars is limited, and only a small portion of the population is part of it. Most people live out their lives on their home planets and never leave them. Planetary cultures are therefore isolated from the rest of the galaxy, often including linguistic and species barriers, and so interstellar cultural influences have a limited effect. There's no cross-cultural mass media because there's no cross-cultural commons.

[Kaptin Keen]

That would be like trying to send a morse code message where your only way of entering the message is to repeatedly flip a fair coin, with heads sending a dash and tails sending a dot. And you can't control the timing either, because if the recipient checks his end of the communicator early, he'll see the entire - purely random - sequence of dots and dashes even before you've started sending it.

Or, to summarize it, the morse code message you want to send IS the value in question.

No, that is precisely the wrong way to look at it.

Flipping the coin is a dash. Not flipping it is a dot.

You're welcome.

[factotum]

No, that is precisely the wrong way to look at it.

Flipping the coin is a dash. Not flipping it is a dot.

You're welcome.

But the point is, *you can't flip the coin*. There is absolutely no way for you to change the quantum state yourself, at least not without breaking the entanglement. You can look at it, see what it is, and know the guy at the other end has the same thing, but that doesn't help send a message.

[Kaptin Keen]

But the point is, *you can't flip the coin*. There is absolutely no way for you to change the quantum state yourself, at least not without breaking the entanglement. You can look at it, see what it is, and know the guy at the other end has the same thing, but that doesn't help send a message.

No - the point is that you can't travel faster than the speed of light.

So if you're prepared to handwave one, then I simply cannot fathom why you recoil at handwaving the other.

I don't know anything about quantum entanglement, I just work in sales. I know it exists, that's all. But I simply cannot see why it would matter, not even in the very slightest of ways. We're discussing two things that are 100% imaginary, impossible things. And you're telling me the one impossible thing is fine, and the other isn't, and I quite simply don't see your point.

[Brother Oni]

I don't know anything about quantum entanglement, I just work in sales. I know it exists, that's all. But I simply cannot see why it would matter, not even in the very slightest of ways. We're discussing two things that are 100% imaginary, impossible things. And you're telling me the one impossible thing is fine, and the other isn't, and I quite simply don't see your point.

Then call it something other than 'quantum entanglement' like 'Star Wars minimum energy entrapment equivalence states' and everybody will be happy.

The point is, by using the term 'quantum entanglement', you're implying that the technology is related to and/or uses some elements of the real world science. Slapping on a real world label to something that doesn't even remotely work that way is Hollywood Science at best, deliberate misinformation at worst (and depending on the intended aim, fraud or propaganda).

There's an ongoing thread 'Professional Annoyed By Entertainment' which goes into this.

[Kaptin Keen]

Then call it something other than 'quantum entanglement' like 'Star Wars minimum energy entrapment equivalence states' and everybody will be happy.

The point is, by using the term 'quantum entanglement', you're implying that the technology is related to and/or uses some elements of the real world science. Slapping on a real world label to something that doesn't even remotely work that way is Hollywood Science at best, deliberate misinformation at worst (and depending on the intended aim, fraud or propaganda).

There's an ongoing thread 'Professional Annoyed By Entertainment' which goes into this.

So what should I call hyperspace, rather than hyperspace? No - I refute thee.

[Brother Oni]

So what should I call hyperspace, rather than hyperspace? No - I refute thee.

Except hyperspace is already a fictional concept in the first place, so calling it hyperspace is perfectly fine, even if Star Wars hyperspace is different from Babylon 5's hyperspace to Halo's slipspace and 40K's Immaterium (although the Warp is significantly different due to the massively non-zero chance of it eating ships, sending the crew mad or backwards/forward time dilation).

Quantum entanglement is a real thing - it's just that we haven't figured out an application for it yet, hence all the (incorrect) speculative uses of it in science fiction (FTL communication for example).

[Lvl 2 Expert]

No, that is precisely the wrong way to look at it.

Flipping the coin is a dash. Not flipping it is a dot.

You're welcome.

Except there is no way to know if the other person flipped a particular coin other then flipping yours and comparing the results you got through some other channel.

As far as I know, nobody had found a way to make quantum entanglement carry even one bit of information unless supported by another form of communication.

It's kind of creepy actually, a bit like it was designed to be the one big but ultimately useless exception on a universal rule. (Although future insights into the nature of the effect could make it a lot less creepy, maybe it really is just some form of hidden stored information, synchronization rather than real instantaneous communication?)

[Khedrac]

Looking at the original question, don't confuse an "Internet" with a "Galaxy-Wide Web" - they are not the same, quite a few of us older forum members were happily using the internet before the WWW was invented.

So what? Well, back then the internet was mainly email and bulletin boards - and they can work in a society which has FTL travel and comms but not near-instantaneous comms. An example of how this can work is in Vernor Vinge's book "A Fire Upon the Deep" which was published in 1992 before the web was well established. Communities post (and receive) messages which take time to make their way around the 'net - messages take time to travel so if they refer to entities, those can move faster than the warnings, but in general it is a useful method of information exchange.
What it isn't, is the immediate-response environment that we are used to these days with the WWW and call the "Internet".

So, to misquote Star Trek - "it's an internet, but not as we know it".

[Douglas]

No, that is precisely the wrong way to look at it.

Flipping the coin is a dash. Not flipping it is a dot.

You're welcome.

Flipping or not flipping is not something that can be detected at the other end. The coin gets flipped when either you or the other end actively check for it, and neither of you can tell whether you were the first to check it or not.

For a more comprehensive and non-metaphorical description of the problem: There is absolutely no way whatsoever to choose a detectable effect of any kind and cause it to happen at the other end of the entanglement. You get pure random noise, the other end gets pure random noise, and nothing can change that. The only thing the entanglement gives you is that both ends get the same random noise.

Hyperspace is not a real world phenomenon, so it's relatively unconstrained by real world science - simply having hyperspace at all is already a break from real world science, so anything an author says about it is just specifying the details of said break. Quantum entanglement is a real world phenomenon, however, and that means it has known real world characteristics and behaviors.

[factotum]

Looking at the original question, don't confuse an "Internet" with a "Galaxy-Wide Web" - they are not the same, quite a few of us older forum members were happily using the internet before the WWW was invented.

So what? Well, back then the internet was mainly email and bulletin boards - and they can work in a society which has FTL travel and comms but not near-instantaneous comms.

I was around then, I well remember it (I still have the little book somewhere I was keeping note of my time online back in 1996 because I had to pay extra if I went over 20 hours a month). However, while the *bandwidth* of the Internet was very low in those days, the response times were still near instantaneous, and as far as I'm aware that has always been the case--there would be no real advantage to e-mail if it took just as long to arrive at its destination as the regular post, after all. Some sort of Internet which had to allow for long communications delays would not be the same thing we had in the 90s any more than it would be close to what we have now.

[Kaptin Keen]

Can I just be very, very clear here: There is no way in hell I could possibly care any less whether quantum entanglement works here, in the real world - in so far as we're not discussing the real world.

If you try to use the real world as an argument for why quantum entanglement doesn't work for communication in a fantasy work of fiction featuring FTL, space wizards and arbitrary weapon systems such as energy beams that split to atomize multiple planets with one shot .... then I quite simply am not going to have that conversation.

I hope that clears up any confusion about that part.

Now, if for some reason it galls you that I use one term for a thing - simply switch if for another. In the above, please pardon me for saying 'quantum entanglement' when obviously I meant zuon powered instant state transferral technology.

Moving on. Right? Good.