Although Captain James T. Kirk flipping open a communicator and saying “Beam me up Scotty” has evolved into Captain Picard tapping his chest and saying “One to beam up”, where are we really going with communications systems and the way we interface with them?

Boom microphones and earpieces get smaller all the time, but where will this end? According to David Drake in the book “Hammer’s Slammers” (1979) it will end with a small relay device being implanted directly into the chest, transmitting sound through bone conduction and sub-vocalising speech to send messages. William Gibson in “The Nano Flower” (1995) has personal messages delivered in virtual reality by an interactive computer representation of the sender.

These, though, are means of interfacing; what of the mechanics of sending the message? In the collection of stories “Venus Equilateral” (1947), George O. Smith gives us a relay station orbiting the Sun and independently forwarding messages to a colony on Venus. To send messages outside our Solar System, faster-than-light communications are the ideal. It may be a subspace message in the mould of “Star Trek” or “Babylon 5”, but James Blish (“Beep”, 1954) and Ursula K. LeGuin (“The Dispossessed”, 1974) have put forward in different forms the idea of the perfect, ideal, instantaneous communicator – the Dirac communicator and Ansible would link the galaxy together instantly. In “Bleep”, for instance, there is an instant communicator which broadcasts to every receiver tuned to it and attaches a compressed message (the beep) containing every message that ever has and ever will be transmitted.

In the film “Contact” (from Carl Sagan’s novel) an alien message is received on Earth. In order to understand it, massive cryptographic resources are brought in, but a basic premise is that any such message is designed to be decoded. As Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) says, “Mathematics is the only true universal language.”

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