Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Waymo?
Neat demo. When are they shipping?
It's a service in operation now.
Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
161–170 of 285 posts
Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming The most powerful weapons on earth already are immune to jamming. ICBMs use celestial navigation (pictures of the stars) to course-correct, which is a form of navigation you cannot jam.
This form of navigation is probably only accurate enough for nuclear weapons, you’re not going to get meter-Range CEPs with that. You probably have to select a city you want to hit.
well there is this now as well - you don’t need to use the stars when you already have detailed aerial images of the earth - https://www.spectacularai.com/gps-free
Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#163Unfortunately anyone out of Google is not ambitious enough. They can't execute. Tiny steps don't accomplish anything.
.. tiny steps don't accomplish anything? Do you think tech innovations spring out of nowhere?
What do you think about Waymo?
Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming The most powerful weapons on earth already are immune to jamming. ICBMs use celestial navigation (pictures of the stars) to course-correct, which is a form of navigation you cannot jam.
To risk being pedantic, US SLBMs (Tridents) indeed use stellar updates for their inertial guidance system. Our ICBMs have no update mechanism at all. Once they're out of the silo, they're completely on their own.
The BM part means "Ballistic Missile", which sounds like they're basically "thrown" into a parabolic path towards their target, like a falling rock.
Or am I over-interpreting the name?
Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
At one point we bought a fancy (for the time) microwave link to cover a distance of about 3km. We specifically asked whether it would be affected by weather conditions. We were assured multiple times in the most confident of terms that it would not be a problem, the technology was tested and such eventualities accounted for with various features and failsafes. The thing proceeded to go down every time it rained, and…
Rain fade is sort of a solved problem in microwave comms [1]. Earlier than that, it was predictable. Laser comms aren’t going to be useful in Houston. They’ll probably be a game changer for swarms of drones at altitude, anything in space and the sorts of arid, weather-stable places we like to build data centres. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_fade
Did I misunderstand or are the solutions:
A) Up the power and blast through
B) Use a different suboptimal frequency with much lower bandwidth
Neither seem like actual solutions...
Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jam resistant comms are critical for drones, and other precision weapons and their infrastructure. Even if line of sight is interrupted modern drones can return to signal nowadays, relay information, and return to target with corrections. You may not need optical cable anymore
I expect drones will become fire-and-forget in two to three years. They won't be jammable because the pilot is in the drone.
You are describing cruise missiles
Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#167Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#168> In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air... If the light is "invisible" then is it even light? I looked it up and it's infrared. Do we consider UV and infrared to be light? Or are they UV and infrared period, in contrast to light? I mean, nobody would ever call x-rays or radio waves "light". You'd never…
> Do we consider UV and infrared to be light? Or are they UV and infrared period, in contrast to light? I mean, nobody would ever call x-rays or radio waves "light". You'd never say "it's emitting infrared light", would you? Yes, we do. No, it's not. Yes, they do. Yes, I would.
The usual distinction between "light" and "non-light" is based on the underlying mechanism by which photons are being produced. Photons produced by electrons jumping between energy shells are what we call "light".
By that definition, UV and infrared are "light". Light that's outside of the visible range for our eyes, but still potentially visible to other camera sensors (and some other animals).
X-rays are not "light" because they're emitted by the atomic nucleus itself, rather than by electrons changing orbitals.
Radio waves are not "light" because they're created by macroscopic-scale movement of electrons back and forth in free space.
Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. I’m a bit of two minds about this. Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities. But the lack of it is what drives and will drive militaries around the world to put more and more autonomy into weapons. It doesn’t matter what kind of treaties we write on paper to prohibit technologies. During a…
I got seriously terrified by reading a PKD SF story at 15 about the few surviving humans hiding from war drones still hunting people long after the war had ended.
Second Variety, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
I've commented this before but it is closer to Terminator than the Harlan Ellison story IMO.
Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
#170Does anyone else find it sus that the VC firm is called Series X Capital? Sounds kinda Google X related.