Just a Thought - The Light Fantastic

by

I love reading Science Fiction, and, from time to time I try my hand at writing it, though I'm not very good. True SciFi takes stretches the boundaries of what we know, and speculates on the thing we don't.

Great SciFi authors, Ben Bova, Arthur C. Clarke, Piers Anthony, and many, many others weaved stories that at times seem fantastic, and even improbable, but are actually rooted in solid science and could actually come to pass. Satellites, television, the computers, man walking on the moon, flat panel TVs, CDs, RAM based USB drives, and just about every modern convenience you can name were likely predicted in science fiction stories.

A few years back I wrote a short story called 'Spook', in which 90% of the world's population of fair skinned people died when the Ozone Layer dramatically shrank. The few White folks that were left lived inside caves, or underground, and only came out at night; hence the title. The protagonist of the story is a small, geeky Black man named Carl, who finds and falls in love with a Spook named Jessica. The story is of how Carl saves Jessica from the clutches of group of paramilitary hate mongers bent on killing any and all Spooks.

In my story, Carl uses a body-computer, connected to a city-wide network that used light as the medium to transfer data, to help him escape and keep Jessica safe. Light was also used to communicate without the chance of the conversation being intercepted. I didn't get into any real detail, but the concept was a sound one, and I often wondered why no one else had thought of it.

Well, imagine my surprise when I read about a group trying to come up with a way to use Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) as transmitters of data. If this group is successful, our cars could talk to each other, our devices could help us locate each other and do so with a measure of privacy no radio based system could offer. Here's the story, titled 'Experts envision taillights that talk':

The Visible Light Communications Consortium, a group of 15 IT manufacturers, most of them Japanese, is proposing using light emitting diodes--which will increasingly become common for ordinary light fixtures and outdoor equipment like traffic lights--to transmit data traffic at high speeds up to 10 meters.

With the technology, a person trapped in a building could hold up a cell phone to a ceiling light, and rescuers would be able to pinpoint his or her exact location. Similarly, cars could exchange information through headlights and taillights, and car computer systems could tell drivers if there were major stalls ahead.

Conceivably, entire movies could be shuttled from one TV to another in a few seconds through signals bouncing between the two screens.

Pretty cool, huh?

Then there's this recent report titled 'Quantum Dots That Produce White Light Could Be The Light Bulb's Successor' from Science Daily: 

Take an LED that produces intense, blue light. Coat it with a thin layer of special microscopic beads called quantum dots. And you have what could become the successor to the venerable light bulb.

Magic-sized quantum dots in a glass flow tube produce white light when stimulated by an ultraviolet laser beam.

The resulting hybrid LED gives off a warm white light with a slightly yellow cast, similar to that of the incandescent lamp.

Is that cool or what?

The potential for such a medium is tremendous; inter-vehicle communication, for example, could make long trips and tedious commutes more tolerable. Imagine meeting your future significant other via a conversation between cars while stuck in traffic. How about shopping sunglasses that advertiser give away; as you stroll through a mall wearing them, items on sale at each store appear -virtually- in front of your.

Imagine driving a car speeding down an interstate and seeing few road signs and no billboards; instead you see is what's left of the natural world as you zip along towards your goal. Highway signs, billboards, and other information is beamed into your car via LEDs along the side of the road.

Of course, one of the greatest potential would be an optical network where your car could query a road system. Each car could be part of a traffic control system where you give a destination, and the fastest possible route given the current traffic conditions is planned for you. As you proceed, any chances in the route cause by changes in the traffic ahead are automatically updated and sent to you.

An optical system based on LEDs would be far cheaper to make, install, and maintain than radio based systems; a city could potentially install a light transmitters on each street corner, or even in each street lamp, and use the power lines to get the data to the transmitters. There is no bandwidth limitation as with current radio frequency devices, so a system could theoretically handle millions of individualized broadcasts, and possibly receive data from passing cars and devices too. As long as you are in the light you have a connection.

The potential for personal devices and computers are obvious: such a system could become the way for cities to offer any one of its citizens a broadband connection anywhere within its limits. The cost to the end user would be inexpensive because the device that access such a system would require less power, and there would be little connection cost since all it would take is an LED lamp to receive data.

A whole new genre of personal devices could come into being based on such a system: light-based mobile communicators, information monitors; maybe extremely tiny iPods, even smaller than the nano, that receives streams of music directly from your Mac no matter where you are in town.

All of this doesn't sound so much like science fiction now, but then, commercial space flights, 2" thick computers, and hybrid cars was the stuff of SciFi not so long ago. Five years from now what seems fanciful could be as common as dirt. Ain't technology grand?

As for my short story, it never got published. Maybe I'll drag it out and dust it off, update it, and send it out again. A writer can never have too many rejection letters, or so they tell me.