Tesla: The greatest hacker of all time | Hacker News Reader

Tesla: The greatest hacker of all time

totse.com

19 pointsiamelgringo10 comments

"Tesla generates a powerful pulse of electricity, and drains it into the ground. Because the ground is conductive, it doesn't stop. Rather, it spreads out like a radio wave, traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second."

And all this time I thought only light travelled at the speed of light :/

While I read that article, I was thinking, what if we found a way to 1. direct the current through the earth to a specific location reliably and 2. managed to represent bits accurately within that current? Free international communication, without networks of cables ;P

Radio wave is electromagnetic wave (aka 'light' in a range of frequency). But "speed of light" in non-vacuum is lower.

"direct the current through the earth to a specific location reliably" Earth is not homogenous. I wonder if pointing a low frequency laser into the ground will accomplish anything. It most likely will be refracted in an unpredictable inconsistent way.

Well, what if we transmit known data in a strong signal from one end to the other and then compare what was received to what was sent... (insert big hand waving) if we replicate those steps x times, we might be able to map the "interference structure" of the Earth and compensate for that somehow...

This is admittedly almost impossibly complicated.

Sure but the insides of the earth keep changing right...

We could recalculate the "interference infrastructure" every couple seconds... Remember that we don't need 100% accuracy also; TCP/IP layers reliability on top of unreliability.

Also, an electromagnetic wave is not current, the bulk of which actually travels many many orders of magnitude slower.

Check out the movie "The Prestige" (http://imdb.com/title/tt0482571/), which (among other things) features David Bowie as Tesla during his time in Colorado Springs.

I was a little worried about Bowie's performance of Tesla before I saw the movie. In the end, however, I was very pleased.

This gives new meaning to "hack the planet".

If we're going this way on hackers, I'd go for Galileo as #1 (although a great case could be made for Archimedes).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com