E.T. Phone Home

One of my guilty pleasures is watching UFO conspiracy shows on TV. One night an episode of "UFO Files" really captured my interest. It was a segment describing how after the 1947 Roswell crash the military called in scientists from Bell Labs to examine the wreckage so they could reverse engineer alien technologies. According to the story this is where us lowly humans came up with lasers, Kevlar, the transistor, night vision goggles and more importantly optical fiber telecommunications. I have linked in the segment to this blog if you are really interested in viewing it. I will discuss my thoughts on this but first a quick lesson on optical telecommunications. UFO Files segment


By 1947 fiber optics was not a new idea. Alexander Graham Bell was actually the first to transmit voice over light in 1880. His invention was called the "photophone" however it was not as cost effective as his previous invention, the "telephone". But it proved sound could travel on light.

Work on optic fibers continued over time, mostly for medical imaging purposes. The inherent electromagnetic problems that come with transporting voice over copper wires pointed our way towards continued fiber optics development. By 1970 three physicists working for Corning Labs came up with usable fiber for transmitting voice and data. Hello Conspiracy Theorists. Invented by Corning Labs, not Bell Labs.

The first commercial fiber network was in place by 1975. By 1986 Sprint installed the first national "all fiber optic" network. If you are old enough you may remember the "you can hear a pin drop" commercials. Initially fiber optics worked with a pulse of light representing a digital "1" and no beam represented "0". We were soon able to break up the light spectrum and send 1's and 0's on the spectrum which increased the bandwidth capabilities exponentially. This multiplexing protocol is called WDM or "wave-length division multiplexing".

The current record on optical fiber is the multiplexing of 155 channels with each channel carrying a bandwidth of 100Gbps over a 7000km optical fiber. This is an amazing amount of bandwidth and the possibilities of a bandwidth limit for fiber optics can currently not be estimated. It will keep growing for centuries to come.

Now to the fun stuff. We as the Human Beings of this Earth are simply not capable of coming up with new technologies on our own, some would have you believe. This takes us back to 1993 when the X-Files came out and became a popular TV show. UFO conspiracies meant big money and people want to believe. So in 1996 a former intelligence agent for the military named Philip J. Corso released the book The Day After Roswell. In a nutshell he claims that an extraterrestrial craft crashed in Roswell in July 1947. The military secretly whisked away the craft for storage in Area 51. The U.S. Government assembled a team of scientists from various military contractors to examine the wreckage. Inside they found glass strands instead of wires. When they sent light beams thru one end of the fibers they would project on the other end. The scientists from Bell Labs then took this concept back to Murray Hills and fiber optic technologies were born. Philip Corso passed away in 1998 taking his secrets with him.

Now my personal opinion on this. Seems amazing to me that I cannot even drop a drinking glass without it shattering, yet glass strands the size of hair were able to survive a horrific crash. I once heard Dr. Carl Sagan address the alien issue in very logical and believable terms. Essentially he stated that in a Universe as vast as ours the possibility of intelligent life is out there. However should this life exist and is looking for other life why would they search out our tiny planet, revolving around our tiny Sun, in our tiny solar system, in our tiny galaxy? In other words if you are hunting for elephants you wouldn't go to an iceberg, that is the last place you would expect to find one.

Something did crash in Roswell in 1947. It was an experimental metallic spy balloon we were developing to spy on Russia during the cold war. This is pretty well documented. A post World War II leap in technology is not unfathomable. Many of the greatest minds of the time emigrated to the United States because of Nazi persecution. Does the name Albert Einstein ring a bell here? If you put together great scientific minds than great technologies are bound to come out of this collaboration. By 1947 the transistor, lasers and fiber optics were already being developed. Mankind is capable of wonderful things and remarkable ideas on our own. We built Stonehenge without aliens, we built the Pyramids without aliens, we developed the Aztec calendar without aliens and we certainly created fiber optic telecommunications without the help of aliens.

The Nanosecond Culture

In 2011 our global society is moving at an ever increasing rate. Our marketing pundits were quick to coin a term to describe us as the "Nanosecond Culture". In telecommunications we have been measuring things in the nanosecond for years.


How fast is a nanosecond? A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. In mathematical terms it can be represented as 10(-9) seconds or 1/1,000,000,000 of a second. In other words it is very very very fast.


Let's try and put some perspective on this without going overboard on physics. We will start with the speed of light since fiber optic communications moves at the speed of light. The speed of light travels at 186,000 miles per second. This is how fast your voice is traveling when you make a phone call on a fiber optic network. The moon is approximately 250,000 miles from earth, so at this speed you can reach the moon in 1.3 seconds.

We are bound by the speed of light. According to Einstein if an astronaut left Earth traveling faster than the speed of light, than he would arrive before he departed. Einstein also said it would take an infinite amount of energy to accomplish this. In our current understanding this is impossible.


Back to the nanosecond. Imagine a one foot length of phone wire. This is how fast light moves in one nanosecond. If the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second then equate the nanosecond to one second of your life to 31.7 years.


In telecommunications we equate fiber optic based communications to one foot equal to one nanosecond. In radio based communications such as satellite, mobile phone and microwaves we equate the nanosecond with one gigahertz (1 GHz). Consequently the speed of transmission with your Smartphone on a 2 GHz network is 2 nanoseconds.


The next time you are on a call with someone on the other side of the world and it sounds like they are next door, try to keep the nanosecond in mind.