Quote:
Originally Posted by Tel Janin  It was discussed in Ender's Shadow. Bean and Nickolai were talking about instant communication, and Nickolai was saying about how he doesn't like to rule things out because they are supposed to be impossible. Bean later realized that it was true when the programmer of the training simulators on Eros told him it wasn't worth programming the time delay in, and I think it was Graff who later explained to Bean that it was stolen from the Buggers when Earth took Eros from them. |
Ansible has sort of become a standard device in SF. Anyone can throw it in.
But it did say in Ender's Game that humans discovered how to make instantaneous communication work after finding out it was possible because the Buggers did it. I think the line was something like: Once mankind learned it was possible to communicate instantly no matter the distance, they created the ansible. Or something to that effect. They found out from the Buggers controlling everyone from their homeworld that it was possible to communicate across the vast stretches of space without concern for distance, and that led them to discover the ansible. I think in the later books it begins to describe the philotes that connect every thing and I think he alluded to the fact that ansible might function because of them.