After my recent experience - fortuitously I keep a can of penguin-repellant to hand at all times, but I digress - because transferring data is a bit boring the conventional way.
What is needed is at least one arch made out of a transparent pipe filled with water, a water pump and a lot of plastic balls, some silver-coloured and some gold-coloured.
Attach device at one end, a gold=1 and silver=0. At the other end, a simple colour recognition system would turn it all back into zeroes and ones.
With two arches you could get duplex, for impatient people.
Goldfish did spring to mind, but I'm guessing they are a bit tricky to identify by gender in a hurry, and sending them up the pipe backwards for a zero seems a little inhumane.
Excuse me, there seems to be an orang-utan at the door..-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 08 2017 Our technical department says there'd be no problem with the goldfish. You could use regular comets for 1's and shubunkins for 0's, if necessary.
Your fundamental data transfer limit is set by (a) the length of a goldfish and (b) the speed of light. But you should be OK up to Gbits/s. And, at those transfer speeds, the goldfish would live more or less for ever.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 08 2017 //there'd be no problem with the goldfish
But what about a fish in the middle hack?-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 09 2017 ^Ahh, that's just a red herring.-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 09 2017 If you're using balls, not goldfish, then what is the water doing for you?-- pertinax, Feb 12 2017 The action will be smoother, and the tolerances can wider, than just using compressed air so it's a kaizen issue.
Admittedly compressed air would enable the use of small children wearing black or white t-shirts, but in the end water has the advantage as you can use fish or plastic balls.
With an air-only system you'd have to use mud-skippers or other amphibians, which tend not to be spherical. Regrettably puffer fish (who can do a good sphere impression) only have gills.-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 12 2017 random, halfbakery