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Light-Speed Spaceships Would Have Trouble Phoning Home
(www.iflscience.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Most people have missed the bit about time dilation messing up the clocks used in signalling, which I thought was interesting at first. However, surely the fix is just as simple as including a timing signal with the transmissions?
Yeah we solved this problem in the 50s by including a clock signal in some form with the data. Most modern digital communications use it.
If nothing else, you discovered a way to gloss over the impossible thing in a bad scifi movie. "No it works because we added a timing signal!"
I think the problem is less timing the messages, and more that the messages from earth will just get redshifted more and more as the ship accelerates, which will require an ever larger antenna to pick up. This also has the affect of bandwidth tending towards 0.