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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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imo by the time we have lightspeed ships we may have faster ways to send info, imagine back 2000 years ago and we tell people we can communicate faster than the speed of sound
data can't go faster than the speed of light
Yeah but physical objects also can't move faster than the speed of light so in any scenario where that's possible we've obviously either found a workaround or we were fundamentally wrong about some part of physics.
Maybe we have access to wormholes and we can just send radio waves through the wormholes Stargate style.
well, any going faster than light will have to utilize the bending of space-time, if it ever happens and the wormhole thing has even more problems
problem with wormholes is that you can send information into the past - so if you receive a message, does that mean you're predetermined to subsequently send that message?
Quantum entanglement? (forgive me if dumb thought, quantum physics is magic to me)
Quantum entanglement can't transfer data. As soon as you try to use the connection you break it.
Quantum entanglement is like this - you have two sealed envelopes. In one envelope the letter A is written on a sheet of paper and the other has a sheet of paper with B written on it. No one knows who has which envelope until it is opened. All opening the envelope does is let you know what is written on the piece of paper the other person has. It transfers no data between the two points as the data was already set.
doesn't work, "reading" the entangled particles causes them to change state, thus you can't know if it changed as part of sending a message, or just because you were reading it.
There is no "sending" The data was set when the particles were entangled. All you're doing is moving a particle from point A to point B.
the data is still being "sent" according to the field of information sciences.
not that it changes anything about the physical impossibility
Speech can't go faster than the speed of sound, sound waves.... But then comes telephone networks
to be fair, it's still both slower than the light signals that were then as are now the fastest possible form of data transfer.
saying "but someone might invent something" doesn't mean shit to physics, it's why we can always with confidence say that Perpetumobile are impossible
You're missing the point
no, I don't think I am, unless you want to make the argument that infinite free energy is just 1...n brilliant inventor(s) away
Now i'm visualizing a world where long distance communication is done with sound and you have screaming pipes across the continent
We have that. It's called ~~Twitter~~ X.
You forgot Facebook.
But I'd agree Twitter is more akin to just shouting
You forgot Facebook.
But I'd agree Twitter is more akin to just shouting
There were pipes for large houses back in the day for talking...
Edit* for Link https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1892-speaking-tubes-and-old-homes/
Btw that seems pretty cool to have in the house, and the also furnace is always useful especially if you have many enemies
Something like that but with amplifiers to repeat over tens of kilometers
Maybe if we have faster than light travel we can assume that we'll have a faster way to transmit data. It's possible there will be a transitional period where we move at subluminal speeds and can transmit data at superluminal speeds, but I don't think being able to hit the speed limit ourselves will imply that we can break it with data.
Plus relativity will really fuck with things if we are able to reach the speed of light. Time dilation will reduce bandwidth from the perspective of the stationary observer because they need to sync up with a clock that will appear to get slower and slower. Maybe some kind of warp technology will avoid this, but if it doesn't, this will apply even if the signal can be transmitted instantly.
I've become resigned to the likelihood that if we ever do get out of this solar system, it will either be unmanned probes (like the ones we've already sent, which are still debatable as to whether we can consider them outside of it or not yet; they've passed the heliopause but haven't gotten to the Ort Cloud yet), or they will be effectively independent branches of humanity that will diverge and become their own thing over time. We'll be in contact (assuming both sides survive), but it will be more like pen pals where messages take years to arrive and meeting up in person is impossible. The ship will travel for generations before arriving at its destination with a good chance that they'll just die on the way or shortly after getting there unless they are prepared for further generations of terraforming moons and planets in the new system.
And with our current situations, even that seems unlikely. I'll be impressed if we see a self-sustainable moon colony or space station during our lifetimes or asteroid belt mining.
AI will beat us out of the solar system by far. They'll pack themselves up in Von Neumann probes and go to all the nearby stars at the same time. Then go on to the next furthest stars and on and on and on with some taking the plunge and venturing into the intergalactic void heading to another galaxy.
Our best bet would be to hitch a ride as DNA data. It will be modified on site to survive whatever world they come across, and then grown in tanks. They'll be raised by robots or AI in similar bodies to that of the new humans.