238
Light-Speed Spaceships Would Have Trouble Phoning Home
(www.iflscience.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
238 points (87.2% liked)
Technology
58123 readers
4297 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
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?
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
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