Light-Speed Spaceships Would Have Trouble Phoning Home

kalkulat@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 238 points –
Light-Speed Spaceships Would Have Trouble Communicating, Spelling Bad News For Interstellar Travel
iflscience.com

Subspace is the answer of course!

138

You are viewing a single comment

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