Subspace is the answer of course!

    • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I mean space is pretty empty yea but I feel like it would be a pain in the ass to prevent a ship travelling at light speed from bumping into small to mid sized space debris. On the other hand, I am imagining with this much drive on energy techs we will be at some point able to come up with a solution to the energy requirement to power such a vessel.

    • astropenguin5@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Also, I don’t think this is anything particularly new. It’s pretty logical of you think about it for a few minutes.

  • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Uh, no shit? That’s how light works once you’re able to travel at relativistic speeds - communication over interstellar distances using light is going to take ages.

    Even within our own solar system interplanetary travel will have significant communication time delays.

    Edit: also, we already know that matter and light can’t exceed c, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we discover that other forces (gravitation, or another that we haven’t understood yet) can transmit information at speeds >c. I wouldn’t be surprised if we turned to quantum entanglement for instantaneous communication over extreme distances either.

    • xkforce@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Gravity travels at c. The Alcubierre drive tried to use bubbles in spacetime to “bend the rules” in order to result in apparent >c velocities but recent simulations indicate the bubble becomes unstable when attempting to exceed c.

    • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
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      11 months ago

      My first thought was ‘no shit’ as well. There’s a horrible heartbreaking anime about that… Voices of a Distant Star.

      other forces … can transmit information at speeds >c

      I sadly disagree. Even if we figure out a way to instantaneously transport ourselves across the universe, there will be some shitty clause in fine-print that says we can’t go back, or it took 0 time for us but 1 billion years for everything else.

      Check out this video by Anton Petrov:

      https://odysee.com/@whatdamath:8/woah!-someone-just-sent-an-impossible:4

      • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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        11 months ago

        or it took 0 time for us but 1 billion years for everything else.

        That’s just time travel with extra steps!

      • Jamie@jamie.moe
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        11 months ago

        They’re probably referring to quantum entanglement, which affects the entangled particles instantly.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          11 months ago

          Yeah but you can’t interfere with quantum entangled particles, if you do you break the entanglement. So it isn’t usable as a method of communication.

        • anotherandrew@lemmy.mixdown.ca
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          11 months ago

          Something I’ve not been asked to get through my head about QE: If observing the entangled particle destroys the entanglement, doesn’t that mean we’d need “containers” of entangled particles to send a bunch of information?

          • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
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            11 months ago

            You can’t send information with entangled particles. You just learn the state of the other particle by inference when you observe the first particle.

    • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Quantum entanglement is like ripping a photo in half, putting both halves in seperate envelopes and carrying them to opposite ends of the world.
      As soon as you open your envelope, you instantly know which half of the photo is on the other side of the planet - Faster Than Light Information Transfer!

      • xkforce@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        For a variety of reasons, no information is actually transferred. Quantum entanglement can not be used to get around the limits imposed by relativity.

      • INeedMana@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        So it’s not like: when I affect the hue (some attribute) of my half, the other half will change too? That has always been my understanding of it

        • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          No, measuring one particle collapses the entanglement and they no longer affect each other. It is a one time thing. You can’t modify them after they have been observed.

            • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Nope. Because you don’t know when it will collapse,. Imagine you have 2 balls, a red and a blue. They are both put in boxes and each ship takes 1 box. After you travel a long distance you open your box. You have just collapsed the “superposition” of what color the balls were. You now know what color both balls are, but you don’t know if the other person has looked in their box yet.

              I think a lot of people get confused by the term “observe” when talking about collapsing quantum uncertainty. Observing requires a photon to interact with the particle which is what caused it to “choose” what state it is in.

    • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      C is more than just the speed of light. It is the speed of Causality. No information can travel faster than C in a vacuum. Gravitational waves already reach us faster than the light from events that cause them (i.e. neutron star collisions) Because small particles slow down the light over long distances, as they absorb and then re-emit the photons.

    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      The problem with information traveling ftl is, that you’re very quickly running into paradoxes. So just by logic wanting to keep intact, I feel like ftl communication will be impossible

      • bluGill@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        Logically it makes sense, but the real world is years and often we don’t use the right logical systems. It makes logical sense to most people that a heavy object falls faster then a light object ,but we know that is false (and a also a non obvious logical system that also shows it is false)

      • justJanne@startrek.website
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        11 months ago

        If you actually calculate the maximum speed at which information can travel before causing paradoxes, in some situations it could safely exceed c.

        For two observers who are not in motion relative to each other, information could be transmitted instantly, regardless of the distance, without causing a paradox.

        The faster the observers are traveling relatively to each other, the slower information would have to travel to avoid causing paradoxes.

        More interestingly, this maximum paradox-free speed correlates with the time and space dilation caused by the observers’ motion.

        From your own reference frame, another person is moving at a speed of v*c. The maximum speed at which you could send a message to that observer, without causing a paradox, looks something like c/sqrt(v) (very simplified).

    • Jamie@jamie.moe
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      11 months ago

      By the time we invent any sort of lightspeed travel, we’ll have long conquered quantum entanglement. If you have a signal transferred over a properly quantum entangled technology, the signal would transfer instantaneously.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Another option would be tiny temporary Einstein Rosen bridges. Sure the energy requirements would be hideous, but if we’ve figured out how to exceed C, I don’t think we really care about energy costs anymore.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    11 months ago

    It might become like the days of sail. The fastest mode of communication might actually be the speed of ships. In order to get a message between earth and alpha centauri you might have to actually build messenger ships.

    You might have to build small automated FTL capable ships with massive data storage capacity and then download all of the data you need to send and then set the ship off on its way.

    • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Star Citizen has a ship like that. A cabin strapped onto the largest engine that wouldn’t kill you, with data storage added almost like an afterthought.

      Well, star citizen has a ship like that - it doesnt have any gameplay loops that make use of that though.

    • WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      The futuristic version of never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

    • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Somebody just watched the Expanse for the first time and thinks it’s a neat new thing to explain to the Earthers

      • crystenn@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        i knew the expanse would pop up somewhere in the comments! been working my way through the books and it’s great!

      • zzx@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Is it weird that I’ve only ever read the books? I didn’t even know there was a show until recently. Is it any good?

        • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          It’s fairly good. Some things are a bit abridged for the sake of action and visuals. Like travel that takes weeks is sometimes happening within hours or days.

          However the dialogue, writing and characters are pretty good. It did lack a bit in season 6 (the last one) but that’s because the material wasn’t there yet in the books and somehow it cuts things short with material from book 6 at best.

      • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        It’s a different part of the universe, separate from normal space where things like baryonic matter exists. In subspace certain of our universe’s fundamental rules as seen in normal space don’t apply or constants are different.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          How much of this is based on reality and how much is based on Star Trek wanting a mechanism to be able to communicate between star fleet and the Enterprise?

          • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I think entirely Star Trek on this one. Although, if we ever want to move* faster than light, it’ll almost certainly require a science or an understanding of nature which we don’t even have theoretical concepts of in 2023.

            • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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              11 months ago

              We use ions for a bunch of stuff like Li-ion batteries and various other chemical engineering marvels on a daily basis. I wonder how new is the idea of ions anyway?

              Wikipedia has this to say: “Svante Arrhenius put forth, in his 1884 dissertation, the explanation of the fact that solid crystalline salts dissociate into paired charged particles when dissolved, for which he would win the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Arrhenius’ explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt dissociates into Faraday’s ions, he proposed that ions formed even in the absence of an electric current.”

              We’ve built so much on top an idea that’s only about 139 years old. Before that, it must have been pretty difficult or even impossible to explain large parts of chemistry we use every day.

              I wonder how would you imagine the future of chemistry in the early 1800s? Could you imagine that nowadays we leach gold from a mineral that doesn’t even look golden at all? Could you imagine that we can pull aluminium from rocks that don’t even look metallic in any way? Could you imagine that we use it to build all sorts of things like cans, door frames and airplanes? What about surface coating of materials to give them corrosion resistance, different colors or scratch resistance. In the past 139 years we’ve done all sorts of absolutely wild things with ions.

              If you start studying chemistry in 2023 you’ll probably hear about ions during the first lecture and later you’ll build all sorts of wonderful things on that bit of information.

              • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Thanks for this. I have similar thoughts as to some people’s definitiveness about our understanding of the universe and its speed limit.

                • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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                  11 months ago

                  The thing is, we don’t know is the speed limit is a hard problem.

                  Maybe will struggle with it for centuries or maybe we’ll find a way to avoid the problem within the next 130 years. Maybe we’ll find a way to bend space so that you don’t really need to travel very fast. Maybe wormholes become a viable option. Maybe we’ll build hyperspace gates or something like that.

                  Or maybe none of that is viable and a thousand years later we’re still struggling with the speed of light wishing there was a way around it.

                  At some point, microbes and immunology were a complete mystery. People dying after surgery was a hard problem and nobody knew how to fix that. Turns it, all you need is ethanol and penicillin, but we couldn’t even imagine it at the time.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Ok, then it’s fictional. The theoretical warp drive that is consistent with Einstein’s field equations moves through normal space but just warps it in a way that it effectively moves faster than light (while locally obeying the light speed limit).

          Though that still requires something with negative mass or gravity (I was very disappointed when they confirmed antimatter has normal gravity, I was hoping the theory was wrong on that).

            • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              There is the idea that everything is shrinking instead of space expanding, which resolves the dark energy question.

      • Gregorech@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Space is like a rainbow, subspace is equal to ultraviolet and hyperspace is infrared. At least inmy head cannon.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Who would have thought that Doppler could apply to communication equipment, too! Shocking!

    Next they are going to tell us that messages might take some time due to c!

  • Deebster@programming.dev
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    11 months ago

    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?

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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!”

    • mypasswordistaco@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    11 months ago

    There was an early 2000s anime movie that explored this idea. It was called Voices of a Distant Star.