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How To Communicate Faster-Than-Light
higuita writes "With faster technologies showing up everyday, people need to prepare in advance the problems of faster-than-light communication. The main problem is that packages will arrive to the destination before they are sent, forcing a huge redesign of most protocols. Read here the first draft RFC. Any network expert is free to help fine tune this draft."
Is there some tradition in some parts of the world to make an ass of oneself on the second of April too?
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
A double dose of April Fools?
Please Shoot Me In The Face Now! Several Times.
That's pretty cool. Of course, I knew about this post yesterday, before you'd even thought about writing it up on Slashdot. I'm not exactly how that worked, but thinking too hard on it makes my head hurt. I think I'll go lie down for a while and hope the future catches up with the past or something weird like that.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
But I read this article first on Slashdot today and I thought that this might actually be somewhat based on real theory, until I read the article.
Maybe I'm too much into Star Trek, but I have to think there's a way to cheat(or at least bend) the speed-of-light limitations. I was interested in how they would deal with potential clock issues.. but bah.. April 1 got me. :(
OK, I know it's April fools, but why would a packet traveling faster than the speed of light necessarily arrive before it is sent? Do bullets shot faster than the speed of sound arrive before the gun makes a sound? No, it just arrives before the sound does.
Stephen Baxter-Exultant
It's perfectly obvious that this is true. However, it actually isn't true at all.
Relativity is a mind fuck.
I think we should just use FTL to request the RFC in its future state.
Hacker Evoution (http://www.hackerevolutionduality.com/) game.. anyone?
God would never let this happen
nothing faster, light can't hold a photon next to it.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It seems that the video game has appeared in the Steam Online store before a method has been devised to download it.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/212680
Just how recursive is this issue?
When people ask if I'm an optimist, I say "I hope so". --Bill Bailey
The info will arrive close to or near instantaneous the faster it travels
But that's not actually how it would work.
(looks at calendar) It's halfway through 2 April here.
We're WAY over the April Fool's thing.
In fact you will need to get your packets arriving before they are sent if you want April Fool's jokes to arrive here on time.
I am anarch of all I survey.
we all know you arrive in the states before you leave Japan... and we've had subspace communication since the 60's (I saw it on TV). don't skip drones pretty much make this moot anyway?
what's the problem?
... how this is still an april fool's joke without having to click thru the poxy ROT-whatever 'encryption'
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
hey, Thanks! That's a really great link, and I like the illustrations about the "relative now" diagonal lines for each frame of reference.
Relativity is a mind fuck.
I think ...
you're holding it wrong.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Last time I started mentioning proven scientific fact, demonstrated in laboratories, and taught in universities, a bunch of dumbasses modded me down, saying that it's impossible. Well welcome to 2013. Guess what, it's not. Even if this is a joke, it i s true. There have been experiments where data from some sort of quantum photon path thing basically did a funhouse mirror trick where the light existed at the end just as it was leaving then . It was a story on Slashdot. You cannot possibly have missed it! It was even titled something like "light arrives at target before leaving."
Also, I'm still 99.99999999999999999% sure that there have been entire Discover Channel specials about quantum entanglement that state, word for word, that quantum entanglement will solve the overseas reporter audio delay issue. Modifications to one particle happen instantaneously to the other since the data doesn't have to "travel," as the two particles are actually the same particle. There is no mass or radiation that has to move from point to point. It's just basically one particle in two places in space at the same time. Via the laws of physics, modifications to one HAVE TO happen to the other in realtime. They even said that a Mars rover with a quantum chip would be able to be driven in realtime by a remote control because of the zero delay. The biggest problem lately, as stated in MANY slashdot stories, is how far they can get the particles away from each other before the entanglement collapses. Every time a new record for distance is set, it's a slashdot story. So stop spouting off outdated crap from your high school physics class 10 years ago and saying I'm wrong.
No you got it wrong, relativity is just a sales gimic talk for a version of a programming language called "mind fuck" ?
This reminds me of a limick about faster than light travel...
There once was a man named Dwight,
who could travel faster than light.
He left one day...
In a very relative way...
and he came back the preceding night!
Okay, smarty. One quantum particle occupies 2 places in space at the same time (aka quantum entangled). You move them a lightyear apart then spin one. What happens to the "other" particle and when?
There is no causality when it's actually the same particle. The cause and effect are both that it is the same particle.
Okay, I see a lot of people focusing on photons being used. But what about an FTL carrier pigeon? Or a carrier pigeon released from an FTL craft? I refer you to RFC 1149.
Okay, dummy. Read up about superluminal lorentz transformation, and we shall talk again.
Wake me up when this shit can be measured. Until then you are all talking out your collective asses.
From your link
Getting a message after it was sent is no biggie. I mean; write yourself a letter if you want to see that in action. But getting a message before it was sent causes issues (see for example; practically every sci-fi franchise). What those issues are exactly depends on how time travel works (e.g., "Timecop" or "Back to the Future" rules?), and thatâ(TM)s wide open to debate.
Flash forward 250 years to a physics class.
"So as we've learned in 2100 scientists discovered it was possible to communicated instantaneously"
"But Miss, doesn't that mean causality violations?"
"No of course not, as I mentioned we now know the multiverse works according to the 'Sliders' rules "
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
....mouthwash?
If we at least consider that current theories do have the speed of light in vacuum as a limit it is still possible to exceed the speed of light in other materials like glass and water.
But even if you exceed the speed of light it doesn't mean that the event is observed before it happens. It just means that you get notified about the event faster than expected.
There are also some phenomena that are a bit on the border of being tricky to explain given the theories of today, but they are usually on a small scale involving quantum mechanics - like teleportation of particles. And even the current theories offers "loopholes" for exceeding the speed of light - like spacetime warping and wormholes.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Even if quantum entanglement worked that way (it doesn't; that's just the most palatable way to present a concept that's too weird to understand without years of intense study), that doesn't change the facts. Relativity still means FTL communications would violate causality if they were possible.
It's perfectly obvious that this is true. However, it actually isn't true at all.
Relativity is a mind fuck.
Maybe I'm punting the brain fuck, but this makes time a weakly-ordered sequence. For instance, a 100ms ping means that "now" lasts 100ms. If I get an answer after 50ms, we say that it has travelled back in time.
Or maybe it's the theory of relativity that says that, in the same way that a binomial equation might have a negative impossible solution. Now is that theory valid outside its scope? Was Newton's?
If we manage to get 10c FTL, then our definition of "now" will become 10x shorter and nothing more will come off it. If we manage to get -1c FTL, our definition of "now" becomes a recursive "always" and we'll get some Steins;Gate snafu.
tl;dr
Instantaneous communication can means different things because "now" has a duration. For your martian pal, "now" means 10 minutes ago, but "now" also means 10 minutes in the future. You can play games with those extremes.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
When we have FTL communication in which packets arrive before they are sent, I will have written the needed protocols in 2010. I'll start them in 2016, complete them in 2010, and finish compatibilty testing in 2009. That'll let Microsoft implement them in 2057.
Ignorance admitted to...
I would argue that all the theories proposing this time reversal have also stated that you can't send the information faster then light. So... assuming we are sending the information faster then light, why would we think the rules that say we can't still apply?
The only way you get FTL communication is if we find some loophole in the laws that lets us slip information IGNORING the very law that supposedly would cause things to time travel.
That being the case, we can't really assume how the information will travel. Possibly it would be instantaneous communication. That is, information arriving WHEN it is sent not before or after.. but precisely WHEN it is sent.
That said, so far as I understand we have no means of FTL anything. Apparently even gravity moves at the speed of light which is sort of depressing. I read a fair amount of science fiction and it was assumed in much of it that gravity "waves" could be used to communicate FTL... well, according to some scientific publications I skim they go at the speed of light. What goes faster then light? I don't know... tachyons? Again, I think I've learned everything I know about tachyons from "fiction"... so I don't really know anything about them besides that they're supposedly unable to travel slower then light and time travel and possibly some other fun stuff.
Whatever... have fun with any of the above systems because they all look equally fruitless.
I'd love FTL communication. We do need it or something like it especially as we try to manage our legions of drones exploring the solar system. But until we have such a system I see no point in theory crafting the protocol it would use. You might as well pick out the sofa coffee table arrangement for your working model of the starship enterprise... complete with teleporter and holodeck... which will be used exclusively for naked orgies with holo-porn... because that's what you do with holodecks.
Anyway, I have no idea what I'm talking about but I suspect everyone is talking out of their asses on this one so at least I'm not alone on it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...throwing a lit torch.
... the result still looks like gibberish.
What gives?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Why do I even bother commenting on this?
Faster than light does not imply faster than time.
Instantanious aka immediately is also faster than light. As in quantum effect you get with entangling sub-atomic particles. Which has already been demonstrated.
But if someone could send information with tachyons then we maíght have an issue mentioned in this topic.
It can be done anywhere in the universe. My guess is in the future when we master an electron moving in a carrier wave entangled to another electron we will have instant communication.
http://saveie6.com/
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Anything posted in April 1 on any American website is fake. This news too.
I can explain dimensions 4 through 10(or even 11...maybe) to people, but I can't understand those diagrams. Didn't anyone ever teach that scientist to label his axes? Jeez.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I think we should parse what we mean by FTL communication carefully there are some possibilities that don't require changes to TCP detailed in RFC 6921.
First we have schemes like EVE online fluid routers which hack entanglement to communicate instantaneously between routers. There is no backwards time travel here.
Second we have wormholes or warp capable ships loaded with tape drives. There is also no backwards time travel here as you are taking shortcuts thru stretched space rather than locally exceeding c.
Third we have to think about what we mean by communications... If you are in a space ship traveling to the nearest star and you are going 99.9999...% the speed of light the 4 ly journy might only seem to you to take a few minutes if you throw in enough 9's. Once you arrive you can carry out normal delay tolerant IP exchanges without ever having to wait 4 years to communicate with the reciving party however they would have waited about 4 years to communicate with you.
Finally we have tachyons which propogate superluminally with reversed cause and effect. This is the only scheme of the bunch that requires RFC 6921.
I think the simplest solution to this entire mess is that relativity is not always correct. There are already certain areas of physics and sciences where relativity breaks down at certain points.
Progress and scientific advancement means adapting existing theories to encompass new discoveries: until we actually can use something like this, it's all theoretical.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
April fools i know but, The Speed of Light is simply that, a recognised speed. If I was travelling 10 light seconds at twice the SOL, I would get there in around 5 secs depending on massive magnetic interference. Something could not arrive b4 it's sent, a tiny fraction over 0 yes. I don't believe travelling at the SOL slows time, mearly presents a huge issue where hitting a tiny particle would be a disaster xD the forces involved would be insane. I could also be wrong but prove it!
What about those other time-travelling ships? They need a way to communicate with each other, right?
I don't get it. Why do physicists use GR for FTL? That does not make sense. It is the same as using Newtonian physic for relativistic speeds. GR was not designed for FTL, obviously.
All of the examples of violating causality is based on defining "now" in two different frame of reference. However, this "now" is established using GR while the "signal" (or bullet or whatever) uses FTL. That does not make sense.
If you have FTL you use FTL for everything including determining "now". Of course, you need new physic to do that. However, disproving FTL with GR is pointless using these examples.
Instead, why not use the curvature of space for disproving FTL?
Every particle travels through space, even the photon. According to GR space itself also changes with the speed of light. This means space itself cannot react fast enough for an FTL particle. It would be similar as if a ship did not disturb the water as it passes. And that is impossible.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Gives a whole new meaning to 'trading futures'
A digital fountain emits a stream of packets, consisting of a packet number, which selects a pseudo-random set of pieces of a file to be sent all XORED together. If you collect enough packets, no matter what order, you can derive the whole file (using Gaussian elimination to un-XOR it). Put everything you want to send to the past into a huge ZIP file, then use a digital fountain to send it, and it get there eventually, no matter what the time shift involved.
and patents that state it have already been issued:
See somewhere in the parts of these lectures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhuSn6sc7sc
I think the only thing that would have made this RFC better would be if one of the reference articles had a publish date in the future.
That doesn't solve anything we talked about in this thread. The main thing giving up on relativity solves is the notion people have that you "should" be able to go faster than light without time travel.
We use this *all the time* and it's not just theoretical.
... in the form of quantum entanglement?
Why should "Time" with a big T "flow" in one direction? In a single direction? Does time flow or is it just an illusion we are ill-equipped to pierce?
One explanation for this illusion might be that time is arbitrary indeed -- and our perceived reality is the emergent state of affairs. That is, the cosmos "takes time travel into account" as the present unfolds. To put it yet another way, the reason time seems to flow in only a single direction ("forward") is that the single moment of Now is in a constant state of chaotic flux due to a profound lack of restrictions on spacetime.
The electron truly is everywhere and everywhen until the actions you take to observe it collapse it down to a narrow range of possibilities that didn't get canceled out entirely.
Communication from the future? Why shouldn't this already have been happening all along? There's no particular reason we can think of except that we're clinging to the axioms of thermodynamics. And axioms are really nothing but assertions, assumptions to be used as starting points for logic. What if thermodynamics is just what happens when time travel does? What if consciousness perceives a "direction of time" just as an artifact? The way gliders in a Game Of Life simulation are destined to travel in a single direction -- though they could be oriented toward any direction because it doesn't actually matter which way they go. Once they're set off, away they go, and you can set up shooters to spray gliders in every possible direction simultaneously. So some of the gliders would be going "backward" and some "forward", but the determination of these labels is truly arbitrary. Forward to one is backward to the other, though their relative velocities are mutually agreeable.
The same way light propagates at a set speed no matter who's looking.
FTL communications would be possible in theory, since "communication signals" do not have mass. The only issue with people getting close to, or surpassing, FTL travel is due to those erroneous things called atoms that would punch holes through our bodies. Also, according to the theory of relativity, it states that it if it were possible to go the speed of light, time would go to a standstill. Surpassing the speed of light would NOT reverse time. Therefore, when the signal is sent, it would be immediately recieved on the other end.
And yes, April's foolsday or no, we do need to start developing the theories / protocols for dealing with FTL communications, since one day, we WILL be travelling to different galaxies eventually. The shortest path from A to B is 0. Instead of going faster than light, it would be more feasible for something with mass (ie: humans) to develop a "gravity drive" to fold space/time so that both points meet, or come very close. When the drive engages, the points "merge".. when it disengages, space/time reverts to normal.
3 Theoretical physics.
ack
ack,syn
syn
open
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
A packet can't arrive before it's sent, If it could then in theory it would be possible to have communication without a source.
Just because a message travels faster than light doesn't mean the message would be traveling backwards in time relative to the people sending and receiving the message. If a satellite is orbiting the sun and sends a message to Earth, it would take roughly eight minutes for the message to get to Earth at the speed of light. If the message travels a little faster than the speed of light, it would get to Earth in 7 minutes rather than 8 minutes. The message wouldn't arrive at the destination before it was sent. It doesn't matter if the message itself feels like it's traveling backwards in time at FTL speeds because the message itself isn't an observer. The end points are the observers and from their perspectives, the message just gets there faster.
Even if the information is transmitted instantly, from the point of view of the observers at the end points, the message won't travel in time.
I suppose if the message is composed of particles, and part of the message's timestamp is based on the age of the particles or something like that, then the timestamp of the message would change as the particles traveled. I didn't get a clear idea if this was the issue the RFC was attempting to address or not.
Somebody wrote the RFC with his own limited knowledge and extrapilated on it using his / her own theories which have no substance.
I'm not going to waste *time by explaining the difference between time and space-time, Straight lines and wormholes, or quantium entanglement. But if he has his own theories, he needs to present them to the scientific communities so they can be correctly vetted, prior to attempting to define a new standard based on them.
Hasn't it already been shown that FTL communication is possible through quantum entanglement?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_gwzx39LQ
I can send one bit of communication faster than light. All I need is really long stick. *poke* *poke*
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Uhhh, April first was YESTERDAY.
Oh, wait! I see what you mean! This post went back in time and really appeared yesterday!
Good show.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I'm not sure what it is that you're trying to say, but I'm pretty sure you're not correct.
What Einstein taught us about time and space is that you *cannot* go faster than light. Pushing something up to the speed of light would take an infinite amount of energy. However, if you *could* go faster than light, it would allow you to leave a point at a certain time, and then return to that same point in space at a time earlier than when you left. If you could send a message faster than light, and the recipient could respond with a faster-than-light response, then you could receive the response before you send the message.
Maybe you should understand it before trying to make exceptions?
In an overly simply nutshell. It's random and uncontrollable. You have no way of influencing or knowing in advance which way it will flip.
As such, you can't send information.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Quantum Entanglement would permit FTL communications.
Does anyone read science news these days?
"spooky action at a distance"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
I think FTL communication is simple, in these days of easily generated photon 'pairs', just that it will result in nearly instant communication, not 'back in time'.
put the photon entangled pair generator between 2 communicators...
setup spin detector aparatus, and ensure exact distances are known... then use a basic binary representation for spin=binary, and the instant action of the paired photon can be seen at the other end...
simple really
There is a very serious bug in this RFC. It assumes a SYN-ACK packet will arrive AFTER the SYN packet at point A. This isn't the case. In FTL travel point B will respond immediately to the ACK packet, meaning the ACK-SYN packet will arrive BEFORE the SYN packet was sent. Similarly the final ACK packet will be received by point B before the SYN-ACK packet is sent, making the very first event (from the pov of observer A) the receival of the ACK packet, then the SYN-ACK then the SYN packet.
The solution is to send everything in reverse obviously.
Thats how Bill S Preston, esq was able to hide his fathers keys in that bush in front of the police station
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
Editors can go into the future and fetch news that isn't quite so old.
Have gnu, will travel.
"spooky action at a distance"
Quoting from the same wikipedia article:
"The outcome of Alice's measurement is random. Alice cannot decide which state to collapse the composite system into, and therefore cannot transmit information to Bob by acting on her system. Causality is thus preserved, in this particular scheme. For the general argument, see no-communication theorem"
I think FTL communication is simple
This is ususally a good clue your understanding is incomplete.
setup spin detector aparatus, and ensure exact distances are known... then use a basic binary representation for spin=binary, and the instant action of the paired photon can be seen at the other end...
Now go try and develop a protocol which exchanges useful information this way.
Okay, smarty. One quantum particle occupies 2 places in space at the same time (aka quantum entangled). You move them a lightyear apart then spin one. What happens to the "other" particle and when?
There is no causality when it's actually the same particle. The cause and effect are both that it is the same particle.
1: It's not the same particle.
2: Information is not transferred, you don't get to spin one, you can merely read the spin of one and instantly know the spin of the other.
Imaging flipping a coin. You look at it as it lays on your hand or on the ground. You see the top and see that it's heads. You instantly know that the bottom is tails.
The information of the bottom being tails didn't arrive faster than light. You discerned it to be the opposite of the top before the experiment, and you learned of the top's state without violating the speed of light by looking at it. If you entangle particles and know the relation of their spins and then send them far apart, you're doing the same thing. Absolutely no information is transferred FTL.
There are already certain areas of physics and sciences where relativity breaks down at certain points.
Can you provide references about special relativity breaking down?
until we actually can use something like this, it's all theoretical
We use special relativity all the time, it is not theoretical.
This is better: http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html
It's called the "Girls' Gossip Group." Your girlfriend knows you cheated on her before you cheat on her.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
This is like something you would see on Troll Physics.
The important thing to remember about relativity is that the laws of physics still apply WITHIN EACH FRAME OF REFERENCE. The supposed paradoxes come about from analyzing a situation in one frame of reference from a difference frame of reference.
Isn't it already done?
There is nothing faster than the speed of thought.
PROBLEM SOLVED
Of course, for FTL to be any use we have to have something to communicate about.
I suggest saying whether the rabbit is (will be?) live or dead.
Except in the real world the average person doesnt need the metric system. Units of measurement are just a way to be able to identify how far/big/much something is. I dont need to know how many feet are in 2.5 miles in order to estimate the distance of 2.5 miles. Hell, trying to visualize how many feet it is would just give someone a headache. I dont know the precise measurement of a horsepower but i know what 100hp does in a 3000 pound car. (not much). Its all about relativity to the user. Why do scientists use AU? An AU is just distance from sun to earth. Hardly metric. Same for a light year. Neither are metric yet are used all the time in the scientific community because you can quickly guesstimate distances that way.
Is the late posting of a Joke about faster than light communications ironic?
could you use the collapse / non-collapse state as a possible binary representation? (since spin can't be chosen?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy
Casteism
Yeah, I know this is an April Fool's Joke. But...wouldn't the bigger joke be if they actually DO figure out how to communicate FTL and THIS is the only protocol we have for it?
Because Clause 9 of the Roommate Agreement http://wiki.the-big-bang-theory.com/wiki/Roommate_Agreement would require them to advise each other.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA