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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
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!
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.
(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?
It wouldn't. It would only appear to the observer on the receiving end to arrive before it was sent. If you don't know about the difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light, never noticed that phenomenon, and someone stands on the far side of an open field from you, and shouts something, you hear it when you hear it. If you are a simple person (by which I don't mean stupid, just not sophisticated, or hip to the jive of the light/sound speed dif,) you might well assume that the moment you heard it was the moment he called it out to you, which is a common occurrence over SHORT distances.
Then he takes a pair or empty, metal fuel cans, and bashes them together over his head, and chucks them to the ground. The moment the cans banged together, you hear only silence, or perhaps the chirping of nearby small birds. It's eerie. It sure looked like he banged the hell out of those cans. A couple seconds drag by then you hear CLANG!!! How'd THAT happen? He seems to have banged them together BEFORE he banged them together. (If you assume the auditory report of the collision is the MOMENT at which it happened.)
In fact, the banging together of the cans occurred NOT ONLY before you HEARD it, it happened before you SAW it.
If the sun winked out into darkness, (but retained its mass) we would not know it for about 8 minutes, because that's how far away the sun is. At the colossal speed of LIGHT, that gulf of space is crossed by light in about that time. To us on Earth, we see the sun shining at noon, noon plus 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3... 7 minutes, then right about at 8, WHOOSH, the sun goes out. Humanity instantly panics of course, but we don't care about the little peon ants that shoot guns at the demon eating the sun, to drive it away as they do whenever there's a lunar eclipse...
But the sun vanishes despite their heroic efforts. We know from our understanding of astrophysics that the sun actually vanished 8 minutes or thereabouts BEFORE we observed it vanishing, which is of course strange and counter-to-reason, but it's what we now understand as a rule of the universe. Some physicists/astronomers/etc. might insist that since we can't get anywhere faster than light, for all intents it IS now when the light from an event arrives, but that's as silly as imagining a letter sent last week was actually sent this morning because you GOT it your mailbox THIS morning. Any argument to the contrary not based on an EXPERIMENT, is sophistic and specious, especially when you consider a message between sender and its intended recipient who are traveling (if at all) in the same direction, with the same speed, acceleration, etc., in other words, have the same relativistic frame of reference.
If I'm on a planet that is moving just as Earth does, and neither toward nor away from it, 1 light year distant, if you sent a radio signal January 1st, 2013, I would receive it on January 1st, 2014. If I had no idea how far away you were, or thought you were just over the horizon, I might think you sent it January 1st, 2014, but you sent it a year earlier. The day I receive the message, it is on YOUR planet, 2014. If I immediately reply, you will receive the response January 1st, 2015.
The only known exception to this phenomenon is if you have a spaceship that is propelled, as it were, by an Infinite Improbability Drive, in which case you can not only be at any arbitrary point in the universe at any time you so choose, (provided you know EXACTLY how improbable your ship being at that location IS, and have a fresh, really HOT cup of tea...) but in fact you can end up in any TIME if you're not careful. You could, for instance, narrowly escape death by jumping a vast gulf of TIME rather than space, and end up at Milliways.
If you do, you must try the quadruped; he insists that he's tender, juicy and delicious!
Of course, the story we're discussing is an April Moron's joke, (I hold that the teller of such tales is the fool, but what do I know?) Still, it's still an interesting topic, so I have chimed in.
... 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.
Relativity is a mind fuck.
I think ...
you're holding it wrong.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
If I could figure out a way to reach through the internet and face-blast you, trust me, I would.
I would also then be the inventor of the most popular feature the world has ever seen: if there is someone out there who wouldn't like to reach through the tubes and punch someone, they're not using the internet.
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 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
haha, but you realize what makes one end of a stick move when the other end is pushed? those forces propagate at much less than light speed, a stick initially compresses when one end is pushed, and the compressed wave propagates.