How To Communicate Faster-Than-Light 265
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."
April fools again? (Score:5, Funny)
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It's still 1/4 in the states.
Re:April fools again? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still 1/4 in the states.
Well, no. In the states it's 4/1.
All of Europe should be on 2/4 by now though.
Re:April fools again? (Score:5, Funny)
It's still 1/4 in the states.
Well, no. In the states it's 4/1.
All of Europe should be on 2/4 by now though.
See, if the US switched to metric, we wouldn't have these miscommunications...
Re:April fools again? (Score:5, Funny)
It's still 1/4 in the states.
Well, no. In the states it's 4/1.
All of Europe should be on 2/4 by now though.
See, if the US switched to metric, we wouldn't have these miscommunications...
I can believe FTL communication, even FTL travel, but the US moving to metric? April fools are meant to be believable.
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maybe europe should switch to imperial / US customary units? how come the world is always telling US to change?
Aside from metric making more sense in science, 7000 million people use metric, 300 million use king george's system.
Re:April fools again? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:April fools again? (Score:5, Informative)
He did say Gigapeople, not Gibipeople.
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You just copied that whole comment in, didn't you?
Quit spamming.
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because everything is in only single dimension units, ever.
This whole stupid psuedo intellectual holier than thou "debate" is waste of time, perpetrated by people who dont even know what they are talking about. Constant whining on /. only proves to me very very few people on here actually make real world measurements on a regular basis. if you did, you'd know that:
-one unit is as good as another
-everything is traced back to actual official standard
-it's all just numbers, and in this day and age, conversions
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-one unit is as good as another
no. Metric is easier to teach, and easier to do in the head.
"Ever had to measure rainfall in acre-feet and convert it to runoff flow rate, and volume change in a river system over some distance?"
funny enough,. yes. It's easier in metric.
"no one gives a flying f about meters or inches."
speak you your ignorant self. moving completely to metric removes one type of conversion. That makes it less complicated, and removes an opportunity for a mistake.
Plus, having a global standard i
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I use time all day too.
I work in milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds.
I'm not kidding either.
Stop bragging about your sex life - geesh.
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US to Europe in just under 3 months is not faster than light. Even a steam ship could manage it in that time.
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No, but it is tradition that some doofus will point out that their particular location has moved on and it's an outrage to still see April fools content.
Unfortunately for you, this site doesn't operate on your time.
Re:April fools again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:April fools again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite frankly I'm surprised Slashdot is able to get April Fools articles out at all.
I come here every year expecting to hear about {insert Google joke of the year} on April 3rd after every other news outlet had published it, and then again a dupe on April 5th.
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Quite frankly I'm surprised Slashdot is able to get April Fools articles out at all.
They're a year late. Easier than you'd think.
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Is there some part of the world so stupid they don't realize that it'll still be April 1st in American Samoa for another 5.5 hours (At time of posting)?
Just roll with it.
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Re:April fools again? (Score:5, Informative)
This is *Not* an April fools!!... Slashdot is reporting on an RFC, published in draft status. No Joke. Like other RFC's published on April 1st, It probably wont have any real world usage (unless we actually find a way of sending things faster than light, at which point the universe collapses into a paradoxial soup), and is there mostly for its comedic value. BUT, that is not the point, the point is this is an attempt at working out how to send things over a FTL medium, and documenting them in an RFC.
IP Over Avian carriers (rfc1149), another April 1st RFC, was implemented a few years later. It worked.
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.. why doesn't the future simply publish the RFC?!
Maybe they did. Maybe tehy did.
This could be it. Prove it wrong.
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why doesn't the future simply publish the RFC?!
You are assuming that they didn't.
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And I thought it was about time somebody actually started looking at this shit when some **** makes it into an April Fools joke :(
BTW Faster than light communications are already here or haven't you been paying attention to the whole Quantum Computer malarchy
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No, they aren't. I would suggest that you haven't been paying as close attention to the quantum computer "malarchy" as you think....
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Functionally, quantum entanglement is the equivalent of placing single red and blue balls in separate boxes without looking at them, sending one box to China, and then opening your box. If it's the red ball, you now know the one in China is blue, and vice-versa, despite the great distance between them.
Now mechanically, the quantum equivalent is conside
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The RFC was written for and published on April Fool's Day. A number of semi-joking RFCs have been published on April 1st including the famous one for IP Transmission via Avian Carriers (i.e., carrier pigeons) and, several years later, a followup that reported the results from its actual implementation and testing (hint: NOT to be used for vi or emacs :-).
While the Avian Carriers RFC can be a model for lossy channels with long latency periods, I cannot guess what use super-luminal communications protocols w
Re: April fools again? (Score:5, Funny)
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You have no idea. They even have bacon flavored chocolate.
Re: April fools again? (Score:5, Funny)
And chocolate flavored pigs. Yes, the holy grail of genetics
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Bacon flavored chocolate. Pfah.
I'll eat your bacon flavored chocolate, and raise you... um... http://baconlube.com/ [baconlube.com]
(And though it's still April 1st where I post, this is no joke...)
Also: It's April Fool's day for another 5.5 hours in American Samoa.
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Who told you about baconnaise? That's supposed to be top secret.
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Well, actually It is 11:15 pm, April 1st 2013 as I type this (Central Time Zone, USA.) So, you are incorrect.
Emphasis mine. Since both you and the person who modded me down don't seem to understand, I'll explain, and then repeat myself: am is before noon, pm is after noon.
April fool's pranks must be performed before noon on April 1st to be considered as such. It was not before noon on April 1 in any timezone when that story was posted.
So it is no longer an April fool's prank.
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Perhaps you play by this "has to happen before noon" rule, but this year is the first I have ever heard of that, in 30 years of living in this country and fucking with people's head on April 1st. I'd say this is a stupid and not widely-followed rule for this pseudo-holiday. I don't even go in to work until noon: How am I going to offend and torment my coworkers if I can't prank them during our normal office hours?
Failure. That's what your post and arrogant attitude reek of. Stay home and practice, and perha
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Perhaps you play by this "has to happen before noon" rule, but this year is the first I have ever heard of that, in 30 years of living in this country and fucking with people's head on April 1st.
I've heard of it before, and always considered it to be a bunch of misinformation put about by people who can't cope with the concept of a joke. If you look closely, it's always the most humorless who insist most on this "rule", clinging to it desperately like a drowning man to a lifebelt.
Back to the Future ... or Past ... or Something (Score:2)
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.
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I feel stupid (Score:2)
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. :(
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Unless the last 200 years of science were all some incredible mistake, we will never find a way to violate the speed of light.
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In a word... Tachyons! We will learn to communicate through tachyons and will know about the end of the world just in time to kiss our collective asses goodbye! And a tip of the hat to you Dr. Manhattan!
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In a word... Tachyons!
You mean those hypothetical particles that modern physics generally does not support as actually existing?
Charliemopps was talking science. If you're going to go science fiction, might as well invoke something like Andromeda's Slipstream.
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Clearly, all we need is an Ansible [wikipedia.org]...
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"Unless the last 200 years of science were all some incredible mistake, we will never find a way to prove the Earth is round." ~15th Century AD
"Unless the last 200 years of science were all some incredible mistake, we will never find a way to prove that the Earth orbits the Sun." ~16th Century AD
Science is always evolving and incorporating discoveries. When we start ignoring things science has not already proven, we have already failed.
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"Unless the last 200 years of science were all some incredible mistake, we will never find a way to prove the Earth is round." ~15th Century AD
Contrary to popular belief, 15th Century humans did know that the Earth is round. They even had a pretty good estimate for its circumference. Which was the reason that Columbus had such a hard time raising funds to go to India: The sailing distance was simply too far. And had the Americas not been in the way, this voyage would either have returned empty handed or maybe not at all.
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Umm, Aristotle was publishing proofs that the world was round back several hundred years BC, and they look like they might well have been known hundreds of years earlier. Proving that the Earth orbited the Sun required better optics than they had in the 16th Century, maybe -- Tycho Brache did pretty well with no lenses but his own eyes and an obsessive attention to accurate measurements over many years.
And finally, Special Relativity is less than 120 years old. Even the Michaelson-Morley experiments are m
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Well those aren't really great examples. People have known that the earth was round for thousands of years. There have been people who have suspected and suggested that the earth may be spinning and moving around the sun for almost as long. Ptolemy even talks about the idea, concluding that we may be moving and it would help make sense of certain things, but he's just not convinced.
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Use FTL to request the RFC... (Score:5, Funny)
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IMO FTL is NIH, so the RFC is a POS and we should MOO FTW!! LOL.
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Yeah, I don't get the part about it arriving before its sent. After all, we've been able to send things faster than light today [wikipedia.org].
And really, faster than light doesn't mean violating causality. E.g., if we have something separated one light-second apart, if we send it at twice light speed, it arrives in half a second instead of a second. The fastest we'll get is instantaneous transmission where the packet arrives the moment it's sent...
Wrong day (Score:3)
(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.
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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.
Doesn't this apply to all of Slashdot's 4 day old "news"?
Never mind the fact that this will be duped again next week just incase you missed it the first time.
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That was it. I've been burned over the past ten years or so. There was no way I'd put up with it this year. I found better things to do.
Slashdot. Why? Why? Why? Why become big childish pricks for a day? The pink pony shite you forced on us a few years back was the straw that broke the
i don't get it. (Score:4, Funny)
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?
Please explain ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Aside from April Fools. (Score:2)
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 scal
Not to worry, I will have written the protocols (Score:5, Funny)
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After applying ROT-13 decoding to the summary... (Score:2)
... the result still looks like gibberish.
What gives?
HOW you get there matters! (Score:2)
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
Why use GR for FTL? (Score:3)
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.
Obvious answer - digital fountain (Score:2)
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.
Server, Client (Score:2)
ack
ack,syn
syn
open
What? (Score:2)
One bit (Score:2)
I can send one bit of communication faster than light. All I need is really long stick. *poke* *poke*
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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.
Really? (Score:2)
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
Re:Might be fast but (Score:5, Informative)
It's perfectly obvious that this is true. However, it actually isn't true at all. [askamathematician.com]
Relativity is a mind fuck.
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Re:Might be fast but (Score:4, Funny)
Relativity is a mind fuck.
I think ...
you're holding it wrong.
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There is no causality when it's actually the same particle. The cause and effect are both that it is the same particle.
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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.
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It's perfectly obvious that this is true. However, it actually isn't true at all. [askamathematician.com]
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 c
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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 recipien
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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.
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This is (almost certainly) probably wrong, but...
As I understood it, a message travelling at FTL will experience exotic negative time, since it is travelling faster than light. (At exactly c, it experiences 0 time) the sender and reciever do not experience this exotic time. However, the message itself acheives its apparent FTL by going backward in time as measured by the conversationalists respectively.
Combining normal time reference frames with imaginary negative time reference frames results in strange vo
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Do bullets shot faster than the speed of sound arrive before the gun makes a sound?
are you serious?!
super-sonic bullets do arrive first, then the sound...that is why they are super-sonic ... but he also proved that you would need a infinity amount of energy to just reach the light speed and that impossible in the reality to go beyond that
Higher-than-light speeds are needed to to back in time, as Einstein proved (mathematically)
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but he also proved that you would need a infinity amount of energy to just reach the light speed and that impossible in the reality to go beyond that
But photons don't have infinite amounts of energy.
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and you? did you read the comment?
for above sound speed, you are correct, but for above light speed (if possible), the package would time travel and so arrive in the past, before the sending
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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
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Very nice reply. I wish I had mod points for you.
I've seen so many B movie plots because people don't understand this simple principle. FTL is exactly like light moving faster than sound. It doesn't matter what reference frame you're in, or the speed of time in your reference frame.
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"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?"
Most likely because they set the TTL to be a negative number.
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God would never let this happen
He let George Bush Jr. happen. He let Carrot Top Happen. He let Paris Hilton happen... you my friend are buggered!
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You do know people have free will, right? We can make choices and stuff.
One choice you simply don't have is to communicate information faster than light. Who or why that is the case may be due to God, which is sort of the point being made by the GP. There is no negative proof of this idea, but there isn't a positive proof either. Stephen Hawking has spent some time discussing what God may or may not have done in terms of setting up the universe as we know it, but there certainly seems at the moment to be some arbitrariness to some aspects of the universe as we see it. One o
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In the many worlds paradigm, all the outcomes that can happen do and become branching points for new possible universes that coexist in parallel in the light cone. So the path you walk may be deterministic inside an infinite number of parallel outcomes and in that context free will is alive and well.
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But let's see if someone with a brain is reading comments. One quantum particle occupies 2 places in space at the same
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The overseas reporter delay shouldn't even really be happening anymore. I routinely make voice and video calls spanning 8 time zones with no noticeable delay.
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There still is a delay of some sort, even if you aren't noticing it. The deal with the "delay" was usually due to sending signals to geosynchronous orbit satellites. At 35,000 kilometers, the time to send a signal to those satellites and have it return is sufficient that somebody with a stopwatch controlled by people is enough to even measure.
In fact a really interesting experiment used to be performed where you could take something like a State of the Union address, and for those stations that used satel
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The most basic variant of quantum entanglement is two particles have opposite states (they could be photons with different polarizations, for instance) which are entangled. When one particle takes a state, the other particle takes the opposite state instantaneously.
The problem's that in order to make a particle "take" a state, we have to measure it. Measuring the particle will collapse the particle's wavefunction into one of its two p
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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.
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I'd have to start posting in rubber panties and booties.
Fuck yeah. Pwned.