RE: Welcome to 'tool' confusion

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

From: Lucas Gonze (lucas@worldos.com)
Date: Mon May 07 2001 - 08:45:15 PDT


A thought that came out of this excellent rant:

> Let's face it, knowing what happens in a remote place faster than the photon
> flies is plain impossible.

How could you send information faster than light? Send a probability in the
past.

Let's say transmission rate is X%. You need to communicate a business decision
that you made on your planet Beelezebub IV to a partner on earth, and it takes
light 100 years to travel. If you send state data 100 years before you make the
decision, then your partner has a chance of predicting what you will do. This
would need to be a huge amount of data, and if your partner could predict your
action others might be able to as well, and events are complex so you can't 100%
predict, so this is a "lossy" method. ...but in some cases it would work.

The limitations on this working arise from the limits of predictability, not the
speed of light. Predictability would be a function of the quality of the state
data on the sender side and analytical ability on the receiver side.

There would still be a photon limit, because perfect predictions would require
complete data, and complete data requires you to send a photon for every photon
whose state you are communicating. But if you accept probabilistic data as just
another form of lossy compression, it can sometimes beat the speed of light.

Just a fun thought.


Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 07 2001 - 09:01:20 PDT