Social, Economic and Political Perfectionism.

[Sothis]

Originally Posted by Woodsprite

Still doesn't make sense, though. How many ISVs could there be? They're huge crafts as big as 3 cities. If it's $7500 per bit, and the unobtanium mined costs over $20 million per kilo, wouldn't the RDA have enough funds to invest in more efficient methods of communication?

Availability of funds isn't the problem -- you're bumping up against fundamental laws of physics here. 300 million m/s is the universal speed limit... it is literally, physically impossible for a signal to travel any faster than that. Speed of light - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All the money in the world wouldn't let you "invest in more efficient methods of communication," any more than it would let you invest in ways to shut off gravity.

Unless... hmm, maybe I'm misunderstanding you. Maybe what you meant is "why doesn't the RDA make every ISV capable of superluminal quantum-entanglement communications, the way the base is?"

It's a little hard for me to answer that, because personally, the "superluminal" communications using quantum entanglement is a bit of a stretch for me, even WITH the caveat that it's insanely expensive, logistically limited, and low in bit-rate. I admit that I'm way out of my depth when it comes to quantum mechanics (took 1 or 2 classes that touched upon it, but nothing more specialized than that). However, every source I've looked at (that isn't complete gibberish to me) seems to emphasize that quantum entanglement could never be used to transmit information. i.e. You can measure the quantum state of a particle and infer information about its entangled pair, but you can't manipulate the quantum states and use the phenomenon to transmit information between pairs. You can only observe what already exists. Below is an example of an excerpt that seems to imply this (it makes more sense in context if you read the linked article).


EPR paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The principle of locality states that physical processes occurring at one place should have no immediate effect on the elements of reality at another location. At first sight, this appears to be a reasonable assumption to make, as it seems to be a consequence of special relativity, which states that information can never be transmitted faster than the speed of light without violating causality. It is generally believed that any theory which violates causality would also be internally inconsistent, and thus deeply unsatisfactory.

It turns out that the usual rules for combining quantum mechanical and classical descriptions violate the principle of locality without violating causality. Causality is preserved because there is no way for Alice to transmit messages (i.e. information) to Bob by manipulating her measurement axis. Whichever axis she uses, she has a 50% probability of obtaining "+" and 50% probability of obtaining "-", completely at random; according to quantum mechanics, it is fundamentally impossible for her to influence what result she gets. Furthermore, Bob is only able to perform his measurement once: there is a fundamental property of quantum mechanics, known as the "no cloning theorem", which makes it impossible for him to make a million copies of the electron he receives, perform a spin measurement on each, and look at the statistical distribution of the results. Therefore, in the one measurement he is allowed to make, there is a 50% probability of getting "+" and 50% of getting "-", regardless of whether or not his axis is aligned with Alice's.

Then again, there are articles on wikepedia about quantum computing that I can't seem to penetrate at all, so maybe if you do some hand-waving and sideways-glancing, it's ok for the avatar universe to have superluminal communication technology. Still, I think I can swallow it more comfortably if said technology is so constrained by physics and expense that you can only have one "pair" of quantum communicators -- one at RDA headquarters on Earth, and one at Hell's Gate on Pandora.

And now I've taken this thread massively off-topic. Maybe I should start a new thread to debate the physics of superluminal communications?