Quantum Entanglment

[ThunderChilde]

:devil: I know there are some sci-fi books working on this theory for realtime FTL comms. One of them uses an array of I think 36 entangled electrons to effect communications. it is linked on a one to one basis, keyed transcievers if you wish. It would be prohibitive to build a full up comm net. But going with a hub set up? Has possibilities.

As I recall the throughput wasn't stunningly high, so the bandwidth would be limited to key gov. comms and military traffic, the key strategic stuff. That and personal contact between nobility and the Emporer or Moot.

This does put a huge crimp in the Xboat, 9 months for news to travel to the core thing.

This does strike me as the secret tech of the Imperial Illuminati, or some other hidden cabal. That or the basis for an ancients realtime link between 2 different bases, or into G'fathers pocket universe, from ours.

 

[Gadrin]

GURPS Ultra Tech offers these as an option for GURPS Space campaigns. I've got a group that utilizes them in Traveller, based on the Electron Incantation from Crusade's Technomages. The full technology was covered better in the older version of Ultra Tech under Dreamnets (IMHO).

Basically you allot so many entangled particles and apply bandwidth for each communication session, so eventually you use up your entangled particles.

It also offers that it might be possible not to have FTL comm if the particles are farther apart than a LY (or light second, I don't recall exactly).

Ultra Tech also offers a similar feature for regular communicators, giving them a "quantum channel" which means if the signal is eavesdropped upon, those involved instantly know, since in theory observing them, changes them.


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[ThunderChilde]

I do like the two cans and a string nature of quantum entanglement. The 1LY limit would make it more of a backbone for a near zero lag Solar Sytem commnet. No more time lag on reporting raiders in a system's fringes eheh.

On a more serious note, it has tactical implacations and risks if the the flag and command ships are all linked like this, it makes them more of a target than they already were.

Considering the nature of the link, I cannot concieve of how you could eavesdrop on any transmissions.

 

[Gadrin]

Considering the nature of the link, I cannot concieve of how you could eavesdrop on any transmissions.

Their examples was a pair of matched radioes with a feature called a "Quantum channel". Communication is done normally, however if the signal is tapped by another source...




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[whartung]

I wouldn't worry about bandwidth -- considering how much of the world was ruled by the telegraph, bandwidth is the least of the problems.

No, the game is the network of devices, since they have to paired. But you could have an "Imperial Switchboard" system that holds half of the units. Comms come in, then get redirected to their final destination.

Here's where bandwidth can come in to play a bit, if you're going to have central hubs routing to other hubs.

But even then I wouldn't worry so much about bandwidth. Consider this message. It could readily be encoded against a dictionary with 65000 words, and thus become a 2080 bit message, and even that could be compressed. It has 130 words, 2 bytes per word, 8 bits per byte.

 

[ThunderChilde]

As an aside, if this is what ET is using, then SETI is probably in aworse position for detecting them.

 

[ThunderChilde]

Okay, what we have emerging is something on the order of the old BellTel system. Planetary Terminals feeding into say subsector or sector Switch Boards. It would still likely be of a limited bandwidth, with no peak or trough. If a "node" goes offline, the havoc would be priceless. With trillions of citizens and corporates, bandwidth would be extremely expensive.o:

This would have to be tighly controled by the Imperium it self, a new buracracy and the planetary nodes run out of the Imperial Starport Zone. I can hear the B'waps turning inside out from here.

Comm Lag would be on the order of a few minutes or less from transmition to reciept. While this would revolutionize the affairs of the 3I, it would likely put a real crimp in the affairs of most travellers. It wouldn't eliminate the mail packet contracts, and the X-boats would still be needed for everyone else other than the Imperium, Navy and Nobles with enough pull to have access to the network.

Hmm, I suppose financial services would also be a key cutomer that would need access as soon as it was feasible to do so.

 

[Spinward Scout]

Cool! I might have to rewrite JumpComm

 

[BlackBat242]

Okay, what we have emerging is something on the order of the old BellTel system. Planetary Terminals feeding into say subsector or sector Switch Boards. It would still likely be of a limited bandwidth, with no peak or trough. If a "node" goes offline, the havoc would be priceless. With trillions of citizens and corporates, bandwidth would be extremely expensive.o:

This would have to be tighly controled by the Imperium it self, a new buracracy and the planetary nodes run out of the Imperial Starport Zone. I can hear the B'waps turning inside out from here.

Comm Lag would be on the order of a few minutes or less from transmition to reciept. While this would revolutionize the affairs of the 3I, it would likely put a real crimp in the affairs of most travellers. It wouldn't eliminate the mail packet contracts, and the X-boats would still be needed for everyone else other than the Imperium, Navy and Nobles with enough pull to have access to the network.

Hmm, I suppose financial services would also be a key cutomer that would need access as soon as it was feasible to do so.

See Elizabeth Moon's Vatta series for virtually exactly this concept.

 

[ThunderChilde]

Damn and Blast! I hate it when good and honest thought experiments re-discover the wheel.

Kudo's Scout, different take, but you were there first.

 

[Gadrin]

Here's the origins/background...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible




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[ThunderChilde]

gah, its been decades since I read that stuff, but I vaguely recall the ansible, not sure from where. The slow text transmission rate is lower than I was thinking, and was a lot more flexible than my point to point theory.

In modern terms I was thinking on the order of 128K to 256K bandwidth. Not huge, and easily overloaded by the vast scale of the Imperiums comm traffic.

 

[mike wightman]

There is an ansible in Orson Scott Cards enderverse, but I'm sure he borrowed the term from an earlier work by another author.

Perhaps I should have clicked on the link above earlier lol.

 

[Gadrin]

gah, its been decades since I read that stuff, but I vaguely recall the ansible, not sure from where. The slow text transmission rate is lower than I was thinking, and was a lot more flexible than my point to point theory.

In modern terms I was thinking on the order of 128K to 256K bandwidth. Not huge, and easily overloaded by the vast scale of the Imperiums comm traffic.

Well, there's nothing forcing you to accept "conventional fiction"; I simply offer it as a starting point.

The Electron Incantation the B5 Technomages use allows a "conference call" with full holographics, so I simply fuse the GURPS Dream Net technology with a Q-Entangled network to simulate it. They also use orbital FTL relays for conventional messaging.

If you're in the mood for a decent, well-written, very detailed book on the various usage of unusual technologies, make sure you read the Technomage Trilogy by Jeanne Cavelos. I've read it a few times, and I bought the omnibus after wearing out the paperbacks.

It's a back-room peek at how the mages operate and is a pretty good story.

I use some of it for Imperial Research Station type of Technology.


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[coliver988]

There is an ansible in Orson Scott Cards enderverse, but I'm sure he borrowed the term from an earlier work by another author.

Perhaps I should have clicked on the link above earlier lol.

Ursala LeGuin used it in a series of books: communication was FTL, but travel was STL, although relative: you went to another system, it would be years relative to both systems before you got anywhere. Relative to you, short trip. Get back home and centuries may have passed. It was at least a trilogy if not more (and dang if I cannot remember it, other than a necklace being a part of the first one)

 

[BlackBat242]

Shamelessly cribbed from wiki-waki:


An ansible is a hypothetical machine capable of superluminal communication and used as a plot device in science fiction literature.

The word ansible was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1966 novel, Rocannon's World. Le Guin states that she derived the name from "answerable," as the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances. Her award-winning 1974 novel The Dispossessed tells of the invention of the ansible within her Hainish Cycle.

The name of the device has since been borrowed by authors such as Orson Scott Card, Vernor Vinge, Elizabeth Moon, Jason Jones, L.A. Graf, and Dan Simmons. Similarly functioning devices are present in the works of numerous others, such as Frank Herbert and Philip Pullman, who called it a lodestone resonator.

The subspace radio, best known today from Star Trek and named for the series' method of achieving faster-than-light travel, was the most commonly used name for such a faster-than-light (FTL) communicator in the science fiction of the 1930s to the 1950s.

One ansible-like device which predates Le Guin's usage is the Dirac communicator in James Blish's 1954 short story "Beep". Isaac Asimov solved the same communication problem with the hyper-wave relay in The Foundation Series.

Anne Mccaffery used special crystals that had a linked instantaneous resonance even over dozens of light years to produce FTL communication in her Crystal Singer trilogy (first book published 1982).

Stephen R. Donaldson, in his Gap Series, introduces Symbiotic Crystalline Resonance Transmission, clearly ansible-type technology which is very difficult to produce and limited to text messages.

 

[boomslang]

This would have to be tighly controled by the Imperium it self, a new buracracy and the planetary nodes run out of the Imperial Starport Zone.

Right up until someone reverse-engineers and then open-sources it, then it breaks out and is ubiquitous within a few decades. You could set up pirate transmitters on starships which operate outside the 3I's formal jurisdiction, and have at it.

Likewise, I would submit that given the feudal nature of the 3I, such QE commo tech would be officially deployed first and foremost among the financial institutions, and only subsequently among the "supporting" military ones (cf. Imperiallines).

Of course, it would be a simple matter to break it if you want to keep it out of YTU: simply rule that transiting Jumpspace breaks the quantum entanglement; this then requires STL ships to deploy the one half of any set of transmission/reception gear across sector-sized distances, and that should prove a deal-breaking logistical headache (especially since telepathy and clairvoyance actually work in the OTU)...

 

[Sifu Blackirish]

...and yet another...

Michael P. Kube-McDowell has an ansible like device in his Trigon Disunity trilogy (hope I got the names right, been years since I read it).

An alien artifact, called a "spindle", can handle FTL transmissions to planets or ships in flight. Ships are STL using focused gravity fields in front so it "falls" at relativistic velocities.

Gives good insight into how fast comms and slow physical presence affect interstellar government.