Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
No. Are you suggesting that you can use it to transmit information?
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Depends on what you mean about "use it to transmit information".
It can indeed be used as a truly secure communications channel.
Hasn't been done but it seems eminently doable. It is moving into the same R&D space as quantum computing.
https://www.livescience.com/59502-ne...nt-record.html
What *current* theory doesn't allow is for classic ftl communication.
"Non-classic" FTL? One of the James Blish stories I cited above, QUINCUNX OF TIME, used Paul Dirac's quantum work to postulate a time-independent communication system that broke speed of light restructions in a unique way.
Look, the key conceit in SF, which is why a lot of writers tried to rebrand it as "Speculative Fiction", is the idea that our knowledge of the universe is incomplete (and in some areas, flat-out wrong) and that a good way to explore the frontiers of knowledge (Clarke's Second Law, above) is via rationalist speculation in stories. In effect, as close kin to the Thought Experiments of physicists and others.
Focusing too strongly on "known facts" and deprecating the "not known to be wrong" is too tight a worldview for a genre that exists to examine ideas. Which is why Hard Sf is a separate (minority) subset of the field.
The problem with classifying all non-hard SF as "fantasy" is that it pretty much says there is no real SF since sooner or later all hard SF fades under the weight of new discoveries and thus becomes "fantasy".
That is a wee bit limiting.
Also kills most of the fun.
"To boldly go", and all that...