The speed-of-light limitation is a local limitation. There have been experiments showing that it's possible to send information faster than the speed of light, and bypassing the speed of light by e.g. moving or changing your frame of reference is theoretically possible (e.g. wormholes, folding space, etc.)
With our current understanding of physics, it doesn't seem possible but the key word is current. Scientists recently measured particles going faster than the speed of light. Granted it was not much faster and is still not verified, but if that's possible, it'd stand to reason that there could be other advancements that could do it. If you asked anyone a hundred years ago if they thought they could have real-time communication with someone half way around they world, they would think you were crazy.
Wasn't this formally disproven, that particles (neutrinos) can go faster than light? A technical issue I think was at play, or some miscalculations that did not take the effects of relativity into account properly.
Indeed, all the experiments located under Gran Sasso are reporting measured speeds compatible with light speed (in the vacuum). Here's the CERN press release:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/releases2011/pr...
There are also named two possible causes of the original, unexpected result.
> If you asked anyone a hundred years ago if they thought they could have real-time communication with someone half way around they world, they would think you were crazy.
It's a different situation: before the radio was invented, people had no idea ho to communicate that far, but they no reason to believe it was not possible at all: it was just a matter of technology. Regarding talking in real time to Mars, already a century ago they had good reasons to consider it impossible: the scientific knowledge of the world is (and already was a century ago) incompatible with faster-than-light cause-effect relation.
One thing is not to know how to do something, another is knowing it to be impossible, short of stunning scientific discoveries.
In our lifetime - No!
Beyond that- I am not sure of the limitation of light.
Consider this- There is a lake which is 50 meters wide but 500 km long. You want to cross the lake. You are at the middle of one side of the lake. Now to cross you need to travel aproximately 500km if you follow the bank.
Now if your maximum speed is 6 km per hour yo need more than 80 hours.
Now you get a great idea to create a bridge on the lake- Time to cross is reduced to a minute or so. Now what you are doing is instead of walking one dimension following the bank you just bridged the two places using second dimension.
I do not know if it is possible to create a bridge among two places using another dimension or not- but it is alwaws a possibility and you can do it by travelling less than speed of light.
The 'generally accepted' theory on how to accomplish this well is some implementation of quantum entanglement.
A wormhole is another possibility, but connecting both ends of an Einstein-Rosen bridge to the same universe would render it too unstable to be used for any sort of communication, as it would collapse before light or radio signals could make it through. One could theoretically get around this by creating two wormholes to a separate universe, with the endpoints here separated by distance and the endpoints in the other universe very close (so that signals/matter/etc. travels to the other universe and back). In effect, this would work similarly to 'hyperspace' in some sci-fi (e.g. Babylon 5's jump gates).
I think they've been able to demonstrate quantum entanglement getting past the latency problem; the light beam has to be continuous (you have to know you want this communication for as long as it takes for the photons to make the journey) but by sending one entangled photon and monkeying with its trapped twin at the source, it's theoretically possible to get near-instant communication over any distance.
Still, as important as latency is here on planet Earth to the financial trading witch doctors in New York, Tokyo, and London, seems odd no one's been able to monetize this idea as yet.
I guarantee that if we develop AI good enough to simulate any given's person's actual responses, the first most popular use-case will be people trying to figure out how to successfully talk their significant others into a threesome.
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It's a different situation: before the radio was invented, people had no idea ho to communicate that far, but they no reason to believe it was not possible at all: it was just a matter of technology. Regarding talking in real time to Mars, already a century ago they had good reasons to consider it impossible: the scientific knowledge of the world is (and already was a century ago) incompatible with faster-than-light cause-effect relation.
One thing is not to know how to do something, another is knowing it to be impossible, short of stunning scientific discoveries.
Consider this- There is a lake which is 50 meters wide but 500 km long. You want to cross the lake. You are at the middle of one side of the lake. Now to cross you need to travel aproximately 500km if you follow the bank.
Now if your maximum speed is 6 km per hour yo need more than 80 hours.
Now you get a great idea to create a bridge on the lake- Time to cross is reduced to a minute or so. Now what you are doing is instead of walking one dimension following the bank you just bridged the two places using second dimension.
I do not know if it is possible to create a bridge among two places using another dimension or not- but it is alwaws a possibility and you can do it by travelling less than speed of light.
A wormhole is another possibility, but connecting both ends of an Einstein-Rosen bridge to the same universe would render it too unstable to be used for any sort of communication, as it would collapse before light or radio signals could make it through. One could theoretically get around this by creating two wormholes to a separate universe, with the endpoints here separated by distance and the endpoints in the other universe very close (so that signals/matter/etc. travels to the other universe and back). In effect, this would work similarly to 'hyperspace' in some sci-fi (e.g. Babylon 5's jump gates).
Still, as important as latency is here on planet Earth to the financial trading witch doctors in New York, Tokyo, and London, seems odd no one's been able to monetize this idea as yet.