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hgoel • today at 12:29 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

Given that c is the speed of causality itself, FTL communications would effectively be like predicting the future.

From that angle, beating light speed by some absurdly tiny factor would probably correspond to a means of predicting the future at some almost absurdly tiny factor better than random guessing.

Edit: Actually...it doesn't make sense to call this FTL communication, it's just predicting the future state of a system given some previous state. FTL comms would have to be predicting the future state of a system without information about the previous state.

Practically speaking predictive modeling would be a means of compensating for light speed comms, kind of like branch prediction in processors or speculative decoding in LLMs, but that wouldn't actually be FTL comms.


Replies

Lerc • today at 12:48 AM

I think that is entirely expected from what we know of modern physics. It doesn't say you can't do it, just things are very weird if you can.

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