this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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It can look dumb, but I always had this question as a kid, what physical principles would prevent this?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Nah, I prefer using quantum spookiness for that. Send a steady stream of entangled particles to the other person on the moon first. Any time you do something to the particles on Earth, the ones on the Moon are affected also. The catch is that this disentangles them, so you have only a few limited uses. This is why you want a constant stream of them being entangled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 minutes ago* (last edited 1 minute ago)

You also cannot choose the spins of entangled particles, they collapse randomly in either direction when interacted with, meaning you cannot send messages. If you can figure out how to directly influence the spin of generated subatomic particles then BAM you have FTL communication.

But you would be amazed how many obstacles the universe throws in front of you when you try to break the speed of causality. Faster than light communication isn't possible because it makes no sense when you understand it. It's like "getting answers faster than questions." It's nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

This wouldn't work, entangled particles don't work like that. They would be disentangled the moment you do anything to either particle of the entangled pair. The only time any information can be encoded onto entangled particles is when they're created.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

The only time any information can be encoded onto entangled particles is when they’re created.

If that were the case, then we aren't really doing FTL communication, unless we manage to entangle them at a distance. No?

OIC, it's still useful if we want to make a secret key and send it somewhere. Then both sides can take a reading sometime in the future and they can then use whatever cluster of entangled particles they saw, as the symmetric key.