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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

"With the available radio telescope time on Earth, he says, it will take about 1.5 years for the spacecraft to successfully transmit the 60 gigabits of unique data it collected during the encounter."

Every time I hear about quantum entanglement I so desperately want instant communication to be in our near future.

0.159 kB/s

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Quantum entanglement does not permit faster-than-light communication, even in theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

Sadly even if there is intelligent life out there around other stars we are terminally absolutely alone in the sense that we will never have anything even remotely resembling a conversation.

They're waiting for us to figure out how to warp space so that we can communicate via wormhole. They're not going to wait around for low bandwidth high latency comms. They're not scrubs.

You're assuming that other intelligent life has a lifespan similar to our own, and that our own lifespan will remain the same forever. Remove those assumptions and our galaxy gets a lot smaller even with radio communication and sub-light travel.

Well, faster than light communication would cut down on the latency, but wouldn't necessarily help with the bandwidth. The lightspeed delay to Pluto is "only" about twelve hours. The low transmission speed is mostly because the transmitter isn't very strong, and it's unbelievably far away, thus the signal is ridiculously weak.

That has far less to do with speed of light than with bitrates.

New Horizons apparently achieves about 1,268 bits/second. Crank that up to 100 megabits/s, and it would take only ten minutes. Plus the 4.5 hour ping lag.

> Every time I hear about quantum entanglement I so desperately want instant communication to be in our near future.

Sadly, that's not how that works...

In fairness, it's not like New Horizons will be doing much in that time. It's hopefully going to be visiting a Kuiper Belt object, but other than that it's got all the time in the world to transmit data.

It sucks to get confirmation quantum entanglement isn't what I thought, but the down votes into negative seems overkill!

It's not just about quantum entanglement, it's about confusing bandwidth and latency.

Hmm, the latency is 4.5 hours, the bandwidth average over 1.5 years is 0.159 kB/s.

Instant communication at low bandwidth would still be nice, they are two different ideas. If we had instant communication I would then expect bandwidth of it to improve over time.

0 latency, 0.159 kB/s this year, 0 latency 100 gB/s for the next launch in 10 years.

I should have been more clear in my thinking.

And every time I tell myself it'll happen, I keep being reminded that most of the theories we have right now suggest it won't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

Meh. :(

It's a little jarring to me to see a result from Physics labelled a 'theorem'. It's clearly a provable mathematical consequence of a particular mathematical model, but to turn that theorem into a physical law you have to demonstrate that the mathematical model is a complete description of how reality works.

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