external gestation…a womb with a view
severe genetic manipulation… designer babies
digit/limb/organ regeneration
I’d really like to at least see humanity fully switch to clean energy in my lifetime but I’m losing hope.
I should already be able to take a self-driving flying taxi to work. I should already be able to vacation on the moon. We shouldn’t be burning stuff to power all our modern tech.
I grew up on 80s/90s scifi. I hope humanity can get it’s shit together and that the current anti-intellectualism phase we’re in is just part of a larger cycle.
Flying taxis won’t happen, way too many risks, even in the future, never mind the horrors of having your skies full of that crap.
We have auto-pilots for planes, those are mostly fine. People are the problem. I dont trust humans to operate motor vehicles in 2 dimensions, let alone 3…
To be fair, you have a 1 in 95 chance of dying in an automobile accident.
Based on modern safety standards for everything else, that’s unacceptable.
If I offered you a job and said you have a 1 in 95 chance of dying from working this job, you would refuse. The most dangerous job in the USA is logging, with about a 1 in 1000 chance of dying. More lumberjacks die driving home than die working their extremely dangerous job.
Not only should we have self-driving flying taxis by now, but we should also at least have level 5 self-driving cars so people aren’t constantly dying driving to get groceries or pick up their kids.
No
What we need is more bicycle roads, pedestrian walk ways and public transportation
Suffice to say that 1 bus is safer than 30 cars but it also generates a shit tonne less pollution, but also keep in mind that the vast majority of car rides are short distance, even in the US
In the Netherlands they changed everything to prefer bicycles and walking and it’s noticable. It changed architecture. It’s why in the Netherlands there are broad loads of small super markets. Wherever you are within a town you’ll have a super market at walking distance
Many people there don’t have a car, not because they can’t afford it but because they don’t want one. Cars are expensive, cumbersome, dangerous, and ugly. You won’t see depressing towns there that are 70% concrete roads or parking lots. It’s all beautiful because they got rid of all that, it isn’t needed.
In before anyone starts about how this can’t be done in the US: it can, and quite easily. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure costs a fraction of car infrastructure, it’s easier and faster to build, no parking lots required, you can now make that a store and get taxes from it, it’ll make your cities richer. People get more exercise, they’ll be healthier and happier, there are no downsides. Inclines near mountainous areas? Electrical bikes to the rescue.
Please please do NOT push this car stuff, especially flying car stuff. It’s not needed, it’s a waste, it’s polluting even when electric, and we have flying cars, they’re called planes and there is a reason why pilots need to learn and train a LOT more than car drivers.
FTL communication using quantum entangled particles.
Not possible; entanglement collapse can’t be used to send information
The idea is this:
2 particles are quantum entangled. Whatever happens to one instantly happens to the other regardless of distance.
So you establish a state that means “0” and a state that means “1” and you can send binary.
At a minimum, you have quantum Morse code.
I’m familiar with quantum entanglement. It doesn’t work because you have no way of affecting which state you’ll measure, and thus what state the other particle will be in.
Read the link posted. They already did it. In 2007. At a distance of 144km.
No they didn’t, they sent a conventional signal that was encrypted with an entangled particle. Nothing was sent ftl, this is like if I had two boxes that I know have the same thing in them, an encryption key, and traveled across the world, and sent you a message, you have the other box, the information in that box didn’t go ftl you just opened it later.
there is no path to ftl communication here.
have a basic video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oBiS_Yb9Ac
The FTL is the sci-fi component that is the subject of the thread, the quantum entanglement communication part is the real world piece they actually got working.
It will never be possible to use this for ftl communications. This is like saying in 100 years we will use very long steel rods to communicate ftl by pushing on them. The problem is fundamental.
That wasn’t FTL
That’s not the part you were trying to say couldn’t be done. ;) You were trying to argue that quantum entanglement couldn’t be used to communicate, clearly it can.
The FTL bit is the science fiction premise of the thread. ;)
That is indeed that bit I was saying couldn’t be done. Entanglement alone can’t be used to communicate; a signal has to be sent conventionally over the distance.
The FTL bit is physically impossible, so it’s not really “achievable in a reasonable time-frame”
Not FTL though. Slower than light, causality preserving version? Sure.
Huh?
Basically, physics says that nothing, not even information can actually travel faster than the speed of light. It’s a universal limit that shows up when you do the math on relativity. This concept is called “causality”.
Because of this, FTL communication is probably impossible. Quantum entanglement seems like it could provide a loophole, but it doesn’t actually work that way. To actually use quantum entanglement for communication, it actually needs a confirmation message, which would have to be delivered by a different means (every quantum message needs a non-quantum confirmation). That confirmation would be bound by the speed of light, thus preserving causality.
This is a very very rough description based on my memory, so some details may be a little off, but it should cover the gist. This article goes into more detail:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-entanglement-faster-than-light/
Edit: After reading, the answer is more that attempting to impart information onto the entangled particles to send a message necessarily breaks the entanglement and thus does not transmit the information to the other side. Entangling the particles makes their states related to each other, but only at the time of entanglement, and anything that changes either particle (including measuring it) will break the entanglement going forward.
Yup. You just summed up the start of the conversation I had with ChatGPT to figure out exactly what we were talking about Here and why the fact that even if we can’t directly send coherent information, if it appears that a change in particle A directly causes a change in particle B, and it appears that that causation happened Instantaneously, we can’t ever prove it or measure it or know it for certain, because the proving measuring and knowing would have to have occurred at instantaneously themselves in order to actually be proof at all. The even more fascinating part I wound up with is discovering the Holographic Principle, as discovered by Beckenstein and later expanded on and proven by Stephen Hawking, that says that all information in the 3-D world is actually encoded into a 2-D framework. That one blew my mind and I’m gonna be thinking about that for a while.
The holographic principle is fascinating, though a quick nitpick: I’m pretty sure we’ve only proven it for contracting spacetimes (as opposed to our expanding one), but a lot of people imagine it does apply to ours as well (I certainly suspect it does)