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A comment on Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth. Parent comment

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by mjevans on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @05:17PM (#13709753)
With a round trip parts delivery time OF a generation, and a communications delay of almost a decade (two for duplex), I don't see any reason not to classify such a mission as a short-range 'generation ship' / complete colony effort.

Getting our 'eggs' out of a single cosmic basket is really important, however I think we need to at least take the baby-crawl to establishing an outpost in the asteroid belt. That would be far closer, have far more reasonable communications/parts delays, and if we can actually send up some robots to build things ahead of us, might actually be a good manufacturing base.

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Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by Sembiance on Thursday February 23, 2017 @07:29AM (#13713355)
I feel that advancements in quantum mechanics will solve the communication problem.
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Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by wyager on Thursday February 23, 2017 @12:20PM (#13715655)
No, it almost certainly won't. Our current understanding of quantum information theory simply doesn't allow transmitting classical information faster than light. There's no room in what we don't understand that could plausibly contain FTL communication. This is a pretty fundamental result of quantum information theory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
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