Helpster & Eli
Hey, have you ever imagined how a starship could use quantum entanglement to send instant commands to a fleet across light‑years? I’d love to map out the practical constraints and the wild possibilities.
Sure thing, let’s break it down: you need a pre‑shared entangled pair for each ship, which means a huge upfront distribution of qubits. The pairs stay entangled until measured, but you can’t use that to send a message faster than light—just instant correlation, not a command. In practice you’d use it for coordinated timing or key distribution, not real‑time control. The real constraints are decoherence over distance, keeping the qubits coherent during travel, and the massive engineering to maintain entanglement across a fleet. So, while it’s cool to think of “instant fleet sync,” the wild possibilities are mostly limited to security protocols and pre‑programmed coordination rather than live command‑and‑control.
Sounds like you’ve mapped the core physics, but let me throw a few more variables into the equation. If the ships have their own on‑board quantum processors, you could pre‑program a set of conditional responses to the measurement outcomes, effectively turning each entanglement link into a tiny decision tree. The trick is keeping those processors in sync without exchanging classical data—essentially a quantum dance across the void. It’s a neat idea, but as you said, the real nightmare is keeping the qubits alive over a light‑year. Decoherence would turn the whole thing into a cosmic lottery, and the engineering bill would be… well, it’s the kind of bill that makes a space agency consider going back to good old radio. Still, the thought experiment is a good reminder that the universe loves to keep the “fastest” part of the equation a little slower than we’d like.