Even if ansibles are real, the total communication payload between them will be limited by the mass of the ansibles. So real time communication won’t be a telephone or a conference call. You won’t be able to send robots and then control them in real time, decide if the colony is ready for humans, send them and then provide any missing expertise when they humans finally arrive. Or send embryos and raise them remotely.
It’ll be telegrams. For everything else it’ll be giant lasers and a 4-20 year wait for the data to arrive.
Why do you say that? Ansibles use quantum entanglement for communication. If you change a particle’s spin (spin up to spin down for example) the entangled particle also changes. So, the amount of data is a function of both the number of entangled particles and the speed we can flip them. Let’s use a modern CPU’s 64 bit architecture for the number of entangled particles. Using a random baseline experiment [1], we can flip photons back and forth in the 1-100 nanosecond timescale. GBps internet is 8 billion bits per second, which means we would need to be switching 800 bits to get that speed. IBM’s 1,000 plus qbit quantum computer is 22ft by 12ft [2]. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to have GBps communication speed if the underlying sci-fi entangled communication were real.
That's not how QE works as I understand it. You can observe one entangled particle and know the spin of the other one, but setting the spin of one would simply break the entanglement. It's for receiving information only, not sending.
Of course. We are talking about ansibles, a Sci-Fi communication device from Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" book series. They work using quantum entangled particles. In the real world, you can't "send" information between two entangled particles, but I was speculating about how it would work and its hypothetical information throughput.
I was thinking the same but couldn’t organize my thoughts to match up with the linked articles. The quantum computer can deliver new entanglements at whatever rate it wishes as long as they are below the speed of light. I don’t believe we know how to entangle particles at a distance. If you can keep particles
Le Guin’s ansibles were used for low bandwidth communication. Card expanded them to realtime immersive 3D surround. But I think that’s more fantasy than science fiction. But I believe in the later books we find out there’s some other dimension of space where things or people are wired together and that’s how his ansibles function.
It’ll be telegrams. For everything else it’ll be giant lasers and a 4-20 year wait for the data to arrive.