Okay, I have too much time on my hands, but bear with me.
I started this train of thought in another thread, but since it's only me that seems to have caught this particular train of thought, I decided to create another thread purely for the convenience of others who may not wish their thread to be interrupted by my dribble.
Here is that post, for context;
Quote:
Originally Posted by Stonius
Thought that hadn't occurred to me before; light must have an upper limit in terms of bandwidth, because a square wave consisting of the presence or absence of a photon would form a basic 'photon-bit' of information - and there are only so many photons you can send in a given time while still maintaining a square wave. Obviously this relates to the wavelength of light used,
The shorter wavelengths of light are therefore 'higher bandwidth' ie, gamma rays, as you can send more in a given time period, which leads to two thoughts;
1) This would fit with the Kardashev Scale that defines civilisations by their energy use (type 1,2,3)
2) Can we therefore expect that civilisations will use increasingly higher energy wavelengths for communication as the demands of bandwidth increase and their access to greater energy resources enables low cost / high energy / high bandwidth communications?
Yes i realise that the bandwidth we're talking about is stupidly high, but who knows what data demands there will be in future? Maybe they'll invent teleportation and need to send the precise location of every particle in a person's body before they can 'beam you up'.
Interesting to think about, anyway...
Markus |
Okay, I got curious as to what this means in terms of limitations of bandwidth in the universe (Trekkies beware, the results don't look good!).
How much bandwidth would it take to beam someone up in a reasonably short amount of time? I started with visible wavelengths (red) for no reason other than it's is easily produced and red cheap lasers already exist.
I'm a bit math challenged, but as near as I could figure out;
There are, according to Professor Google, around 7*10^27 atoms in a human body.
The highest possible baud rate of red light corresponds with its frequency. You can encode the information however you like - polarisation, presence/absence of a photon, whatever, but you can't get around the quantum nature of light, so assuming the frequency of red light is the same as its baud rate. IOW, a red light at 430 Teraherz can transmit 430,000,000,000,000 bits of information per second, which is just under half a teraflop of information per second.
Let's give the scientists of the future a break and say that they manage to encode what type of atom, it's orientation, and position into this one bit of information somehow (remember it's a one or a zero). So by my calculations for 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00 atoms in the human body transmitting using red light at 430 THz, you could expect to arrive on board the Starship Enterprise in
7*10^27 / 4.3*10^14
=1.6*10^13 seconds
OR (dumroll please)...
a mere half a million years!
Yikes!
And blue light doesn't help much, shaving it down to only 288 thousand years.
So then I started thinking how high does the frequency have to be?
Gamma rays start at 1*10^20. Surely that should give a reasonable transmission time?
Nope - you'd still be waiting 2.2 years.
But of course, there is no end to the electromagnetic spectrum. I decided to plug in the value of the most energetic gamma rays yet detected in the form of Gamma ray bursts which apparently reach 2.42*10^25.
The sad news is that even given the best case scenario and using the highest frequency light in the universe from a conveniently placed collapsing star (or whatever causes these bursts, we still don't really know yet, do we?), transmitting a person by light would still take 4 minutes and 49 seconds.
Sorry Trek fans. It's still a good show. Try not to think about it when you watch it. :-/
-Markus
