• FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    3 Body Problem has an interesting take on this. Faster than light travel is not possible but communication is, meaning we’re anxiously preparing for an alien war that won’t happen for 400 years but they can see everything we do in real time thanks to quantum entanglement.

    • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      FTL coms are a concession to the story, it would have been terrible without it

      IRL quantum entanglement can’t ever provide causality breaking info. In very simple terms, you need correlation to know when the data stream began as just observing the resulting spins still seem just as random before and after the event.

      In even more simple terms: Whatever message they can send even if pre-agreed on seems like random heat results until you know the exact moment the transmission began, as confirmed by a light lagged message.

      In less simple terms, the misunderstanding comes from treating the metaphor of ‘flipping the spin north switch’ as a literal thing instead of a less-than ideal ‘lies to children’ of what is actually happening to particles that experience spin transition, and the meaning of ‘entangled’ is both less and more strange than people understand.

      But again, 3 body problem would have been a terrible story without it,t hat’s why it’s science fiction

      • daellat@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        From what I’ve heard the Chinese version is rather literal to the books to a fault.

        Having read the books I enjoyed the Netflix series, but understand they made some changes to both adapt it to a series (fine) and made a lot of characters westen (a bit unnecessary maybe).

        I am excited for season 2

    • spicystraw@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Good show, fantastic books. Recommend to anyone reading this comment and are remotely interested in sci-fi. A lot of facinatong ideas explored throughout the series.