All right, so I was running a certain -other- game with transhumanist elements and the discussion was re-routed to the ego and the speed at which it can move.
So, say I'm a hyperelite who wants to send a beta fork to *personally* oversee a construction project on Proxima Centauri. (I know the setting is open, but was there ever any canon mention of extrasolar colonization that didn't use pandora gates?)
Can I send an ego through a quantum-entangled communication device? Is that possible? If not, what are the alternatives? Do I really need to just send a regular fork of myself and wait *years* for it to arrive? If so, how long is that?
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Speeds for transmitting an ego?
Mon, 2013-07-22 02:41
#1
EccentricOwl
Speeds for transmitting an ego?
Mon, 2013-07-22 04:14
#2
zombiak
Extrasolar colonization & egocasting
AFAIK there are NO current colonization efforts not conducted via gatecrashing. There was a colony ship sent to Barnard's Star by the Titanian Commonwealth, and I think that they were planning to send one to Proxima Centauri as well, but that's pretty much it - and the ships will take decades to reach their destination. I think that the farthest point transhumanity got is Tyche (50.000AU, which is less than one light year), but it was only an unmanned probe; the Oort cloud section in Rimward also describes some other interesting ships/probes on the verge of the Solar System.
QE communication is quite expensive because qubits are consumable. The more data you send, the more qubits you consume, and transhuman egos are bound to require a lot of computer memory. This isn't a problem when you simply store them, thanks to nearly unlimited space available in the Mesh cloud, but sending terabytes of data through QE which cannot be safely compressed (I wouldn't risk making an .rar./.zip version of yourself, unless you want to end up as a gamma fork) would probably be EXTREMELY expensive - maybe even the hyperelite wouldn't be able to afford it. The core rulebook (p.315) even mentions that full sensory AR cannot be trasmitted via quantum entanglement due to bandwidth limitations.
So how many years would it take to arrive on Proxima Centauri? I'd say that it'd simply take 4.2 years, give or take a few months, depending on the location of your departure. Gatecrashing there (if a Pandora gate is available, that is) and communicating with your fork via QE is a better option, although it's still quite expensive.
Mon, 2013-07-22 05:11
#3
Arenamontanus
"High-capacity qubit
"High-capacity qubit reservoirs can be used for 100 hours of high-resolution video conferencing or meshbrowsing and 1,000 hours of voice or text only communications." Internet video today is about 3.5 Mbit/s, so 100 hours x 3600 x 3.5 Mb = 12.6 Tb. Nobody knows the size of an ego, but about a petabit is a popular guess in the brain emulation community. So that would require about 80 reservoirs for a single transmission. Maybe doable if you had a lot of money.
Egocasting normally would merely be about lightspeed in terms of transmission delay, while the signal length would depend on the bandwidth. If I remember the old thread on that right (can't find it in the archives), laser comms could allow enough bandwidth to send an ego in a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on error-checking and distance (long distance signals are weaker, so there will be worse signal-to-noise ratio).
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Mon, 2013-07-22 13:19
#4
nezumi.hebereke
Good question.
Good question.
Let's assume that transhumanity has reached Proxima Centauri (PC) the old-fashioned way and there are no gates available.
You have three options;
1) Follow using the old fashioned way. This will likely take decades, however I fully expect that ships between the colonies are pretty common, especially since ...
2) Qubits - they have to be manufactured together, then separated. That means the total number of qubits PC has is based on how many they had when the left Sol. They can't create new qubits on PC that connect with Sol; they have to be physically shipped. So that means that your hyperelite isn't just paying for a qubit reservoir, but the cost of shipping those qubits across that whole distance, plus the limited supply given that he's spending some quantity of PC's entire supply of qubits.
I'm sure that PC packed a LOT of qubits, but they're expecting those to last until the next shipment in maybe 10 or 20 years for ALL of their real-time transmissions.
3) Light speed - like Aremanterous said, bandwidth is limited by distance and power. To transmit all the way to PC means you're barely moving at all. Technology may help us gettng a narrower laser beam, but ultimately, these are laws of physics that you just can't get around; light will always spread by a steady rate. Ideally you'd solve this with repeaters, but that's a LOT of repeaters to string across that whole distance, and the power cost of sending high-bandwidth data so far is intense. I'm not convinced that a repeater network is really functional for high-bandwidth connections like that because the resource costs will be too much to be reasonable.
The end result here is you have to transmit your data much slower, at great cost, and likely taking well beyond 4.2 years (especially if you're waiting on error-checking validation on the other side).
Probably what I would do in your situation is take an existing ego at PC which is very similar to the desired person, use the AI and public records to create a basic mind mapping, then request ONLY those small items you're missing to create a solid personality profile. Using the personality profile, you use neurosurgery to rewire your existing ego into a replica of your hyperelite. It wouldn't beat testing via neural testing, but it would give you a character who behaves like and believes he is your hyperelite.