Given that c is the speed of causality itself, FTL communications would effectively be like predicting the future.

From that angle, beating light speed by some absurdly tiny factor would probably correspond to a means of predicting the future at some almost absurdly tiny factor better than random guessing.

Edit: Actually...it doesn't make sense to call this FTL communication, it's just predicting the future state of a system given some previous state. FTL comms would have to be predicting the future state of a system without information about the previous state.

Practically speaking predictive modeling would be a means of compensating for light speed comms, kind of like branch prediction in processors or speculative decoding in LLMs, but that wouldn't actually be FTL comms.

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Lerc 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think that is entirely expected from what we know of modern physics. It doesn't say you can't do it, just things are very weird if you can.

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elcritch 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly! It’s not forbidden, just very unlikely and would be very strange.

It’d likely involve exponentially more energy as well. It’d be a good sci-if plot point if FTL communications required machines the size of Jupyter to get a few milliseconds of prescience.

	▲	roywiggins 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You can bootstrap a tiny duration of prescience into arbitrary durations by passing back the same message over and over as many times as you like. If you know what will happen in one minute, write down the message you see yourself writing down in one minute. In a minute, do the same thing. Now you can pass messages back two minutes.
	▲	empraptor 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		reveal at the end of the story: the mysterious purpose for which all of that was built? high frequency trading.