NASA's Psyche spacecraft just fired a laser 10 million miles away in deep space

[Unclear Engineer]

The rumors are that the calculated density (and that is very hard to figure out exactly) is very close to the density of Gold. It this thing turns out to be an actual huge chunk of Gold, I fear a huge race to grab as much of this (or remotely claim it as theirs) as possible. I fear a huge human folly powered by greed. Even if it isn't Gold, it could have other very valuable metals, again triggering greed. Well, we'll all know in time. Oh, BTW. The thing is 500,000,000 miles away. Not very close at all, between Mars, and Jupiter.

Yes, we are going to need to establish some international law about exploiting resources located off the planet. The concept of who "owns" an asteroid is not easily decided. Is it the country of origin of the astronomer who first discovered it, or the science team that first remotely determined it had unusual density, or the country that first sent a spacecraft to fly by at close distance, or the country that first lands on it, or the country that first returns a scientific sample, or does it remain available for any country to take as much as they can manage to take back to Earth? And, who is going to enforce that law, and how?

To me, it is not rational for one country to be able to lay claim to a whole asteroid or moon or planet or star. At least, not to one that it cannot actually move as a whole object to bring it to Earth or a mining base that is off-Earth.

But, from a financial perspective, if it is only economical to develop and execute a mining operation when most of the material gets extracted in order to make a profit, having 2 competing entities working to acquire the same asteroid's resources could doom both to financial insolvency.

Actual cooperation is what is needed. With enough cooperation, laws really aren't needed. But, our species seems to have a short supply of cooperative urges.

 

[billslugg]

Numerous tests have shown entanglement to be true. They have done it with photons, atomic particles and diamond grains. They have done it in the laboratory, in the real world, from space to the ground, over hundreds of kilometers. There is argument going on right now about whether entanglement is true.
Bell's test proved that the information is not in the remote particle ready to be viewed but travels instantaneously from the first one to be measured to the other one, no matter how far away it is.
Despite that, there is no way this can be used to communicate. It is a random message which tells us about a quantum state back home. No information can be passed. No timing can be discerned.
Quantum mechanics is not intuitive, you're wasting your time there.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Bill,
Quantum Theory is not only not intuitive, it is not necessarily all correct in its current from.

All I said in the beginning, in response to other posts about sending info faster than with NASA's laser, was:

Seems like the only way to get faster communication would be to really master the ability to use entanglement. Not sure we will ever get that working for us.

So, it is an observation that I think you should agree with. Since there are others who are trying to figure out how to use it to transmit info, I am not going to assume they are wasting their time based on your assertion, but I do agree that you might be right. That was clearly implied in my first comment on the subject.

 

[billslugg]

Entanglement is proven not to allow FTL information passage. Try something else.

 

[Questioner]

Has entanglement been infered through time as well?
Can one schedule an observation on one end and then a significantly later observation on the other end and does the pairwise statistical correlation still hold?

Entanglement seems to be a dimensionless point.
(that can be enduced to be dimensionless in multiple dimensions)

 

[billslugg]

When either end is forced to choose a state, the other end instantly assumes the opposite state. There are fatal problems at each end, though. At the sending end, the person can choose the time but they cannot choose the state. At the receiving end the state cannot be determined until the photon is absorbed in a detector. In that case we don't know if the sender fixed its state or if we fixed its state as we looked at it. Thus the receiving end cannot determine what time it was sent and then use that bit of info to derive information.
The best can be done is each side knows what randomly selected state each side has. Yes, we know something, no it does us no good.