Spooky Entanglements Faster Than the Speed of Light…

Pale Blue Dot

On September 5^th, 1977, a Titan IIIE rocket blasted off from Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying a spacecraft called the Voyager 1.

Voyager 1 was one of a pair of spacecraft launched to explore the planets of the outer solar system, the inter-planetary environment, and the interstellar space beyond the sun’s heliosphere. It was launched about two weeks after its twin, Voyager 2, and because it was given a slightly different trajectory it’s now the farthest human-made object ever launched from Earth and the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space where it’s currently a little more than 15 billion miles away and moving outwards at a speed of over 38,000 miles per hour.

Besides providing some of the best images and pictures of Jupiter and Saturn, the little craft is also famous for the “Golden Record” that it carries, conceived of by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, that contains natural sounds from earth, recordings greetings from around the world, music from artists such as Chuck Berry, as well as some symbolism intended to let any aliens that may encounter it be able to have an indication of where it originated.

Voyager 1 also had the distinction of being turned around when it was slightly beyond Neptune and about 3.7 billion miles away to take a snapshot of Earth that became known as “The Pale Blue Dot” where it showed our planet to be no more than a mere pixel of fleck seemingly resting within a reflected glimmer of sunlight against a cosmic background of complete and empty darkness.

Because it seems more imperative now than ever at this present moment in human history where mounting challenges such as disease, climate crisis, food scarcity, and impending nuclear war resides on the immediate fringe, I’ll take a moment to include what Carl Sagan said and wrote about the image when it was taken on February 14^th, 1990:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

I’ll pause for a moment to let that sink in…

Voyager 1, this tiny emissary and potentially all that will ever be remembered of the current inhabitants of earth a few billion short years into the future, also has the distinction of being the first ever man-made object to leave our cosmic neighbourhood, exit the heliosphere, and enter into interstellar space, which it did on August 25^th, 2012, and where it is currently more than 15.147 billion miles from us.

The spacecraft uses a series of three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) that convert heat from decaying plutonium and turn it into electricity and the extended mission was expected to run out of enough power to operate its scientific instruments sometime around 2025, however plans have been in place to shut off more of its 10 scientific instruments in the hopes of extending the operating life of the probe beyond the more than 46 years and 5 months that it’s already been in service.

For comparison, your smartphone has 200,000 times more memory and computing power than what the Voyager 1 has, and the problem right now is that its experiencing problems with the spacecraft’s Flight Data System, one of three computers on the vehicle working alongside a command-and-control central computer and another device that oversee attitude control and antenna pointing, and its affecting its ability to send back telemetry data, such as measurements from the craft’s science instruments or even basic engineering information about how the probe is doing.

Since November of 2023 all it’s been sending back is a repeating series of 1s and 0s in its binary communications format, as though the system is stuck and a “bit” has been flipped or corrupted. Without the ability to determine accurate telemetry however, NASA can’t find out where the probable FDS memory failure is. There is a carrier tone still arriving to receivers on the planet so scientists know the spacecraft is still alive, and changes in the carrier’s tone modulation indicate that the craft is receiving data from earth, but this is where the expansive realities of space and distance seriously come into play.

I’d like you to imagine for a second that you’re playing a game of catch in the backyard and are tossing the ball between yourself and a friend standing about 20 feet apart. Now stand back 50 feet. Now 100 feet. Now a mile…

Now imagine that you’re trying to communicate with a spacecraft that’s about the size of a MINI Cooper that also happens to be more than 15 billion miles away and where even a tiny shift in the direction that you point the craft’s transmitter could mean trying to send a signal back to earth and missing it by a billion or so miles either left or right.

Speed of Light is too Slow

Now, consider that it takes a little over 22 hours for a radio wave signal, traveling at the speed of light, to reach Voyager 1 from Earth, and little more than another 22 hours to come back to Earth from the craft, so given the distance between them, even simple commands take almost 45 hours to go round trip.

Now, because people often imagine Star Trek’s warp speed to be the same as the speed of light and especially as we’ve all been taught that nothing can move faster than light, it’s important to know that the two are vastly different. In fact, if the Star Trek Enterprise was limited to the speed of light, most of the show’s would pretty much be confined to at best the closest outer edges of our own Milky Way because due to the size of space, light speed is pretty close to the same speed as pouring ketchup out of a newly opened and held upside down Heinz bottle in real world terms.

To get a real sense of where the speed of light gets you, to go to the moon takes about a second, to get to Mars – a trip that takes NASA rovers about 7 months – takes 3 minutes. Going to Mercury, about 4 minutes. The Sun, a relatively speedy 8 minutes and 20 seconds. Jupiter, would take 32 minutes. To get to Neptune, from near where the Pale Blue Dot image was taken, about 4 hours and 1 minute. To get to the next closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, it would take about four years. To get to the heart of the Milky Way, about 25,000 years. To get to the next closest galaxy to us, the Andromeda Galaxy about, 2.5 million years.

So, while light is fast, it’s really not fast enough to make travelling the universe really realistic in the timescale of any person’s lifetime.

And the limitations of light speed also isn’t going to be fast enough to give Voyager 1 a real fighting chance at getting its bugs worked out.

That’s just how far away Voyager 1 is.

Oh, and it’s a small thing, but the data module corrections that engineers might be able to feed into Voyager 1 haven’t been used for more than 40 years and there’s a good chance that the people who built and last used these systems have either retired or died.

There are, of course, instruction manuals and such, but all of it is on yellowed, dog eared, and banker-box packed reams of paper, and even finding it in the vast storage areas of NASA’s warehouses and then understanding it all would make some Indiana Jones’ movie type searches akin to looking for the Ark of the Covenant that got intentionally and secretly stashed away in a giant holding facility look small and quaint in comparison to the real world realities.

Toss in that it’s no exaggeration to say that most of the youth of today can’t read cursive – never mind being familiar with outdated and outmoded computer languages – and that more than a few can’t even read time off of an analogue clock, and its no stretch of the imagination to consider that hauling out these dusty texts and then even trying to decipher the relatively “ancient scrolls” of schematics and data available will probably need an AI system residing on a quantum computer and given a Rosetta Stone to solve.

So, as much as I’m a fan of the underdog and am always stunned by the overachieving successes that NASA constantly pulls out of the rabbit hat, a failure of the FDS or the eventual depletion of the nuclear power pack pretty much assures us that Voyage’s time corresponding with Earth might have already run its course or else soon will. And unless “V’Ger” returns to us as was done in 1979’s, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” we can be pretty sure that unless it’s picked up along the way by some hopefully benign and friendly alien civilization that decides to be kind enough to get our directions off of the golden record and then just drop the spacecraft altruistically back off to us, it’s a pretty good bet that the hard ceiling on humanity’s ability to travel the stars or even progress much beyond our current stage of technological achievement as AI and other developments come to the forefront, we’re probably going to have to say goodbye to our daring and adventurous craft that carries with it potentially the only evidence that we were ever here and ever managed to voyage into the cosmos.

But this is where an interesting thought comes to mind. What if we had sent Voyager 1 – or perhaps another craft to duplicate its route – out into the cosmos and used the above-mentioned Quantum technologies to at the very least manage its communications?

Quantum Communications

Quantum Communications is a relatively new field and is currently being looked for its abilities to revolutionize many aspects of our world including communication speed, security, internet functionality, and teleportation.

To start, Quantum Communication has in many ways been largely driven by security issues and the threats posed by cyberattacks that are forcing governments, militaries, and businesses to explore more secure ways of transmitting and protecting information.

Most of the world’s sensitive data is typically encrypted and then sent across fiber-optic cables and other channels along with the digital “keys” that are needed to parse, disassemble, reassemble, and eventually decode the information being transmitted. The data and the keys are sent as classical “bits”, or streams of electrical and optical pulses carrying a series of 1s and 0s. And this very dependence on a binary system is what makes them especially vulnerable. Yet, as our computing power and capabilities increases exponentially, smart hackers, motivated governments, bad actors, and bored teenagers can often infiltrate, read, and copy the bits in transit, and often without leaving a trace.

Quantum Communication, almost as a natural biproduct of its very nature, takes advantage of the laws of quantum physics to protect data. These laws permit the particles involved, typically photons of light, to allow data to be transmitted along optical cables as they take on a state of superposition, which means that they can represent multiple combinations of 1s and 0s simultaneously.

These particles are known as quantum bits, or “qubits”.

The nature of qubits, especially from a cybersecurity perspective, is that if a hacker tries to observe them in transit, their super-fragile quantum state “collapses” to become either a 1 or  a 0. And this means that someone trying to hack into the data stream can’t tamper with the qubits without leaving behind a telltale sign of their activity, and by their own actions automatically corrupt the transmitted data beyond recognition.

It’s almost as though a person who might try to pull a card out of a tower of cards, or even look at a card or contemplate pulling it out, causes the whole edifice to collapse into atrophy.

Many security companies have taken advantage of this property to create what they believe to be ultra-secure networks for transmitting highly sensitive data based on a process called quantum key distribution (QKD).

QKD is sort of a melding of the old and the new whereby the data that needs to be secured is sent over classical networks, while the keys to decrypt the information are encoded and transmitted in a quantum state using qubits, sometimes on the same carrier mediums and sometimes through alternative mediums.

Quantum states are typically very fragile, and some will collapse because of decoherence, so another attribute called “key distillation” is used to calculate the anticipated frailty falloff of the individual states and project quantum fail rates to see if the Quantum security bundle is naturally eroding or if it’s been attempted to be hacked. The variability in the stability of the quantum bits by themselves adds a secondary line of defense as the erosion of its own stability is able to be defined and predicted by the sender and is all but impossible to have its “quantum frequencies” inferred or guessed at by even the most sophisticated hackers.

Because financial services industries are intrinsically dependant on speed to confirm their transactions – as is easily seen through the 2018 movie “The Hummingbird Project” that, while only 6 years old is already multiple generations behind in the technology that it ardently sought as solutions to speed up the transmission of trade orders, it is nonetheless a good primer in understanding how speed affects the markets – more and more QKD are emerging seemingly overnight. The longest such network is in China and features a 1,263-mile ground link between Beijing and Shanghai. But make no mistake about it, banks and trading houses all around the world are rapidly moving to install and use the technology to securely and more swiftly than ever transmit data.

When it comes to commodity, stock, or even currency trading, time, even the most seemingly infinitesimal fraction of a second makes a difference. And in these worlds, time truly is money.

Yet, while QKD is relatively secure, because of the deterioration in the quantum state as information is transmitted, the technology can be made even safer with the addition of quantum repeaters.

Just as transmission cables draw off a portion of the electricity that they move between towers, materials present in fibre optic or even last mile classical copper wiring have a tendency to  absorb photons as they travel through their networks. This means that protected information can typically travel for no more than a few dozen kilometers before it experiences degradation that will render the information lost. In a classical network, repeaters at various points along a cable are used to amplify the signal to compensate for this.

QKD networks, by necessity, have had to come up with a similar solution, creating “trusted nodes” at various points. The Beijing-to-Shanghai network, even for its relatively short distance, uses 32 of them. Essentially what these nodes do at their waystations is to have quantum keys decrypted into bits and then re-encrypted into a fresh quantum state for their journey to the next node.

But the nodes in and of themselves can create a security breach because if a hacker was able to infect a node, they could copy the information passing through it, and before it was re-encrypted, copy it without detection.

So, ideally, the need for quantum repeaters, or waystations with quantum processors in them that would allow encryption keys to constantly remain in quantum form as they’re amplified and sent over long distances is an important concern that needs to be added to transportation lines carrying the data packages. But the thing is, even though they’re needed, they haven’t been fully developed yet. And because hackers may be able to find a way to  intercept these needed repeaters, scientists and engineers are looking at an alternative approach to shore up safeguards called Quantum Teleportation.

Quantum Entanglement

Don’t confuse it with Start Trek’s, “Scotty, beam me up” teleportation. Although at some time in the not-too-distant future the technology may provide the seeds for that reality. But for now the teleportation that we’re dealing with utilizes a quantum phenomenon known as Quantum Entanglement.

Entanglement is a marvel of the quantum realm and will even, I believe eventually allow for instantaneous communications, exceeding the speed of light, over unimaginable distances, and possibly even be the solution for fixing Voyager 1, or at least making future iterations a whole lot more robust. And in terms of technologies like my Quantum Cognition projects, the unbridled speed made available for traders and others will revolutionize financial transactions on unprecedented scales.

What this little quirk of quantum mechanics means is that we’re able to generate pairs of qubits that are “entangled,” or in other words that two members of a pair exist in a superposition quantum state.

This also means that changing the state of one of the qubits instantaneously changes the state of the other one in a reliable and predictable way. And best of all, this occurs even if the quantum particles are separated by potentially limitlessly long distances.

Nobody really knows quite how or why entanglement works. What it does is seem to bind particles in such a way as to violate the currently accepted rules of space and time. But breaking the rules or not, they still happen.

As my good friend, Dr. Ilana Wisby, a quantum physicist and founder of OQC, recently reminded me:

“Our understanding of the world around us is severely limited. Every building block of the world around us, every atomic interaction, molecular and biological system, is, at its most fundamental – quantum in nature.”

So let me try to explain how entanglement works.

Trying to Simplify Quantum Entanglement

Imagine that you have two one-dollar coins, and that you’re holding one in each of your hands and that your hands are being held about shoulder width apart.

If you turn one coin in your hand from its heads side up to its tails side up, it won’t affect the position of the other coin being held in your other hand. And, if your sample size is large enough – and we sort of ignore for the moment the most recent statistical model that shows that coin flipping isn’t really an exact fifty-fifty proposition – we can say that at an almost equal  rate that each coin, when flipped, will have a fifty percent chance of landing either as a heads or a tails. And this would be true no matter what you see when you look at the other coin being flipped in your other hand. Statistically each coin would enact a random 50-50 action acting on its own accord and uninfluenced by the results occurring in the other hand.

But what if we could do some magic trick so that if one coin came up heads that the other would always come up tails? Or that if the starting coin turned up tails, that the other would always turn up heads? And this wouldn’t change no matter how far apart the coins were.

In fact, let’s say that you keep one coin in your hand and give the other to your best friend who is right beside you, in your own home, but who’s flying off in a rocket ship to join up with the Voyager spacecraft in the morning.

You’re both under strict instructions to hold your coins in your hand and not to flip either one until you’ve been travelling apart for at least ten years. When the time’s up, you send a signal to each other telling the other what the result of your coin flip was. The information that you send, even at the speed of light, will still take some time to get there, but the entanglement means that the moment that you flipped tails, you know that your friends’ coin flipped heads, and visa-versa.

What entanglement means is that you don’t have to wait for your friend’s radio signal to arrive to know what it will say. Your coin might have a fifty-fifty percent chance of winding up a heads, but your friend’s coin will be tails 100% of the time whenever you flip a heads.

This might sound impossible, but this is exactly what quantum entanglement does to individual particles.

It even baffled Einstein, who famously described it as, “spooky action at a distance”, because according to his theory of relativity, nothing should be able to travel faster than the speed of light – including information.

He postulated that you shouldn’t be able to know anything about what was going on with the two coins when you were holding them in your own hands, never mind if they were a foot apart or 15.7 billion miles apart. Especially before the information about them – travelling at the speed of light – could reach either one of you.

Some argue that this is not faster than the speed of light communication, because a coin has to be flipped to create the entangled action, but there are many who postulate that perhaps it might be able to be. Then there are of course others still who maintain that it doesn’t have to be faster than the speed of light, just as long as it is always entangled and that distance never becomes a factor.

In this way, a Voyager 1 type spacecraft that reaches the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years from now would still be able to be in constant communication with earth even once it has long left any sort of dead reckoning that we might use to have any hope of seeing it.

This entanglement used in teleportation of data also offers untold possibilities for security and encryption.

The dream for this reality means that there are serious dollars being invested to make it happen, but we’re still a few years away or maybe even a few decades more from seeing it become a workable reality. But the speed of technological growth, as I’ve discussed in other articles before, is expanding at exponential rates never before imagined.

Quantum Internet

So these new quantum realities are going to lead us to the advent of the Quantum Internet.

And just like the traditional internet, it will be a world-wide network of networks, with the big difference being that the foundations upon which the networks transmit data would be in the quantum state, and, even more excitingly building secure, global networks of quantum computers, which leverage these fascinating properties of quantum, entanglement and superposition.    

My best estimation is that because of the costs and the technological inputs required to power such an enormous engine, that for a long while we’re going to have an internet that combines the attributes of both worlds, with family photos, music videos, and shared recipes travelling in low bandwidth 1s and 0s, while organizations that need to keep particularly valuable data secure will depend on the melding of quantum safeguards and information packets.

China is leading the push towards a quantum internet, and it launched a dedicated quantum communications satellite called Micius in 2016, while in 2017 the satellite helped stage the world’s first intercontinental QKD-secured video conference between Beijing and Vienna.

A ground station already links the satellite to the Beijing-to-Shanghai terrestrial network and more satellites are being launched and the network aggressively expanded.

In the US, a start-up called Quantum Xchange struck a deal giving it access to 500 miles of fiber-optic cable running along the East Coast to create a QKD network a year after the Chinese launched and the initial leg linked Manhattan with New Jersey, allowing for the unification of many banks as well as large data centers.

In 2023, an Indiana public-private partnership called, Quantum Corridor, completed testing and proved commercialization of the fastest, most secure fiber-optic network in the Western Hemisphere with a historic transmission speed taking place on October 24^th. The transmission between the Chicago ORD 10 Data Center and the Digital Crossroads data center in Hammond, Indiana showed connectivity speeds more than 1,000 times faster than traditional fiber networks, and the Indiana-based quantum communication network now directly connects Indiana to the international internet superhub in downtown Chicago.

I Think the Future is Quantum

Like many technologies of today, we’re at a nascent stage with where the exploration of the quantum realm is taking us, and it may be that the benefits of Quantum Communications and spooky actions at a distance never get fully realized, but the benefits that will be derived until we progress to the advent of the next great thing will allow for better, faster, and more secure information transmission, and ultimately will even lead to the development of the technologies needed to help keep us in constant contact with the branch of human civilization that will leave the planet to explore the solar system, the universe, and all that that entails.

And who knows, it may even mean that one day we’ll get to say hello once again to that little emissary to the stars that transports a golden record that tells the story of a civilization that once inhabited a little mote of dust hanging in a sunbeam that was home to every single thing, person, and idea that we’ve ever known, imagined, and loved.

– Written by a human.

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p.s. Regarding the Voyager Record, I’ve always found the cover of it a work of absolute genius. It’s designed in such a way that any intelligent being that discovers it could understand it, regardless of language, because it is created based on the logic of physics.

Take a look at the explanation:

“In the upper left-hand corner of the record cover is a drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary notation is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record—about an hour (more precisely, between 53 and 54 minutes).

The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to analog television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). Picture lines 1, 2 and 3 are noted in binary numbers, and the duration of one of the “picture lines”, about 8 milliseconds, is noted. The drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered “interlace” to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 (2⁹) vertical lines in a complete picture. Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction. Color images were represented by three images in sequence, one each for red, green, and blue components of the image. A color image of the spectrum of the sun was included for calibration purposes.

The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the Solar System with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.”

Tell me this isn’t genius.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.