Quantum Entanglement

Quantum communications, shortened quantcomms, is based on the principle of quantum entanglement discovered by Albert Einstein in the 20th century. When two particles are allowed to interact in close proximity, they become entangled - that is, they influence each other’s properties and state. When these particles are then separated, changes to one particle result in a corresponding shift in the entangled particle at precisely the same time, regardless of distance. This allows entangled particles’ state to be used as a way to encode and transfer digital signals.

The implications of quantum entanglement in communications technology were profound. Before quantcomms, interplanetary data transfers were supported by radio wave technology. This means it was limited to line of sight, requiring careful coordination to ensure signals sent from Mars, for example, would be directed at the Earth taking into consideration the orbit of the two planets. More crucially, data transfer speed was limited to the speed of light, which at an interplanetary scale meant minutes, hours or even days for messages to arrive on their destination. Data sent from Earth would only reach the Martian Outpost 5 to 10 minutes later, and Pluto over 5 hours later. This is the reason images captured by the Caravel probes, confirming life in Proxima b, took over 4 years to reach the Earth - these probes were launched before quantcomms was developed, and therefore used radio wave technology to send their images back. Current generation probes are quantcomms-enabled, able to send us real-time feeds from Proxima b.

Adoption

SEV pioneered research to explore quantum entanglement commercially. Initial prototypes were used to exchange messages between Earth and the Martian Outpost. Once quantcomms was proven to work at scale, legacy Mars to Earth communication systems were replaced in less than 5 years. Newly built carrier spacecraft started to be equipped with quantcomm devices allowing real-time monitoring and solving of malfunctions and incidents, significantly improving survival and delivery rates. Older carriers were either decommissioned or retrofitted with quantcomms, making legacy communication systems disappear in less than a decade. The last radio wave receiver was decommissioned in 2067.

Memory backups

Backing up human memories and restoring them during revival was the other major impact of quantum entanglement. While revival is now available to all of us (albeit with the controls we are all too familiar with), that wasn’t the case 50 years ago, before memory backups were technically feasible and regulated. Back then, people would actually stop existing and lose their memories forever when their bodies died. Learn more on the revival page.