According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, that’s the way things will stay. Nothing can go superluminal, reasoned Einstein, since the speed of light is a universal constant.

If a way around this limitation were to be discovered, it would “violate the laws of information theory and require some rethinking of basic physics”, according to Les Deutsch of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, who has spent years designing deep space telecommunications systems for Nasa.

Today, almost all conventional communication in space is conducted using radio waves, which travel at the speed of light through the vacuum of space. Optical (Laser) communication technology is currently being introduced, but this is still in the development phase.

Warping wormholes

We may not be able to increase the speed of transmission; however we can increase the volume of information that is transmitted per second. “One of the things we are doing is moving the carrier frequency to higher in the spectrum, from 8GHz to 30GHz” says Deutsch. The higher the frequency of the signal, the greater its bandwidth and the higher the volume of information you can transmit every second. Using data compression and error correction allow us to further decrease the size of information, increasing even further the amount of data that can be sent per second.

Perhaps in future we might find ways to make the speed of the messages seem quicker. “Relativity Theory allows for things like wormholes, which you can think of as warps in spacetime, where you could have short-cuts” says Deutsch. An easy way to think of a wormhole is to draw two dots on a sheet of paper. You could draw a straight line between the two, which would be the shortest distance between the points on flat paper. However if the paper was folded, so the two dots were held close together, a pin could punch through from one to the other. In space, wormholes are unlikely to be positioned quite so conveniently, though: they might speed up some messages, but that communication still would not be instantaneous.