Expanding Readership
by Raymond M. Coulombe

Quantum Muse has plans for future expansion, we want to take over the universe. Now that might seem rather grand for an upstart electronic magazine, but we have some huge advantages over our printed on paper brothers.

The grand old magazines are essentially distributed almost exclusively in their country of origin. Sure, US magazines might ship a few thousand copies over the border into Canada, but that's about it. A few intrepid American souls might subscribe to British or Australian magazines. Good for them, but it hardly does all that much for the bottom line.

QM has a good sized US base, but that's to be expected. The founders and staff are Americans located in the US, after all. More importantly, the US has a lot of people tied into the Internet. We also do well in English speaking countries, Canada, Australia, England, and New Zealand. Places like India, France, Sweden, Germany, where English is a common second language (or third or fourth, or whatever) also provides us a ready market.

Some effort is being made to reach non-English speaking readers. Observant readers have noticed the "translate" link on the left sidebar of our front page. True, electronic translation has a ways to go, but it's getting there faster than most people think. As it gets better, we expect to get more readers from around the globe.

We already cover most of the world. I'm told Mike and I are celebrities in Russia, but that's just reflected glory from our Glen Cook interview. Glen is a god in Russia. I digress. The point is, we get around this big old blue marble of ours.

Well, except for a few places. We never had any visitors from Taliban Afghanistan. There had to be something seriously wrong with a country that couldn't log onto the net and read QM. When we do get steady visitors from there, I'll consider the country well on the path toward recovery.

OK, so much for the globe, then what? The International Space station seems like a good bet. It's only a couple hundred miles away. Straight up, but electrons don't care. I think slipping QM into their daily data would be a good thing.

Our expansion beyond there begins to get a bit limited by the speed of light. The moon is only about 30 seconds away. Mars is something like 15 minutes. Both of these places, due to recent water discoveries, appear to be good colonization prospects. It should be such a big deal to broadcast our zine over to the new colonies. That's much easier than physical mail delivery. QM, being mostly text, doesn't even take up much electronic storage space.

On the other reaches of our solar system the wait stretches from minutes to hours, but still within the realm of reasonable delivery times. An explorer could receive his data burst of QM, read it, and reply while the issue is still posted. That's not too unreasonable. In fact, the turn around time at the far reaches of our solar system is only as slow a sending a written letter to a paper magazine by US mail.

But then what? At interstellar distances, our magazine would arrive years out of date. I remember stumbling across a collection of really old girly magazines. It took some of the zip out my youthful fantasies to know these nubile young things in the magazine were probably grandmothers by now. I can't imagine delivering such a stale product to our faithful readers.

Why should I even care? It will be some time before we even get the end of the solar system, never mind take the great leap beyond. I'm counting on life extension science progressing much faster than space travel. Just in case I'm still around hundreds of years in the future, I want to make sure I can deliver my product. Early planning pays off.

Fortunately, faster than light communication might just be possible. Those clever physicists have come up with something called quantum entanglement. The short explanation for idiots by idiots is that the quantum magic done to one of a pair of entangled electrons does the same to the other electron, regardless of the distances involved. To me, that sounds like a basis for faster than light communication.

It all would make poetic sense that a zine called Quantum Muse would be delivered by quantum entanglement. Can't wait to find out.

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