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ET Will Phone Home Using Neutrinos, Not Photons
Posted by
timothy
on Tue May 20, 2008 07:49 AM
from the speak-and-spell-is-cross-particle-compatible dept.
from the speak-and-spell-is-cross-particle-compatible dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Neutrinos are better than photons for communicating across the galaxy. That's the conclusion of a group of US astronomers who say that the galaxy is filled with photons that make communications channels noisy whereas neutrino comms would be relatively noise free. Photons are also easily scattered and the centre of the galaxy blocks them entirely. That means any civilisation advanced enough to have started to colonise the galaxy would have to rely on neutrino communications. And the astronomers reckon that the next generation of neutrino detectors should be sensitive enough to pick up ET's chatter."
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Imagine the first alien message! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Imagine the first alien message! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
OK I got dibs (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Too late! (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0345331354/ref=sib_dp_pt# [amazon.com]
(search "neutrino", click Page 260)
And Ann Druyan will you sue for billions and billions of dollars.
Civil rights of aliens (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Civil rights of aliens (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Civil rights of aliens (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
All your basse are belong to us!
Neutrino@Home (Score:5, Funny)
Still bound by the speed of light (Score:5, Insightful)
Neutrinos might be good for short distances (100ly), but then, you're less likely to encounter interference sources. Since photons are easier to emit and detect, they are the more likely choice.
In summary: photons for short distances, since interference isn't a factor and nothing for long distances since lag time makes meaningful communication impossible.
Re: (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Still bound by the speed of light (Score:5, Insightful)
The time from big bang to big crunch might be a "day" for them. Our entire civilization would be like a lightning flash. They'd consider carbon based civilizations as random events that cover entire galaxies in an instant and then fade to void by the next.
If that's the case, I don't think we'd be much interested in their messages, though.
Parent
Re:Still bound by the speed of light (Score:5, Insightful)
Such a species cannot survive. Even a lack of natural predators wouldn't help: geologically active planets would take care of them.
"Nature always finds a way."
Parent
Re:Still bound by the speed of light (Score:5, Insightful)
Such a species might live and sense the universe in several more dimensions than us. A single galaxy in a single three dimensional volume might be the smallest of it's body "cells".
Planetary geological activity would bother them about as much as quark behavior bothers us. i.e.: They'd need much advancement to even be able to detect it.
Parent
Re:Still bound by the speed of light (Score:5, Interesting)
Not if they're made of meat [baetzler.de].
Parent
Re:Still bound by the speed of light (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of your own life. When you are 10 the idea of working on one project for a year seems like forever. Heck you can not even stand ten minutes of down time. It seems sooo long to you.
By the time your 40 a year seems like a short amount of time and five minutes is a blink of an eye.
If you where a 1000 years old and where going to live for another 50,000 years waiting 200 years for a reply wouldn't seem so bad.
Even waiting a thousand years for data to come back from a probe is very doable.
But no I do not think you can have ultra turtles.
Parent
Re:Still bound by the speed of light (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently, it does. Entangled particles *always* have opposite angular momentum. This has been observed experimentally. It may not be accurate to say that one particle is "transmitting" to another. It may be more accurate to say that each particle is independently reading the same variable in some higher dimension. But something is happening. It's not a trick.
Whether or not we can use this information to transmit information of our choosing is another issue entirely.
doing so breaks the link
It's possible that what you mean to say is that observing the system causes it to collapse, in which case you are right. But I'm not aware of any way to actually break the link between two entangled particles.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're oversimplifying it a bit. There really is something spooky going on there. The full explanation is lengthy, but I'm going to give it a try anyway.
First off, consider the photon from a classical physics perspective. We know photons can be polarized to discreet angles, and we know how to compute the chances of a photon passing thro
Encryption? (Score:2, Interesting)
Encryption? Probably Not Intentionally... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Encryption? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
What about those from the sun? (Score:5, Insightful)
-molo
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I watched my husband help design and build a detector for his PhD research. There are a lot of scientists hard at work on the problem, but right now advances are incremental.
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Re:What about those from the sun? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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His Master's Voice (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_(novel)
So, to find any aliens on Earth... (Score:5, Funny)
Vodafone takes notice (Score:2)
How likely are you to be hit by a beam? (Score:2)
Faster than light? No? Useless? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is also why I think projects like SETI@Home are ridiculously stupid. Even if other intelligent life did evolve elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, unless they evolved sooner than us (by at least the amount of time it would take for signals to travel from their world(s) ) their signals likely wouldn't have reached us yet. It's also possible that they evolved, developed RF technology, then either died out (and so stopped sending coherent signals), or moved on to FTL comms that we currently have no idea how to receive, or even the basic principles that they are based on (since we currently have no notion of any possible way for information to travel faster than the speed of light).
Since we've only been receiving RF signals for about 100 years, the window of opportunity for other civilizations' RF signals to reach us during the period in which we were 'listening' is ridiculously small.
Neutrino comms might be good for communicating inside of our Solar system, but unless they travel FTL, it would take a message a little over 4 years just to reach the next closest star to our Solar system. That seems pretty useless to me.
Gravity sucks (Score:2)
Ok, ok, wasnt my idea, maybe Asimov got mad in advance when predicted what hollywood will do in the future to the bicentennial man.
Nuttier than fruitcakes (Score:2, Insightful)
That means that 99.9999% of all neutrinos ever created are still zoooming around the universe.
And there are a billion billion stars all making 10^37 neutrinos every second.
That's what's called "background noise".
Now there are several noise-reduction strategies, like narrow filters (which don't work well when the endpoints are moving). But still, it's hard to make a signal make a dent with all that background noise.
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Now there are several noise-reduction strategies, like narrow filters (which don't work well when the endpoints are moving). But still, it's hard to make a signal make a dent with all that background noise.
Now apply the same rea
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you don't understand anything about neutrinos. They don't respond to electromagnetism, gravity, or the strong force. That means it's really hard to get a hold of them, like impossible.
So you can't use diffraction, reflection, refraction, or the other techniques for filtering and capturing objects.
And numerically there are a whole lot more neutrinos than photons. Like by a factor of 10^10 at least. That's nothing to sneeze at.
So
TFA is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Duh.
Noise free? (Score:3, Informative)
Apart from that, how exactly is this hypothetical neutrino comm generating its signal? Neutrinos are the byproduct of nuclear reactions, and you'd need to generate an awful lot for the signal to be heard over interstellar distances. Are they rapidly switching a fusion source on and off? Perhaps using matter and anti-matter instead? Either way, it'd be somewhat akin to blasting off hydrogen bombs in Morse code.
Final catch, if we don't know how a hypothetical neutrino comm would work, why would we assume it's feasible? I mean, if we're just going to handwave around the technical hurdles in generating a long range signal using exotic particles, why not go the extra mile and assume they're using gravity waves? Same benefits, equally difficult engineering problems.
Not that looking for neutrino signals isn't worth it - it costs us next to nothing to try it, and who knows, they might be right. However, there is a world of difference between "we should look for X in case it's used to contact us" and "they will contact us with X" which is the way the article is pitching it.
Speed of Light != Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
If your two options are: A) communicate at the speed of light, or B) don't communicate...
I think it's reasonable to assume you'd find some communication, no matter how slow, useful.
We've gotten so accustomed to (what is to our senses) instantaneous communication it's easy to forget that empires existed across much of our globe when the fastest method of communication was a sailing ship.
We've seen our 'world' shrink a great deal in the past few hundred years. Is it so hard to imagine it growing again?
Re:Speed of Light != Useless (Score:5, Interesting)
They had it down to 18 hrs from Great Britan... I think that's damned impressive.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Back in the Roman Empire days, they could communicate with Rome using towers built on each others horizon. They then used light codes (similar to morse) to then relay information back to the Caesar.
Semaphore towers were only invented in the 18th century. The Romans used couriers on horse back to send written messages. And according to rhe Wikipedia: In about 35 AD, the Roman emperor Tiberius, by then very unpopular, ruled his vast empire from a villa on the Isle of Capri. It is thought that he sent coded orders daily by heliograph to the mainland, eight miles away.
Nyh
Neutrinos are HARD to detect (Score:3, Insightful)
Alien tech indeed...
Noise free but hard to detect (Score:3, Informative)
But 'easier' doesn't mean 'easy'. Even at high energies, you can only detect one in 10^20 or 10^30 neutrinos, even with detectors of order 1 kiloton. Detectors of order 1 megaton are feasable by current technology, but getting i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If we can learn the nanotech and computing required, we should be able to upload ourselves in durable substrate (diamondoid CPUs). Once we have control what was once only biological control, we could change the way we perceive time to say a second per year (or more or less for the required job).
It could also be said that if we lived between compute platforms in each solar system, our global consciousness could be diffuse and communicate with the idea that light speed is the barrier which we will