ET Will Phone Home Using Neutrinos, Not Photons 299
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."
Imagine the first alien message! (Score:5, Funny)
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I love South Park [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Imagine the first alien message! (Score:4, Funny)
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OK I got dibs (Score:2)
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Any civilization advanced enough to colonize the galaxy probably has figured out how to negate - or at least deal with - the mass of these pocket-blackholes they'd have to carry around.
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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)
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Re:Civil rights of aliens (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Civil rights of aliens (Score:5, Funny)
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All your basse are belong to us!
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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.
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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.
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."
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.
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Evidently, it organized itself akin to DNA, shared genetic information between 2 "creatures" to create a 3rd unique creature, 'ate' other inert space dust, and other tings we wouldnt hesitate to call life here on Terra. Their time-frame was also very slow to what we perceive.
And that's not science fiction. It's science fact.
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Re:Still bound by the speed of light (Score:5, Interesting)
Not if they're made of meat [baetzler.de].
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.
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They are undetected theorised particles that travel faster then the speed of light. However physicists doubt their ability to carry information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon [wikipedia.org]
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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.
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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)
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If you think about a lot of the noise that earth sends out it's increasingly encrypted, so the window of unencrypted easily detectable data is maybe 50 years... a blink in galactic time.
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We might not be able to decrypt an alien encrypted transmission, but it would still be detectable. For example, look at a radio scanner. If the local police encrypts all of their communications, you will not be able to listen in unless you have a scanner that can decrypt their transmissions, and the proper key. However, as long as your scanner picks up the frequency that the police use, there will be a signal there. It may just sound like noise, but that transmission will be different from the normal ba
Re:Encryption? (Score:5, Funny)
What about those from the sun? (Score:5, Insightful)
-molo
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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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Betrayed by Direction of Travel (Score:2)
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Re:What about those from the sun? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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)
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Screw that, I want another Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster! Those things will fuck you up real good, better than tiny orange kittens [uncyclopedia.org].
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Woodstock references = auto karma +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.
Easy ! (Score:2)
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Even with a lag time of possibly hundreds of years, that doesn't mean that there's no useful communication to be made. Twitter probably wouldn't be all that popular with that sort of latency, but I'd imagine there'd still be plenty to talk about (scientific discoveries (maybe a new planet to col
Ahh, but those would be seperate civilizations (Score:2)
A new tower of babel, once again
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Again, even if another intelligent species created such a beacon, unless it just so happened that the 'lifetime' of transmission of that beacon was during a pretty narrow window of opportunity, it's likely that the signal either passed us long ago, and is no longer detectable, or we will have to listen f
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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).
Well I'm not so sure we'll ever figure out how to send a message faster than light, but I agree-- we don't know how another civilization on a distant planet would send messages. Light/RF, neutrinos, or something else we haven't thought of yet, we just don't know. However, that don't see why that should stop us from monitoring some of the obvious candidates for inter-stellar communication.
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.
Sounds like a window of 100 years, which is small when put in perspective of how long the universe has been around.
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This is also why I think projects like SETI@Home are ridiculously stupid.
From your post, you seem to be basing that opinion on the possibility of carrying on two-way communication with life on another world.
From my perspective, things like SETI are extremely worthwhile, even if the likelihood of finding something are tiny, and even if there's no way we could ever communicate with them.
Simply having solid proof that there is other intelligent life out there would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of our species. Sure, communication would be nice, but it's not a
On SETI. . . (Score:2)
Yes, we should probably listen, but we shouldn't make over-much of the lack of finding any signals.
Maybe, by listening in on alien communications, we could l
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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
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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
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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.
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Why Not Tachyons? (Score:2)
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.
18 hours? Seems like a long time? (Score:2)
Each 'telegrapher' would probably take several minutes to receive then relay the message (and they probably used some sort of error checking/correction procedure, to verify
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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
Ship = few months, not 90000 years (Score:2)
I mean, think about it, if the signal takes 30,000 years to reach it's destination, not only would everyone who was alive when you sent the signal be de
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I mean, think about it, if the signal takes 30,000 years to reach it's destination, not only would everyone who was alive when you sent the signal be dead, but roughly 1000 generations would have lived and died. Governments, societies, religions would likely have all come and gone, risen and fallen.
Or, these being people with such staggeringly awesome technological prowess that they can travel between the stars, they individually live for vast periods, and over the ages have built more stable institutions. 30,000 years might still seem a long time for cross-galactic communications, but for such people, 50 or 100 years may not matter much at all. And from one side of the galaxy to the other, each step of the way to your neighbors might only be a few years.
From Earth to Alpha Centauri is, by this mea
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You could have had a few thousand years of advance warning that the giant planet-eating space-monster is headed your way ... but you opted for no communication. Too bad.
Neutrinos are HARD to detect (Score:3, Insightful)
Alien tech indeed...
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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
Why communicate at all? (Score:2)
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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
Re:Why communicate at all? A: to share information (Score:2)
Imagine all these alien races pumping out designs for their technologies, their culture, maths, arts, ideas (and mistakes). A sort of free/open-source for technologies, arts, ideas. No-one gains directly from sending out their "intellectual property", but no-one can be threatened by having a recipient turning it against them (the distances are too large for any sort of practical attack - Andromeda Strain/Ophiuchi Hotline notwithstanding.)
While none of the ci
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Also, I wonder about the value of discoveries when a lifetime is 100 years and your transmission time is 100 years, particularly when you start from the same technological base...
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Don't worry - if the aliens are capable to sent anything destructive our way, they're quite likely also capable to detect our presence without us announcing it.
I can see it now (Score:2)
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Add to the list:
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I still get a pretty big number after the division. But that's not really the point. Interstellar communications wouldn't be "conversations", they would carry essential, long term information (important scientific breakthroughs, targets of new colonization ships (to avoid redundancy/fights/etc), dat
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Probably you mean to ask if Quantum entanglement can be used for FTL communication. If so, the answer is NO [wikipedia.org].
Informally, to be able to communicate via Quantum entanglement, you need to transport the entangled particles (probably done before the actual communication, so irrelevant) and then upon aligning the state of one entangled particle one needs to send some classical information to the destination. Without this classical part the receiver can not "decode" the state of his/her particle
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So did Computers. [usatoday.com]