AMANDA Maps Cosmic Neutrinos

Uosdwis writes "Remember those 'little neutral ones', neutrinos? You know those little guys have no charge, are invisible and just about no mass. Well a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor has created an array, burried in the antarctic, to detect them with help from the National Science Foundation and produced a map of nuetrinos in the cosmos. A different method than the tau neutrinos found a few years ago, and show the 'natural' neutrinos are at a higher energy level."

Comments

Yes and no.

[rjh]

Yes and no. Yes, neutrinos are created in many kinds of nuclear reactions, and yes, they do travel at lightspeed with some awe-inspiring ability to travel clear through anything, and yes, they could be used for SETI; but no, nobody's going to be using them for SETI.

The reason for this is any civilization advanced enough to have fission--much less fusion, MAM, quark-gluon conversion or other exotic energies--is first going to progress through a much lower-tech level, during which point their civilization is going to glow like a supernova in certain bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Earth, for instance, far outshines the Sun in several wavelengths.)

Rather than peek at the cosmos with a neutrino telescope to see the (relatively small) signatures of an individual fusion reactor here or there, it makes more sense to look at the cosmos with radio-astronomy tools to look for planets that are brighter than stars. Find one like that, and dollars to donuts says it's got intelligent life.

To give you an idea of just how quiet the cosmos is... if you were to stand on Pluto and turn on a cell phone, you'd create a radio signal so loud it would drown out literally everything in the night sky (at least on its band). It's quiet out there.