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ET Will Phone Home Using Neutrinos, Not Photons
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."
We'll learn precisely what kind of chemical product aliens use to enlarge their penis.
on the patent for using neutrinos for communications, OK? All other patent trolls, stay off, this baby is mine!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Can I assume they'll need galactic warrants for these cosmic wiretaps?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Does this mean I have to leave my computer on running Neutrino@Home listening for Extra Terrestrials while destroying my home planet?
Any civilization that wants to communicate across the galaxy is going to use something (and I don't know what that something would be) other than a particle that can't travel faster than light. The Milky Way is about 100,000ly across, so the ping times from one side to the other would be 200,000 years - try playing Intergalactic Counter Strike over that.
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.
Do you think that ET will be using encryption?
I thought there were billions of neutrinos coming from the Sun every second. Wouldn't that provide a lot of noise to drown out your signal?
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Surely the vastness of space would make any sort of standard communication, whether using protons or neutrinos, unfeasible. Who wants to wait 6 minutes for a message to travel the distance between the Earth and our sun?
Unless aliens have some sort of incredible way of communicating through subspace, or wormholes, or some other fantastic medium through which they can shorten or eliminate the pesky problem of distance, neutrinos over photons won't make too much of a difference, even if they are used solely for advertising their presence.
\x72\x6D\x20\x2D\x72\x66
This is exactly what Stanislas Lem wrote in "His Master's Voice" in 1968 :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_(novel)
all we would have to do is see who's buying a lot of dry cleaning fluid?
Is this practical? Is it possible to detect neutrinos with a small device?? I mean, Neutrinos detectors use to be huge.
Did anyone really think photons would have been best? Maybe easier but still, seems like a no-brainer to me. In other news: New study suggests telephones are a better means of communication than smoke signals.
I don't believe you, I'm here for a seat on the secret spaceship.
They might use Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" which will be instantaneous and impossible for us to detect assuming our current understanding of how the Universe works is correct. LHC might change all that.
Cool, can't wait to have my pan-galactic neutrino-based mobile phone! Complete with 470 tons of tetrachloroethylene and a few thousand photoreceptors. Fits in your pocket!
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
" And the astronomers reckon that the next generation of neutrino detectors should be sensitive enough to pick up ET's chatter."
Which can be accomplished by a large headed alien with a speak and spell, a coat hanger, and some blankets.
There is a book called "The God Particle" written by the dude who got the Nobel Prize for discovering the neutrino. Very interesting and a recommended read.
Neutrinos lack of interaction with normal matter is a problem for potential eavesdroppers, not only because it makes it harder to detect them, but any usable communication beam will have to be collimated (somehow) to a very narrow beam... to the point where even after tens of thousands of light years it still wouldn't have spread very far. This makes it unlikely that we'd be intersecting any beams at all.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but communication with neutrinos would still NOT be faster than light, right? I'm sorry, but I don't think any galaxy-spanning civilization can possibly exist without FTL communication. Like, thousands of times FTL, because of the massive distances involved. According to one site the Milky Way is about 90,000 light years across. Which means it would take, let's see, 90,000 years (hard math, there) for a signal to cross the galaxy. Not exactly useful for galactic communications.
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.
... but wont be a mini black hole a better instant communication device?
Ok, ok, wasnt my idea, maybe Asimov got mad in advance when predicted what hollywood will do in the future to the bicentennial man.
".....static.......UNCE UNCE UNCE.....siren......UNCE UNCE UNCE......whistle......UNCE UNCE UNCE"
I had this precise idea months ago. Would it be practical to use neutrinos to establish communication links across Earth?
Even if detectors are huge, even if we have yet to invent modulable neutrino emitters. This would provide direct point to point links with shorter distance and lattency than relying on cables across surface or satellite.
Léa Gris
Encoding likely, hopefully binary. We'll have to figure out ET's communicative symbology after the pleasantry of exchanging "assumed to be universally consistent" math facts in whatever encoding. Then, assuming we can receive and decode, we have to try to understand ET's symbology with no common base. Then, we have to interpret ET's intent along with the message. Might take longer than the Fermi-labs mystery letter.
Invenio via vel creo
What about quantum entanglement? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
Big problem, you can't aim, focus, or do anything other with neutrinos than create them.
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.
If they wrapped a plot around this it would work just as well as a short sci-fi story as a paper.
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
Everyone knows ET used trees, the wind, some string, a coat hangar, a record player and a speak'n'spell to communicate.
Duh.
Unless, of course, ET has a real hot pad.
Invenio via vel creo
That part of TFS left me scratching my head. Since nothing short of a black hole or neutron star will actually stop neutrinos, and since every active star in the galaxy gives off neutrino radiation as a byproduct of stellar fusion, shouldn't the noise level be relatively high?
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.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
With tachyons, the message can arrive before it's sent! All we need to do is to figure out how to keep them from condensing....
Invenio via vel creo
There are alot of posts saying "Well it's still not faster than the speed of light, so it's still useless for a pan-galactic civilization".
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?
FTA:
Given such "modest" power levels, one may imagine transmitting at rates higher than hypothesized for the resonant Z o method, perhaps one per second, as is easily foreseeable with present technology (a gigawatt of power, less than many present nuclear power stations).
Multiply this by the number of directions ETI would like to send in...
Other suggested transmitting schemes draws energy comparable to star output powers. It would have been nice if they'd actually come up with some physics advocating the feasibility of controlled neutrino transmission. Their mentioning of the better efficiency of shipping away artifacts to hang around in solar systems was interesting however.
They could reverse the polarity of the neutrino emitter by modulating the frequency harmonics across the sub-space spectrum to acheive FTL comm. At least, that how Geordi La Forge did it.
Maybe they rely on something even better than Neutrinos that we (as a civilization that has NOT begun colonizing the galaxy) haven't discovered yet?
Oh yeah sure, let's use neutrinos, who's most remarkable physical property is that they barely interact with matter, no problem!
Alien tech indeed...
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Doctor Zee is a child prodigy of about 12 years of age, and appears to be the most-intelligent being in the Fleet. His origin isn't explained, but he's soon introduced as a scientific "whiz" who has great influence over Commander Adama and the Council of Twelve. However, not everyone is comfortable with the young Zee having so much influence; Xavier expressed this in the pilot.
Zee convinces Adama not to attempt direct contact with humanity, because the nations of Earth aren't unified and are ill-equipped to resist the Cylons, who have been clandestinely following the Fleet. He's also unsure whether Earth's communication systems are Neutrino or Photon-based.
Zee is responsible for creating most (if not all) of the gizmos used throughout the series - for example, the invisibility screen, as well as the method of time travel first employed by the renegade Xavier. Zee is an expert on any topic about which he's consulted, including sociology, history and agriculture. Just after the pilot episode, he completes construction of an antigravity craft that resembles a UFO ("The Super Scouts, Parts 1 and 2").
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Given the distance to cover and the speed of light, lag times will be high. The smallest duration would be on the order of 10 years, with most 100 to 1000 years. This would require very long lifetimes for any chatter to make sense. What would really be communicated? Only those items of utmost importance. I figure it would be data on other civilizations, their development and threat assessment. Or, habitable worlds for an expanding population. Anything else would be considered hum-drum, or capable of being discerned from great distances. Eventually your remote populations would grow evolutionarily distant, and you'd be communicating with an alien race from your own planet. Perhaps then the communication is to keep the two races friendly, and to maintain a common form of communication, if the ever do come together again.
It is only when FTL comes into play that things get interesting (as any sci-fi viewer would know)
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something at a great distance with only an energy beam, if we find a fairly regular atomic shape (like a diamond but more diverse) can we create cohesive distortions in it or use it to cohesively distort a particle stream?
Might be kinda cool if we could build something using naturally occuring distortions over long distances...
If we could make a bacteria that would be so badass.
Phoning ET would be a lot fun if we could destroy his world with a virus.
Our first contact with interstellar life will be an adolescent alien playing their version of Counter Strike Source and screaming "STFU you noob, I DON'T HACK"
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
It's true that civilizations can exist when it takes weeks or months, maybe even a small number of years for the message to reach it's destination. On the scale of thousands of years, what could you *possibly* say that would be useful or relevant to anyone living at that time? How would you even know if anyone would still be alive at the signals destination?
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. New species might possibly have evolved (though, I suppose, 30,000 years is fairly small in the timescale of evolutionary theory).
The one and only thing I can think of that might be of some sort of use for speed-of-light communications to other points in the galaxy is simply for publishing significant works of art, literature, etc, that other planets might find amusing or educational in thousands of years' time. By the time they reach it, it will be History, and likely not applicable to 'modern' Earth anyhow.
It seems to me that, at a point where groups of people are essentially completely isolated from each other, with the only communications being art, entertainment, and educational literature, they are effectively seperate civilizations. Sure, it might be possible for mankind to spread to other planets and establish completely new, isolated civilizations, but before your transmissions reached them, there is a good chance that they would no longer even understand your language.
A new tower of babel, once again caused by reaching for the heavens.
...they would be using it and it would hard to tell communication apart from background noise.Not really, that is the point about using neutrinos. There are so few being disbursed (so we think) that even if we come across an encrypted data stream we should know it's there due to the increase of neutrinos.
This whole article smacks alot of the Piers Anthony book Macroscope. It's his one decent book imo.
Although the Macroscope would also destroy the mind of anyone who wasn't ready to view the vast knowledge of the Universe. Someone warn Dick Cheney. Better yet, don't.
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 civilisations gain from sending their own stuff out, they do gain from receiving other "people's", hence the system works in an altruistic way.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Considering they are using light relays, that actually seems kinda slow? I suppose, though, now that I think about it more, that makes sense. The transmission of info from one tower to the next via light is fast, but they probably needed well over a hundred towers to reach from GB to Rome (and maybe a ship or two in the English Channel?).
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 they had the message correct before forwarding, which might add another few minutes at each tower).
So, I guess your right, that is pretty impressive given the distance, and the limitation of line-of-sight relays (and they didn't have telescopes/binoculars to increase line of sight between towers).
This is the fundamental problem, NOT noise sources, as earlier posts suggest. Although the sun produces large numbers, they are all low energy, less than 10 MeV. Supernovae aren't much bigger. As you go up in energy, astrophysical neutrinos both become more rare and easier to detect.
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 into the 10-100 megaton range means that you have to start instrumenting huge volumes of heavy matter, like the Great Lakes.
If you imagine aliens attempting to communicate over galactic distances, with resources such that they can turn a small moon into a 3D array of particle detectors, well, then maybe. A good science fiction story. But don't expect IceCube to be listening to alien Viagra commertials any day soon.
--Nathaniel, Experimental Neutrino Physicist
But the benevolent will always be victim to the malevolent. Any society that broadcasts into space better be damn sure they are capable of defending from attack or incredibly naive. In my book humanity is the latter. I don't value the discovery alien life so much that I'm willing to have my species destroyed for it.
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.
Now that particle physics is essentially dead they are trying to come up with some wacko idea that sounds cool so they can get some funding. NO should be the answer. This does not cut it for many reasons: 1) There are gazillions of neutrinos passing through us coming from the sun and all the stars. How are we (or any other civilization) going to compete with those with a meager particle accelerator? 2) Neutrinos are almost non-interacting with matter so they are extremely difficult to detect. Tell me how you are going to detect ENOUGH of them, coming from a relatively low intensity source and still be able to get a good s/n ratio? Complete non-sense if you ask me (and I am a physicist).
Considering the wasteful amounts of energy for broadcasting outward, combined with relying more on satellites, high frequencies that don't make it outside the atmosphere, and when we eventually wake up to planetary security concerns it's not hard to see that broadcasting sporadic signals into space won't continue much longer. When we eventually need to communicate with intra or inter planetary craft it will be with some type of more efficient, focused and secure means.
Even given our still primitive understanding of physics; laser, maser, or quantum entanglement (quasi-FTL) could be a few useful approaches that would not happen to be very detectable.
In addition, due to the size needed for the detector, a neutrino communication device could only make sense for communicating between planets. But still they would send a beam to the other planet which we could only detect if we were in the direct line of the beam..
His Master's Voice looked at an interstellar neutrino message found by humans. Unlike Sagan's Cosmos, this tale has not nearly as happy or tidy an ending as some may wish.
But for someone like me who doubts the value of the SETI enterprise, quite nice. Thankfully, also about zero chance of Zemeckis making a dumbed down movie of it!
If curious, here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_%28novel%29
After visiting the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) and talking with the scientists there, I can be pretty sure that this is not going to happen.
The SNO experiment used 1000 tonnes of heavy water in a 12m acrylic sphere suspended in a 30-meter barrel shaped cavity 6800 feet below ground, and was only able to detect several dozen of the trillions of neutrinos passing through the area.
What will your receiver look like, if you want a usable signal? Or your transmitter for that matter?
Ok, let me rephrase that bit about SETI; yes, we probably should listen - even if the chances are remote, it may still be possible to receive signals from other civilizations. What is stupid is people thinking that as soon as we start listening, we should quickly find signals. We could listen for millenia upon millenia and not necessarily hear anything.
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 learn new insights into science and math, so that would be useful. But that is a very limited 'subset' of what people generally have in mind when they think of communication. General diplomatic messages of goodwill, and exchanges of knowledge, could certainly, over great periods of time, be accomplished, if we had civilizations sufficiently close. Within a couple hundred light years' of time, maybe. Greater than that, and I still think speed of light communication is kind of impossible.
FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE? http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/20/0114211
I dunno. Maybe the ability to transmit atomic states? If it is possible to deliver a state to the other site of the galaxy. You would have to deal with the initial delivery time but it should be instantaneous communication there after as long as it does not collapse.
... crop circles are out?
Have gnu, will travel.
The fine paper notes that while stellar level output is needed for one solution, another solution is within range of the output of a contemporary nuclear power plant. Tens of kilobytes could be sent this way at a power level that would be unique even in comparison with supernovae events. The extremely low signal to noise ratio would make the galaxy transparent. However, the most interesting solution they offer requires a 1000 km beam to be aimed directly at the planet Earth with knowledge of its orbital ephemeris, which they say would be same as resolution needed for optical resolution. They also mention possibility of snail mail of artifacts and sending the message of where the artifact is. Also data security is noted as a good reason to use neutrino comms.
So the scenario is: use one of the technical solutions in the paper to initiate communications, based on knowing Sol is one of the promising stars to target. Broadcast over geological time frame. Meanwhile send snail mail.
It seems likely that neutrino comms would be used to warn a civilization not to broadcast too much radio, or not to do high energy experiements, and also to direct attention perhaps to lower time lag, higher bit rate modes perhaps platforms out of the plane of the galaxy hence less dust occluded, etc. The cool thing is that we could be sure this is an ET message even on the basis of one detected neutrino. This means that we would have a chance of detecting it with the generation of detectors currently being built, if we happen to luckily be listening while they are sending.
but we'd sure have a hell of a lot of kids...
Great! Once we get the science of neutrinics going, we can make chronoscopes!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Carl Sagan got dibs way before both y'all.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0345331354/ref=sib_dp_pt#
(search "neutrino", click Page 260)
And Ann Druyan will you sue for billions and billions of dollars.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
quantum messages :thumbsup:
I've said it before and I'll say it again, they're using microwave gravity waves. They pass through anything and if beamed into a nearby black hole, all other black holes in the universe re-radiate the same signal. Kind of like radio repeaters located on the top of nearby mountains, all you have to be is within a reasonable distance to a nearby black hole and you cut your ping time considerably. At least that's what ET told me the last time I was visiting their mothership.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Can't you entangle two particles and then use them for communication? Is this practically possible? Moreover if you want superluminal communication can't you use a wormhole to connect the two points? Surely they may have reached this stage.
Stanislaw Lem
wrote that in 1968.
I did this, back in the late 80s. i used the neutrino pings at Fermilab to send out a morse encoded neutrino beam.
It took several minutes, because we only got three (iirc) pings/minute, but i sent out "Dinner is served" a couple of times.
No, really.
This sounds like subspace communication technology to me.
Dear mods: The parent post isn't a troll.
Sheldon Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel prize in physics for his work on electroweak interactions. He's also the (co)predictor of the "charm" flavour of quark. He is affiliated with Boston University (or at least, was in the 1970s).
Additionally, the fact that neutrons decay into protons (which requires a flavour change) is proof that neutrinos can interact with regular matter, via the weak nuclear force that the GP deliberately didn't mention. Doing so emits a W-boson, which decays into an electron (beta decay) and an electron antineutrino.
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.
Even assuming this is true, that doesn't mean we need to stand out unnecessarily. If you were standing in a field of bushes with a gun, you can easily shoot any rabbit you see. From the rabbit's perspective, is it better to lay low in hiding or jump up and down for attention?Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This seems to be a reference to a section in StarMaker. Unfortunately, it's a section that has become strongly contradicted by physics since it was written (1920s or 30s?).
It could also be a reference to "Vaster than Empires and More Slow". I think that was by R.A.Lafferty, but I'm not sure. (Another part of my brain says Rodger Zelazny.) In any case it was a short story, and didn't go into enough details to be obsoleted easily by advancing physics.
It's a theme that seems to have tremendous attraction. It's not used often, however, because it's so difficult to make it sound plausible. (Dragons are much easier..and *they*'re usually relegated to fantasy.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
therearenoets??? Any scientist who believes in statistics would suggest otherwise, and that includes intelligent ET's.
If these guys are correct, then why have we been spending all this time and money listening to radio signals?
Now if the first neutrino message we get contains the word CULT, the aliens will need to face the Public Order Act.