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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.
Can I assume they'll need galactic warrants for these cosmic wiretaps?
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Does this mean I have to leave my computer on running Neutrino@Home listening for Extra Terrestrials while destroying my home planet?
One may eventually draw a comparison between the huge underground neutrino detectors and the room sized computer.
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.
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?
I for one don't want to be carrying around a billion light-years of solid lead worth of mass in my back pocket to be able to pick up a signal.. this seems like a problem with physics, not with how advanced the tech is.
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.
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
Everyone knows ET used trees, the wind, some string, a coat hangar, a record player and a speak'n'spell to communicate.
Duh.
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.
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?
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.
Big problem, you can't aim, focus, or do anything other with neutrinos than create them.
...Yet. Since they do interact with ordinary matter to some
degree, we can reasonably expect to some day have the ability to
make/use/detect them in a controlled and predictable manner.
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 reasoning to photons... Have you any idea just how many of them come at us from every direction, constantly, even during the night in a "dark" room? Fortunately, we can select them based on direction, frequency, amplitude, phase, polarization, and probably a few more properties that I can't think of at the moment. Why would we expect neutrinos to have any fewer selectable properties on which to filter? In fact, they would likely have more aspects to select for, as they periodically convert between several different flavors.
Not really..
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 never cross.
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
Yes, and if my grandma had subspace thrusters, she'd be a starship.
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 a neutrino lens, or diffraction grating, or speed trap, or siphon, or spectrograph, or pinhole camera, they're all impossible unless we discover a new force of Physics.
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!
And the first message we get is a cease and desist order from the Glactic Neutrino Communication Industry Association of Andromeda...
Of course they respond to gravity. Everything responds to gravity, with no exception whatsoever. Also, given that we now know for sure that neutrinos have mass, even from a Newton point of view it would be strange if they wouldn't respond to gravity.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.