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."

Comments

Imagine the first alien message!

[Thanshin]

We'll learn precisely what kind of chemical product aliens use to enlarge their penis.

Neutrino@Home

[Metorical]

Does this mean I have to leave my computer on running Neutrino@Home listening for Extra Terrestrials while destroying my home planet?

What about those from the sun?

[molo]

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

So, to find any aliens on Earth...

[Hankapobe]

all we would have to do is see who's buying a lot of dry cleaning fluid?

Re:Civil rights of aliens

[grantek]

Of course, ET'll be using transport-layer encryption we've never seen, so it'll just look like random noise and we'll dismiss aliens again :)

Re:Still bound by the speed of light

[Thanshin]

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. You're assuming a being that senses time as we do. An alien creature might live for millions of years and generate the simplest thought in years. two hundred thousand years might be a blink, for them.

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.

TFA is wrong

[soulsteal]

Everyone knows ET used trees, the wind, some string, a coat hangar, a record player and a speak'n'spell to communicate.

Duh.

Re:Still bound by the speed of light

[sysusr]

The time from big bang to big crunch might be a "day" for them. Our entire civilization would be like a lightning flash. Are you suggesting some sort of hyper-slow motion state (metabolism, perception etc)? If so, that would be an extreme natural disadvantage. They wouldn't even be able to keep up with the geological events on their home planet, let alone adapt to predators.

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:Civil rights of aliens

[veganboyjosh]

Thank you, Frank Shoemaker!

Speed of Light != Useless

[LakeSolon]

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?