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Undersea Neutrino Observatory To Be Second-Largest Human Structure
cylonlover writes "An audacious project to construct a vast infrastructure housing a neutrino observatory at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is being undertaken by a consortium of 40 institutes and universities from ten European countries. The consortium claims that KM3NeT, as it is known, will 'open a new window on the Universe,' as its 'several' cubic kilometer observatory detects high-energy neutrinos from violent sources in outer space such as gamma-ray bursts, colliding stars and supernovae. On the scale of human constructions, it will be second only to the Great Wall of China."
Why build one from scratch? Let's just upgrade the Great Wall of China to be a Great Neutrino Wall of China.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that this is the second-largest human created structure. While this is an impressive experiment which I think is very clever and great for physics, calling this a structure is a bit of a joke. If you were to call an array of phototubes a structure you could easily compare it to, say, the street lights of Los Angeles -- which I'm sure would be counted as a larger "structure".
On the scale of human constructions, it will be second only to the Great Wall of China.
...and the largest one not visible from space...except if you're a neutrino, presumably.
*this space intentionally left blank
"One of the four pointers saying 'come and see', and I saw, and beheld a white
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk0Is8-gGSQ
Klaatu, Little Neutrino
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
No, it's not the biggest. The Deep Space Network has satellites (antennae and data storage servers) around Earth and around Mars. And neither it nor the KM3NeT are solid structures.
The Great Wall is not strictly connected either but at least it consists of large solid fragments that are big on their own. This observatory is merely an array of sensors suspended in the sea. If you want the biggest structure, I'd look at a road system of a country.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
At last, it was high time we build something interesting under the seas.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
"In addition to the neutrino observatory, KM3NeT will house equipment for monitoring the deep-sea environment, including (according to Popsci) the recording of whale song and the observation of bioluminescent organisms."
I guess they thought of that.
It will never get fully funded.
the great wall of china commit suicide, because he felt he had offended nature by attempting to impose human folly on it?
"recording of whale song" I hope the RIAA doesn't find out.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So how many people are going to be buried in it?
More likely Cobra.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
both wrong, this has all the tell-tails of the machinations of KAOS. We'd better shoe-phone 86 and 99 to get on it.
1. The European Union (which is smaller than Europe btw) is the largest economy in the world with the highest GDP by lead of 12% so I guess not. 2. I'd be pretty surprised if a single guy built the Great Wall of China.
In Capitalist US, the commerce controls the Government.
Will this "ocean palace", which is built to "detect" these mysterious "neutrino" emminations inadvertantly rouse the mighty lavos before he's good and ready?
You know how it is with those quantum mechanical things- all kinds of consequences happen as a result of obervation! /joke
Ok, jokes aside, this is very awesome. The engineering lessons learned could be applied in a wide range of ocean construction projects.
. . . and I thought it was THRUSH, for sure.
. . . "Open Channel D . . . you there, Ducky, um, I mean, Ilya . . . ?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I know it is not your fault or the fault of /. in general. It should read tallest human structure. And it is probably that way only because it is underwater. The article says second largest considering the scale of construction for a singular project. Nothing about actual size.
These are the Europeans, right? The same group of countries currently scrambling to tighten their belts and prevent a financial calamity?
Let's not hold our collective breaths. Funding might be a little scarce, for a while.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Yep. Can't argue.
What makes you think that a particle physicist would have any aptitude whatsoever in toxicology?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
is higher than your GDP.
2. oh yeah. i know it was easy to mis-understand what i meant. there was actually one guy, who told other people what to do, and thats how the great wall of china got built. but then he committed suicide. because he had disturbed the Chi of the earth.
I hear Apple has a patent on the shoe phone.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I would hate to live in your world of us versus them. Does your brain really filter every piece of information into what will those people I disagree with do about that? I mean damn, second post and you're bringing up environmentalist and sabotage.
Present your own viewpoints instead of painting others.
Turn Great Wall into a neutrino detector
Table-ized A.I.
woops...meant "+1 interesting"...
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Are we going to chop them up into little bits and stuff them into those little pods? There is no habitable structure down there, just a bunch of floating receiver elements.
Since the medeterranian is full of turds how will they see a neutrino?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
understanding physical effects which will bear no consequence on the extreme challenges we will face in the very, very near future.
This is just flat out wrong. You should know from getting an undergraduate physics degree that EVERYTHING we use for technology now was at one time a "physical effect which will bear no consequence on the extreme challenges we will face in the future". Seriously, just look at electricity and magnetism as an example. Those were just "physical effects" at one time but now they're the basis of computing. We're now using computers to model biological systems and cure diseases, which is just one example of thousands where we're taking extreme problems and solving them with something that was once just an odd "physical effect".
:-)
What if they learn something from the neutrino observatory that leads to teleportation technology? Or solves our energy crisis somehow? These are all possibilities and to not investigate the unknown is just a waste of humanity itself. You're a scientist, man. Act like one! Where's your spirit of curiosity and undying passion to know the unknown? I guess you decided to go into engineering instead of research, and maybe that passion isn't something we share. Engineering is an awesome degree and I hope you do great things with it. But don't lose your inquiring spirit
-Glitch "We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." - Linus Torvalds
I hear Apple has a patent on the shoe phone.
If not, they will after reading your post.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Every time a story like this about a massive particle physics project surfaces, my stomach turns. I am by no means anti-science; I did my undergrad in physics, and am a graduate student in engineering. It all just seems like a massive misappropriation of resources. One can blow the horn of scientific inquiry all day, but there are incredibly daunting and very real challenges facing the world today (e.g., energy, toxicology) that need the attention of intelligent people. We live in such a unique time in human existence, when we have this massive supply of cheap energy.
So do we have an energy problem or not?
Your inconsistency notwithstanding, you could pick something better to complain about than spending
trillions of dollars into understanding physical effects which will bear no consequence on the extreme challenges we will face in the very, very near future.
Try military spending, or even luxuries like cosmetics and perfumes. Besides, I doubt anyone can say with certainty that those poorly-understood physical effects bear no consequence. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that such understanding could provide the keystone to overcoming the challenges you point out.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Yeah, man, understanding basic physical processes couldn't possible lead to better technologies/solutions down the road. We know everything we need to now, let's just stop all scientific inquiry, or maybe we should have done that in the 50's, or at the beginning of the industrial revolution, or hell, once we found out how to make fire, did we really need anything else?
If countries were spending like 50% of their GDP on projects like this, you might have a point, but you and I both know the expenditures are relatively miniscule on the level of nation/international budgets, and if you didn't know that and were actually serious about the "trillions of dollars" nonsense, you're woefully uninformed to be commenting on the issue (You wouldn't be alone, mind you- I remember seeing a US poll indicating a significant portion of the populace thinks NASA's share of the national budget is something like 20%, when it's closer to 0.5%*). The basic research into subatomic physics is what made possible the development of nuclear reactors, which are likely going to be increasingly important to our energy future once the cheap oil runs out. Similar for better solar panels, more efficient engines, etc. Basically, if you want to solve technological problems, you should be arguing for *more* fundamental, not-immediately-profitable/usable scientific research, not less. The amount of physics and math graduates being sucked into jobs in the financial industry because they pay so well in comparison to actual useful work is a far bigger drain on our ability to deal with the future than fundamental scientific research, in my opinion.
* Similarly, the National Science Foundation is about 0.2%, and the amount of the Dept. of Energy's budget devoted to research, while less trivial to work out, likely comes to a similar percentage of overall expenditures.
Because it's in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea?
Take the Red Pill.
Comments like this sort of make my stomach turn. If we had all thought like this, we would still be living in caves.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
No, neutrino detection threshold will be around 1 GeV. Nuclear reactions produce neutrinos in the ~MeV scale. But ICECUBE are planning on additions that will be able to detect neutrinos with such low energies. Ps, the detector will be more or less protected by the french navy. As there is a very close naval base in Toulon, France.
So, the plan is to immerse a huge number of optical detectors into the deep sea for an extended period of time. Talk to any biologist or oceanographer and they'll tell you what happens to things like that - they become completely encrusted with plant and animal material. It's called "bio-fouling" and it's one of the biggest problems with putting anything in the ocean (aside from extreme pressure). I just don't see how they'd keep a system like that a) operational and b) calibrated.
RobotBox - Robot projects from around the world
No, doing that would be like trying to see a firefly in the middle of a 4th of July fireworks grand finale while wearing welding goggles.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Oh get a life, it's not like this would be the only neutrino detector in the world; Italy has one, Japan has one, Antarctica has one, India is building one and I think the US has two or three. Trying to pick out flashes from muons in turbid seawater with luminescent marine life just seems like unduly complicating a fiendishly difficult task anyways and little more than a pork-barrel project for the photomultiplier tube manufacturers. The world's economies are in bad enough shape that being a little more selective about funding research to get more bang for our bucks is just going to conserve good-will.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I think ASCAP or a similar organization would be the one to collect royalties "on behalf of" the whales.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This will be great, until a ship forgets to pull up the anchor or drops it in the wrong place.
Humanity isn't ready for the responsibilities that come with being a SPECTRE.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I was doing great reading the article linked to, until I got to the part where the optical goodies are built to withstand 6 atmospheres or 20,000 feet of pressure.
'Scuse me, but according to my calculator, and knowing that 34 feet of water is one atmosphere, then 6 is a measly 204 feet. 20,000 feet would be, in slightly rounded figures, 600 atmospheres. And since the Med. Sea is salty, its safe to reduce that to 200 feet.
Its amazing that in all the posts to this story ahead of mine, no one has mentioned the missing word after the 6 "hundred".
Shame on you all, blathering away on stuff that if this is true, will have zip effect because it will fail spectacularly, both in terms of results per unit of money, and the scientific disappointment.
In terms of knowledge gained vs money spent, it certainly seems like its worthwhile to do. Doing it in the Med. also spans a much wider bit of the universe due to the planets rotation in comparison to ICECUBE, which is aimed more along the polar axis.
My unasked till now question though is: Is there enough daytime sunlight penetration at that depth in the Med. to represent a background noise level that will have to be subtracted, and how will this limit its ultimate sensitivity? Secondarily, what is the clarity of the water from the top of those 800 meter towers on down? Given that its sea water, with the detrious of life falling through it from the oxygenated surface layer 1000 feet above, there is zero chance in hell its not somewhat absorbtive of the emitted photons from a neutrino event.
My $0.02 (in 1934 dollars, adjust for inflation of 77 years)
Cheers, Gene
Don't give PETA any ideas. That's not actually half as crazy as some of the stuff they do.
But Smart didn't have a white iShoe with rounded corners, judging by color that had to be a BlackBerryLoafer. sometimes the thumbwheel would break on those older models
Anyone else think of Sealab 2021?