If you could use any technology to communicate like an alien race why not use: - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 08, 2018, 07:18:36 pm
content: Neutrinos? They travel almost at light speed go through any object and can hold way more info like spin type and energy as well as combinations and other quantum stuff. RF just caries frequency and amplitude. If you had a generator and receiver you would have a far better system then RF and I would think highly advanced civilizations would use those to communicate. You could filter out the noise easily perhaps 100 times more then with RF.Perhaps we are covered in communications now from other worlds but are blind to see;like where we were 150 years ago from RF. Not along time in the grand scale of things.

author: alpher
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 08, 2018, 08:00:12 pm
content: 1968 , not exactly anovelidea.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_(novel)

author: igendel
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 08, 2018, 08:17:00 pm
content: Quote from: alpher on June 08, 2018, 08:00:12 pmOne of my all-time favorites.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 08, 2018, 08:42:47 pm
content: We have; it caused a scare that they might be superluminal. Turned out to be a loose cable though.https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/once-again-physicists-debunk-faster-light-neutrinosNeutrinos aren't terribly easy to generate or detect, and don't offer any of the benefits that conventional waves have: high gain, directivity, spectral efficiency and so on.Light waves can be tuned to very precise frequencies; neutrinos don't even like to stay the same flavor!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillationThat said, I do wonder if anyone has thought of using neutrino beams to communicate high-speed trading through the globe. The time savings would be considerable (up to ~3x). Surely they have, in which case the lack of it suggests just how expensive it must be to pull off. That said:https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2012/04/30/neutrinos-to-give-high-frequency-traders-the-millisecond-edge/but, six years ago, so who knows, maybe there's one or more doing it now.Tim

author: CopperCone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2018, 12:45:57 am
content: I believe that the book 'the forever war' by joe haldeman used one way neutrino communications to setup a communications channel between a orbital warship and something akin to a marine expeditionary forceThe idea was that the neutrino link was resistant to the electromagnetic interference resulting from nuclear/high energy weapons combat that was occurring on the upper atmosphere of the planet, but its been a good decade since I read itsimilar idea to ELF submarine communicationsor thishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford

author: JohnnyMalaria
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2018, 12:55:26 am
content: I'm not sure. That's the problem (Heisenberg and all that)

author: apis
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2018, 01:02:30 pm
content: One problem is that if neutrinos pass through most things, it also passes through the detectors. Neutrino detectors are usually the size of a cathedral filled with very pure water and with the walls covered with specially designed photo multiplier glassware, even then they only catch a small fraction of the neutrinos passing through it. It might be possible to build efficient detectors and receivers in the future though.But there is another problem: neutrinos have mass so they will always travel slower than light which probably makes them unsuited for interstellar communication.

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2018, 08:35:36 pm
content: Quote from: CopperCone on June 09, 2018, 12:45:57 amHow did they ever think that was a good idea like when the US shot down that spy satellite or when the Chinese tried the same thing making 1/3 of the hazardous orbital debris.Imagine being on a space walk and having needles shot at you at 15000 mph? That wouldn't be fun. 38 clumps still in space. As it is now the ISS has to move up and down to avoid known debris fields.I wonder how much the cold war cost civilization or at the same time all the beneficial technology that came from it. Probably net gain for the US net loss for USSR.

author: JohnnyMalaria
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 03:02:55 am
content: Two tin cans joined by a superstring.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 07:07:05 am
content: Eventually the fools who believe in aliens will realise it is just another fad that will pass away. Just like biorhythms, ESP, ouija boards, astrology, the Illuminati, Area 51, George Adamski and all the otherdesigned to make a few scammers some money.Nope, there is not one scrap of evidence of intelligent life anywhere else in the universe beside on planet Earth or orbiting Earth.

author: BradC
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 07:20:15 am
content: Quote from: VK3DRB on June 10, 2018, 07:07:05 amThere doesn't appear to be much sign of it on or orbiting earth either. Life, yes....

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 09:05:40 am
content: Quote from: Beamin on June 08, 2018, 07:18:36 pmThe problems are:1) catching them2) catching enough of them to get any useful information out of them, even with spin et.al It's not like you can hold the enitre encyclopedia galactica on one of them3) That pesky speed of light thing. Why bother sending any information at all over massive distances, even with neutrinos. Who are you talking to and why? How can you expect a response?

author: hendorog
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 09:41:51 am
content: Quote from: apis on June 09, 2018, 01:02:30 pmI guess an optimisation would be to arrange the detectors and water in a long straight pipe if you know where they are coming from.

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 12:53:30 pm
content: Quote from: JohnnyMalaria on June 10, 2018, 03:02:55 amHow about yelling? Did you know you can get +6dbi by shouting into your cell phone? I have seen many do this while holding the phone to their ear having a hard time hearing because the speaker phone was on. Also they are always in the waiting room while the people who work there are trying to answer the phone.

author: Acecool
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 01:43:31 pm
content: I'd use instant communication which would work anywhere in the universe INSTANTLY.. Believe it or not, but the technology exists today...The way it works is they create a particle or photon or something, and it becomes a clone of itself mimicking all behavior from one to the other and it doesn't matter where it is, both particles mimic each other. I'll see if I can find the article, but it's really interesting.. I believe it is a photon because I remember thinking, attach it to a fiber optic cable and you're in business...Although, the best way for technology like this to be utilized would be in a chip on a board or something... Although before that happens, if it actually comes to market it'd probably end up as a dongle so plug one into router, one into pc and you have WIFI without electricity, without signal, without being intercepted, etc... basically a cable with infinite length - and instant data transfer....Eventually they'd build computers around this...It is possible to slow down a photon, and they've already frozen a photon for a decent amount of time... That's basically what they need to do - they need to generate the pair together, as far as I know, and move both photons into place, and freeze them then keep them like that forever for the device to work and be available to the public.I could see laptops being made with this type of technology on a chip and an RJ45 connector the size of the connector itself ( like a loopback which is the connector and a few wires with no cable attached rerouting sent to received ) so they'd only need to plug it into a port somewhere in the world, and have that internet connection for as long as it is plugged in and there is service at that location... Imagine using your own internet connection around the world and it be as fast as if you were sitting there with a wire connected to it........Imagine plugging a few into an ISP routing center.... wow...EDIT: Anyways, back on topic...Since we've already successfully teleported photos ( or made copies of them ) this would be viable to communicate with an alien species even if they were in another galaxy when we have the ability to teleport photos over such a distance, and if the alien race is able to detect it, and capture it....Since it is a photon, it'd generate light so honestly the best way to get someones attention would be to spam photons and hope they are intelligent enough to understand it - obviously we'd need to be intelligent enough to establish base-lines such as base 2, base 10, base 16 - base 60, some of the ones we use and a way to send instructions how to capture the photon to read the data other than visual so a machine to establish a network....Honestly though - this would be ideal for Earth to Lunar and Mars communication for when we start leaving the planet. I'd like to see it in my lifetime but I doubt I'll live that long - there are too many issues to solve here first...Example: we need to get rid of money, for starters... That'd solve so many problems.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 01:50:44 pm
content: Quote from: Acecool on June 10, 2018, 01:43:31 pmThe problem with this "spooky action at a distance" is how do you get the other particle of the pair created at the same time to the other side of the galaxy/universe to enable this magic cross-universe instant communications?The answer is of course, you can't, so you are back to square one.

author: Acecool
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 01:54:57 pm
content: Actually, I updated my post...We have successfully teleported photons already - we just need to increase the distance... I think I read something along the lines that they have created one from Earths surface and beamed it into space...So the technology basics exist, but it needs to be refined, the range extended, other civilizations intelligent enough to receive and capture need to be discovered, etc...I'm honestly not sure whether or not a teleported photon could be traced back to the home address - because if it can that'd be terrible news if we contact hostiles...But, I see this technology being used for planet-to-planet and to spaceship communication before being used for first contact although it could be the likely method for first-contact when we get that far, if we survive long enough.. based on the immense distances in space and because it truly is instantaneous...

author: apis
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 10, 2018, 02:42:26 pm
content: Sorry but you can't use quantum entanglement to send information. It's a cool idea that's been used in science fiction, but the laws of relativity still holds: "you can't send information faster than the speed of light". If you measure/change one of the particles the "entangling" breaks. Say you create a pair of entangled particles and send one to your friend. You later measure it. You now know the state of your particle and your friends particle but you haven't sent any information.(And as Dave says, you would have to send the particles the old fashioned way first as well.)

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 11, 2018, 05:51:53 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on June 10, 2018, 01:50:44 pmThere's more to it than this because the speed of light is actually the speed of causality and the speed of light is more of a side effect from the behavior of light cones. PBSSpace time does a show called the quantum eraser and the bonus question explains why spooky action at a distance even if you separate the particles before hand then use it to communicate still by observing spin it still won't work.Plus everyone knows subspace beacons can go faster then warp 9. When Tom Paris crossed the trans warp barrier on start trek voyager why didn't they just use that technology to send beacons through instead of going to credits and forgetting all about it? Objects wouldn't evolve like humans would and surly the doctor could infuse them with chronoton beams to prevent it... I wish they would start making that line of shows again; the TNG(best) voyager(better) DS9(good) type shows. Star trek enterprise is boring because you already know the future from the other episodes. But how much fun could it be with the borg destroyed in the future kind of present /30 years later but at the time present? Totally broke the prime directive and time causality. What ever Piccard used to wipe his ass with the prime directive when ever the replicators ran out of space toilet paper.My vote is still neutrinos because they change flavor and experience time unlike photons. Ever pondered what the world would look like if you switched the place of matter and light? A negative image where there is no time and everything in view is connected instantly or always unless it was outside the path. From a photons point of view there is no space because no travel time. Out side light cones nothing exists. But in reality nothing exists out side my light cone that's 10 of light years long by now. I wonder how many space time miles I have traveled when you add in the speed of earth and the local group.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 11, 2018, 06:03:35 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 08, 2018, 08:42:47 pmWe're a couple of rungs lower in the technological ladder than is needed to create neutrinobeams. We're basically at the Marconi spark gap level in neutrino production. (Except we use nuclear reactions to generate neutrinos.)This is just my personal opinion, but when a society decides to create nuclear reactors just to do high-frequency trading faster, I think we're pretty far along in the wrong direction. I'd rather, you know, solve actual problems like how to make humans less stupid, and maybe explore space a bit on the side, and put the gamblers into a casino resort or something instead. Would be cheaper, too.

author: BocaDev
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: June 11, 2018, 06:15:16 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 11, 2018, 06:03:35 pm

author: CopperCone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 11, 2018, 07:32:30 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 11, 2018, 06:03:35 pmunless you need to steal money from rich people and start a neutrino fueled communist revolutiona secret north korean neutrino communications system buried in the sewers of new york designed to bolster the NK economy to unprecedented levels among talks of peace between the dear leaders of the two nations

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 11, 2018, 11:26:47 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 11, 2018, 06:03:35 pmThe beams aren't like lasers, more like x-ray tubes "with more steps". You start with a tightly collimated particle beam, smash it into a target, and neutrinos (and a ton of other crap) spews forth. The neutrino momentum and trajectory comes from the beam, plus some scattering due to the messy collision process.I don't know how well collimated the result actually is. Evidently well enough for research labs to play with them, but even over some hundreds of km the SNR is pretty low, I guess.Tim

author: FrankBuss
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 12:05:17 am
content: I don't know if it would be possible to use neutrinos for communication, but a neutrino telescope would be cool. It would show all stars very bright, regardless of any nebulae in between, better than radio astronomy.BTW, can someone explain why neutrinos don't stop sometime? They have a tiny mass, which means e.g. they should getting slower when emitted from the sun and then gravity pulls them back, and sometimes they interact with other particles, so why do they always travel near the speed of light?

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 01:56:57 am
content: Quote from: FrankBuss on June 12, 2018, 12:05:17 amYeah, perhaps some day it will be possible -- at current state of knowledge, it would require at least a Kardashev level 1 civilization I think. Perhaps in the process, new physics would be discovered that reduces the structural burden a lot.Add to that, a spectral neutrino telescope -- which is probably pretty easy to provide, in addition to merely detecting the neutrinos, at that point. That's something we do already, we're just really terrible at detecting them in the first place.Stars would glow with gamma-ray-energy neutrinos, nebular clouds might glow with lower energies (weak decays), supernovae would burst with utterly blinding brilliance (because, well, of course they would, everything about a supernova is astronomically astronomical), and as you go further away in distance, and back in time, you get closer and closer to primordial sources of neutrinos; which should be, ah, yes it would,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_backgroundPolarization / spin would also be very interesting to figure out, though I don't see any good general methods on doing that right now.You'd observe gravitational lensing all the same as with light, with the bonus of being able to see through the lensing object as well, to the extent that you can disambiguate the two sources of course.Incidentally, gravity waves are also subject to lensing, but that's irrelevant under our current state of progress with g-waves. High resolution there may be achievable within centuries, which is neat to think about if not necessarily hopeful that any of us would be able to see the results.QuoteMass has nothing to do with it -- anything going nearly the speed of light follows the curvature of space. Indeed, light is "pulled back" by gravity as well; since the speed of light is absolute, the energy difference shows up as relativistic Doppler shift. The same is true for neutrinos, where the frequency changes (namely, the de Broglie frequency), or for electrons or protons or any other particle travelling with kinetic energy many, many times its rest mass energy (i.e., towards the ultrarelativistic limit).In the case of everything but light, the velocity must of course be slower -- but it may be so incremental as to be immeasurable. Such is the case with neutrinos, and super high energy cosmic rays.Tim

author: JohnnyMalaria
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 02:45:40 am
content: Quote from: FrankBuss on June 12, 2018, 12:05:17 amBecause they do not carry a charge and so do not interact electromagnetically.According to the late Prof. David Griffiths, it would take light years length of lead to absorb a neutrino. That's nuts.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 12:22:19 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 11, 2018, 11:26:47 pmIt is not. The idea in the particle accelerator approach is to supply the momentum with the desired vector, so that whatever the distribution of the generated neutrinos is, it should have a peak in the direction of the original momentum. (I'm not a particle physicist, so I don't know the exact distribution.)My point is that we have no way of collimating the results. A particle accelerator with a stationary target (so that the momentum gives the results a preferred direction) is the best we can do. Any nuclear reactor produces much more neutrinos (I'd like to say orders of magnitude more, but that's just handwaving, as I haven't checked the actual numbers), but in random directions.Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 11, 2018, 11:26:47 pmIt's more like "horribly low". Even the number of neutrinos detected, per neutrinos generated is quite low. The detection equipment literally detects single neutrinos.Although particle physicists call those "beams", it is in the same sense that a machine gun sends out a beam of bullets.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 12:42:59 pm
content: Neutrinos only interact via gravity and weak interactions. Weak interactions have very short range, basically only within atomic nuclei. According to the electroweak theory, above 250 GeV (corresponds to a temperature of roughly 1 000 000 000 000 000 K), electromagnetism and weak interactions combine to a single electroweak force.This means that according to our best models right now, if we could just make "bottles" or "sheets" with high enough energy density (something like 40 million times the temperature at the core of our Sun), we might be able to "catch" or "reflect" neutrinos, since that is what we need to have to enhance the interactions.The interesting thing is that a "sheet" would not need to be thick at all. Something on the order of the diameter of a proton should be enough. The overall volume, even for a measurably large "sheet", would be tiny. The hard part is containment. You cannot build a bottle out of matter, because all matter would instantaneously turn to plasma in those conditions. Electromagnetism is iffy, because of the energy densities involved, and the fact that inside, the fields would combine with the weak interactions into electroweak forces. So, it's not just an engineering problem at this point; we do not even have theories as to how to construct such things.Although I love to ponder such things in my free time, it's all just magic at this point.

author: apis
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 12:58:21 pm
content: Quote from: FrankBuss on June 12, 2018, 12:05:17 amHmm, did someone say they do?If the ones we detect mostly do I would assume it is because of their tiny mass. It does not take much energy to accelerate them to near light speed, and since they do not interact with other particles there is not much that will slow them down. But there should be slow neutrinos around as well.Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 12, 2018, 01:56:57 amShouldn't it be possible to build large phased arrays of gravity-wave detectors?Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 12, 2018, 01:56:57 amDon't forget Gluons and Gravitons which are also massless.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 02:28:02 pm
content: Quote from: apis on June 12, 2018, 12:58:21 pmIndeed, that's what they're doing already, just that with two(ish) quadrupole antennas, the spacial resolution is piss.It'll be a long while before the network is sharp enough to listen to stars wobbling, but it should just be a matter of continuous improvement in noise floor, bandwidth, and above all, number of detectors!QuoteYes, although gluons and quarks are confined so there's no conceivable way to do telescopy with them; microscopy perhaps. Hmm, and on that note, we're more or less there already, having found nothing deeper than QCD in quite some decades.Tim

author: apis
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 04:03:02 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 12, 2018, 02:28:02 pmThat will be very cool. You are probably right that it will take a long time before there are enough detectors built, it's sadly not as prioritised as certain other things.Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 12, 2018, 02:28:02 pmBut theoretically gravitons are to gravitational waves what photons are to electromagnetic waves... so basically the gravity wave detectors are looking at gravitons if I have understood it correctly. If it is possible to do the same with gluons and the color force field is more than I know though.It looks like we have found the smallest particles, but on the other hand it is a long way to go before we reach the planck scale so there is still some room for surprises.

author: In Vacuo Veritas
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 06:18:23 pm
content: Quote from: Acecool on June 10, 2018, 01:43:31 pmNo.

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 14, 2018, 05:27:15 pm
content: Quote from: FrankBuss on June 12, 2018, 12:05:17 amThey only interact though the weak nuclear force I believe which has tiny field of influence and needs to hit an atom dead center as most of the atom is empty (every thing at this level is a probability field not actually empty space) and it has to go through that field. I will also speculate since I'm still making things up at this point that they travel so fast because they have the momentum of huge massive particles that make them in the collision; like pool balls hitting newly formed ping pong balls. Or why do alpha and beta have such huge energies? Maybe because if they didn't they wouldn't over come the strong and electromagnetic forces keeping them at rest.