From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Fri Sep 22 2000 - 09:01:52 MDT
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> John Clark wrote:
> >
> > Only a moron would say there is no signal degradation at interstellar distances.
> > I am not a moron. Speaking of morons, it would be interesting if somebody could
> > come up with a more moronic way to communicate than neutrinos, well lets see,
> > gravity waves would be pretty stupid, but perhaps not quite stupid enough. Come on,
> > somebody out there must have a stupider idea.
>
> Okay: Shout REALLY LOUD...
>
> "Most people think Star Trek has solved the problem of faster-than-light
> travel. I am much more fascinated by Star Trek's solution to the
> sound-in-a-vacuum problem."
> --Karen Lingel
And of course John is positive that the Star Trek universe is accurate that most
all people would have no problem with questions of continuity of conciousness in
teleportation as described in Star Trek tech manuals.
>
> On a more serious note, are we really sure that neutrinos can't be used for
> communication? Suppose you had some way to aim the neutrino beam almost
> perfectly, correcting for gravitational influences, so that you can pour a
> beam into a 1mm-diameter cup orbiting another star. Suppose that you also
> fire off a million neutrinos in a perfect two-dimensional grid, each neutrino
> an infinitesimal bit to the side of the previous one, so that at least one
> neutrino in the pattern is guaranteed to hit any atomic nucleus inside the
> pattern's radius. Fire the beam at a crystal where the atomic spacing is less
> than the pattern diameter, and at least one neutrino is guaranteed to hit.
> The result could be an interstellar radio that shines effortlessly through any
> amount of dust.
>
> I have no idea whether this makes any sense from a physicist's perspective,
> but my guess is "NO". The basic assumption seems to be that a really
> perfectly aimed neutrino can be deliberately made to be absorbed by an atom,
> and I don't know whether the penetrating quality of neutrinos derives from the
> improbability of a perfect hit, or the improbability of absorption in any hit
> (glancing or otherwise).
>
> Is a detector made of neutronium more likely to get hit? Could you reverse
> the patterned-neutrino theory and use patterned neutronium to guarantee a
> hit? Or is that just not the way quantum neutridynamics work?
>
> Neutrino-neutronium radio... ought to be a pun here...
>
> This makes a nice little dialogue for a post-Singularity novel:
>
> "You communicate with Andromeda? How?"
> "Oh, we send out a sequence of neutrinos; a neutrino strikes
> a chlorine atom and turns it into argon, that's a 'one'..."
> "But can't a neutrino pass through ten light-years of lead
> without being absorbed?"
> "We aim them really carefully."
Either that, or our signalling syntax is REALLY redundant, such that we could
interpolate the whole message if only 0.000000000000001% of the neutrinos are
recieved...
In reality, since neutrinos don't interfere with normal matter much at all, and
we don't typically have any chlorine-37 of any appreciable amount in us, we
could use neutron stars as a sort of teletype machine, dropping great gobs of
hydrogen at them so they send out huge quantities of neutrinos at discrete
intervals. We also use a wormhole as a wave guide, and the reverse setup on the
other end to focus the signal...
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