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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating. Q for you since you are so clued in.

I am a ham radio operator and was thinking about novel forms of signal propagation.

I landed on the idea of gravitons. Could gravitonic signal propagation be done somehow? While researching, I keep coming across familiar terms I know from radio land.

Just curious if the fields here could be harnessed for communication. Thanks.

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The big big downside of gravity waves is that they have no dipole radiators - with electric charge you have + and - and that allows very efficient propagation. For gravity there is only one charge ,and this allows only quadrupole radiation - making it extremely awful for transmission.

Yes, but there is no dispersion relation or absorption by the interstellar medium (not directly related to the quadrupole nature, but that which makes a radiation hard to detect also makes it hard to interfere with).

The detectors are such precision instruments it took over 10 years of calibration until they even had the first detection. Maybe some far off comms network could use them, but I doubt anytime soon. I wonder if you could use erasure codes with them too :)

Accelerating star-like masses to 99% speed of light in a few seconds also seems somewhat less efficient than your typical FM transceiver.

The Three-Body Problem science fiction series involves gravitational waves. I’m not going to spoil it, but the series is a great read :)

Not quite possible today, though, as others have pointed out

Aren’t neutrinos holy grail for signals?

Gravity waves are way too hard to detect and generate to be used for communication. The waves we can just barely detect too 8 solar masses worth of energy to generate.

And people complained about next door's aerial farm!

Remember that that 8 solar mass gravity wave source is potentially 100’s millions of light years away. A sci-fi author could conjure up a ‘portable box’ containing a couple of orbiting micro-scopic black holes in a box to generate gravity wave signals someone somewhere in the solar system could pick up with a portable LIGO device. Consider this comment a patent on the idea :-)

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