Wireless neutrino network could pass through the center of the Earth | Hacker News Reader

Wireless neutrino network could pass through the center of the Earth

extremetech.com

32 pointsSkippyZA33 comments

Well, it's nice to see that I'm not completely crazy ;). I'm happy to see, however, that the article pretty much sums up why this isn't actually a feasible solution.

In addition to the extreme bulkiness of both the emitter and detectors (See Super Kamiokande), neutrinos only really get generated in certain particle decays. This means you're pretty much stuck with needing a nuclear reactor (of varying sizes) to generate them. Although this alone isn't necessarily a problem, it's really not something governments are going to be overly happy with garage hackers doing. :(

Can the detectors be sized down? Maybe. Unfortunately, there's a good chunk of inherent randomness in neutrino particle detection. It may be that there's no good way to actually detect them short of brute force: Big detectors, lots of neutrinos, and just playing the odds.

We can dream though. And investigate.

"it's really not something governments are going to be overly happy with garage hackers doing"

Fusion reactions aren't that difficult to create: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

Of course controlled fusion reactions that generate more energy than you put in are slightly more difficult.

I didn't say that they were difficult, I said that governments (or at least your neighbors) aren't big fan of neutron emitting sources. ;)

I'm also not saying those concerns are justified, Nuclear Theatre and all that.

I think future materials might make better detectors. Or perhaps a way to increase sensitivity?

Misleading headline. No one is thinking seriously about building a neutrino network. As the article mentions at the end, the detector has to be massive and the transmitter uses a great deal of power.

There would need to be an extraordinary breakthrough in our ability to detect neutrinos before something like this would be practical.

Neat trick and impressive that they could make it work at all, though.

Or the communications requirements of Earth's population would need to change in such a way that communicating through miles of planet becomes our most practical option.

For example, nuclear/EMP attacks kill all the comm satellites and force what's left of humanity deep underground...where luckily some superpower or three has tucked away big particle accelerators in addition to MREs.

Or perhaps off-planet, trying to send messages to mining operators, or through asteroid fields...work with me here.

Perhaps this is what all the aliens are using. Much better than dealing with EM interference?

When will SETI be switching to neutrino detectors?

Propose it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qwv9g/im_seth_shostak_...

So that's what gamma ray bursts are! ;)

This isn't the first time this has been thought of. A particle physicist had suggested nuclear submarines be laced with scintillators so the could receive messages sent by neutrinos a while back, which seems like a somewhat feasible, practical use of this technology.

Yes. One of the problem with that is unfortunately quite silly. We don't know the exact position of submarines, since the water interferes with the GPS-like systems and makes them unreliable, while neutrino beams need to be highly collimated to create a big enough flux.

So we need neutrino-based GPS?

I wonder if we could create black hole out of protons and neutrons only (to make it possible to move this black hole with electrostatic field), make it the precise size that it will evaporate at the same rate that it will absorb particles from sun - so it will be stable, put it with driving mechanism and precise clock on the orbit around the sun to occlude for example 10x10 meters on the Earth, and move it with the driver to create CRT-like pattern at changing frequency - one period at X Hz, one at 100X Hz, repeat.

You can decode your position on earth based on time between the 2 holes in neutrino pulse.

Should I file for a patent?

A submarine can use dynamics and seafloor maps to know where it's at, I think he was alluding to the fact that it's harder for us to know where the submarine is at, and collimate the beam accordingly. Although, if the submarine could collimate the beam it could communicate it's location (which it should be able to know a little bit better than the base) to a base via collimated beam.

Also, you'd probably want at least one more black hole to even attempt a somewhat accurate 2d/3d fix :) I'd imagine VLF communications are probably good enough for now.

"Instead of traveling 10,000 miles or more via cable, it’s only 8,000 miles in a direct line through the center of the Earth."

8k vs 10k -- is it such a big difference? I see it more as cost efficient -- "powering up" 10k miles long cable may be more expensive than shooting a "beam" through the Earth.

Well, the 10,000 miles is also through multiple routers -- and I think it's probably a lot more than 10k, once you factor in obstacles and landing points and stuff.

But yeah, it could also be more power efficient (assuming, of course, we find a way that doesn't require a few-mile particle accelerator to fire the neutrinos :)

People are building the Atlantic Fibre Optic Cable connecting Europe to the US, in part to reduce latency. The obvious question is, is someone willing to pay a LOT of money for a low-latency, low-bandwidth connection from Sydney to NYC? The Great Circle minimum time of light in fiber is 74.6ms, while neutrinos (which travel at almost the speed of light) going through the Earth's diameter take 42ms.

Thus, you could cut the time in half if you could use neutrinos.

+1. Thanks. Didnt see it this way.

Yeah, location arbitrage. There is no way to trade equities faster and on better information than if you're faster than everyone else. Having this 30ms advantage will give whomever has it a huge advantage.

Don't forget about all the repeaters/boosters, hardware, and networks that signal is going to propagate through (that’s going to slow it down at every point).

With a neutrino network, you just set it up to point to the receiver, and let the fabric of space-time do the rest.

Maybe it would require a little less energy, if instead of generating our own neutrinos, we modulated the neutrinos that go throught the Earth from sun - no nuclear reactor required, "just" a huge fast moving lead block :)

EDIT: also - what happens, when neutrino passes event horizon? Because maybe we could modulate neutrinos stream using very small black holes :)

Also, if we could just modulate the entire Sun, we'd have a very effective cross-galactic communication device.

Modulating solar neutrinos is a good idea, but you could only send a message to someone on the other side of the planet, and then you'd have to wait twelve hours to get a reply.

It seems like nearly all the extremetech articles end with a big whimper at the end...

Would you rather big, flashy, ignoring-reality hyperbole? :)

Do I have this right? Neutrinos are fermions, carriers of mass, and therefore have no wave characteristics in the two-slit experiment sense. Seems to me that "neutrino radio" is a misnomer?

So I was wondering if we ever started "broadcasting" neutrinos (assuming we had technology to receive them like radios today) would we have a way to divide up the spectrum or otherwise prevent interference? Anyone know? Anyone want to guess?

The precision which neutrino pulses could be detected in time (phase modulation) would determine the signal-to-noise ratio. The bandwidth of the channel is dependent upon that.

So very large, very short bursts of neutrinos at controllable times in very fast succession would be a very high-bandwidth channel. Divide up the spectrum exactly as we do today with radio.

All particle, whether fermions or bosons, are waves. The difference is that fermions can't pile up on top of one another like bosons can, which means they can't form macroscopic classical waves, like light or gravity. This is probably what you mean when you say that "neutrino radio" would be a misnomer. Normal "radio" consists of radio waves, which are macroscopic collections of many, many photons. In principle, you can measure these waves by watching how they tug and pull on charged macroscopic objects.

However, the sense in which neutrinos have wave characteristics is precisely the two-slit sense. (For examples, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_interferometer .) Furthermore, the distinction between fermion and boson is independent of them having mass. There are massive bosons (the W and Z) and, though none yet discovered, plenty of proposed massless fermions.

here is a thought: center of the earth is 6,000c hot. There is a heat resistant aluminium to withhold this temp. Further, I am sure there are solutions to generate electricity from the heat. I wonder how hard would it be to dig a hole through the center of the Earth and put the cable in it, hahah :)

So far as I know, no one has ever breached the dense, hard layer at the bottom of the earth's "crust", just above the mantle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovi%C4%8Di%C4%87_disconti...

If you're trying to generate electricity by exploiting a difference in two temperatures, it would probably be more cost effective to just drop a cable into the ocean.

Wouldn't it be easier to generate electricity from extreme heat, rather than from cold water?

What actually matters is the temperature difference between two points.

But to answer your question, sure, probably - assuming your materials can withstand the extreme heat, and assuming you can get at it, which as sp332 pointed out here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3708465), we can't.

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