

How Neutrinos Could Revolutionize Communications with Submarines - TriinT
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24203/

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jerf
That's an awful lot of _we're confident this six-orders-of-magnitude problem
can be overcome_. A six order of magnitude increase in the speed I could wave
my hands would be well more than I would need to fly, at least if I could keep
my hands from burning up.

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dstorrs
They kept talking about "3 orders of magnitude" (3 OoM) between ELF (1) and
neutrinos (100) which confused me. I had to go back and recheck the units
before it made sense. ELF: 1 bit per _minute_. neutrinos: 100 bits per
_second_. It would have been substantially better to compare them in the same
units by saying 6000 bits per minute.

Aside from that though...I went to this article all excited. The title seemed
to imply that they really had something. Unfortunately, to make it work they
need to:

1) Improve their neutrino detection ability by 6 OoM.

2) Either cover the entire hull of the sub in detectors--tricky, since subs
are already covered in acoustic tile and the insides are jammed with stuff,
making it hard to retrofit the system in--or use Cerenkov light detection,
which requires filtering out light from bioluminesce, moonlight, sunlight,
etc.

3) Even if all this happens, the submariners can only receive. So this system
needs to be in addition to, not in place of, their existing commo, and they
still need to come to the (near) surface to transmit.

Still, great concept. As other people have commented, would be great to see it
used on land.

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jedc
I'm a former submarine officer. Submarines are much more concerned about
receiving key messages from their commanders than they are about sending
messages back. Eliminating trips to periscope depth (the most dangerous
activity a submarine does consistently) would be a Very Good Thing.

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dstorrs
Thank you for straightening me out, jedc. And thank you for your service.

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DarkShikari
Not just submarines--assuming that the beam can be as focused as necessary,
you could even have lightspeed communication with the other side of the world,
albeit at a very low bitrate.

~~~
dspeyer
Absolutely. Current latency from New York to Tai Pei is about 210ms. With
neutrinos it would be under 80ms. And immune to earthquakes and undersea
mudslides.

It would also be a lot easier to build emitters and detectors on land than in
submarines.

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duskwuff
But what applications are there for a low-bitrate-low-latency link?

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DarkShikari
High-frequency trading/arbitrage?

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duskwuff
Even considering how lucrative HFT can be, I'm not sure it's _quite_ gone to
the point that we should be expecting to hear about the Goldman-Sachs Particle
Accelerator anytime soon.

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tocomment
I always figured SETI should be listening for neutrinos. Perhaps that's how
aliens communicate?

What would it take to make this a practical method of communication e.g., have
a reciever and transmitter in your phone? Would a super dense material work to
capture them?

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scotty79
In my opinion that's exactly why SETI has not detected any signal. There is a
very low probability that two civilizations will be using radio waves for few
exactly same centuries (even taking into account birthday paradox).

Civilizations just few hundreds years more advanced than us probably routinely
use cheap neutrino based communication channels. Sadly even if we can detect
them they will be probably multiplexed, compressed and encrypted so much that
without proper (impossible to guess) algorithms they will be indistinguishable
from background noise.

Looking for radio waves in space and sending them is almost as dumb as making
big fire to create huge smoke signals for aliens and using looking glass to
spot same kind of messages from aliens in the sky.

~~~
tocomment
I wonder what other cool Physics phenomenon could be used for advanced message
sending? Maybe Aliens communicate through gravity waves?

