ET Uses New Communication System from Space
John Learned and colleagues of the University of Hawaii has just changed the rules for how extraterrestrials will be communicating with us in the near future—instead of photons as originally thought, the evidence will come through with neutrinos. Their theory is pretty simple, actually, as any communication coming from an advanced civilization means they will not be using smoke signals or the pounding of a rock or two. The neutrino travels at “almost” the speed of light”, and every human body on Earth is penetrated by millions upon millions of them every second. Interacting very slightly with atoms, they are difficult to detect as they can penetrate several light years of very densely packed matter before they ever interact with an atom.
Regardless of the method, the communication will need to be reliable, in order to travel over intragalactic distances. And with our latest research, photons just won’t cut it. With so much scattered noise in the electromagnetic spectrum, the photons are also easily scattered and then absorbed, by traveling from one side of the galaxy to another. In comparison, the neutrino spectrum is considered noise free, interacting with each other in a weak manner. Their travels in the galaxy are unhindered because of this.
A test is being proposed for the idea of generating a neutrino signal, using a particle accelerator to generate “Z nought particles” –decaying into neutrinos of a relatively easy detectable energy. Similar to the method of Morse code, it would then encode information in the time structure of the beam. With this in mind, Learning and his colleagues feel the type of neutrino signals that extraterrestrials would beam down to Earth (or up to Earth?) would be detectable by our present our present generation of neutrino detectors under construction.
Similar to the electron we know so much about, the neutrino has one crucial difference other than the fact is consists of a low mass—the electron carries an electrical charge where the neutrino does not. In 1931, the neutrino was theorized by Wolfgang Pauli, a quantum physicist, but was not actually discovered until 1956 by Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, near the nuclear power plant at the Savannah River, South Carolina, at the neutrino observatory. The very first neutrino detectors were tanks—filled with water and cadmium chloride—with the very first neutrino ever found or detected being an anti-neutrino instead of the conventional neutrino.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 9:25 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
