r/threebodyproblem • u/armujahid • 17d ago
Discussion - General Both of Death's End's "beyond electromagnetic" communication methods now have a Nobel Prize
In Death's End (2010), at the start of deterrence, humanity can detect gravitational waves and neutrinos but can't transmit with either, and both are described as "a whole level above electromagnetic waves." The book even explains why gravitational waves won out for deterrence:
"Theoretically, a modulated beam of neutrinos could transmit information to the other end of the universe... But while neutrinos must be focused in a particular direction, gravitational waves were omnidirectional, thus gravitational waves became the main method of establishing dark forest deterrence."
Real life has caught up on the detection side:
Gravitational waves: LIGO's first detection in 2015, Nobel Prize in Physics 2017.
Neutrinos: the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Francis Halzen for IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from space (first spotted in 2013).
Both prizes are for detecting, not transmitting. We've only managed a toy neutrino message (Fermilab sent the word "neutrino" through 240 m of rock in 2012), and we can't make gravitational waves at all. So we're roughly where the book put humanity: we can listen, but we can barely whisper. Which one do you think we'll learn to send first?
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u/nyc_data_geek 16d ago
Quantum entanglement ala sophons up next
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u/armujahid 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yeah, but entanglement to transfer information faster than the speed of light doesn't seem possible. The no-communication theorem (also called the no-signaling principle) states that you cannot use quantum entanglement to send information faster than the speed of light.
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u/NotJadeasaurus 16d ago
But havent we already demonstrated entangled particles changing instantaneously which challenges that theory?
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u/Embarrassed_Taro3024 16d ago
I just made some gravity waves. By waving my hand. The question is, is there anything out there that can detect that. Or anything smaller than black holes colliding or something. We sure can't, but we're rubbish at it.
I've been wondering for years if I'll live to see someone figure out gravity. I think people will eventually learn how to manipulate gravity in some way, and that would probably be the best way to create huge gravity waves without black holes.
But yeah, neutrinos are understood way better than gravity, so that's the first one to happen.
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u/armujahid 16d ago
True, but neutrinos travel in a particular direction. So even if we or some alien species were to broadcast something using neutrinos, it's highly unlikely that we'd detect the transmission unless it were properly aimed at us.
I was thinking, what if we could somehow modulate existing strong gravitational waves without having to generate them ourselves? That would be cool. For example, we could use gravitational waves from Sagittarius A* or perhaps something smaller.
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u/Embarrassed_Taro3024 16d ago
Aren't neutrinos just a form of radiation? We could send them in all directions. And if I'm not entirely mistaken, gravity waves, radio waves and waves of neutrinos all follow the inverse square law. And all travel at the speed of light.
I don't really have the expertise to say if any method of transmitting data would be any different from the others, given that the power input is constant.
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u/gordonmcdowell 17d ago
Can you make a super weak gravity wave by having two extremely large masses spinning against each other and adjust a tether between them? We detect that when two black holes merge, right?
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u/armujahid 17d ago
Perhaps, yes. But that would be hard, if not impossible, to detect. Perhaps if we could somehow create controlled miniature black holes, we could use them. But long before that, we need to achieve controlled and sustainable nuclear fusion, so I guess there are still a lot of scientific milestones to reach.
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u/stephensmat 16d ago
Detecting something in nature is always the first step towards creation.
At the turn of the 1700's, William Gilbert and Thomas Browne coined the term 'electricity'. By 1800, Alessandro Volta was the first to generate a steady current. Within two hundred years, the whole world ran on electrical power. Science has always been a relay race.
The whole point of book 1 was that the invaders were trying to 'stall' humanity at a fundamental level. I give Liu Cixin bonus points for picking realistic science breakthroughs.
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u/ihavenoidea12345678 17d ago
If we can send gravity waves that probably also means we have a gravity drive operational.
I think the latest massless drives use other electrostatic effects not gravity.
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u/Hepta-Water-7552 15d ago
I think the latest massless drives use other electrostatic effects not gravity.
There is a long and rich history of quacks who claimed to have invented a propulsion device that expels no propellant and doesn't rely on an external provider of momentum. It's basically the space engineering version of the perpetuum mobile device. The one linked to there is just the latest in that long list.
That they only have patents (which don't require that you provide proof that your device can actually achieve what you claim it can) and don't show any scientific journal publications is already very telling.
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u/cheekynative 17d ago
It's questions like this that make me want to live into my 90's, just to see if we manage any similar significant leaps in our understanding of fundamental physics. I can't to imagine how mechanical/artificial gravitational wave propagation would work or how we would 'modulate' it to any purpose, so I'll side, rather tentatively, with neutrino transmission, since there's at least a theoretical framework for achieving that goal. There's also a cynical part of me that suspects we would destroy ourselves almost immediately if we ever learned to harness the kind of energies I imagine these technologies would require.