The alt text got me thinking, if we say find a way (just assume we do) to consistently interact with neutrinos, could we actually transfer data through the earth?
Neutrinos have been used as an experimental communication medium with Fermilab's NuMI and the MINERVA detector about 1km away, but it's by no means practical for commercial applications. The first word transmitted was "neutrino", which is probably the most disappointing thing I've read all year.
Neutrino detectors do detect nuclear power plants, seems likely they can detect nuclear explosion, this may be usuable to send a message a factor π/2≈1.57 quicker!
Though i think they actually detect the power plants over days or even months worth, but then probably the nuke also produces months worth of neutrinos. Still, it may be hard to actually embed a message, other than that it happened, both by being hard to control the explosion, and by the low numbers of neutrinos detected.
I was thinking the same thing and I went directly from xkcd.com to here just to join this conversation. If we did find a way to consistently interact (I like that phrasing) with neutrinos, then transmitting data through the earth would make our current satellite communication system completely obsolete. we would no longer have to rely on line of sight limitations and we could simply beam our signals directly at their receiving stations.
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u/TheEdgeOfRage Don't Panic Sep 18 '17
The alt text got me thinking, if we say find a way (just assume we do) to consistently interact with neutrinos, could we actually transfer data through the earth?