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This is giving me chills after reading Dark Forest. I hope this sparks a new era of SETI with gravitational waves as the medium. I believe a civilization advanc
by typon 7y ago
This is giving me chills after reading Dark Forest. I hope this sparks a new era of SETI with gravitational waves as the medium. I believe a civilization advanced enough would use gravitational waves for communication.
- Ar-Curunir 7y agoWhy are gravitational waves better for long distance communication than EM waves?
- Florin_Andrei 7y agoIt's hard to shield them. But bandwidth would probably suck.
- choeger 7y agoOh come on, just collapsing some million black hole pairs to get the latest JavaScript based ad across the whole Galaxy. Let's not pretend there are still people with a 56k gravitation modem out there.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoWe will send you thin information even if you don't want it! Otherwise, there isn't much obstacles in empty space.
- nerfhammer 7y agothey can propagate through literally anything
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoSo do neutrinos. They're a lot easier to make.
- Florin_Andrei 7y agoTBF, the waves propagate more literally through anything than neutrinos. In a, you know, "technically correct" sense.
- aqme28 7y agoWhat are the advantages of using gravitational waves for communication? They seem incredibly difficult to produce or detect, and don't travel any faster in a vacuum than electromagnetic waves.
- mrlala 7y agoDo they potentially propagate through matter with less interference than electromagnetic waves? I have no idea, that would be the only thought.. otherwise yeah I don't see what the appeal would be.. and how the hell do you create them on any small scale that can be actually read by someone, since gravity is such a weak force?
- typon 7y agoBecause gravitational waves get "dimmer" inversely with distance, while electromagnetic waves get dimmer inversely with the square of the distance.
- teraflop 7y agoNo, both gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves decrease in intensity with the square of distance. (This is true of any wave in 3D space, because the area covered by a wavefront increases with the square of distance. The inverse square law is a consequence of conservation of energy.)
- typon 7y agoThe energy of the gravitational waves will decrease with the square of the distance, but the amplitude will not. We can detect this in LIGO. This amplitude is also known as "strain". For more discussion check this page: http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/ast613/lectures/grav_i/grav_i.html http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/ast613/lectures/grav_i/grav_i.h... The equation for strain is: http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/ast613/lectures/grav_i/eqn_strain.png http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/ast613/lectures/grav_i/eqn_stra...
- hannasanarion 7y ago
- schaefer 7y agospoilers... Ugh.