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My pet theory is they’re using gravity waves for coms and we’re the dumb apes still looking around in the electromagnetic spectrum. Once we can reliably detect
by newZWhoDis 4y ago
My pet theory is they’re using gravity waves for coms and we’re the dumb apes still looking around in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Once we can reliably detect and generate gravity waves much of our knowledge of electromagnetic waves can apply. 802.11gr anyone?
- thriftwy 4y agoGravity is so many orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetism that it is not even funny.
- buildbot 4y agoTrue, but you can theoretically format a gravity wave to not follow the inverse square law - these are called solitons (apparently, I just looked this up)
- jerf 4y agoYes. Now look into how you construct a soliton, and try to figure out what monstrous levels of control you'd have to exert over solar-system sized quantities of degenerate matter to create them, and how much energy it would take. Now compute how much laser light you can generate for, oh, let's say, 6 orders of magnitude less energy. And how tightly you'd expect a civilization that apparently can casually wiggle dozens of solar masses at multiple Hz, in a modulated manner no less (so just a several Hz orbit is not sufficent, we are wiggling these things under power), to be able to collimate such a beam. This is the problem with gravity waves. It isn't some sort of supreme cheat code of the universe for super awesome communication. It's transparently obviously idiotic. Like, not just, "well, it's not necessarily the best way, but even if it's not great someone may have tried it", like, you're burning dozens of orders of magnitude more energy per bit. Plural dozens, of orders of magnitude. Not dozens of times, ten to the power of dozens. This is not sensible no matter how advanced the civilization. We're talking levels of stupid that would greatly exceed spending the entire output of Earth's collective industrial civilization for all of history on a single pack of Skittles. This is not a bright thing to do, and it only gets dumber the smarter you suppose the aliens are.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoTo be fair, because we don't know how to construct gravity waves does not mean such a means does not exist. Keep in mind, not too long ago we thought we needed to heat up a fillament surrounded by an inert gas in order to make artificial light, and our understanding of gravity is fairly poor (to the point where it's largely considered an unsolved problem quite how it fits together with other parts of physics).
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoIf we make assumptions like that then the sky is the limit for other baseless assumptions, right? We're basically just picking our favourite pseudomagical science and arguing for it?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWell that is the basic posture of all science, uncertainty. We must assume we don't know until we are convinced otherwise.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoBut you don't use that to suggest new unsupported ideas. In that case why can't I postulate for FTL communication by form of anti protons to be the best communication method?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI've never talked about FTL communication.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoI didn't say you were. I was trying to make the point we're both suggesting science fiction now and it's not terribly helpful when trying to talk about the current science.
- all2 4y agoYes, but does it propagate faster than the speed of light? Even if a gravitic field is weak, it would be my preferred mode of communication if it propagated "instantly" across space/time. And it moves at the speed of light [0] so there's no speed advantage here. I see no reason a sufficiently advanced species would choose gravitic waves over any other EM wave. Does someone with a clue (not me) have any ideas why this would be the case? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
- jerf 4y agoIt does not. The concrete evidence of this is relatively recent; theoretically nobody has expected that it would for a long time, but it has been theory. But yes, we've coordinated detections between LIGO and radar astronomy now, and there's no reason to believe gravity travels FTL. As always, there are error bars, but they're tight enough not to get excited about. That is, who cares if gravity travels at 1.00000000000001 the speed of light? (The theoreticians would go absolutely ballistic, but pragmatically that would mean nothing.)
- nwiswell 4y ago> but pragmatically that would mean nothing Well except the part where you could use gravity waves to send messages to the past, I imagine that would have some pragmatic implications.
- raverbashing 4y agoThis is the answer Something like a neutrino bean sounds more plausible as a communication medium than gravitational waves
- JohnBooty 4y agoWhat would be the advantage of that?
- Reason077 4y agoUnlike radio waves or light, gravity waves aren't impeded by obstacles like stars, planets, interstellar dust, or anything else that might be out there. Nothing could block or jam them and you'd always have a clear signal.
- vecter 4y agoIt takes so much energy to create gravity waves and so much effort to detect them that it's silly to try to use them as a medium of communication.
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago*For Kardashev Type 1 civilizations like us. (And we’re only 0.74 not even 1)
- moloch-hai 4y agoWe are not even 0.01 Kardashev.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nmeagent 4y ago~0.73 seems about right. 0.01 is about 1.26 MW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#:~:text=equivalent%20to%20an%20average%20power%20consumption%20of%2018.87%20TW%20or%200.73 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#:~:text=equiva...
- moloch-hai 4y ago
- landswipe 4y agoIt'll be more likely something subatomic, like they're chain entangling photons, we just don't know how to interpret it yet.
- whycome 4y agoThey keep ringing our sun and we never even respond! And now they're just annoyed with us and won't respond when we eventually call back.
- jjtheblunt 4y agowe generate gravity waves every time we move something with nonzero mass, don't we?
- vecter 4y agoYes but not in any practically detectable way.
- euroderf 4y agoCan a gravity wave be (in theory) directionally focused ?