I often talk about solutions to the Fermi paradox on this channel and how we
might detect alien civilizations some of those solutions simply say that we're
looking in the wrong place this story drives that idea home and
it's noteworthy in both its simplicity and its elegance and the fact that we
should if we look be able to determine if this is a viable way for aliens to
communicate using fairly straightforward means one of the problems of the radio
spectrum is that it's still made up of photons like visible light and various
frequencies can be absorbed by intervening material it's long been
stated that while radio is useful to us at least right now it may not be seen
that way by advanced alien species and may be largely abandoned by civilization
at some point in their development abandoning it may actually be a
common-sense thing to do in light that there is one particle in this universe
that even the largest densest interstellar cloud can't stop if you're
using beams of them for communication or navigation that particle is the neutrino
the reason neutrinos were rarely interact with anything is because they
have near zero mass and in neutral charge they just pass right through
anything in their way most of the time that communications advantage is
compounded by the fact that they can travel it very close to the speed of
light despite rarely interacting this makes
them potentially ideal for pulse-code communications the double-edged sword
disadvantage is that their lack of interaction makes them hard to detect on
the receiving end you need huge detectors to do it we've built detectors
like this though typically it's a volume of material such as a huge tank of water
buried deep inside the earth in order to filter out other particles like cosmic
rays occasionally a neutrino weakly interacts with the detector and produces
an electron or a muon in the water along with a flash of Cherenkov radiation
that's the eerie blue light that you see emanating from this nuclear reactor in
1977 a group of scientists led by aw Saenz pointed out that an experiment
being done at Fermilab could be used to send pulse messages this has been done
since proving that you can indeed use neutrinos for pulsed communications
while neutrino communications are not practical or very useful for us right
now that may not be the case for an advanced
alien civilization wishing to communicate through interstellar clouds
neutrinos are complicated there are different flavors and energies and
certain variations of those would have no known natural source so could be
identified as artificial in origin but there are other ways to use neutrinos to
communicate an interesting suggestion made by neutrino physicist John learned
and colleagues link to the paper below is that an alien civilization could
modify a star to serve as an omnidirectional optical beacon the idea
is to use a neutrino beam to modify the output of a si fiood variable star these
stars are extremely useful to astronomers first study by Henrietta
Leavitt and subsequently used by Hubble and Slipher to determine that the
universe is expanding C feeds are extremely predictable in their variation
in brightness and are of major use in determining distances in the universe
alien astronomers would deduce that other alien astronomers such as humans
would be looking closely at C fiood variables so if your goal is to say
hello then you can modify such a star's pulsing in a way that doesn't occur in
nature one way to hypothetically do this is subject the star to powerful pulses
of neutrinos aimed straight at the Stars core interestingly this effect may be
detectable in old sky surveys and there is in fact a candidate star for this a
separate video on that start to come there are numerous Sky Survey stretching
back a century that could be combed for oddly behaving sea feeds but there are
other options for detecting alien neutrino magic in a paper from earlier
this year by Ephraim Fishbach and John T Grunwald links and citations to all
papers mentioned in this video in the description below for those that like to
dig deep they detail other telltale signs that could indicate alien activity
depending on what sorts of neutrino interactions are seen if an alien
civilization wants to announce their presence using neutrinos for example
they could simply pulse out prime numbers contact style if they're using
nuclear fusion or fission for that matter that would also produce a
distinctive signature that should be detectable the paper also makes an
interesting point if we built detectors to
for these signals they would have another seriously handy practical use
they could be used to predict solar storms see my video on this channel
about the Carrington event for information on why we should probably do
that but neutrinos might also serve another useful purpose for a spacefaring
civilization they might be good for synchronizing navigation clocks clocks
are useful in navigation in fact John Harrison revolutionized oceanic
navigation in the 18th century simply by inventing and refining a clock that
would remain accurate on a rolling ship accuracy was everything and in space
that may also be the case and neutrinos due to their non interactivity might be
better suited to it over electromagnetic waves I think it would be interesting
and perhaps poetic to find neutrino communications this is a ridiculously
speculative question but what happens if we start searching for neutrino signals
only to find our galaxy lit up with them after spending all this time looking for
signals that we produce as a civilization such as radio rather than
things more advanced civilizations might produce perhaps neutrinos just a thought
thanks for listening I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael
Gautier currently with a song stuck in my head after writing this script
looking for love in all the wrong places and be sure to check out my books at
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in-depth explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of
this amazing universe in which we live