Neutrino Communications: An Interstellar Future?

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Neutrino Communications: An Interstellar Future?
by Paul Gilster on April 18, 2012

The news that a message has been sent using a beam of neutrinos awakened a flood of memories. Back in the late 1970s I was involved with the Society for Amateur Radio Astronomers, mostly as an interested onlooker rather than as an active equipment builder. Through SARA’s journal I learned about Cosmic Search, a magazine that ran from 1979 through 1982 specializing in SETI and related issues. I acquired the entire set, and went through all 13 issues again and again. I was writing sporadically about SETI then for Glenn Hauser’s Review of International Broadcasting and later, for the SARA journal itself.
Cosmic Search is a wonderful SETI resource despite its age, and the recent neutrino news out of Fermilab took me right back to a piece in its third issue by Jay Pasachoff and Marc Kutner on the question of using neutrinos for interstellar communications. Neutrinos are hard to manipulate because they hardly ever interact with other matter. On the average, neutrinos can penetrate four light years of lead before being stopped, which means that detecting them means snaring a tiny fraction out of a ...