Arrays for all frequencies and modulations gravitational signal surveys for astrophysics and civilizations
Dear SETI,
Looking at the whole Internet, and the potential of true AIs to allow systems to essentially live forever, I realized that exploration and development of galaxies is likely the norm, not the exception in the universe. An evolved natural lifeform might well develop systems that record all knowledge and process it. The system is eternal (can be), so it evolves over billions of years not just a few million for organic systems like humans. Looking for “aliens” is harder than looking for “intelligent systems in operation”.
How would you search for “intelligent systems in operation”?
I doubt they would use electromagnetic signals. More likely they would use gravitational signals which are not trapped or attenuated like light.
When Joe Weber was explaining his gravitational detector to me (about 1978), I asked him what he wanted to use the detector for, when it is refined. He said it would be a system that could send and receive very precise three dimensional signals that do not change with distance. It would be used for exact communication over any distances. But he recommended that I not follow him, rather he told me to read everything that Robert Forward did and work on that.
There are low cost, three axis (and tensor), time of flight gravitation sensors now that can be used in arrays. And computers powerful and fast enough to compute the fields in near real time. Or to receive and map them. The gravitational potential field operates at all frequencies and in full volumetric 3D. The signals cover at least nanoHertz to ZettaHertz and across all energy densities and power densities.
I am fairly certain Robert Forward had something to do with the founding of interferometric gravitational field detection. He wrote about “Wideband laser-interferometer gravitational-radiation experiment” in 1978. It seems to have gotten published with “graviational” misspelling. https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.17.379
A global array of low cost detectors can map the universe of gravitational signals. If civilizations are using gravitational signals, they likely can span from nanoHertz through the frequencies we associate with gamma rays, hard x-rays, soft x-rays and would operate in space and from planetary arrays. Nuclear powered transmitters are very likely so that modulated devices using “neutrinos” are likely. There is a lot of activity now in using neutrinos from generators to detectors (transmitters and receivers). The modulation now is fairly crude, but error correction starts with modulation and precise known signals.
Filed as (Arrays for all frequencies and modulations gravitational signal surveys for astrophysics and civilizations)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
