[LINK] "SETI: A detectable neutrino signal?"

[rfmcdonald]

Centauri Dreams reports on the latest way to search for technological extraterrestrial life: use the neutrino.

Somehow I never thought of the IceCube neutrino telescope as a SETI instrument. Deployed in a series of 1,450 to 2,450 meters-deep holes in Antarctica and taking up over a cubic kilometer of ice, IceCube is fine-tuned to detect neutrinos. That makes it a useful tool for studying violent events like galactic collisions and the formation of quasars, providing insights into the early universe. But SETI?

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[I]f we can get around formidable practical challenges, we’ll eventually want to develop a muon collider. So, presumably, would an extraterrestrial civilization. And indeed, Silagadze discusses the practical uses of a high-energy neutrino beam in, for example, the study of the inner structure of a planet, or the use of collimated neutrino beams for communications. A 1979 paper by Mieczyslaw Subotowicz went so far as to argue that advanced cultures might deliberately choose neutrino channels for interstellar communications to shut out immature emergent civilizations from the ongoing conversation.

[. . .]

IceCube, anyone? The beauty of neutrino SETI is that it can readily run in the background of concurrent neutrino-based astrophysical studies. Thus keeping an eye out for possibly artificial high-energy neutrino signals produced in muon colliders light years away makes a certain degree of sense. Will it succeed? Silagadze quotes Cocconi and Morrison’s classic paper: “The probability of success is difficult to estimate: but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.”