How Neutrinos Could Revolutionize Communications with Submarines

That's an awful lot of <i>we're confident this six-orders-of-magnitude problem can be overcome</i>. A six order of magnitude increase in the speed I could wave my hands would be well more than I would need to fly, at least if I could keep my hands from burning up.

They kept talking about "3 orders of magnitude" (3 OoM) between ELF (1) and neutrinos (100) which confused me. I had to go back and recheck the units before it made sense. ELF: 1 bit per <i>minute</i>. neutrinos: 100 bits per <i>second</i>. It would have been substantially better to compare them in the same units by saying 6000 bits per minute.<p>Aside from that though...I went to this article all excited. The title seemed to imply that they really had something. Unfortunately, to make it work they need to:<p>1) Improve their neutrino detection ability by 6 OoM.<p>2) Either cover the entire hull of the sub in detectors--tricky, since subs are already covered in acoustic tile and the insides are jammed with stuff, making it hard to retrofit the system in--or use Cerenkov light detection, which requires filtering out light from bioluminesce, moonlight, sunlight, etc.<p>3) Even if all this happens, the submariners can only receive. So this system needs to be in addition to, not in place of, their existing commo, and they still need to come to the (near) surface to transmit.<p>Still, great concept. As other people have commented, would be great to see it used on land.

Not just submarines--assuming that the beam can be as focused as necessary, you could even have lightspeed communication with the other side of the world, albeit at a very low bitrate.

I always figured SETI should be listening for neutrinos. Perhaps that's how aliens communicate?<p>What would it take to make this a practical method of communication e.g., have a reciever and transmitter in your phone? Would a super dense material work to capture them?