RE: Sol-like system discovered...SETI new directions?

From: Paul Grant (shade999@optonline.net)
Date: Fri Jul 11 2003 - 21:48:51 MDT

  • Next message: Paul Grant: "RE: Sol-like system discovered...SETI new directions?"

    -----Original Message-----
    From: owner-extropians@extropy.org [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]
    On Behalf Of Robert J. Bradbury
    Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 11:11 PM
    To: extropians@extropy.org
    Subject: Re: Sol-like system discovered...SETI new directions?

    On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 ABlainey@aol.com wrote:
    It is also true that to get gravity waves one has to manipulate *very*
    large masses.

    Me: or shutter a large mass :) like a signal fire :) Why build the fire
    when you can misdirect it using a blanket :)

    That is *very* expensive relative to the manipulation of photons (which
    effectively have very low masses [based on E = mc^2]).

    Me: Depends on how you do it :) no doubt an elegant solution is just
    waiting to be found :) At this point, I wouldn't say its
    impossible, or even improbable :) Just that more data is needed :) In
    any event, it certainly is worth examining, if nothing
    else for the questions it would raise.... As to light, generally
    coherent light is used as signaling mechanism; however, the
    same effect (a sheild) could be used for say, the light of a
    sun(star)...

    consider the effective size of the sun on our retina...now say I had a
    shield roughly the size of the moon (the size of the shield
    would of course, be dependant on the resolution of our telescopes versus
    the distance to the receiver.... ergo, if we were trying
    to communicate really far away, you could scale the size of the shield
    down, and place it in an orbit), I could open or shut
    it using morse code. certainly anybody looking at the sun would notice
    my attempt at communication... and you could further
    enhance said communication system, by aiming additional telescopes
    (corrected for phase), off stellar clouds of gases
    and synchronizing a shield-gate system, thus minimizing down time (where
    other stellar objects blocked the receivers view
    of the source 'light'). The main reason I don't like this as an
    approach, is that I suspect that gravity propogates
    faster :) but the same effect could be generated by skewing the
    pulse...

    for instance, say I have a stable stellar object which is generating
    large gravitational pulses, coded to a particular
    frequency; say I know where my receiver is; there's no reason why I
    couldn't have a significantly smaller gravitational
    force (would probably be energy-based, not matter based) skew the
    generating source frequency enough to mess up
    the receivers signal. It would be the equivalent of us agreeing on a
    stellar object, measuring its frequency, the receiver
    setting his receiver to that frequency, and us introducing a "drift"
    from the source transmitter, using the drops as a method
    of communicating information.

    Another really interesting question, which just occurred to me, is:
    does gravity reflect? are their materials which absorb/rebuff gravity...
    or is it all simply a matter of constructive/destructive interference
    sans reflection?

    anyway :) all stuff over my head in any event...for now :P

    omard-out

    omard-out



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