If you believe aliens are using special types of stars to create a galactic internet and transfer data at about 180 bits per year then I have TONS of stuff I’d like you to consider for exclusive purchases: an invisible suit; a magic rock; a stick that will heal you.
Regardless, some very smart researchers are looking into that possibility and think it could be done cheaply, finished within a couple of months, just to check if aliens have left us any messages. The idea is based on a specific kind of star called a Cepheid variable star. Save all the technical mumbo jumbo, which Nature.com nearly eradicates from its report, these are stars that have cycles of varying light emission.
The reason they are like this leads to the possibility, John Learned of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu suggests, that an intelligent being could fire a “high energy neutrino beam” (those are Dr. Evil quotation marks) at a star and manipulate the star’s light cycle.
Similar to zapping a heart with electricity to make it skip a beat, Learned says the pulses could be used to encode data and form a type of “galactic Internet.” A star with a one-day light cycle would be able to transmit at 180 bits per year, assuming whichever hypothetical extraterrestrial race sophisticated enough to fire high energy neutrino beams at stars to make them talk hadn’t already discovered radio towers, which transmit more information over the same distance. They probably just use it for alien porn anyway.
Still, you can bet Google’s heard about this and already has started brainstorming about how to deliver text ads to it.
Meanwhile, the smartest men on our planet fired up the Large Hadron Collider Wednesday, and so far so good. We’re all still here. Then again, they haven’t actually smashed any atoms against each other yet. On the positive side, they had to set up an Internet much more powerful than the one we have now just so they could do the math required in the off chance they don’t kill us all. My guess is that the new Internet, while not a galactic one, is likely faster than 180 bits per year.
It’s a great time to be alive, eh? Well, if you can ignore everything else in the world, it is.