3017: Neutrino Modem

Neutrino Modem

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Title text: Our sysadmin accidentally won a Nobel Prize while trying to debug neutrino oscillation error correction.

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Explanation

This is one of 55 incomplete explanations: Created by a 1978 neutrino fax machine - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Neutrinos are tiny, nigh-ghostly particles that are so small they barely interact with any solid matter at all. Despite trillions of neutrinos passing through your body every second, one will only hit you once every 10 years or so.

In this comic, Randall gives a helpful tip to networking companies: in order to avoid latency issues with their servers, simply relocate their node to the Earth's core and use neutrinos to communicate with the surface, rather than radio waves, electrical impulses, or photons in fiber-optic cables. Since the core of the Earth is approximately equidistant from every point on Earth's surface, and neutrinos are capable of (pretty much) phasing through solid matter, this allows communication with any server or network node anywhere on Earth, all with the same light-speed latency, but at the cost of an unbelievable amount of lost data (since only a teeny teeny teeny tiny fraction of the neutrinos sent from the modem will actually be received by the servers on the surface).

There are also, of course, the practical problems of constructing a facility at Earth's core, which is extremely far away, extremely hot, and under extremely high pressures.

Blondie and Cueball are shown floating because a hollow space in the center of a body experiences microgravity. This is because all the mass of the object is evenly distributed in all directions. While there is 4,000 miles of rock "above" you pulling you "up," there is also 4,000 miles "below" you pulling you "down," and so you experience net-zero gravitational acceleration.

Transcript

This is one of 30 incomplete transcripts: Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Check it out-45ms ping times to every server on Earth!

That 99.999999999999% packet loss is pretty bad, though.

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Discussion

If someone wants to describe the logo on the Neutrino Modem in the transcript, have at it. Barmar (talk) 22:42, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I wonder how long it took Cueball to send and receive enough packets to be able to calculate that average ping time? Barmar (talk) 22:47, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

If you ping every IPv4 address on the planet once a second, 3-4 packets will be received per day. Unfortunately, the packet loss is bidirectional, so your chance of hearing the reply is equally low. So maybe when the earth is 16 times older than it is now you will have a reply. Divad27182 (talk) 23:13, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

That packet loss rate (detecting only 1 in 100 trillion) is actually a very high rate of neutrino detection, isn't it? And that's assuming a "packet" is a single neutrino. DKMell (talk) 23:33, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Ah, yes, just added something about that. Going by (confirmable) solar-neutrino detection rates, because I couldn't work with figures for generated/detected neutrino streams (and, besides, you might then have FTL latency times! :D ), it seemed that we're detecting hundreds of events per day in "cubic kilometre" detectors which would be being hit by perhaps 60-65 million neutrinos per second per square centimetre so I don't think it's far wrong (scaling up to the square face of the cube, over a full day) to suggest one in 50 long-Trillion (or 50 short-sextillion) neutrinos is identifiably captured. The rates might be better for merely "several olympic swimming pools of fluid" detectors, so I fudged it rather than talk of 10¹⁸ish rates with respect to the 10¹⁴ish ones quoted. (Which, because it is at least two neutrinos, one there and one back (with magically implied Ping Request/Ping Response status), is more like two 10⁷ish rates anyway, in order that the neutrino-spamming is equally intense from either side in order to attempt to minimally convey a message... Could still be short-trillions sent, one ping request detected, short-trillions replied to that one as a similar 'overkill', yet one valid returnee received.)

But if I'm overestimating (or underusing, on the flipside) anything by an order of magnitude or three, then it still doesn't really change the comparison. The numbers are still huge. We don't even know the transmission bandwidth, just that somehow Ping-Request then Ping-Reply (and no other ACKing and handshaking or OSI Physical Layer overheads, never mind other layer 2, 3 and 4 fine details) happened at practically the speed of light regardless of the necessary near-simultaneous spamming of attempts that the boxes that each endpoint concerned must have to juggle when prodded accordingly. 141.101.96.41 14:00, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

The explanation says that it's Blondie floating behind Cueball, but I think it's actually Ponytail. PDesbeginner (talk) 01:58, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Why do I have the feeling that the sysadmin from the title text is the same as in 705: Devotion to Duty? --Frog23 (talk) 12:20, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

In 2012 scientists at Fermilab have managed to use the world's strongest source of a neutrino beam to send a message (ASCII code for the word "neutrino") over a distance of 1 km. The communication speed was 1 bit per 10 seconds, with an error rate of 1%. (And the neutrino detector isn't something that you can build in your backyard, either.) [1] - Mike Rosoft (talk) 22:29, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

You just don't have a big enough back yard. SDSpivey (talk) 02:43, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Don't give Amazon Web Services any more ideas - they might try this for their next datacenter! Numbermaniac (talk) 10:06, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The bot text (do not delete too soon), says "Created by a 1978 NEUTRINO FAX MACHINE", as if the concept of a "modem" is somehow a retro concept (presumably limited in this conception, to audible signals, rather than being the basis of virtually all digital telecommunication). I feel that perhaps a very concise explanation of what constitutes a "modem" may be useful?

ProphetZarquon (talk) 15:19, 30 November 2024 (UTC)
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