3017: Neutrino Modem

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Neutrino Modem

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

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a 1978 NEUTRINO FAX MACHINE. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Neutrinos are tiny, chargeless, ghostly particles that barely interact with solid matter at all. Despite trillions of neutrinos passing through your body every second, one will hit you only 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 networking node to the Earth's core and use neutrinos to communicate with the surface, rather than radio waves, electrical impulses, photons in fiber-optic cables, etc. Since the core of the Earth is approximately equidistant from every point on Earth's surface, and nearly all neutrinos pass through solid matter unaffected, this allows communication with any server or network node anywhere on Earth, all with the same near-light-speed latency and without having to install wires, fiber optic cables, or anything else along the way. However, the cost is an unbelievable amount of lost data, since only a teeny teeny teeny teeny tiny (teeny⁴ tiny) fraction of the neutrinos sent from the modem will actually be received by the servers on the surface, and the same again for those neutrinos that make the return journey: the specified packet loss amounts to 1 in 100 trillion packets completing the journey, with the rest missed (for reference: the lower threshold for acceptable packet reception is 98 in 100). If symmetrically failing to be detected, this suggests that only one in 10 million neutrino 'packets' is being received by the remote server, and only one in 10 million of the prompted replies are being received at Cueball's end.

This may still be a vastly better rate than expected. Neutrino detection with vastly bigger detectors than Cueball's device may only detect a fraction of the necessary neutrinos. Perhaps a little over 60 billion neutrinos per cm² per second pass through the Earth from the Sun, but detectors much larger than the whole of Cueball's indicated living space tend to detect no more than a few hundred of those per day. As the neutrino modems, at either end, must also generate (and, ideally, aim) their own modulated neutrino traffic, what proportion of the modem is usefully detecting is debatable. Beyond this issue, network packets consist of a series of signals to convey purpose, routing information and other overheads (including error detection and correction, which may be particularly important in this case). Even if direct point-to-point transmission (assumed, at least in this respect, to be reliably targeted) removes the need for full routing overheads, each ICMP echo request and reply will still require a significant number of neutrino events to be triggered, and then sufficiently detected for what they are, to be of any practical use.

A time delay of 45 ms is the approximate round-trip time for light (or neutrinos, which move nearly as fast) to travel the distance from the center of the Earth to the surface and back. Visible light, of course, couldn't make this journey through the rock at all. Perhaps only very long wavelength electromagnetic radiation could reliably penetrate half the Earth, which would give (like these hit-and-mostly-miss neutrinos, but still vastly better) a very low effective bit rate. This has the opposite issue of using a Sneakernet connection, where a reliable but physically slow transfer protocol (as discussed in What-If: FedEx Bandwidth) can potentially reliably deliver huge amounts of data in a single successful communication.

There are also, of course, the practical problems of constructing a facility at Earth's core, which is extremely far away (~6400 km / 4000 mi underground), extremely hot (~6000°C / 6273K / 11292°Ra / 8400°⋲ / −5900°real C) and under extremely high pressures (~3½ million atmospheres / 50 million PSI).

Ponytail and Cueball are shown floating because a hollow space in the center of a body experiences near-zero gravity. 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", with much the same amount left, right, front, back and every other direction, so you experience net-zero gravitational acceleration.

The title text refers to neutrino oscillation, which is a phenomenon in which neutrinos change between three different "flavors" - electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. A Nobel Prize was in fact awarded for the discovery of neutrino oscillation, which implied that neutrinos have mass, albeit an extremely tiny amount (< 2.14×10⁻³⁷ kg for the sum of the three flavors). The "neutrino oscillation error correction" could refer either to a way to correct for errors in the signal introduced due to neutrinos oscillating, as above, or for the method of error correction that cleverly uses modulated neutrino oscillation to its own advantage. Either of these could perhaps be considered such extraordinary developments as to make the system administrator involved deservedly elegible of a Nobel Prize, or perhaps one or other close equivalents.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Cueball and Ponytail are inside a large white circle on a black background. Cueball is at a workstation typing on a computer keyboard, floating above a wheeled desk chair behind him. Ponytail is floating in the air up and to the right of him. Attached to Cueball's computer by cables are a second monitor or a tower unit floating to the left, and a large device labeled "Neutrino Modem®" below and to its left. A logo on the modem shows circle with five horizontal lines entering from the left; the fourth line from the top stops within the circle, while the others pass through to the right; this presumably represents neutrinos passing through a planet or other object.]

Cueball: Check it out—45ms ping times to every server on Earth!

Ponytail: That 99.999999999999% packet loss is pretty bad, though.

[Caption below the panel:]

Networking tip: You can minimize worst-case latency by locating your node at the center of the Earth and communicating with the surface using neutrinos.

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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)