We here on this little planet have “The Internet” which people can only access if you have the right equipment. Is it possible that there is an “Intergalactic Net” that we cannot access as we don’t have the required equipment? If so, should we be looking for it, or not?

yes & no

The_observer said:

yes & no

Would you like to also add “Maybe”?

>>>Would you like to also add “Maybe”?<<<

perhaps

The_observer said:

>>>Would you like to also add “Maybe”?<<<

perhaps

;)

purely speculative, but maybe human (and maybe alien) thoughts travel on an ‘ethernet’ that could be picked up with the rght equipment.

bob(from black rock) said:

We here on this little planet have “The Internet” which people can only access if you have the right equipment. Is it possible that there is an “Intergalactic Net” that we cannot access as we don’t have the required equipment? If so, should we be looking for it, or not?

its possible

like some people might not have a phone

I sometimes think galactic filaments looks like communication links and visually can be compared with a human brain’s neural network

Mouse brain compared with galactic filaments

Neural Networks in the Brain

Human nervous system

Galactic Filaments

Maybe aliens are using gravity waves to communicate or using the strong force or maybe something more exotic.

CrazyNeutrino said:

Maybe aliens are using gravity waves to communicate or using the strong force or maybe something more exotic.

something that we don’t even suspect I’d say

this place is more like a zoo to them

no

you still have the problem of distance and time.

von neumann probes would be the best we could hope to find. repositories of alien knowledge.

Some good work there, CE

i’ll be glad when the aliens take over

they couldn’t be any worse than the mockery of intelligence amongst our so called leaders/ managers

wookiemeister said:

i’ll be glad when the aliens take over

they couldn’t be any worse than the mockery of intelligence amongst our so called leaders/ managers

What makes you think they haven’t already?

what I see are vast armies of cyborg chickens being dropped to wipe out mankind

the alien overlords would communicate their heinous crimes by donning sunglasses and laying hands on the scalp of a communication agent a seated bald man also wearing dark glasses that remains mysteriously silent as the orders are relayed across the eons

wookiemeister said:

what I see are vast armies of cyborg chickens being dropped to wipe out mankind

the alien overlords would communicate their heinous crimes by donning sunglasses and laying hands on the scalp of a communication agent a seated bald man also wearing dark glasses that remains mysteriously silent as the orders are relayed across the eons

the communication centre itself would be gloomy, the bald bloke sat immobile in a large chair with a bright light shining down on his scalp, rendering it shiny and drawing the customer to the “phone”

a group of strange aliens some with thick hair like a pelt on them would prowl in the shadows hurling the odd screech at those who dared to engage in chit chat

wookiemeister said:

wookiemeister said:

what I see are vast armies of cyborg chickens being dropped to wipe out mankind

the alien overlords would communicate their heinous crimes by donning sunglasses and laying hands on the scalp of a communication agent a seated bald man also wearing dark glasses that remains mysteriously silent as the orders are relayed across the eons

the communication centre itself would be gloomy, the bald bloke sat immobile in a large chair with a bright light shining down on his scalp, rendering it shiny and drawing the customer to the “phone”

a group of strange aliens some with thick hair like a pelt on them would prowl in the shadows hurling the odd screech at those who dared to engage in chit chat

in the corner a monkey would mount a large stuffed toy and screech from its lungs when a call was coming through

then and only then would the bald man take pick up a small cocktail remove the umbrella and take a small sip to nourish his brains to allow the call to be put through

bob(from black rock) said:

We here on this little planet have “The Internet” which people can only access if you have the right equipment. Is it possible that there is an “Intergalactic Net” that we cannot access as we don’t have the required equipment? If so, should we be looking for it, or not?

We could be awash in hardcore alien porn signals, as we speak.

seti@home

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

http://starwars.com/play/online-activities/crawl-creator/?cs=sg47dhkvmp

bob(from black rock) said:

Is it possible that there is an “Intergalactic Net” that we cannot access as we don’t have the required equipment? If so, should we be looking for it, or not?

Given what we currently know about the universe, no it is not possible.

The distance between galaxies is too large to allow any useful form of communication because of the speed of light limit.

An “Intragalactic Net” is more possible, although the galaxy is still a very big place and any network would only be effective within a very small volume of that space.

esselte said:

bob(from black rock) said:

Is it possible that there is an “Intergalactic Net” that we cannot access as we don’t have the required equipment? If so, should we be looking for it, or not?

Given what we currently know about the universe, no it is not possible.

The distance between galaxies is too large to allow any useful form of communication because of the speed of light limit.

An “Intragalactic Net” is more possible, although the galaxy is still a very big place and any network would only be effective within a very small volume of that space.

so what if thoughts operate in the same dimension that gravity appears to and aren’t limited by the c boundary?

so what if thoughts operate in the same dimension that gravity appears to and aren’t limited by the c boundary?

if thought operates in the same dimension (whatever that means) as gravity then they too will be constrained by the speed limit of light.

ChrispenEvan said:

so what if thoughts operate in the same dimension that gravity appears to and aren’t limited by the c boundary?

if thought operates in the same dimension (whatever that means) as gravity then they too will be constrained by the speed limit of light.

Isn’t gravity faster than light?

no.

ChrispenEvan said:

you still have the problem of distance and time.

Imagine waiting 20 years for an answer to a forum post.

it would be worth it if it was one of my jokes.

CrazyNeutrino said:

ChrispenEvan said:

so what if thoughts operate in the same dimension that gravity appears to and aren’t limited by the c boundary?

if thought operates in the same dimension (whatever that means) as gravity then they too will be constrained by the speed limit of light.

Isn’t gravity faster than light?

What speeds do the strong and weak force travel at?

I’m gonna need a reference for that claim.

How does one measure the speed of gravity?

Does the expanding universe travel faster than light?

CrazyNeutrino said:

Does the expanding universe travel faster than light?

If it does, we won’t know about it.

weak force would be under light speed as it is carried by massive particles. light, gravity and the strong (i think the strong) are carried by particles without mass and therefore travel at light speed.

Does the expanding universe travel faster than light?

yes. but the objects in that space aren’t.

Divine Angel said:

How does one measure the speed of gravity?

It would be different on every Star, Brown Dwarf, Planet and Moon

the speed of gravity would be the same in all cases i would imagine.

ChrispenEvan said:

the speed of gravity would be the same in all cases i would imagine.

Ok, as in relative to the object

as in relative to all observers i would think. just like light.

Divine Angel said:

How does one measure the speed of gravity?

To directly measure the speed of gravity you’d use a gravitational wave detector to observe the gravity waves from a high energy event (eg a supernova) and compare the gravity wave travel time to the electromagnetic wave travel time.

Unfortunately, gravitational wave detection is still in its infancy.

As of early 2014, no direct detection of gravitational waves has yet been accomplished, although a number of experiments have now added to the evidence that gravitational waves are more than mathematical anomalies of relativity calculations (ref. the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics).

So at the moment our speed of gravity measurements are indirect, the most famous being the decay rate of the period of the Hulse–Taylor binary pulsar which lead to the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics mentioned in the Wiki quote above.

In Newtonian physics, the speed of gravity is infinite, but in General Relativity it’s finite and equal to the speed of light; the indirect calculations currently agree with this prediction to within 1%.

This article, Does Gravity Travel at the Speed of Light? explains how this apparent contradiction is reconciled. There are no equations in the article, but it’s not exactly an easy read for the non-physicist.

…

CrazyNeutrino said:

Does the expanding universe travel faster than light?

Not really, since with Hubble expansion nothing is actually traveling, per se, it just seems that galaxy clusters are traveling away from each other as the space between them gets bigger. But even if we dismiss that statement as semantic quibbling, we still can’t utilise Hubble expansion for our intergalactic internet. Hubble expansion obeys GR, and in GR no information can travel faster than lightspeed.

…

ChrispenEvan said:

weak force would be under light speed as it is carried by massive particles. light, gravity and the strong (i think the strong) are carried by particles without mass and therefore travel at light speed.

Kind of. Quarks inside a hadron are bound by gluons. “Naked” gluons are massless, but gluons themselves have a color charge, so they are bound together with yet more gluons (and virtual quarks), and this recursive mess ends up having an effective mass by virtue of the energy it holds. The force that binds hadrons together is called the residual strong force , which is mediated by pi and rho mesons. Mesons are hadrons composed of quark-antiquark pairs (internally bound by gluons), so they have a no-zero rest mass, and hence a propagation speed less than c. See the Wiki link for a cute animation.

yeah, wasn’t sure about the strong force. i find it amazing that someone(s) worked all this stuff out.

ChrispenEvan said:

yeah, wasn’t sure about the strong force. i find it amazing that someone(s) worked all this stuff out.

They were pretty smart someones, though. :)

It’s a bit like coming up with the internal mechanism for a Rubik’s Cube that’s impossible to disassemble without utterly destroying it. All you have to go on is its external behaviour.

So you make various theoretical models of the internal structure of protons and neutrons that are consistent with the current data and then test your model by seeing if it can “predict” the more exotic hadrons that arise in particle collider experiments.

Postpocelipse said:

thanks for the info on the propagation speed of gravity PM. I’m still unclear whether it is a limitation of particulate matter that ensures that effects are registered at c or whether gravity is governed by that boundary but the information was concise as ever.

No worries, Postpocelipse.

No, it’s not simply “a limitation of particulate matter”, since light is also affected by gravity. In GR, gravity isn’t merely a force that particles exert on each other, it’s a distortion of the metric structure of spacetime itself, so it affects everything.

To be more specific, gravity is a systematic deviation from the simple Pythagorean formula for calculating the spacetime “distance” between two points in spacetime), with the amount of metric distortion caused by a given spacetime region being directly proportional to the energy density there.

In relativity, c is special because it’s the scaling factor relating spatial distances to temporal distances, i.e. 1 light-second of space is the same size as 1 second of time. The geometric structure of spacetime ensures that information cannot travel at faster than this speed, and that particles with zero rest mass (like photons) must, by necessity, travel at that speed. So it’s better to think of c as being a property of spacetime itself rather than it being a property of light, per se.

Admittedly, we don’t yet have a working theory that unites GR with Quantum Mechanics, and we expect that Quantum Gravity theory will provide some subtle corrections to current GR, but the points I made in the previous paragraph are fairly basic and won’t be affected in any significant fashion.

The hypothetical carrier particle of gravity is the graviton. Without a Quantum Gravity theory we can’t say much about gravitons – we can’t even definitively say that they exist, but if they do, then they have to be bosons (like photons), with quantum spin of 2 (photons have a spin quantum number of 1), and they have to be massless, since gravity obeys the inverse square law (in the weak field limit), propagating to infinity. And as I mentioned earlier, massless particles travel at c.

…

One major difference between photons & gravitons is that photons have virtually no effect on each other, whereas gravitons are expected to have more of an effect on each other, since any energy density causes gravity; OTOH, under all but the most extreme circumstances, graviton-graviton interaction is still expected to be rather weak, since gravity is such a weak force, compared to the other fundamental forces. Eg, the gravitational attraction between 2 protons is roughly 10⁴⁰ times weaker than the electromagnetic repulsion between them.

The novel Accelerando posits this hypothesis and humanity discovers most civilisations dismantle their solar system and turn it into a Matrioshka brain.

Suddenly Wookiemeister emerges from a quantum fluctuation and can be seen surfing the galactic filaments that form along and follow web-like strings of dark matter, he waves to you, he continues surfing and disappears into the dark void, leaving a surprised look on everyone.