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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, someone is trying to harness neutrinos for power:

https://www.power-technology.com/features/neutrino-energy-ha...

One of my far-future-tech fantasies is that we someday learn to make photovoltaics that are powered by cosmic rays and/or neutrinos.

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That's not someone harnessing neutrinos for their power, that's someone harnessing technobabble for it's ability to separate rubes from their money.

If I'm reading that paper above correctly, which despite its silly premise appears to have been seriously written (by undergrads, but the numbers pass the smell test), neutrinos have ~1/70th the power flux of solar anyhow, assuming you could catch all of them, which you can't.

Yeah I wondered about that. And their initial target application sounds pretty sketchy too. You have a brand new power source, you sell it to NASA first, not to Motorola, right?

From a little poking around it sounds like cosmic rays have a more useful power flux.

This thing is bizarre. It reads and looks like the standard "use trappings of actual science to sell bullshit", except they don't seem to be selling anything?

To be "charitable", maybe someone multiplied the solar neutrino flux/sqcm by their "maximum" energy (wikipedia numbers: 17e10 x 8e6 ~= 0.2w) and thought "that could power things!!!"

But more likely this is some sort of deliberate scam.

The science doesn't add up here. There are dozens of fluffy "this-will-save-the-world" articles without any substance which eventually led me to a single website that claims to represent a team working on that technology. That site seems to be seeking investors.

Without a miraculous scientific breakthrough the math doesn't add up. We don't know of any way to capture neutrons in a way that would provide meaningful power. For those reasons, I'll suggest this is more likely a scam than a sincere or realistic effort.

Why not communications? Neutrino-based communication is borderline ideal. A properly-aimed low-energy beam will make it to its target, obstructed or not.

...and through its target...

Next step in HFT.

Serious answer: because bandwidth is terrible. A transmitter the size of the LHC can only produce enough neutrinos (a few quadrillion per second) for a detector to receive a hundred per second or so. Accounting for noise, that means you can only achieve a few bytes per second at best, and again, that's with using the LHC to produce the neutrinos in the first place. With far less power you could instead use ultra-low frequency radio waves and still get better bandwidth.

You’d think the HFT lot would jump at the chance to knock 100ms off Singapore to New York.

That's assuming the LHC has less latency than 100ms.

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