Cool! A major step forward from the traditional tin-can + wire telephone! My current theory is that aliens gave up on electromagnetic waves many (millions/billions) years ago, for the same reason that we gave up on transmission of information by means of light (e.g., semaphores): it doesn't work in smoke or fog, so we use longer wavelengths. I think that they (and we) should be using neutrinos for communications, because they go right through most stuff. We're having a bit of a problem receiving neutrinos just now, but we had equally difficult problems receiving radio waves in the 19th C. In 50-100 years, we're going to be using neutrinos in computers, and will consider the "electrical" age with the same nostalgia that we now have for "steampunk". (Google it.) At 08:25 PM 5/24/2016, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
Their radio detector works by using a gravitational wave laser to measure to absurdly high precision the distance between two charged pith balls. As their great scientist Inocram predicted, the hypothetical electromagnetic waves would cause the distance between two charged objects to vary slightly. It's not very sensitive, nor does it work at all at frequencies above 1 kHz, but nobody can think of a better way. Nor can anyone think of a better way to generate radio waves than to shake a charged pith ball in a paint-can shaker. Of course radio waves could never be used for interstellar communication, as the most powerful paint-can shaker can't even send a detectable radio signal across a room.