ET Might Write, Not Radiate: inscribed matter vs. electromagnetic channels

Professor Christopher Rose

Rutgers University

Abstract

We consider the energy requirements of information carriage using physical transport of inscribed matter and compare it to that using electromagnetic radiation when delivery delay beyond light transit time can be tolerated. Somewhat counter-intuitively, physical transport of inscribed matter is often more energy efficient than electromagnetic broadcast by many orders of magnitude over a wide range of scenarios -- from chip-to-chip computer communications to interstellar signaling. In fact, the efficiencies are so enormous that it may even be more likely for initial contact by extraterrestrial civilizations to occur using physical artifacts -- essentially messages in a bottle -- than via electromagnetic communication.

Details of this work are at http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~crose/cgi-bin/cosmicT.html

Bio

Dr. Christopher Rose received the B.S. (1979), M.S. (1981) and Ph.D. (1985) degrees all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Following graduate school, Dr. Rose joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. as a member of the Network Systems Research Department. Dr. Rose is currently a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rutgers University in New Jersey an Associate Director of the Wireless Networks Laboratory (WINLAB). He has been editor for the ACM Wireless Networks (WINET) journal, the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and has served on numerous conference technical program committees. He was technical program co-chair for MobiCom'97, Co-chair of the WINLAB FOCUS'98 on the U-NII, the WINLAB/UC Berkeley FOCUS'99 on Radio Networks for Everything and the UC Berkeley/WINLAB Focus 2000 on Picoradio Networks. Dr. Rose, a past member of the ACM SIGMobile Executive Committee is currently a member of the ACM MobiCom Steering Committee and has also served as General Chair of ACM SIGMobile MobiCom 2001 (Rome, July 2001). In December 1999 and 2003 he served on an international panel to evaluate engineering teaching and research in Portugal. Closer to home Dr. Rose has served on the Scientific Fields Advisory Committee of the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology.