Reply To: What can we do with $189 Billion?

[Mstry4u]

I understand that these detectors find few neutrinos, but compared to how many bombard the earth at any given moment “few” is relative:

“Current estimates predict the detection of about one thousand such events per day in the fully constructed IceCube detector….Most of the remaining (up-going) neutrinos will come from cosmic rays hitting the far side of the Earth, but some unknown fraction may come from astronomical sources. To distinguish these two sources statistically, the direction and energy of the incoming neutrino is estimated from its collision by-products. Unexpected excesses in energy or from a given spatial direction indicate an extraterrestrial source.”

“Although IceCube is expected to detect very few neutrinos, it should have very high resolution with the ones that it does find. Over several years of operation, it could produce a flux map of the northern hemisphere similar to existing maps like that of the cosmic microwave background. Likewise, KM3NeT could complete the map for the southern hemisphere.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Detector

Maybe it’s not as big of a concern as I think it is, but even one or two neutrinos from a fusion device in a residential area being classified as an extraterrestrial source is more press than I’d like.