I know this kind of technology is WAY off in the future, but how viable would it be to use neutrinos for wireless power transmission in, say, 100 years? From a physics standpoint, that is - can power be converted into neutrino rays and back with a high efficiency and little loss?

 

Just wonderin'.

I don't see how, even theoretically, this is possible (although that may be due to my small understanding of neutrinos).

 

I mean, neutrinos hardly interact at all with anything (look at my sig!) so how could we capture then to use as a power source, and furthermore they don't have massive amounts of energy.

 

Maybe, as I said, I'm missing something, but I don't see how... how did you come up with the idea? (Or is there something I don't know?)

5614 is right. The particles have to interact. Neutrinos interact via the weak force, so cross sections are extremely small.

They couldn't be used for efficiently transfering power because most of the neutrinos would escape, running away with your power.

 

However, they do interact, so you could send signals with them, and their unreactivity could be very useful - you could send a beam straight through the planet for example. Unfortunately their interactions are very weak (as Swansont already pointed out) so you would have to send a hell of a lot of them to make sure you got a good signal. I suspect there will be other techs which are better by the time this would become feasible.

Well, their non-reactivity was the one and only thing that prompted me to ask the question. That way, you could send power without worrying about interference from planets. I don't really know much about neutrinos either, hence the question. So now, I would consider that a definite no.