Twisted lasers could let us send messages with gravitational waves

Powerful, twisting lasers could let us create and detect gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time thus far only seen coming from cosmic objects. While the technology to do so is decades away, this could eventually let us communicate via gravitational waves, in the same way we use electromagnetic waves today.

Anything that has mass or energy creates ripples in time and space, known as gravitational waves, as it moves. These waves are almost all so weak that they are impossible to detect, with the …