I can see that, though not where he got six orders of magnitude. Gravitational waves could have been dissipating and losing coherency a lot faster than they turned out to do, sure, but that's about four more than I could conjure (assuming 10^3-10^4 ly distance to a binary). It wouldn't be surprising if my approximation would be equally garbage, since these were my doodles on Xeelee, but that's the unfortunate truth about the horizons of science: it's not that far from "it's like, your opinion, man" with math until there's an observation. Always glad to hear these kinds of stories. By the way, I want to stress that I don't endorse Baxter, from horrible character writing through goofy names to being nowhere near as scientifically accurate as many tout, but I got interested when someone recommended Flux with "a society of primitive posthumans inside a neutron star deals with impending ecological collapse."he ended up not going to Caltech because in his opinion, LIGO was "around six orders of magnitude" too insensitive to detect a neutron star.