Edward SnowdenTalks Alien Communications With Neil deGrasse Tyson

An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden, the former contractor who leaked National Security Agency secrets publicly in 2013, is now getting attention for an odd subject: aliens. In a podcast interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Snowden suggested that alien communications might be encrypted so well that humans trying to eavesdrop on extraterrestrials would have no idea they were hearing anything but noise. There's only a small window in the development of communication in which unencrypted messages are the norm, Snowden said.

Comments

Maybe they don't even use RF

[Spy Handler]

All we know is radio, and listening with radio telescopes has yielded nothing. What if they use neutrinos or some other weird method that we don't know of?

Re:Maybe they don't even use RF

[penguinoid]

Thing is, high entropy electromagnetic communications would be indistinguishable from noise -- and even if it weren't, it would be hard to compete with the ridiculously powerful noise of their star. Since entropy is approximately the same thing as information, we should expect to see nothing but noise even if we got a perfect noise-free replica of their communication. It'll only get worse -- higher entropy and higher directionality -- as the technological level improves.

Only way we're finding aliens is if they're also doing a SETI program and use radio waves to do so.

Encrypted is still not natural

[mbone]

I think he is confusing encryption and steganography. Encrypted signals will still require framing, will still be likely to be bandwidth limited, and so will not appear truly natural, even if we can never break the code. As the Brits found through traffic analysis in World War II, you can learn a lot from observing alien communications, even if you never decode a single word.