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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.
9 out of 10 alien messages are for tentacle enlargement pills
Sufficiently advanced compression could be indistinguishable from encryption (esp. if have a standard table to draw from).
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either a movie title, indy band, or gang name.
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?
They have been preparing us for their code for thousands of years but only those who are in the know like this guy can read it correctly!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Maybe the scariest aspect of that idea is that they're hiding from something.
Either they're just going about their business without giving a crap about anyone else.... meaning their communications may or may not be encrypted because they basically don't care if we see it, or bother to consider it an option that we see it..... or......
They're trying to communicate with us, in which case i doubt they'd be so stupid as to encrypt unless they're sharing information, instead of simply saying "hello, we're here," that they deem should be reserved for a "sufficiently advanced" society (their opinion on what that may be).
Back in college, one of my friends started learning to speak Russian... more because he thought it would make him "cool" instead of it actually being useful. He was always pretty much an ass, with an ego that seemed to never be contained by the room he was in, but i remember his conversation one day with his brother and another mutual friend where he attempted to play the "i'm superior to you" card by switching into talking Russian. His brother, by far the best of our little group in temperament and patience for the ego, simply said: "language is a tool to communicate with others. What the fuck are you trying to do?" IF the LGM's out there are trying to communicate with us, they're not going to encrypt.
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Regardless of the contents of my Slashdot sig... don't let your nerd celebrity cred go to your head too much. This sort of stuff just makes you easier to simply dismiss when it comes to the general populace.
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Sure, because they don't want the NSA or the FBI to find out about their tunnels under the border.
Oh, he meant Space Aliens? I bet they don't want the NSA or FBI to read their emails either.
We know this, and have tests to verify deviation from true random noise to detect encoding candidates, even if you can't, perhaps ever, crack it.
Actually, I hypothesize this is what SETI and so on are doing. If not, they should.
It cannot be mathematically identical to true randomness over the long run, even though the closer to statistically random data you get with your encoding, the more compressed.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
One method of Encryption is to use very wide (high chipping rate) Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS). This has the advantage of
digital processing gain that looks like an incredibly good filter, and also spread the signal over a very wide bandwidth. GPS satellite use this
so they can all transmit on the same frequency at the same time, but use different codes (CDMA Code Division Multiple Access) This
makes the GPS signals approximately sub thermal. Sub thermal means that the background noise is as powerful as the signal.
Now in actuality, using just a little bit of antenna gain, and any processing or averaging power on a spectrum analyzer will let you see the
signal, but they are pretty close. That is old 1980's Tech. Think Pre-Wifi. And the precision military code for 10x positioning accuracy is still
unusable without the crypto keys.
Digital Signal Processing uses cryptographics really easily and makes these signals pretty much undetectable.
See why:
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I'm not surprised that Snowden would focus on a pet obsession and Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't an xeno-anthropologist, but surely both of them could have stop to ask themselves if radiated communications are the norm given how inefficient a use of energy that it is.
Only sustainable civilisations survive, now that is a hypothesis that is more likely, so extreme efficiency would be a very large factor in the difficulty in sensing such a civilisation. And as other's have pointed out this would require compression.
There is also a small issue with the "oh it is just encrypted" idea, you would still see an unnatural energy spectra.
There has been a recent development in the control of heat flow and if puny humans can do that why should puny humans even expect to detect waste heat from an advanced civilisation? Surely it would make more sense to dump it back into the nearest star? Not getting noticed would be a priority the moment a civilisation realised, or detected the possibility of a competing civilisation. Even being 50 years ahead of another star system (give or take propagation delays) would ensure a neighbour goes silent before they get noticed.
SETI is a monumental waste of time and money.
I've long thought this could be the case. First, you'd have the communication be in an alien language. We're not just talking a foreign language, like Spanish, that has the same (or nearly the same) alphabet as English or even a language, like Russian or Hebrew, that has a completely different alphabet. Those languages were still made by humans. We'd be talking about a language formed by a completely different creature that evolved in a completely different environment.
After this, you'd have the communication encoded in an alien codec. I guarantee that a hypothetical alien wouldn't be communicating video conversations in H.264 or audio communications using FLAC. Imagine if you had never seen an MP3 file before (or MP4 or any related codec) and didn't have any pre-written tools to play it. Would you be able to decipher an audio file encoded as an MP3? Now take that example and substitute a codec made by someone who is literally not of this Earth.
Finally, take that message in an alien language using an alien codec and compress it using a schema that (again) was devised by aliens. This wouldn't be gzip, but something totally different. Given how different all of this would be from anything we've ever seen before, what chance would we have of identifying it as an alien communication and not a random burst of electromagnetic radiation? (There's also the question of whether aliens would be using electromagnetic radiation instead of some other, more advanced form of communication, but that's a different story entirely.)
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in 2013 on slashdot
As much as /.ers hate Joe Sixpack and his fascination with the Kardashians - they sure perk up their ears when their media darlings pontificate.
First question that come into my mind, why the hell aliens would send encrypted message in the galaxy? If I wanted to send a message to Aliens, my first reflex would write it in so many different way so that any aliens will know it's a message for them. The only reason it should be encrypted is to hide it from someone they know and odds are thar they a far more advanced than us and that some random communication wont reach anyone esle than the disignated targed let alone leaving their solar system.
Elok
It is fundamental that a well designed Spread Spectrum transmission is essentially the same as wideband noise, and unless you know the code, is un-crackable.
The Spreading Code itself provides the Encryption (eg via Gold-Codes, or if necessary, via a one-time pad)
The idea of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence using Spread Spectrum is not a new idea. It dates back to the '40's when Spread Spectrum was first declassified.
I wonder if he read My
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I wonder if he read my November 24 2014 post.
In it I pointed out that modern radios, in order to approach the Shannon limit, put out signals that are very close to random noise (and essentially indistinguishable from band-limited theral noise once distorted too much for clean reception).
And that this would make the window between no radio and radio that is indistinguishable at a distance from thermal noise very short - in our case, about 120 years from Tesla and Hertz to mostly OFDM, m-QAM, and the like.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We won't ever get off this rock.
We already have. And the technology to live on other rocks in the solar system is entirely plausible. The real limiting factor is the cost of doing so right now.
Our efforts are better spent elsewhere.
Not really. The useful resources available on or near the surface of the earth, chemical and mineral, are dwarfed by the amount of resources floating around on other rocks, asteroids and such, in the solar system. As I mentioned the real problem is the cost of getting things from earth to orbit. However once we can access the resources such as asteroids the cost of space development will drop. We are at a temporary impasse, one where we have to bootstrap things. Massive economic development and the prosperity it brings awaits.
is Edward SnowdenTalks?
He seems to be implying that all communications will tend to encryption at some point in a species existence. That's far from the case. Even if we did all get angry at the snooping of our government and start encrypting everything there are many use cases left for unencrypted content. Think the type of content that we go out of our way to transmit in a common language so we're sure that everyone can understand without problems.
Encryption may be the solution to oppression but it is also a hindrance to common communications, unless everyone has the decryption key at which point you have to wonder what the point was in encrypting at all.
Regardless of if the communication is encrypted or not it shall be possible to detect the existence of radio waves.
If the aliens uses something else, then we are blind.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Not really. The useful resources available on or near the surface of the earth, chemical and mineral, are dwarfed by the amount of resources floating around on other rocks, asteroids and such, in the solar system.
The usefull resources available on or near the surface of the earth, chemical and mineral, are dwarfed by the amount of resources deeper below the surface of the earth.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
I suspect that advanced cultures would deeply value data collection and analysis and would like very open communications. Think of an ant hive. As far as we know every ant in the hive is able to receive as much communications as every other ant. As very advanced cultures there would be almost no danger from less evolved cultures and very advanced cultures are by definition rare compared to more mundane cultures. One would think that truly advanced cultures would have no need for war or aggression but be more than able to easily defend themselves if attacked. This is the very reason that Babe Ruth could point to the spot at which the ball would go over the fence when he hit home runs. there was nothing the opponent could do to stop him. The more advanced a species becomes the less one has to be concerned about enemies. In a way encryption really is an act of war. In the human equation hidden equals sinister.
At this point we would start looking for laborers outside the home planet. I am sure there are small advance scenario planning teams planning on exploiting the minerals of the asteroid belt and may be out sourcing possibilities of non earth civilizations in Morgan Stanley, Citi and Credit Suisse. Never under estimate their fiendishness, if there is some remote 1 in trillion chance, they will take it. Why wouldn't they? It is heads they win, tails the public bails them out.
Anyway other advanced civilizations will be looking for animals intelligent enough to do their dirty jobs. And we might get picked for it. So they will come looking for us, we don't have to go looking for them.
We can expect to be treated by them exactly the way Cortez, Magellen, Columbus and Pizzaro treated the remote cultures they encountered.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Think about the technology a scientist from a bare fifty years ago, or even thirty, would need to invent, just to be able to BEGIN to work on a sample of wifi communications, or a Blu-ray.
They have to invent the equipment to listen to it, decrypt it, figure out the file formats, and so on. And these technologies are all designed specifically to prevent that.
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You both stare at the things that attract you, regardless of actual value, so no - there isn't any difference.
We h ave to know how they encode the communications h oned towards us. Far be it for us to assume it will be EM waves.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Radio Comms have been encrypted for a very long time in the manner he's talking about in the podcast. If the carrier wave is the same amplitude as the data, you'd just hear white noise. I believe quantum entangled comms to be more likely. While Snowden is technically correct about it being encrypted, without the same quantum entangled radio, we'd never be able to hear what's being said because it's inherently scrambled as well as being instantaneous across all of space.
Snowden should really, really know better than to make this argument. Compression will always be necessary because the amount of information transferred generally outpaces the throughput capacity of data transfer channels. Encryption may increase the entropy of messages, but compression minimizes the entropy. So detecting lower-than-expected entropy in received information should occur fairly regularly if there is any intelligence communicating.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
First, getting to those resources is even more difficult and costly than going to space and grabbing some asteroids. In space, you only have to deal with containing 1 atm of pressure inside your ship. Underwater, you have to deal with tens or hundreds of atm of pressure. Deep underground (as in below the crust, inside the mantle), you're looking at much higher pressures plus a lot of heat, since it's hot enough down there to melt rock.
Secondly, all the resources are in the crust, not deeper. Deeper than that it's just silicates and then iron. All the most valuable minerals, such as iridium, are in the crust because they came from asteroid impacts eons ago; they weren't part of the planet's formation. Going out and grabbing more asteroids will yield much more of that, far more than we can easily get by digging up our habitat.
Perhaps we could get a visionary like George Lucas to help us understand what they have to say?