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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 21, 2015 11:20:16 GMT -5
Interesting notion.Snowden proposes that the encryption (which is functionally the same thing as compression, after all) is the reason we haven't identified extra-terrestrial communications. We could be being bombarded with intelligent communication from a multitude of other planets, but we would never know because their communications are fully compressed/encrypted, rendering them indistinguishable from background noise.
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Post by Marshall on Nov 21, 2015 11:26:57 GMT -5
Why would someone encrypt a message to an unknown other person who doesn't have the means to decode the message?
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 21, 2015 11:47:35 GMT -5
Depends on how you think about it.
If you think that other civilizations are sending messages with the express intent of contacting US, then no, they would not be encrypted or compressed.
But if you think you are looking for whatever stray signals happen to be floating around out there, Snowden's hypothesis is that they will be indistinguishable from background noise. Other than a brief period when electromagnetic communication is first discovered, the demands of bandwidth conservation will inevitably result in compression, which done efficiently, will reduce any signal to noise.
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Post by patrick on Nov 21, 2015 13:30:09 GMT -5
Why would someone encrypt a message to an unknown other person who doesn't have the means to decode the message? They encrypt them because they are messages from one extraterrestrial advanced society to another extraterrestrial advanced society and they don't want all the other extraterrestrial societies listening in. |
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Post by millring on Nov 21, 2015 13:39:00 GMT -5
Why would someone encrypt a message to an unknown other person who doesn't have the means to decode the message? They encrypt them because they are messages from one extraterrestrial advanced society to another extraterrestrial advanced society and they don't want all the other extraterrestrial societies listening in. well, duh. |
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Post by millring on Nov 21, 2015 13:39:22 GMT -5
Isn't "Fermi" what the Muppet's Swedish chef says?
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Post by jdd2 on Nov 21, 2015 18:34:22 GMT -5
Ah, so this is a message?  |
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Post by Doug on Nov 21, 2015 18:37:41 GMT -5
What we think of as compression and encryption is what they consider kid's communication.
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Post by TKennedy on Nov 21, 2015 23:16:54 GMT -5
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 22, 2015 11:30:47 GMT -5
Ah, so this is a message? Its a tantalizing thought, isn't it? If Snowden's hypothesis is correct, that map could be teeming with [Carl Sagan Voice] "billions and billions" [/Carl Sagan Voice] of examples of intelligent live and we would never have any idea. Instead of wondering why we seem to be all alone in the universe, maybe "billions and billions" of civilizations are actually crowded into the same room and yet are all entirely invisible to each other. |
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Post by Village Idiot on Nov 22, 2015 11:41:07 GMT -5
Why would they encrypt something we probably don't understand anyway?
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Post by millring on Nov 22, 2015 13:06:22 GMT -5
I just heard on Meet The Press that the administration is hot on the trail of shutting down encryption. That's show those ETs.
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Post by RickW on Nov 22, 2015 14:24:30 GMT -5
Interesting thought.
You guys are missing the point. We encrypt our traffic here, to make sure that it doesn't get intercepted by other people. Businesses don't want other people reading their communication, or stealing their signals for free use. We certainly are not worried about aliens. But we encrypt an awful lot of stuff. In addition, even if we don't encrypt, we compress - which works out to much the same thing as it's the removal of a lot of information, in order to make is smaller and easier to send. But you have to know how it was done to reverse it and make sense on the other side. So: we encrypt/compress a signal at the source, send it in this format to prevent theft and make the transfer quicker, then the receiving knows what was done to encrypt/compress it, and uses that knowledge to decrypt/decompress and interpret the signal.
So, essentially he's saying the extraterrestrial's "noise", their tv signals/communications, whatever, that we try to detect, are unreadable, and we can't even recognize themfor what they are, because they were encrypted/compressed.
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Post by Doug on Nov 22, 2015 14:50:41 GMT -5
I just heard on Meet The Press that the administration is hot on the trail of shutting down encryption. That's show those ETs. I think governments have been hot on the trail of shutting down encryption for a few thousand years. |
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Post by Russell Letson on Nov 22, 2015 15:02:11 GMT -5
Unless I've been missing the point all these years, encryption and compression are distinct operations with distinct functions.
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Post by RickW on Nov 22, 2015 15:18:15 GMT -5
Unless I've been missing the point all these years, encryption and compression are distinct operations with distinct functions. They are. But when you compress something, you remove a whole bunch of information, and add information about how it was done. So, for the purposes of supporting the theory, it's pretty much the same thing as encryption. You can't read it unless you know how it was compressed, or encrypted. |
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Post by Chesapeake on Nov 22, 2015 15:26:42 GMT -5
The only possible explanation is the aliens want to communicate only with the Yetis.
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Post by Village Idiot on Nov 22, 2015 21:32:05 GMT -5
No one here has said The Fermi Paradox would be a great name for a band yet? That's like not having Hitler on page 7.
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Post by james on Nov 22, 2015 21:50:43 GMT -5
In related news, the Oscar winning documentary 'Citizen Four' about Edward Snowden is excellent. Was it on TV there? I don't know if it's available on Netflix or anywhere. I recorded it off the telly. They have screwed up wider release formats quite badly as far as I can tell.
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