Posted on 09/19/2015 9:45:02 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Whistle-blower Edward Snowden has some strong opinions on communications — even when those communications are coming from aliens.
The former intelligence-agency contractor turned fugitive was an unexpected guest on famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk podcast on September 18. And, inevitably, the two got to talking about extraterrestrials.
Snowden became an infamous household name in 2013 when he leaked classified documents divulging the government's top-secret mass-surveillance program, which involved collecting personal information on Americans via phone records without their knowledge.
When the news broke, the US charged him with theft and espionage, and he's now living in Russia where he has asylum.
But Tyson scored an interview with him in New York City. How? Snowden rigged a robot that he can control from Russia, and rolled right into Tyson's office at the Hayden Planetarium in New York with his face displayed on the screen.
The conversation turned to encryption and cybersecurity, but here's where an astrophysicist differs from a journalist: Tyson's line of questioning quickly turned to how encryption relates to communication with ... aliens.
Tyson asked Snowden if a highly intelligent alien civilization might be communicating with encrypted messages. And Snowden had an unsettling answer.
First, Snowden said, let's assume that most advanced societies eventually realize that they need to encrypt their communication in order to protect it. This could also be the reason why we've never heard from other civilizations — their messages may have just been melding into the background static of the universe.
Here's Snowden's full answer, from the StarTalk podcast:
So if you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there's only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communication will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means.
So when we think about everything that we're hearing through our satellites or everything that they're hearing from our civilization (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default.
So what we are hearing, that's actually an alien television show or, you know, a phone call ... is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.
So it could be possible there are alien messages constantly hitting our satellites, and we just don't recognize them because they're so heavily encrypted. (The cosmic microwave background radiation that Snowden mentions is thermal radiation throughout the universe left over from the Big Bang. It basically looks and sounds like static to us puny humans.)
Of course, that's assuming an alien civilization has the same security issues that we have here on Earth, and they need to worry about protecting their communication system from their alien governments, Tyson jokes.
Snowden agreed that aliens might be a little more politically sophisticated than us.
Listen to the entire StarTalk conversation with Edward Snowden >>
1. If the “advanced” civilization is attempting to communicate with previously unknown civilizations using radio energy, the radio frequencies to be used are rather obvious due to the limitations of using other radio frequencies, and encryption of the radio communications would be obviously contrary to the purpose of making First Contact using such primitive technology.
Snowden's talking about routine communications being intercepted by distant civilizations, not about deliberate attempts by one civilization to contact others which may be somewhere "out there". His argument is that such ordinary traffic, if receivable at all, would be indistinguishable from noise, due to routine encryption employed by civilizations advanced beyond a certain level.
Nope. We’d still pick up the signal spike.
I think of it this way.
Any alien who can ‘travel the galaxy’ has to be able to travel faster than light. So if they’re already traveling FTL why would they use the slower light speed to communicate? They’d use FTL for communications too.
I already addressed that scenario in Point Number 2. Interstellar distances are too great for radio communications to be useful in ordinary communications, because such radio transmissions take to many years, centuries, and millennia to transit the intervening space and require too much transmission power to be detectable at such interstellar distances. Unless an alien civilization just happened to be located within only 1,000 light years of the Earth and was radiating their radio emissions within 1,000 years ago, we simply could not detect their radio transmissions. About all they could say to each other would be to indicate the colonies in their other solar systems were still around when the message was sent and communicate other stale information and requests. Without what effectively amounts to some form of Faster-Than-Light (FTL) transport and/or communications, the feasibility and utility of interstellar radio communications is very limited in purpose and range of distance. Whether or not such inter-species communication were taking place with encrypted radio traffic, it would not matter to us because such transmissions would be undetectable here on the Earth.
“His argument is that such ordinary traffic, if receivable at all, would be indistinguishable from noise....”
No, because the carrier signal would be detectable whether or not the message was encrypted.
Communication to/from another star system would involve huge time gaps.
What? ET uses CW, AM, FM? Who knew!
We’ve been sending messages deep into space since Marconi’s first emission. However, the inverse square law causes our perpetual comms field to dilute and blend, like the ripples of a raindrop on the ocean, long before it gets to the first star.
All that assumes that the putative aliens use the electromagnetic spectrum radio lengths to communicate. That may sound odd, but all we know (from Einstein to Hawking) about that stems from one 19th century self-educated man (Heaviside) who rewrote 4 of 200 field equations (the quaternions of J.C. Maxwell) into vector equations because he considered the former abominations. So there’s an awful lot we do not know by apparent and deliberate ignorance.
What exactly do the 200 quaternions say? We can only speculate as they are ignored today. However, from Maxwell came the 1859 prediction on what the rings of Saturn were made of and how they are stable; unified the theories of electricity and magnetism; advanced Kinetic gas theory; took the first color photograph; developed ways to analyze stress in a structure and even; laid the foundations of cybernetics.
Maybe our aliens are smart enough to use those field equations to communicate (among many other seemingly magical possibilities Maxwell hinted at) instantly over interstellar distances in a way we are too willfully ignorant to use or discover.
Imagine if 2/3’s of Nikola Tesla’s ideas and plans hadn’t been buried, quashed or otherwise rendered moot. Every time I read anything about him I see 3 or 4 more things he was looking at doing that somehow were shoved down the memory hole.
Are either of you guys aware that the NSA has posted partial decodings of ET messages? Their public web site contains a PDF file that describes a signal, an evaluation of whether or not the receiving stations followed correct signal identification protocol, and finally keys of cipher. They conclude that the message is a periodic table of the elements with one extra parameter for each element.
They also indicate that a number of other messages remain untranslated.
This isn’t an interesting theory at all, it’s a nonsensical load of Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Fixed it for you.
My confidential source tells me that when aliens wanna talk, they’ll get our attention by flinging large space boulders at us.
Don’t judge.
It’s a cultural thing.
Tyson is the Obama of astrophysics!
Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages
https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/key_to_et_messages.pdf
Tesla’s Biography
http://teslasociety.com/biography.htm
FYI: Tesla was heavily influenced by J.C. Maxwell ... Tesla was an engineer, not a mathematician so how much he understood is unknown. However, free energy was one Maxwell concept that Tesla tried out with his broadcast power scheme.
When I see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s name I think affirmative action.
Our oceans would not protect us in this situation. but what if the aliens were poisoned by greenhouse gases, CO2 in particular?
What would we do then?
And what if they fed exclusively on aborted fetuses?
Would we defund Planned Parenthood?
SETI is also a monumental waste of time and effort, for many reasons already discussed on this thread.
Think of the analogy of an ant walking on top of a newspaper.
The word they are walking on is “Chicago”.
They don’t know what the language is. They don’t know what it describes. Even if they knew it was a place they wouldn’t know how to get there. Even if they got there it wouldn’t make sense why it was there or what is was.
Alien means alien.
Only dumb ants believe otherwise.
If they aren’t encrypted on purpose to obscure the communication, the other likelyhood is that the protocol used is indecipherable/undetectable to us.
It would be the same problem — radio communication is discovered/developed and is initially “in the clear” relative to their technology. Then, as the technology matures, the technology evolves purely in the interest of more efficient communication over longer distances and/or through barriers/obstacles (buildings, terrain, planets, stars).
So it could also be that the communication is not necessarily encrypted (although, concealing comms is rational in many use-cases), it could also be that the way the radio wave carries the information is too advanced for us, even if “they” think it is simplistic.
We know how to modulate an electromagnetic wave to convey information and we can alter that modulation in various ways; however, the bottom line is that encrypted or not, all we know how to do is modulate the waveform (amplitude or frequency) and that’s what we look for: An unnaturally modulated signal to indicate it was manipulated by a (presumably) intelligent source. But perhaps because we don’t know all things undiscovered, we could be getting blasted by signals and not even realize it. Yet.
However, if they were that advanced, were aware of us and had some interest in contacting us, I would think they would realize they needed to match our comms tech to make that contact. But if they aren’t aware of us and are just casting a net and fishing, it’s possible each of our signals are passing by each other completely undetected.
At least, that’s how it would seem to me.
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