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Encryption might be the reason why we haven't heard from aliens
- SagelyGuru 11y agoOr it might be that advanced civilisations use more advanced means of communication. In such a vast universe, clearly superluminal communication speeds, should they be attainable, would be used. Maybe we just need to "tune in" properly.
- rimantas 11y agoOr maybe aliens are still in the stone age.
- elorant 11y agoOr in the same technological level that we are and they just didn't had the chance or the means to find us yet.
- teambob 11y agoOr they can only communicate through carefully modulated gastric emissions. Then discovered fire. https://youtu.be/Do-wDPoC6GM?t=2m3s https://youtu.be/Do-wDPoC6GM?t=2m3s
- tiatia 11y agoThis is possible but extremely unlikely, hence an unscientific assumption. You always assume the likely. That is is more likely that you are in the middle. You could argue that ONE of the steps to intelligent life is unlikely, incredible more unlikely as we assume. But the questions remains: Why are they not here? I am afraid we may not like the answer, whatever it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox Related statistics: Doomsday argument German Tank Problem Capture Recapture
- rimantas 11y agoThe answer is obvious to me: the chances of life are very small. The universe is very big (that's some underestimation). So it is likely, that we are not alone in the universe, but we may be so far apart in terms of space and time that there will be no contact ever. Just take a look how far our signals have travelled since we began transmitting — they only covered a small part of our own galaxy.
- ricardolopes 11y agoOr both. Yes, I don't believe higher civilisations use the same means of communication we use today, just as we don't use the same as we did some centuries ago.
- morsch 11y agoThat might be true if you only consider technologically facilitated means of communication, otherwise simple direct speech probably still makes up the largest part of it, just like it did some centuries ago. Though, strangely enough, only when you count it from the performative side. That is I bet overall more words are spoken each day than written down (or otherwise technically transmitted). On the receiving end, ie. hearing/reading, due to the "broadcast" nature of newspaper, radio, TV and the internet, maybe more communication is technologically facilitated than not. That is more words are read or listened to than heard directly from another person. I wonder if and when that happened.
- analog31 11y agoGuided waves would also be possible. I wonder what we'd think of alien civilizations, if we'd discovered fiber optics before radio.
- dogma1138 11y agoYou mean like we did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone
- bhaak 11y agoThis is a plausible hypothesis. I don't know if somebody else has already proposed this as a solution to the Fermi paradox. But it doesn't even need to be encrypted communication. Highly compressed communication is also indistinguishable from random noise. Of course, only under the assumption, that aliens are using the same technology as we are.
- VLM 11y agoHollywood IT proposes that people who know nothing about computers all "know" that every computer thing that has ever been invented is trivially interoperable with every other computer thing that has ever been invented on a fast hollywood movie timescale given a sufficiently advanced computer mage to recite some incantations and be treated as socially inferior if its a plot requirement. I think everyone here is experienced enough to laugh at that. There is an EXTREMELY close analogy in EE / telecom land where people with no domain specific knowledge think all radio hardware, modulation methods, protocols, are all trivially interoperable with each other. Sure... go ahead and try to listen to trunked public service comms using a spark gap era coherer detector, good luck with that. Or try to listen to 60s era SSB voice using 30s era AM receiver. Higher order PSK/QAM is indistinguishable from white noise on a non-phase oriented receiver. This is all before we get into weirdness like trivial line coding, think of old T-1 circuits and B8ZS "scrambling" to get around the clock sync limitations of AMI line coding. Try to use an aircraft NDB receiver on GPS satellites or vice versa in order to navigate. Or connect an accurate clock built to sync to WWVB to the GPS constellation instead, or again vice versa. Telecom, being usually run at the limit of hardware when it was new, is even less interoperable than "computers in general". Given poor interoperation pragmatic results on our own planet, the odds of communicating with space aliens is basically zero, even the odds of detecting are almost zero.
- tomphoolery 11y agoI'll just take it in my ready room.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago> every computer thing that has ever been invented is trivially interoperable with every other computer thing that has ever been invented Isn't this what Perl is for? To my eyes it fits the incantations part of the description as well.
- jgrahamc 11y agoAssuming that traffic analysis is useless in this case, and there's no unencrypted metadata.
- radmuzom 11y agoIs there any point of this article? (serious question) Or perhaps this was just some light-hearted conversation which has been reported as "news" because Snowden was involved. I can as well say that we have not yet heard from the aliens because we are yet to discover the Mass Relays and the Citadel (apologies to those who have not played the Mass Effect series of video games and this statement makes no sense).
- morsch 11y agoI like the thought, but encryption is not enough to hide it from us, it'd require steganography. If all communication itself on Earth were encrypted, how much of a visible signal would we still emit? You wouldn't be able to decypher the communication, but you'd still see that something is happening that's requires a structuring intelligence behind it. Unless they pay special attention to not only encrypting their communication but masking it as a natural phenomenon, steganographically. If I shout an encoded message to you in a restaurant, the other people won't know that I told you to order the creme brulee, but they will know that I told you something. I'd have to discreetly tap my plate in order to mask it. And even aside from that, you'd need to mask all other emissions, even those not designed to facilitate communication. On earth, you don't have to intercept and decrypt a rocket launch command, you can tell by the infrared (or whatever) emissions on your spy satellite.
- kabouseng 11y agoNot so much steganography, but spread spectrum communications does achieve the effect you are looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
- Mithaldu 11y agoThis seems nonsensical to me. Just like internet protocols, any radio transmission is built on a layer of protocols that envelope the actual data being transmitted. Encryption is applied on the data layers not to hide that something is being transmitted, but what is being transmitted. However scientists aren't even trying to detect signals with any sort of data in it, but merely radio emissions that look like they might come from something with an intellect. If we haven't found anything like that yet, and encryption is supposed to be the reason, then that means that encryption would have to be applied at the most basic protocol layer in such a way that even the physical properties of the emission look like the universe's background radiation. Is there currently human technology that does anything similar to this?
- jjoe 11y agoWhat if it's such advanced protocol layering and encryption that those alien signals appear to us to be "cosmic noise"? Surely an advanced civilization would have advanced communication capabilities we haven't even considered.
- kabouseng 11y agoSuch as spread spectrum techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
- geomark 11y agoYeah, I was gonna say. In addition to making it hard to detect it also makes the channel robust to some kinds of noise and fading. See Chirp Spread Spectrum for example http://nanotron.com/EN/CO_techn-css.php http://nanotron.com/EN/CO_techn-css.php
- kanzure 11y ago> What if it's such advanced protocol layering and encryption that those alien signals appear to us to be "cosmic noise"? Another interesting way to speculate is the "under our nose" concept, which is the concept that the existing distribution of stars and galaxies, as well as the recorded background noise, might be the byproduct of alien intervention. Binary star systems are a popular speculative example of "starivore" civilizations that consume entire stars that have been moved into the alien civilization's own star system, and perhaps some combination of multiple stars in a single system are not "naturally" occurring in the absence of alien influence. To an unsuspecting observer, some forms of distant astronomical-scale engineering could be mistakenly interpreted as natural astrophysics that the observers then incorporate into their standard models when refactoring to account for all of the observed data... Usually the simple explanations are correct, but when your models require really insane updates to handle the observed data, perhaps there are other explanations? At the same time though, what recourse would we have if 99% of the visible universe was already astro-engineered?
- Tepix 11y agoAnother reason is that unless they want to communicate with other species, they'd use only the minimal signal strength that is required for the signal to reach its destination, not a signal strength that is several orders of magnitude higher. That and our limited brain capacity, which prevents us from recognizing and/or understanding a message from an advanced alien civilization.
- nabla9 11y agoDon't even have to be encrypted. Just compressing the data makes it hard to separate from noise. Turbo Codes and LDPCs used to transmit data over noisy channels (like NASA uses in deep space satellite communications or UMTS and LTE networks) look just like noise. I don't think Seti or astronomers have ever tried to analyze noise for some alien codec that might be transmitting.
- jerf 11y ago"I don't think Seti or astronomers have ever tried to analyze noise for some alien codec that might be transmitting." They can't. "It looks like noise" isn't a metaphor, it's a mathematical truth... it is indistinguishable from noise. This is, IMHO, another one of those cases where people like to do a bit of social signaling with their fashionable misanthropism, but we actually know quite a bit about this problem. The optimal solution for using the electromagnetic spectrum for signaling, even with our current level of technology, is to use it in such a way that it looks like noise due to compression and due to not using any more power than necessary, in any direction other than the necessary one. Of course aliens do not sit there using four or five (if not six) orders of magnitude more power than necessary by broadcasting in all directions instead of using a directional beam, and of course they do not sit there and transmit in an uncompressed format that is an obvious signal, so of course we don't see their transmissions. It would be bizarre if it were otherwise. We have no reason to believe that aliens, who live in the same universe as us and are subject to the same engineering constraints as us, would be particularly prone to missing this incredibly obvious optimization. (Math may be the one true cross-universe universal, but within this universe engineering is pretty universal too.)
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoProblem - humans have been doing all of the above for decades, occasionally as a deliberate attempt to communicate, but mostly by accident. So I can't see how your comment has any basis in fact. You're only going to compress a data channel if you're in a hurry. When a message is going to take decades or centuries to get somewhere, you're more likely to keep the encoding as simple as possible to increase the chances of reception. Besides that, I can't imagine radio being used for interstellar communication at all. It's fine for "Is anyone there?" but unless your aliens live at geological rather than biological rates, it's far too slow for almost anything else.
- nbush 11y agoAnyone remotely interested in this idea should check out Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice [1], which is an entire (short) novel about how and why an extraterrestrial message would be encrypted. It's worth mentioning how why turns out to be the most compelling question. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
- sn41 11y agoA brilliant book which made me think that this is how science is really done. One of the questions is whether there is a message at all. How this message is first suspected (due to non-pseudorandom behaviour of a fraudulent table of random numbers) itself is a fresh idea. I found the various hypotheses in this book itself to be a very nice. IIRC, there is also an "opera singer" hypothesis that it is not the content of the message which matters, but its frequency.
- berntb 11y agoWhat surprises me is that I've never really seen Malthus argued as a reason as a cause for implosions of civilizations and hence the Fermi paradox? (Think Moties, etc.) Humans might be lucky, since (so far) we tend to get fewer children when we get richer. I assume this is probably just too politically sensitive to elaborate upon? (I'm Hellbanned, but this would be a small step from being removed anyway. :-) )
- tired_man 11y agoJust because Snowden says something does not make it newsworthy. It's more likely that we and the aliens wouldn't be using the same technology.
- Bud 11y agoKind of a facile statement. Radio waves are radio waves. The spectrum is the spectrum. Any intelligent aliens are very likely to be using the electromagnetic spectrum for wireless communications. They might use it in somewhat different ways, but the technology is still essentially the same.
- marcosdumay 11y agoFor intraplanetary communication, yes, I'd agree. But those signals shouldn't be strong enough for us to detect (otherwise, what a wasteful species). Now, for interplanetary signals, radio does not look that interesting. There's the problem that it, like everything else, is jut too damn slow. So just the assumption that long distance communication is common is already iffy. Then, radio is either too hard to manage, or has a too long wavelength. Yes, some hyper intelligence out there may think differently, but from our current understanding, it looks way more likely that such hyper intelligence will still find it easier to send matter, neutrinos, or whatever it is that composes most of the Universe.
- norea-armozel 11y ago>For intraplanetary communication, yes, I'd agree. But those signals shouldn't be strong enough for us to detect (otherwise, what a wasteful species). Many of our radio signals are detectable from terrestrial sources such as radio and air TV stations. Even Ham radio signals throw out enough power for their signals to be easily detected beyond our solar system.
- cgriswald 11y agoEh, not really "easily." If a comparable civilization was located around Alpha Centauri, we would have to focus the equivalent of an Arecibo radio telescope at it for many months, maybe a year, to detect its presence. That's "easy" in the sense that we could do it, but it's also very expensive to do and we won't do it without having at least some idea that a civilization exists there already. The farther out we go from Earth, the harder it is, and it gets impossible (in the sense that we lack the resources to do it) very quickly with increasing distance. For interplanetary communication, tight beams would make way more sense than broadcast. And unless one of those beams is directed at us, we aren't likely to intercept it. This is really what SETI is looking for because it's the easiest thing to look for.
- current_call 11y agoIf it doesn't work the first time, try it again? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10246610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10246610
- gus_massa 11y agoFrom the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > Are reposts ok? > If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. > Please don't delete and repost the same story, though. Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges.
- d_theorist 11y agoThis doesn't really make sense to me. Even if it was encrypted, you would still be able to detect a powerful, directed radio signal wouldn't you?
- d_theorist 11y agoA slightly-off-topic thought related to the Fermi question. What actually is the point of communicating at sub-luminal speed between star systems or galaxies, other than CETI projects? The delay between transmissions would make such communication impractical for day-to-day purposes. Perhaps this is one possible explanation for the apparent lack of such signals. Either the aliens don't bother much with communicating at galactic scales, or they have developed a system of doing so at super-luminal speeds that eludes our current understanding of physics. If this is correct then you would expect most artificial radio signals to be easy to detect and decipher, because the only plausible use for such signals is long-term communication with alien civilisations. And you might also not expect to find many of them.
- talmand 11y agoSeems logical to me that a civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would have solved the problem of the extremely slow radio wave for interstellar communication. I would think we shouldn't be limiting such possible civilizations with the limitations we currently face.
- mcguire 11y agoYears ago, I attended a talk from a professor about a networking system using the Lego blocks metaphor. In his examples, he had a block labelled "encryption" and another labelled "compression" and talked about how you could arbitrarily compose the blocks in the system. To my eternal regret, I didn't call him on the fact that those two blocks are not arbitrarily composable. Both encryption and compression make the resulting data look random (and you can't compress encrypted data), and compression seems to be a much more likely candidate. P.S. And spread-spectrum transmissions, as someone else mentioned.