I am glad that someone finally wrote this article. The logic that they use is the same argument that I have used for years as to why we have never captured a radio signal of extraterrestrial origin.
I have always argued that our technology would likely not recognize any signal that we might intercept much like the very first radio could not recognize a High Definition TV transmission. We could be bathed in signals from outer space but we don't have the technology to recognize them. Of course, if another race wanted to be found they might transmit a radio signal, or perhaps it would be like Dr. Brin's story "The Crystal Spheres". Perhaps we won't recognize or understand a signal until we have developed sufficiently advanced technology. Just some musings on a wet and cold December night :-) Gary Is It Time to Scrap SETI? Researchers Claim Listening For Signals From ET Is Futile Excerpts from the article..... During the few decades that scientists have searched systematically for life elsewhere in the universe there has been some hope that electromagnetic "leakage" from communications systems on other planets - such as television broadcasts - might be detectable from Earth. If that's the case, then radio telescopes sweeping the sky might pick up those signals, giving us a window onto other worlds, and finally answering that increasingly overworked question, "Are we alone?" Don't count on it, say researchers from three institutions. Any advanced civilization would likely encode and compress their communications to make their systems more efficient, just as your computer compresses files that you send over the Internet, the researchers argue in a report in a recent issue of the "American Journal of Physics." A computer can't show a picture that has been compressed by another computer unless it knows how to decompress it, and likewise we couldn't decode a television signal that had been compressed unless we already knew the code. And, Newman and his colleagues argue, any advanced civilization which has used wireless communications for even a few decades would surely have figured out that it makes sense to encode. Complete article... http://tinyurl.com/46r27 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
