On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 8:10 AM, David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote:
A thought just occurred to me. Maybe the fact that we have not discovered > radio signals from any of these aliens is a strong suggestion that there is > an alternate superior method of communication that we will discover within > the next few years, assuming that we progress as others have. This is all > the more reason for us to adequately fund new unknown energy sources. > > Dave > I like that thought. To further flesh out the idea about the novel form of EM radiation communication, imagine a GIF image of the Mona Lisa. It looks just like any other such image, but some of the pixels have a slightly different color. The modification is subtle enough that the human eye won't be able to see the difference. And if the encoding is done very cleverly, even very good computer algorithms won't be able to pick it out. But if you have the public key, you can run the image through decompression software and get a message out. The encoding scheme could involve the colors in the image as they relate to other colors, for example. Now imagine doing this with radio communication across a spectrum. The "image" in this case is whatever is passing through the transceiver at that moment. Since we're using a lot of redundancy in the encoding of the information, we can afford to make the modifications to the incoming signal very slight. You might be able to get away with such a scheme with every little power consumed in relaying the modified signal -- I'm just guessing here, but perhaps it could be more energy efficient to transmit information this way. And there could be different "channels" -- low frequencies together with their harmonics, which you could use for things like error correction. This seems like something that might already be possible. I wonder if militaries already have something like it. The quantum entanglement idea is an interesting one. Eric
