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from the international-calls-take-on-a-new-meaning dept.
Twenty years ago today, an invisible object circling an obscure star in the constellation Pegasus overturned everything astronomers knew about planets around other stars. No, the fallout was even bigger than that. The indirect detection of 51 Pegasi b—the first planet ever found around a star similar to the sun—revealed that they had never really known anything to begin with.
At the time, even the most adventurous minds blithely assumed that our solar system was more or less typical, a template for all the others. 51 Peg b threw a big splash of reality in their faces. The newfound world was bizarre, a Jupiter-size world skimming the surface of its star in a blistering-fast "year" that lasted just 4.2 days. Its existence ran counter to the standard theories of how planets form and evolve. It answered one big question: Yes, other planetary systems really do exist. But it raised a thousand others.
How long before we discover signals from one of those planets, and what will it mean for our civilization?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @10:03PM
Aren't sufficiently encrypted communications indistinguishable from noise?
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:19PM
Encryption done correctly is noise at the interpretation level without the decryption key. There is, at the transmission's EM level, still has a distinguishable carrier wave. However, the carrier becomes less and less prominent due to frequency hopping and no single one is immediately seen.
But that still assumes that EM communication is the only method used. Lets, for example, make it exotic and assume gravity wave based communication. Still not (afaik) FTL and we have not been able to detect any. It does not follow that they do not exist (according to theory), but we have no equipment sensitive enough at our current technological level to detect them, even the ones from collapsing stars.