Stephanie Pappas reports that Edward Snowden, the former contractor who leaked National Security Agency secrets publicly in 2013, is now getting attention for an odd subject - aliens.
In a podcast interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Snowden suggested that alien communications might be encrypted so well that humans trying to eavesdrop on extraterrestrials would have no idea they were hearing anything but noise. There is only a small window in the development of communication in which unencrypted messages are the norm, Snowden said. So if you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there is only one small period in the development of their society where all of their communications will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means, he suggested.
But those holding out hope for contact from extraterrestrials can breathe easy - Humanity current search for alien intelligence does not rely on an intelligible message, say scientists with the SETI Institute, which is dedicated to the search for life in the universe. The real hunt, they say, is for the medium.
We are not looking for the message, said Seth Shostak, director of the SETI Institute Center for SETI Research. We are looking for the signal that tells us that somebody has a transmitter.
To be fair, Snowden was speaking off-the-cuff about encryption in general. It is not likely he expected to be chatting about aliens or has done an in-depth study of how the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has evolved. But data encryption is beside the point, Shostak said. So far, most of the hunt for alien signals has used radio waves, based on the theory that radio is a relatively easy and cheap way to send signals a long way through space.
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