(Newswire.net — September 20, 2015) — If we want to hear aliens we need to encrypt the code, former NSA employee Edward Snowden told Neil deGrasse Tyson, during an interview on astrophysicist’s podcast ‘StarTalk’.
Science communicator Tyson, interviewed Snowden via a robot video link called a “beam remote presence system,” which follows the person around so Snowden was able to roll straight into Tyson’s office at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, controlling it from Moscow.
In an interview, Snowden said that the most advanced civilizations use encrypted communications so this might be the reason we can’t “hear” them. Snowden’s reply to Tyson’s question imply two things: First, our civilization is technologically developed enough to track deep space signals, and second, if we can’t detect their presence, that doesn’t mean aliens are not near.
“If you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there’s only one small period in the development of their society when all their communication will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means,” Snowden told Tyson.
“So when we think about everything that we’re hearing through our satellites or everything that they’re hearing from our civilization (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default,” Snowden continued.
What we are picking up so far is a merely a sound of a cosmic microwave background radiation. However, it may be that the noise we receive is actually an encryption, the same as scientists on Earth from another epoch before digital age would react picking up a Wi-Fi signal. But the thing is that that signal has its patterns that disclose it is artificial. However, if we can encrypt this signal to look like it is coming from natural Earth’s magnetic field, there is absolutely no way someone would recognize it is made by other than nature.
“If you look at encrypted communication, if they are properly encrypted, there is no real way to tell that they are encrypted,” Snowden said. “You can’t distinguish a properly encrypted communication from random behavior.”
Snowden is less famous for his views on extraterrestrials and more so for leaking classified documents which revealed the US government’s secret mass surveillance program.