Another submission[1] on hn’s front page talks about whale songs being more structured than we thought.
If we cannot understand or even perceive information in messages from a species from the same planet, then I’d guess we’re incapable of finding (noticing) non earth signals.
Sure, an interstellar message could be tuned for easy recognition, but there are plenty of regular patterns in the observable universe already.
No, we only happened to detect a language; still, we thought it’s simpler than it actually is, even though we are on the same planet and carbon based, with similar life spans, sizes, etc.
I wouldn’t say we can reliably detect languages, I’m sure there are many more communications between earth species that we’re still not seeing, not noticing or otherwise misclassifying.
All language is going to be governed by information theory though, so I would think that if we have trouble detecting language then either a) we’re not looking very hard, or b) the comms are so efficient it’s approaching indistinguishable from white noise.
Later category seems unlikely with animals, but I could see it being the case for hive minds leveraging emergent properties of simple behaviors like in bee dancing or ant pheromones
Maybe even both a&b can happen at once. The article also mentions Fermi’s paradox and “the great filter”, a proposed solution. There are more[1], notably: “our search methodologies are flawed and we are not searching for the correct indicators”.
If we cannot understand or even perceive information in messages from a species from the same planet, then I’d guess we’re incapable of finding (noticing) non earth signals.
Sure, an interstellar message could be tuned for easy recognition, but there are plenty of regular patterns in the observable universe already.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40322267