14 DAY TRIAL // Discovering artifacts left behind by intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations is a nearly-impossible task. While he does not doubt that aliens exist, British physicist Stephen Wolfram says identifying even some of their signals is close to impossible due to a variety of issues.
The first and most important it that these civilizations would most likely eliminate all patterns from communications, similar to how we use our current technology to compress signals even more.
Without a repeating signals to go on, or even the smallest pattern, it's nearly impossible to separate artificially-generated radio signals, from example, from the pool of signals the Cosmos generates.
There are incalculable numbers of radio sources out there, and each of them produce random noises. If we were to detect our own signals from space, we would not be able to say that they were indeed produced here. Rather, they would seem random.
At the same time, it stands to reason that an advanced civilization would not be too intent of being very obvious in space. What this implies is that any artifacts it may have produced would resemble a normal cosmic object, and would not immediately stand out as something artificial in nature.
With our level of development, distinguishing a train from a bush is very simple, because the differences are monumental. But most of them are based on the fact that we are not extremely advanced from a technological perspective.
If aliens reach a level of technology that allows them full access to space, then they would also have the necessary technology to achieve a high degree of complexity in whatever they build. This includes the ability to mimic naturally-occurring systems.
We find it easy to distinguish between natural and synthetic objects “because our technological artifacts are primitive. As they become more complex – with computer processors enabling them to make a moment-by-moment decisions – they will begin to look just as complex as trees and people and stars,” the expert says.
However, testing such assumptions is extremely difficult. There is a great deal of uncertainty related to whether they are true or not in the first place, and we have no frame of reference against which to test our potential findings.
But situations such as this one have been commonplace throughout scientific history, and somehow we always prevails. It remains to be seen whether discovering alien life is another of these instances, Daily Galaxy reports.