British physicist Stephen Wolfram believes extraterrestrial intelligent life is inevitable, but with a caveat. Although intelligent life is inevitable, we will never find it. Wolfram says that in order to compress more and more information into our communication signals – be they mobile phone conversations or computers – we remove all redundancy or pattern. If anything in a signal repeats, then it can be deleted. But this process of removing any pattern from a signal makes the signal look more and more random – in fact, pretty much like the random radio “noise” that rains down on Earth coming from stars and interstellar gas clouds.
According to Wolfram, if someone beamed our own 21st-century communication signals at us from space we would be hard pressed to determine whether they were artificial or natural. So what chance do we have of distinguishing an ET communication from the general background radio static of the cosmos?
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