Edward Snowden: Advanced Encryption May Stop Us Communicating With Aliens
Snowden’s theory was, sadly, that aliens would probably have super-sophisticated encryption on their communications to protect themselves, and that this would render it impossible for humans to be able to unscramble it. Some are not quite expected, though, such as one he revealed during a chat with Neil deGrasse Tyson on his StarTalk podcast.
If that’s the case, Snowden believes encrypted radio signals between either civilization are lost in space. 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…
The famous USA government whistleblower was physically present in Moscow, while a telepresence robot under his full remote control was transmitting his image and voice live via a video link all the way across the ocean to North America.
“You’re assuming they have the same security issues we have on Earth”, Tyson said joking of Snowden’s flight from the United States for stealing thousands of classified documents and handing them over to journalists in a Hong Kong hotel room. Since then, he is one the most wanted men in USA , charged with espionage and theft and resides in Russian Federation , after he requested asylum.
Tyson asked Snowden if a highly intelligent alien civilisation might be communicating with encrypted messages.
Snowden says properly encrypted communication would be hard to distinguish from random behavior.
In other words, it’s actually totally possible that if there were aliens and sent signals to Earth, their messages would be so well encrypted they’d be totally lost in the ether. Snowden says that it’s likely any civilization will only have open communications for some time; afterwards, evolution will apparently end up introducing encryption.
In response, deGrasse Tyson pointed out that encryption would only be a problem for an extraterrestrial society if you assume “they have the same security problems as us”. The way he sees it, there’s a very short window for communication to happen, and that’s when the development of a society is sending out messages “via the most primitive and most unprotected means”. To that, Snowden admits alien entities could be “politically a little bit more enlightened” than us humans.