[interesting material about information theory, with which I pretty much
agree, snipped]
>With a radio signal from space, if we do not KNOW the message, we can not be
>sure that there IS a message. It is fundamentally undecidable. The only
>thing we can do is to characterize the strength and complexity of the signal.
>
As I understand it, people who have tried to communicate with other
civilizations -- assuming they exist -- have tried to stack the deck in
favor of the intelligent beings presumably receiving the message: lots of
redundancy, use of numbers believed to represent "universals" like pi, e,
etc. IF another civilization is trying to communicate with us, and IF they
choose a means of stacking the deck in our favor that we can either infer
or stumble on, then we would have a chance of identifying that we are
receiving signals from intelligent signal designers. How big are the if's?
No one knows. I have always been skeptical of SETI. In a book I read of
cryptography years ago (it was probably Fletcher Pratt's "Secret and
Urgent") a story is told in which censors comb through the letters of a
suspected World War II spy. They analyze the text and find nothing.
Finally, after much handling the "period" falls from a sentence and drops
on the table. It turns out to be a piece of microfilm containing sensitive
information. If an intelligent civilization elsewhere makes an unfortunate
choice of encoding or packaging, we might miss their message.
Walter ReMine gives SETI as an example of a scientific search for
intelligent design. If we actually identify signals from another
civilization, than we will be able to say that at least for that
civilization and ours, we can detect the evidence of design. But if we
don't, we can't say anything. Perhaps the message was there -- plain as
day to the senders -- but we just weren't looking in the right places or
with the right algorithms.
Progress report on Walter's book: I'm now about half way through (about
page 255) and I'm going to recommend even more strongly that others read
the book. It seems to me that Wlater has done what I have urged other
creationists to do -- with little success: He has reviewed the literature
of the evolution research community fairly thoroughly, to the point that he
can identify genuine questions, puzzles and incongruities in it. Whether
he has refuted evolution is not mine to judge, but what he has done should
not be dismissed lightly.
Bill Hamilton | Chassis & Vehicle Systems
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
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