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A comment on SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy. Parent comment

Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by JoeAltmaier on Thursday September 13, 2018 @04:07PM (#17982043)
How about soliton pulses in a plasma? Isn't interstellar space mostly plasma? Its still EM radiation. Such pulses can survive incredible distances undiminished, and they are point-to-point (not broadcast). So other civilizations might be using this, and we'd never notice unless we got between them and their target by accident

And of course it would be compressed or encrypted or both. So it would be indistinguishable from noise (as mentioned in other replies)

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Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by koolba on Thursday September 13, 2018 @06:01PM (#17983050)
> And of course it would be compressed or encrypted or both. So it would be indistinguishable from noise (as mentioned in other replies)

The perennial optimist in me thinks that that all the work on cracking Tor is finally going to pay off when we can decipher alien's sending each other selfies.

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Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by earenndil on Thursday September 13, 2018 @06:14PM (#17983143)
No reason to assume that they use the same encryption schemes we do.
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Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by King-Aaron on Thursday September 13, 2018 @09:31PM (#17984102)
Well Geoff Goldblum made that assumption, and he was able to scp his files straight into an alien workstation soooooo
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Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by reaperducer on Thursday September 13, 2018 @04:45PM (#17982391)
I put "soliton pulses in a plasma" in a search engine and everything that came back was well above my head.

Does anyone have a link to something that explains this in plain language?

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Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by JoeAltmaier on Friday September 14, 2018 @12:41AM (#17984711)
In a plasma (or certain nonlinear media) a wave will not diminish in size. Its why waves in shallow seas can go for hundreds of miles unchanged, why light pulses in fibre optic cables can cross the ocean bottom without diminishing to noise. These waves are called solitons. It was my EE Professor's (Lonngren) favorite research topic back in my undergraduate days
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Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro... by ethagnawl on Thursday September 13, 2018 @04:26PM (#17982225)
Perhaps, if it gets a sequel, this (or similar) will be revealed as the cause of the "event" in _Seveneves_?
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