Arecibo Observatory Detects Mysterious, Energetic Radio Burst

Re:Arecibo Observatory Detects Mysterious, Energetic Radio B... by a1a on Sunday May 18, 2014 @10:36AM (#7763178)

Possibly. We should keep in mind that our knowledge of number theory is very limited. They are probably not really interested because it's all really obvious to them -- and has been for quite a while. It's quite amusing to think about how they might laugh at our encryption systems relying on simple discrete logarithm-problems etc. Not unlike we laugh at Julius Ceasar for relying on simple substitution.

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Re:Arecibo Observatory Detects Mysterious, Energetic Radio B... by JoeAltmaier on Sunday May 18, 2014 @10:45AM (#7763202)

Julius Caesar didn't have number theory nor computers so his cypher was actually pretty sound.

We have a pretty good idea about the limits of encryption. I doubt advanced aliens would have much to laugh about our current state of our encryption systems.

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Re:Arecibo Observatory Detects Mysterious, Energetic Radio B... by a1a on Sunday May 18, 2014 @10:51AM (#7763219)

Considering that most people couldn't even read regular text back then it was definitely pretty sound, but that's not really my point.

We do? Got any references for that? Take RSA -- it's not even proven that breaking it is equivalent with integer factorization. Even if it was, there are no proof that integer factorization needs to be time consuming at all, there might very well exist an algorithm with polynomial complexity.

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Re:Arecibo Observatory Detects Mysterious, Energetic Radio B... by 0x0 on Sunday May 18, 2014 @07:26PM (#7764862)

Do you really think that the last 30-40 years of crypto research represents the best we can have, given timespans of millions of years?

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