David Kipping

Something that can explain anything can avoid anything, so it's almost unfalsifiable.

and could always just be to some degree as you said we have this very limited knowledge of the infinite possibilities of physical law and we're probably only scratching the surface each time and we've seen it so often in history we may just be detecting some new phenomena

That's one of the best sales pitches to do technosignature work, is that we always have that as our fallback.

We're going to look for alien signatures.

If we fail, we're going to discover some awesome new physics along the way.

And so

even any kind of signature that we detect is always going to be interesting.

And so that compels us to have not only the question of looking for life in the universe, but it gives us a strong scientific grounding as to why this sort of research should be funded and should be executed, because it always pushes the frontiers of knowledge.

Yeah, information is a really useful way to frame what we're looking for though, because then you're divorced from making assumptions about even a civilization necessarily or anything like that.

So any kind of information-rich signature, indeed, you can take things like the light curve from Boyajian star and ask, what is the minimum number of free parameters or the minimum information content that must be encoded within this light curve?

And

The hope is that maybe from, you know, a good example would be from a radio signature, you detect something that has, you know, a thousand megabytes of parameters essentially contained within it.

That's pretty clearly at that point, not the product of a natural process, but it's any natural process that we could possibly imagine with our current understanding of the universe.

And so thinking, even if we can't decode, which actually I'm skeptical we'd be able to ever decode it in our lifetimes, it would probably take decades to fully

ever figure out what they're trying to tell us.

But if there was a message there, we could at least know that there is high information content and there is complexity and that this is an attempt at communication and information transfer and leave it to our subsequent generations to figure out what exactly it is they're trying to say.

Yeah.

I can imagine something like a prime number sequence or a mathematical sequence like the Fibonacci series, something being broadcast as- Mathematically provable that this is not a physical phenomenon.

Right.

I mean, yeah, prime numbers is a pretty good case because there's no natural phenomena that produces prime number sequences.