David Kipping

It seems to be a purely an abstract mathematical concept as far as I'm aware.

And so if we detected a series of radio blips

that were following that sequence, it would be pretty clear to me, or it could even be Carl Sagan suggested that π could be encoded in that, or you might use the hydrogen line but multiplied by π, like some very specific frequency of the universe, like a hydrogen line, but multiply it by an abstract mathematical constant that would imply strongly that there was someone behind the scenes operating that.

Sorry, stored in which phenomena though?

In that case, I'm thinking of a radio wave.

But the information, I mean, we kind of toyed with this idea in a video I did about hypothetical civilization on my channel.

But one kind of fun way, I do want to bring this conversation towards time a little bit and thinking about not just looking for life and intelligence around us right now, but looking into the past and even into the future to some degree or communicating with the future.

And so we had this fun experiment of imagining a civilization that was born at the beginning of the history of the galaxy and being the first and what it would be like for them.

And they were desperately searching for evidence of life, but couldn't find it.

And so they decided to try and leave something behind for future civilizations to discover, to tell them about themselves.

But of course, a radio signature is not gonna work there because it has to have a power source and that's a piece of machinery.

It's gonna eventually break down.

It's gonna be hard to maintain that.

for billions of years timescale.

And so you wanted something that was kind of passive, that doesn't require an energy source, but can somehow transmit information, which is hard to think about something that satisfies those criteria.

But there was a proposal by one of my colleagues, Luke Arnold,

which inspired a lot of us in technosignatures.

And he suggested that you could build artificial transitors.

So you could build sheets of material that transit in front of the star.

Maybe one thin sheet passes across first, then two, then three, then five, then seven.