[teraflop]

The article suggests it could be a spinning neutron star, which is what a pulsar is. But a pulsar produces an extremely regular sequence of pulses. (Well, actually it emits a continuous beam of radio waves, but its rotation causes the beam to point towards any given observer at regular intervals.)

This article describes a source that seems to start and stop at regular intervals of several days (much longer than any known pulsar's rotational period) but within the active intervals, the bursts appear to be random. That suggests a more complex mechanism is at work.

[rootbear]

I just throw some gasoline on the "It must be Aliens!" theory (to which I do not subscribe!) and point out that heavily compressed data looks random...

[menybuvico]

As does encrypted data.

[elwell]

Compression is just a bad encryption algorithm. Encryption is just a bad compression algorithm.

[beamatronic]

That’s why somebody needs to send out a sequence of prime numbers

[lumost]

What protocol do you use to represent the sequence? Bytes, Morse, Amplitude modulation, frequency modulation? All of these combinations may appear random to one without the right codec.

[0-_-0]

1 is 1 blip, 2 is 2 blips, etc. just like in the movie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

[beamatronic]

I wonder if this could be accomplished with a train of satellites. All in the same orbit. Just spaced out like this:

xx xxx xxxxx xxxxxxx

So they just go around and around, including the light, from the point of view of a far away perspective

[cgriswald]

You would need to set up the satellites in such a way that anyone receiving your message is viewing their orbits edge on. Your satellites would also have to be extremely large and fairly close to your host star. And there’d have to be no dust between your star and the receiver.

As a method to communicate with people you don’t know exist, it’s not very good because chances are they won’t be viewing your satellites edge on. For people you know are there, it’s needlessly complicated and expensive.

If you’re going to go to the trouble, you’d be better off making a Dyson swarm and cloaking your star completely. You’d get energy back and be just as detectable for a civilization that thought to compare visible and IR sources (which some Earth scientists have done, with negative results).

[namarie]

It would take 500 million years to get there, if the signal was strong enough in the first place.

[anoniuyiu33412]

Maybe is encrypted because we are not the intended receiver.