[bawana]

If aliens did exist, they would probably compress their communications. And they might use a fault tolerant infrastructure like TCP/IP. In either scenario, real communications would not be periodic but closer to random noise. Has anyone performed a Zipf plot or calculated shannon entropy of non-periodic radio signals?

[Supermancho]

TCP over radio? Direct communication by is the simplest implementation. Encoding a signal further seems counter intuitive, as opposed to a short repeating beacon that serves initial groundwork for a handshake. If the signal is supposed to cross vast interruptible distance, the bodies interrupting a continuous straightforward signal would appear periodic to the receiver.

[Santosh83]

Not if they wanted to specifically send out a beacon to other aliens.

[dylan604]

Exactly. If you wanted to get someone's attention, you make your signal something that would standout from all of the background noise. If someone send a RCPT signal back, then you could consider sending a more complicated signal.

[koheripbal]

Why would an advanced intelligence advertise its location?

It is a high-risk low-reward strategy.

[EamonnMR]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_dangerou...

[anoniuyiu33412]

Maybe the transmitter is located far away from their civilization's main location.

It should be a stronghold, just for comms, fully expendable, probably with no information in any local hard/soft/wetware about where they actually reside.

If we answer, we would be probably be talking to "a phone tapped to another phone"

[cat199]

> closer to random noise

in the data stream, sure, but the underlying data framing would probably still have very strong patterns as compared to true noise

[DiogenesKynikos]

What if they use error coding?

My pet theory for a while has been that they use point-to-point communications (lasers), rather than wasteful omnidirectional radio waves, so that you have to get very lucky in order to eavesdrop on them.