Re: [asa] Contact with Alien Civilizations

> The Carl Sagan (first contact) idea (often cited by Dembski) is a sequence
> of prime numbers. That's not THAT intelligent, of course, but it would be
> world headline news if such a signal were received from outer space.

This also illustrates a major difficulty of SETI. Most of our signals
are too complex for easy detection of pattern. Unless they are
deliberately sending a simple message so as to be readily detected,
it's unlikely to be detectable as non-noise. (Of course, probably the
vast majority of electronic signaling on earth shows little sign of
intelligence even when processed with knowledge of the transmission
method). It's far from evident that an intelligent designer of the
sort envisioned by ID should be expected to encode something
analytically similar to a sequence of primes in DNA.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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