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http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=311101&page=1...Any advanced civilization would likely encode and compress its communications to make its systems more efficient, just as your computer compresses files that you send over the Internet, the researchers argue in a report in the American Journal of Physics.
And that, they say, would make those signals indistinguishable from the thermal radiation of stars, and thus impossible to detect because it would seem like part of the universe's background noise.
Even if we did somehow capture such a signal, we wouldn't know it, says physicist Mark Newman of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"If you don't know how to decode it, then you can't make out what's going on," Newman says. [continued]