Hi All

Shannon deomonstrated that a perfectly encoded signal is indistinguishable from noise if you can't translate it. So would SETI miss optimised signals because they are just like thermal noise from stars?

Here's a news-bite to that effect... U Michigan SETI research

Makes sense. I think current SETI is really only meaningful if some super-civilisation imagines a long-term beacon is worth operating - and considering the recent work on message probes vs beacons that's a dubious option. Advanced solar-sails could launch message probes at 0.01 c and a series of automated probe factories could easily cover the whole galaxy with the things over a few billennia - a fraction of the assumed life-time of a super-civilisation. We're better off searching the asteroid belt and similar space-debris for messagers than we are scanning the skies for excruciatingly encrypted message-bursts between people who aren't even talking to us.

Adam