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our signal buried in noise
Tuesday, July 16 2002
I was in Barnes and Noble again this afternoon, again skimming through Stephen "Mathematica" Wolfram's audacious new tome A New Kind of Science, this time reading a section about the radio-frequency search for intelligent life. Wolfram makes an interesting point here. Though present scans of space for the signals of intelligent life seek to find carrier frequencies containing obvious embedded information, our own technology is rapidly advancing beyond the need for detectable carrier frequencies. Not only that, but with the increasing tendency in technology to digitize, encrypt, and compress data, identifiable patterns are gradually being eliminated from our planet's intelligent radio spectrum output. After a few centuries of technologic progress (if we live that long), it's doubtful our radio communications will sound like anything but white noise. The ongoing golden age of radio, during which our transmissions contain patterns detectable by simple analogue equipment, may only last 150 years, an easily-missed blink in humankind's existence, let alone the existence of life on Earth. From the distance of space, a hyper-intelligent society's radio output is probably indistinguishable from the television snow we find on empty channels. This leads to a sobering thought: progress in technology leads to its own interplanetary isolation because our informational exchanges become so complicated that they pass for noise. At this point in the argument, Wolfram tries to save us from our isolation in space with his "new science" of cellular automata, but I am unconvinced. I was left wondering if perhaps ultimate knowledge and technological advancement is a bad thing because it is tantamount to a state of maximum entropy. Perhaps the more we figure out about how the universe operates, the less sense "our message" makes (occasional backslides to Medieval worldviews not withstanding). The end result of consciousness is absolute entropy, which (of course) is just a partial case of what the Second Law of Thermodynamics has been saying all along.
Mind you, this idea has occurred to me before in a less pessimistic context. I realized, for example, that the magnetic domains of high-capacity hard drives seem like absolute chaos precisely when they contain the most amount of information, and the thin grey line that keeps information from being noise is someone's ability to decode and use it. This leads, by the way, into a perfect anti-Microsoft rant, wherein I take the company to task for changing their file formats with each software "upgrade" while never publishing their format specifications, thereby keeping our data under continual threat of becoming noise. The difference between signal and noise should never be left in the hands of one corporation.
This is the reason you should always save your important data in open, documented formats: HTML, SWF, XML, RTF, TEXT, JPEG, GIF, MP3, etc. Lobby your employer and government to do the same.
On a somewhat related note, I've completely switched my web browsing and email from Internet Explorer/Outlook to the open source Mozilla. Never again will I have to worry about my email being locked away in a proprietary Microsoft format. Furthermore, the spam filters in Mozilla seem smarter than they do in Outlook. Without difficulty I can now search for an IFRAME tag embedded in my incoming email and, if that sucker is there, automatically delete the message. No entity has ever sent me an email containing an embedded IFRAME who hasn't been either a spammer or a virus. At some point I'd like a filter that allows me to automatically delete all HTML-containing email coming from people not on a special "white list." I hate my mail looking like web pages, but I'm willing to tolerate it from trusted friends.
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