Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2016) 131: 26
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2016-16026-6

Regular Article

Non-random structures in universal compression and the Fermi paradox

¹ Russian-Armenian (Slavonic) University, Emin Street 123, 0051, Yerevan, Armenia
² Yerevan Physics Institute, Alikhanian Brothers Street 2, 0036, Yerevan, Armenia

^* e-mail: gurzadyana@gmail.com

Received: 20 November 2015
Accepted: 19 December 2015
Published online: 2 February 2016

Abstract

We study the hypothesis of information panspermia assigned recently among possible solutions of the Fermi paradox (“where are the aliens?”). It suggests that the expenses of alien signaling can be significantly reduced, if their messages contained compressed information. To this end we consider universal compression and decoding mechanisms (e.g. the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm) that can reveal non-random structures in compressed bit strings. The efficiency of the Kolmogorov stochasticity parameter for detection of non-randomness is illustrated, along with the Zipf’s law. The universality of these methods, i.e. independence from data details, can be principal in searching for intelligent messages.