Hello, Hello, Earth?

If ET ever phones home, chances are Earthlings wouldn't recognize the call as anything other than random noise or a star.
New research shows that highly efficient electromagnetic transmissions from our neighbors in space would resemble the thermal radiation emitted by stars.
University of Michigan physicist Mark Newman, along with biologist Michael Lachmann and computer scientist Cristopher Moore, have extended the pioneering 1940s research of Claude Shannon to electromagnetic transmissions in a paper published last month in the American Journal of Physics called, "The Physical Limits of Communication, or Why any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise." Lachmann is at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany; Moore is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.