This last Friday, whistleblower Edward Snowden sat for an interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Since he's currently in Russia, where he sought asylum after having been accused of treason for disclosing classified info from the US National Security Agency, Snowden had to resolve to chatting with Tyson via robotic telepresence.

The two talked about Isaac Newton, education and learning, knowledge and even chemistry. It took them a while, but they eventually got around to discussing information security.

The US National Security Agency and the US Central Intelligence Agency got their fair share of attention, as did issues like an individual's right to privacy. Then the conversation all of a sudden took an unexpected turn, and Edward Snowden and Neil deGrasse Tyson found themselves conversing about alien civilizations in the distant universe.

Their little chat on extraterrestrial beings on foreign planets made it on SoundCloud just the other day and is available below. To get to the part about aliens, fast forward to about 30 minutes in.

Aliens could be trying to talk to us

If aliens exist, then it could be that they are sending us messages and trying to communicate with us. If they are an advanced civilization, however, their messages are probably encrypted for safety reasons, and so we are pretty much clueless when it comes to deciphering them.

In fact, it's safe to say that we're not even picking up on these messages, seeing as, being encrypted, they would seem to us no more and no less than random noise in the universe.

“If there are indeed aliens out there, all of their communications are encrypted by default,” Snowden told Tyson when asked how come we haven't made contact with aliens just yet.

“So what we're hearing - which is actually an alien television show or a phone call or a message between their planet and their own GPS constellation, whatever it happens to be - is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation,” he added.

To Snowden, the only way we could pick up on alien messages would be if the civilization sending them were still primitive and so wouldn't know to encrypt the signals they sent.

True, this scenario that Edward Snowden described to Neil deGrasse Tyson in their Star Talk interview is a bit far-fetched, but it's not entirely implausible. Even the astrophysicist seems to think it could happen.