"They found strong indications of a 157-day activity cycle; 121102 seems to flare up for 90 days and then go silent for 67, the team reported in a new study."
Maybe there's nothing to it, but both 157 and 67 are primes.
Maybe there's nothing to it, but both 157 and 67 are primes.
As an example, our day on Earth is roughly 1440 minutes, while on Mars it is 1477 minutes. So on Mars it would be 153 & 65 day intervals.
I deliberately chose the closest comparison to Earth. Had I chosen any other planet in our solar system, the numbers would have been much, much more different (on Jupiter it would be 406 & 173 days, respectively).
EDIT: Also an Earth day is not a constant value. It would have been much shorter 3 billion years ago and this cycle wouldn't be repeating in prime numbers. This theoretical alien intelligence would therefore need to not only be able to recognize life on Earth in the first few hundred million years it existed. It would also need to be able to accurately model the Earths orbit over the next 3 billion years in order to customize the message for when it would be received. All that work to send the message and they still needed to luck out that the 3 billion year journey happened to reach us at nearly the perfect time for our technology to advance enough so we could hear it.