Excellent. Let me contribute the abstract for your paper: Imagine two unseen cars in a race are moving towards you. You recognise the unmistakeable sound of a Porsche, even when it's doppler-shifted. Now you can calculate what the other car must sound like when you drive beside it.

I forgot: So it's like a known plaintext attack: Detected spectrum=encrypted message, redshift=encryption algorithm, known plaintext=hydrogen spectrum in laboratory/inertial frame of reference, full spectrum in lab=plaintext

IANAP, but I guess the answer is hydrogen. You can pretty much count on it, whereever you look. You know the hydrogen spectrum, which is like fingerprint, without Doppler shift, so if you see a distorted version, you can determine the distortion, i.e. Doppler shift. When you know this, you can transform the distorted signal into undistorted information, and then recognise water and what have you.

And your understanding of chemistry and physics is such that you know for certain that no chemical and physical processes are possible that give rise to mechanisms unlike any on Earth, though we might still call them life? If you know all humans are based on DNA, which has universal rules, do you know every person on Earth?

Stanislaw Lem said it best (regarding SF). And it was something like this: When we look for alien life far away we are really looking for life similar to us, because we want to extend the boundaries of Earth. The aliens could be a little different from us, so we have something to look up to/down on, but we are only interested in what is basically our mirror. He also said truly alien life would be completely unfathomable. If someone can do a better job quoting him, feel free to correct me.

I guess there are similarities to the basic premises in real-life science you mentioned.

You might wonder why TFA calls a 100m-radio telescope 'giant'. That's because the radio telescope Effelsberg is fully steerable and was/nearly is the largest such telescope.

It's also a pretty cool sight when you drive through this quaint hilly region and suddenly come across this friggin' huge satellite dish. (Pic in German version of article gives better overview.)