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9 strange excuses for why we haven't met aliens yet China rover spots strange glass spheres on far side of the moon "This may be a unique window in our history as Earthlings where we can do pretty good SETI searches, where not all of the possible radio bands are corrupted by our own signals." 100 years from now, I don't think we'll be able to do it from the ground," Werthimer said.
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"100 years ago, we didn't really know how to do SETI. With the ever-increasing numbers of satellites orbiting above our heads, Werhimer says this problem will only get worse. Scientists are used to ruling out interference if it shows up in all 19, but if the interference only appears in one (as it did with all three of the supposedly "alien" signatures detected in this case) even experienced researchers can be led astray. According to Werthimer, the FAST telescope's receiver can look at 19 different places in the sky at once. In this setup, picking up a false positive is a lot like flipping a coin to get twenty heads in a row, Werthimer told the publication Futurism (opens in new tab) - it may seem like a remarkable outcome on its own, but not when the coin has been flipped trillions of times or more.Īnd the less history a given research team has with a particular radio telescope, the more likely it is that they won't spot a subtle interference effect. The 1,600-foot-diameter (500 meters) dish is powerful enough to detect radio devices like those on Earth operating many light-years away, and the data it captures contains just under 40 billion observations per second. Radio interference is a big problem for a telescope like FAST precisely because of its scale and sensitivity.
"Finally, somebody figured out (opens in new tab) they were happening at lunchtime." "A lot of very sophisticated astronomers looked at that and we couldn't figure out what it was for a long time," Werthimer said, referring to the microwave lunch incidents. Similarly, another famous set of signals once supposed to have come from aliens, detected between 20, turned out to have actually been made by scientists microwaving their lunches. Studies released two years later, however, suggested that the signal was most likely produced by malfunctioning human equipment, Live Science previously reported. The signal was a narrow-band radio wave typically associated with human-made objects, which led scientists to entertain the thrilling possibility that it came from alien technology.
In 2019, astronomers spotted a signal beamed to Earth from Proxima Centauri - the nearest star system to our sun (sitting roughly 4.2 light-years away) and home to at least one potentially habitable planet. The recent false alarm is one of several instances in which alien-hunting scientists have been misled by noise from human activity. "The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed and ruled out. "These are several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past, and the team is currently working on further investigation," Zhang Tongjie, head scientist at the China Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group at Beijing Normal University, said in the report. In spite of this excitement, Werthimer's Chinese collaborators were nonetheless cautious to hedge the more sensational remarks, emphasizing the ultimate likelihood that the signals originated on Earth. If you're kind of new in the game, and you don't know all these different ways that interference can get into your data and corrupt it, it's pretty easy to get excited." "They're very weak signals, but the cryogenic receivers on the telescopes are super sensitive and can pick up signals from cell phones, television, radar and satellites - and there are more and more satellites in the sky every day. "The big problem, and the problem in this particular case, is that we're looking for signals from extraterrestrials, but what we find is a zillion signals from terrestrials," Werthimer told Live Science. But Werthimer says that, while the signals are certainly artificial, they're almost definitely from humans and not aliens. The claims quickly went viral, spreading across Chinese state media and the Chinese social media platform Weibo before being reported by the international press and Live Science. One FAST official who was not directly involved in the research also said that an extraterrestrial origin for the signals was "likely."