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It's quiet out there: scientists fail to hear signals of alien life
Astronomers have come up empty-handed after scanning the heavens for signs of intelligent life in the most extensive search ever performed.
Researchers used ground-based telescopes to eavesdrop on 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth. During three years of observations they found no evidence of signals that could plausibly come from an alien civilisation.
[...] During the three-year effort, the astronomers scanned billions of radio channels and filtered out any signals that appeared to come from nature or equipment on Earth. Having dismissed millions of signals this way, the team was left with only a handful of "events". On closer inspection, these too turned out to have prosaic explanations.
The Breakthrough Listen team described their latest attempt to track down ET in two papers released on Tuesday, which made all the data available to the public. "There could be a signal in the data that we didn't detect this time around, but others can now look through it to see if we missed anything," Price said.
Also at Astrobiology and The Register.
The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Public Data, Formats, Reduction and Archiving
UC Berkeley SETI Program GitHub
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:58PM (2 children)
We're trying to do a stock take by peering through the Warehouse door keyhole.
I don't know what the answer is though. Space is big.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:03AM (1 child)
For one billionth of the time that the warehouse has been operating, across 1,300/100,000,000,000 of the shelves.
Call me when we reach 1% coverage with still no signs. Until then, this is like asking: are there platypuses on Earth? by standing in one random spot, opening your eyes for one second, then counting all the platypuses you don't see there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 20 2019, @08:33PM
What? Venomous underwater cats with a duck's beak? Of course there bloody aren't, that would be mental.