Tag: Andrew Siemion

A Breakthrough in the Search for ET Intelligence?

Article by Deborah Byrd                                    September 2, 2020                                        (earthsky.org)

• Researchers at University of Manchester in the UK have developed a new analytical technique that they say represents “a milestone in SETI”, the ‘search for extraterrestrial intelligence’. Making use of new data being gathered by European Space Agency’s ‘Gaia’ satellite, this “analytical technique” will “place limits” on the probability of other extraterrestrial intelligence in the Milky Way.

• In a new research paper published on September 2nd in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, University of Manchester astronomers Bart Wlodarczyk-Sroka and Michael Garrett, in collaboration with Andrew Siemion, the director of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative (at SETI), have increased the number of stars available for applying SETI search criteria by more than 200 times – from 1,327 to 288,315 stars.

• The Gaia spacecraft satellite and observational platform is currently gathering a vast quantity of data to create the first-ever three-dimensional map of our Milky Way galaxy. SETI estimates that fewer than 0.04% of stellar systems have the potential of hosting an advanced civilization with at least 21st century radio technology. “Combing through the catalogue produced by the ESA’s Gaia spacecraft, which measured the distances to over a billion stars,” reads the report, “[we] recalculated limits on the prevalence of transmitters around additional stars within the radio telescope’s fields of view. By selecting stars out to much larger distances (up to about 33,000 light years) than the original sample of nearby stars, [we] were able to expand the number of stars studied from 1,327 to 288,315.”

• In other words, Wlodarczyk-Sroka and Garrett have extrapolated this 0.04% standard to a much larger field of data – representing 200 times the number of stars that it was once applied to – to ‘place some of the most stringent limits to date on the prevalence of powerful radio transmitters in this region of our Milky Way galaxy’. This SETI-approved 0.04% probability of other advanced civilizations out there doesn’t include non-technical ‘simple life’ civilizations.

• Team leader Mike Garrett is glad that SETI searches can now take into account the many other ‘cosmic objects’ (ie: exoplanets) that fall within the range of the ESA telescope, and apply the same SETI limits to 287,000 more star systems. “Knowing the locations and distances to these additional sources greatly improves our ability to constrain the prevalence of extra-terrestrial intelligence in our own galaxy and beyond,” said Garrett. “We expect future SETI surveys to also make good use of this approach.

• According to the report’s conclusion, “fewer than 0.04% of stellar systems have the potential of hosting advanced civilizations with the equivalent or slightly more advanced radio technology than 21st century humans. As well as improving the limits for nearby stars, the team for the first time have actually placed limits on more distant stars with the caveat that any potential lifeforms inhabiting the outer limits of the galaxy would need even more powerful transmitters in order to be detectable.”

• “Our results help to put meaningful limits on the prevalence of transmitters comparable to what we ourselves can build using 21st century technology,” said Wlodarczyk-Sroka. “We now know that fewer than one in 1,600 stars closer than about 330 light years host transmitters just a few times more powerful than the strongest radar we have here on Earth.”

• [Editor’s Note]   Is this what they call hiding the deceit in plain sight? Is the deep state’s SETI admitting that they are simply extrapolating its 0.04% probability estimate of advanced ET beings in the galaxy to more and more stars as they are discovered? And how do they arrive at this ‘1 in 1,600 stars’ probability in the first place? Their false narrative is that there must be some other intelligent civilization out there in this vast galaxy, but we have a pathetically small chance of ever detecting them, much less meeting them. Now, if this was a true analytical probability, it would presume that they actually discovered some of these civilizations through returned radio transmissions to compute a ratio. This hasn’t happened, not according to SETI. But SETI isn’t so much in the business of actually finding evidence of intelligent extraterrestrials as they are in looking for them. So all that this prestigious university report does is to arbitrarily “place” SETI’s pseudo-scientific “limits” on any new stars that the highly advanced ESA space observatory finds. Yay.

 

            ESA’s ‘Gaia’ satellite

The researchers called their new analytical technique “a milestone in SETI.” One researcher commented: “We now know that fewer than one in 1,600 stars closer than about 330 light years host transmitters just a few times more powerful than the strongest radar we have here on Earth.”

Astronomers at the University of Manchester in the UK said today (September 2, 2020) that they’ve made an

          Michael Garrett

analytical breakthrough in the ability to seek and perhaps someday find intelligent extraterrestrial life in our Milky Way galaxy. They said this breakthrough is a “milestone” that could “significantly improve” our chances of finding extraterrestrial intelligence by dramatically expanding the number of stars available for searching. They said their new analytical technique has increased the number of stars that can be analyzed by more than 200 times. And they said they’ve now placed the best limits yet on the prevalence of artificial radio transmitters, dubbed techno-signatures, in the Milky Way.

In new research published on September 2 in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In a statement the researchers said: “The collaborative research team have been able to dramatically expand the search for extra-terrestrial life from approximately 1,400 stars to 280,000 – increasing the number of stars analyzed by a factor of more than 200 …”

        Andrew Siemion

“The result suggests that fewer than 0.04% of stellar systems have the potential of hosting advanced civilizations with the equivalent or slightly more advanced radio technology than 21st century humans. As well as improving the limits for nearby stars, the team for the first time have actually placed limits own more distant stars with the caveat that any potential lifeforms inhabiting the outer limits of the galaxy would need even more powerful transmitters in order to be detectable.”

The research team consists of University of Manchester Masters student Bart Wlodarczyk-Sroka and his advisor Michael Garrett, collaborating with Andrew Siemion, director of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative.

The analysis, say researchers, can only locate intelligent and technically advanced civilisations that use radio waves as a form of communication. They could not, for example, detect ‘simple’ life or non-technical civilizations. They said: “Combing through the catalogue produced by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft, which measured the distances to over a billion stars, [we] recalculated limits on the prevalence of transmitters around additional stars within the radio telescope’s fields of view. By selecting stars out to much larger distances (up to about 33,000 light years) than the original sample of nearby stars, [we] were able to expand the number of stars studied from 1,327 to 288,315.”

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The ‘Very Large Array’ in NM Will Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life

 

Article by Georgina Torbet                           February 15, 2020                               (digitaltrends.com)

• A collaboration between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the SETI Institute will use the NRAO’s “Very Large Array” (VLA) of radio telescopes (with operations center in Socorro, New Mexico) to search for the presence of extraterrestrial life in the universe by such indicators as laser beams, structures built around stars, constructed satellites, or atmospheric chemicals produced by industry.

• In a statement, Andrew Siemion, Chair of the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, said “The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky. This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.”

• NRAO Director Tony Beasley stated, “As the VLA conducts standard observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we’re already collecting.” “Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.”

• Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute said that “Having access to the most sensitive radio telescope in the northern hemisphere for SETI observations is perhaps the most transformative opportunity yet in the history of SETI programs,” giving SETI researchers the opportunity to search further than ever before. “We are delighted to have this opportunity to partner with NRAO, especially as we now understand the candidate pool of relevant planets numbers in the billions.”

• [Editor’s Note]   Well this should be a huge waste of time and money for a few more years as SETI continues to search the skies in bad faith, desperately trying not to actually find any sign life in the universe, which is its true deep state objective. For if SETI ever admitted that there are signs of an extraterrestrial presence all around us, and has been for decades if not millennia, then they would be exposed as the frauds they are and find themselves out of a job.

 

        Andrew Siemion

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is getting a boost through a collaboration that will use existing

                 Tony Beasley

radio telescopes to search for indicators of life elsewhere in the universe.

A new collaboration has been announced between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the SETI Institute, to add SETI capabilities to the NRAO’s radio telescopes. To begin the project, an interface will be added to the NRAO’s Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to search for events or structures which could indicate the presence of life, such as laser beams, structures built around stars, indications of constructed satellites, or atmospheric chemicals produced by industry.

“The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting

              Bill Diamond

unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky,“ Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. “This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.”

As well as adding the new interface, the data collected by the VLA will be analyzed for signs of life. “As the VLA conducts standard observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we’re already collecting,” NRAO Director Tony Beasley said in the statement. “Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.”

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The Iconic Film ‘Alien’ Came Out 40 Years Ago. A Scientist Explains Why Hollywood Depictions of Extraterrestrials Have Changed Since Then.

Listen to “E80 8-29-19 The Iconic Film ‘Alien’ Came Out 40 Years Ago. A Scientist Explains Why Hollywood Depictions of Extraterrestrials Have Changed S” on Spreaker.

Article by Aylin Woodward                  August 20, 2019                      (businessinsider.sg)

• This year marks the 40th anniversary of the film “Alien” by Ridley Scott, where a creature called a ‘xenomorph’ attacks and eats the entire space crew except for Sigourney Weaver’s character. (see ‘Alien’ 1979 movie trailer below) But as movie making has developed and as modern science has changed, so has the industry’s idea of what an alien would probably look like. ‘The days of little green men and giant scaly monsters in alien movies are over.’

• Physicist and author Sidney Perkowitz says that Hollywood attempts to depict what the public is afraid of. In the old days, aliens were scary, unintelligent creatures bent on the destruction of the human race. Dr Strangelove tapped into the public’s anxiety over nuclear holocaust. But Hollywood director’s decisions to make extraterrestrials appear human-like could simply boil down to cost. “Humanoid aliens are cheap to portray,” says Perkowitz.

• Andrew Siemion, the director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center (ie: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) thinks that the chances that alien life would look humanoid is infinitesimal. “We don’t have any reason to believe that they would look anything like us,” says Siemion. “The form of a human being is the result of several billion years of evolution.”

• Today’s scientific thinking is that extraterrestrials will likely be non-humanoid and have compassion for the human race, as depicted in the 2016 movie “Arrival” where Amy Adams’ character learns to communicate with passive, non-humanoid creatures. The destructive aliens have become a viral microbial contagion, such as in Jake Gyllenhaal’s 2017 movie “Life”. But Perkowitz doubts that even dangerous biological entities would likely exist in space. “Nothing lives for pure evil,” Perkowitz insists.

• Modern astrobiologists only expect to find errant microbes in outer space or on alien planets. Perkowitz feels that the decidedly non-human and microbial aliens that are currently in vogue in sci fi movies will help to establish more appropriate expectations for any discovery of life that NASA might make. And if they are falsely depicted as deadly microbes, says Perkowitz, it is only because “Hollywood isn’t concerned with the social responsibility of getting the science right.”

• [Editor’s Note]   Hollywood isn’t concerned with the social responsibility of getting the science right? These so called “experts” – a physicist writer and of course the Deep State’s reliable mouthpiece, SETI, have some nerve.  They are carrying forward a false propaganda war that has been waged by the Deep State since the 1940’s!

First they mocked the small Grays and the pale Ebens that were covertly recovered at various UFO crash sites in the 40’s and 50’s as “little green men”, which the public adopted as too strange and silly to be believed. Then Hollywood began to depict aliens as scary humanoid creatures to make the public fear and reject any ET presence. Now, the Deep State has altered Hollywood’s game plan to completely erase the possibility that extraterrestrials could be human-like, or even humanoid. At the moment, they want us to believe that there’s nothing out there, and certainly nothing out there to fear.

Well we know that there is good and evil out there, and the evil has had its way with this planet for millennia. And we know that the galaxy and universe is absolutely teeming with intelligent star civilizations of countless varieties of species. In our particular star cluster, the vast majority of these species are, in fact, human-like. The Deep State either intends to stage a false flag invasion by malevolent humanoids, or wants the public to reject and fear any benevolent human-like beings who might come to assist us in our planet’s imminent spiritual transition.

This Deep State can always rely on highly compromised academic and scientific institutions, such as SETI, and its Hollywood propaganda machine to manipulate the public’s conceptions toward its own agenda of casting the extraterrestrials as the scary bad guys and the Deep State as the good guys, so that when spiritual transition begins the people will look to the Deep State Illuminati cabal – the folks who got us into this mess – to save us.

 

The 1979 blockbuster “Alien” opens with a tension-filled scene: A spider-like creature attacks an astronaut named Thomas Kane on an unknown planet.

The crew of Kane’s ship brings him back on board with the mysterious critter still attached to his spacesuit. Under the fluorescent lights, the creature seems to die, detaching from Kane’s face. When the astronaut eventually wakes up, he seems unharmed by the encounter.

But a miniature alien later bursts out of his chest in a shower of blood as his shocked crewmates scream.

The xenomorph, as it’s called, grows to be larger than any human, with glossy black skin, razor-sharp teeth, claws, and a tail.

In the four decades since “Alien” came out – the film’s 40th anniversary was in May – that creature’s image has influenced moviegoers’ mental pictures of alien life.

But as NASA has embraced the objective of searching for extraterrestrial life in our galaxy, the scientific understanding of what extraterrestrials might look like has converged around a type of lifeform far different from the director Ridley Scott’s brainchild.

Today, astrobiologists suspect that extraterrestrial lifeforms are likely to be microscopic in nature, akin to the bacteria scientists find in extreme environments on Earth.
Hollywood filmmakers have started to embrace this idea and depict aliens as less humanoid, according to the physicist and author Sidney Perkowitz. In other words, the days of little green men and giant scaly monsters in alien movies are over.

Sidney Perkowitz

“In the old science-fiction flicks of the 1950s and ’60s, if you did an alien, monster, or robot, it was a guy dressed up and stomping around a sound stage,” Perkowitz, who cofounded the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange group, which connects directors with science advisers, told Business Insider. “In the last few decades, CGI has changed that, allowing for the potential of really life-like, imaginative creatures.”

No more little green men

The chance that alien life looks humanoid is infinitesimal.

“We don’t have any reason to believe that they would look anything like us,” Andrew Siemion, the director of the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center, told Vox. “The form of a human being is the result of several billion years of evolution.”

Perkowitz said that Scott and other directors’ decisions to make extraterrestrials appear human-like could simply boil down to cost.

“Humanoid aliens are cheap to portray,” he said.

He added that the problem with “Alien” wasn’t just that the movie portrayed the alien as humanoid – it was that the extraterrestrial was depicted as unintelligent and beast-like. The xenomorph doesn’t try to communicate with the astronaut crew; instead, it eats the crew members one by one until Sigourney Weaver’s character blasts it into space.

“It’s hard to imagine a different lifeform would have such a negative reaction to another lifeform – nothing lives for pure evil,” Perkowitz said, adding: “If we always decide that ‘the other’ is hostile or contemptible, how does that encourage our efforts to relate to them?”

But the examples of nonhostile aliens in Hollywood are few and far between (Steven Spielberg’s E.T. notwithstanding). That’s because, according to Perkowitz, society uses film to explore what it’s afraid of.

2:10 minute trailer for the 1979 movie “Alien” (20th Century Fox)

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If Aliens Are Flashing Laser Beams at Us, We Now Have a Way to Detect Them

Listen to “E66 8-13-19 If Aliens Are Flashing Laser Beams” on Spreaker.

Article by Tim Childers                        August 2, 2019                      (livescience.com)

• The $100 million 10-year project funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, called the  “Breakthrough Listen” project, is the most extensive SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program in history. The project, which began in 2015, has surveyed over 1,000 stars within 160 light-years away from Earth for signs of alien radio signals, with no positive results.

• ‘Breakthrough Listen’ announced that its team will begin looking for new signs of alien technology using the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), consisting of four 12-meter optical telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona. Using VERITAS, astronomers will begin scanning the night sky for nanosecond flashes of light, known as “fast optical pulses”, from nearby stars indicating a new class of alien communication. Said Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley’s SETI Research Center, “Optical communication has already been used by NASA to transmit high-definition images to Earth from the moon, so there’s a reason to believe that an advanced civilization might use a scaled-up version of this technology for interstellar communication.”

• VERITAS searched for such laser pulses from the mysteriously dimming Tabby’s Star after some speculated there could be an alien megastructure surrounding it. If Tabby’s Star pointed powerful lasers at the Earth, VERITAS could detect them. Less powerful lasers could be detected from closer star systems. David Williams, a member of the VERITAS and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said, “It is impressive how well-suited the VERITAS telescopes are for this project, since they were built only with the purpose of studying very-high-energy gamma rays…”.

• At the VERITAS initiative’s launch, physicist Stephen Hawking said, “[I]n an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life… [P]erhaps intelligent life might be watching these lights of ours… Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos, unseen beacons announcing that, here on one rock, the universe discovered its existence?”

• SETI’s Russian benefactor, Yuri Milner says, “[O]ur philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”

• [Editor’s Note]    SETI is now using a $100 million telescope array to search for lights and lasers emanating from extraterrestrial sources in the cosmos. So much money is being wasted on this Deep State disinformation program which is only meant to make the public believe that if there were any extraterrestrial beings and civilizations to be found, such equipment could not miss them, when in reality the extraterrestrial presence is all around us. Of course the Breakthrough Listen project will fail because the Deep State’s true agenda is to deny the existence of extraterrestrials. Or will it be used by the Deep State to claim success and control the narrative through a new disinformation campaign when the exposure of the extraterrestrial presence becomes imminent?

 

Are aliens using super powerful flashlights to get our attention? Astronomers think there’s a chance they are.
Since the invention of the radio, humans have been silently listening to the stars, wondering if we are alone in the universe. But if intelligent alien life does exist, the extraterrestrials could be using other forms of technology to communicate. Astronomers are beginning to not only listen to the cosmos but also gaze toward it for other signs of alien tech: laser beams.

              Andrew Siemion
                       Yuri Milner

Breakthrough Listen, the most extensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program in history, announced that its team will begin looking for new signs of alien technology using the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona.

“When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates,” Yuri Milner, billionaire particle physicist and founder of Breakthrough Listen, said in a statement. “So our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”

Using VERITAS, astronomers will begin scanning the night sky for nanosecond flashes of light from nearby stars. Like a lighthouse beacon for the cosmos, these brief pulses of optical light would outshine any nearby stars and could indicate a method of alien communication.

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Powerful New Telescope Joins the Search for Possible Laser Pulses from Aliens

Listen to “E46 7-30-19 Powerful New Telescope Joins the Search” on Spreaker.

Article by Michael Irving                 July 19, 2019                 (newatlas.com)

  • The “Breakthrough Listen” initiative is the largest scientific program designed to survey the million closest stars to Earth for any signs of radio and laser transmissions, which extraterrestrials might use to communicate with one another or the galaxy at large. The project has gained a new tool for its arsenal, the ‘Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System’, or ‘VERITAS’.
  • VERITAS is made up of four 40-foot telescopes designed to detect gamma rays by the bursts of blue light they create as they hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The Breakthrough Listen team claims the tech is so powerful it can detect a laser with the energy of a regular light bulb from 25 trillion miles away. The idea is that if aliens are using lasers to communicate, Earth might just happen to cross the path of a rogue beam for a split second, alerting us to their presence even if that wasn’t their direct intention.
  • Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, says, “When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates. Our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”
  • Andrew Siemion, leader of the Listen team, says, “Breakthrough Listen is already the most powerful, comprehensive, and intensive search yet undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. Now, with the addition of VERITAS, we’re sensitive to an important new class of signals: fast optical pulses. Optical communication has already been used by NASA to transmit high definition images to Earth from the Moon, so there’s reason to believe that an advanced civilization might use a scaled-up version of this technology for interstellar communication.”

 

Statistically, it’s pretty much a given that alien life is out there somewhere, whether that’s Martian microbes or highly intelligent life beaming comms through the cosmos. While the Curiosity rover is poking around in the dirt for the former, the Breakthrough Listen initiative is searching for the latter. Now, a new telescope array has joined the hunt, scanning the skies for flashes of laser light that alien civilizations might be giving off.

Andrew Siemion

The Breakthrough Listen initiative is the largest scientific program designed specifically to find evidence of extraterrestrials. The aim is to survey the million closest stars to Earth for any signs of radio and laser transmissions, which aliens might be using to communicate with each other or even deliberately broadcasting their existence. The team claims the tech is so powerful it can detect a laser with the energy of a regular light bulb from 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km) away.

And now the project has a new tool in its arsenal. The Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) is made up of four 12-m (40-ft) telescopes, and was designed to detect gamma rays by the bursts of blue light they create as they hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

                           Yuri Milner

As part of Breakthrough Listen, VERITAS will search for pulses of laser light that might be as short as a few nanoseconds. The idea is that if aliens are using lasers to communicate, Earth might just happen to cross the path of a rogue beam for a split second, alerting us to their presence even if that wasn’t their direct intention.

“When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates,” says Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives. “So our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”

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If Aliens Beam Us a Signal, What Should We Expect?

by Elizabeth Rayne                  May 21, 2018                         (syfy.com)

• If another intelligent species were trying to transmit a message to Earth, a weak radio signal from some distant galaxy might get lost in the chaos of light and noise from cell phones, wifi, TV and radio broadcasts, satellites, microwaves, traffic jams, and cities that never sleep, not to mention cosmic phenomena like black hole collisions and fast radio bursts.

• “By far the biggest challenge in radio SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is what we call radio frequency interference,” said UC Berkeley SETI Research Center director Andrew Siemion. For example, the Wow! signal that was thought to be first contact for years (picked up by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope in 1977) was revealed to be the radio frequency emitted by the hydrogen gas from two comets.

• We are now able to search 10 billion radio channels as opposed to the hundreds that could be investigated when SETI investigations first started. How exactly would we be able to tell an extraterrestrial signal apart from all this visual and auditory pollution? Advances in astrophysics and technology have made it possible to search through more types of signals, analyze data faster, and determine which part of the electromagnetic spectrum we should be watching for a signal from another planet.

• Using such advanced technology, scientists have evaluated signals from a couple thousand star systems so far. And every one of these suspicious signals from outer space has been ruled out by some kind of interference. But SETI still has about a hundred billion stars to go.

 

Aliens could be trying to get through to us right now and we might not even know it. Even if another intelligent species was trying to transmit a message to Earth, a weak radio signal from some distant galaxy could get lost in the chaos of light and noise from cell phones, wifi, TV and radio broadcasts, satellites, microwaves, traffic jams and cities that never sleep.

That signal also has to contend with disruptive cosmic phenomena like black hole collisions and fast radio bursts being zapped through space before it reached a network of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) radio telescopes.

“By far the biggest challenge in radio SETI is what we call radio frequency interference,” UC Berkeley SETI Research Center director Andrew Siemion told Seeker. “Because we use our own technology as an example of what we should be looking for we in fact find many many examples of our own technology and those examples actually pollute the signal that we see especially with radio telescopes.”

How exactly would we be able to tell an extraterrestrial signal apart from all this visual and auditory pollution? The Wow! signal that was thought to be first contact for years was actually revealed to be the radio frequency emitted by the hydrogen gas from two comets. Hypersensitive instruments have been set off more than once by triggers that were much closer than scientists thought, including that one infamous case where the source of what was assumed to be a hello from aliens was actually no further than the visitor center of the observatory — a microwave oven without proper shielding had probably been heating up someone’s frozen pizza.

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