Aliens Could Be Listening To Us Right Now, Says NASA Study

Alien civilisations might be able to detect Earth's space communications, according to a recent study by researchers from Pennsylvania State University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The study suggests that when scientists send commands to spacecraft like Mars rovers or orbiters, not all of the radio signals are absorbed. A portion of these signals continues travelling through space, possibly for eternity.

“Humans are predominantly communicating with the spacecraft and probes we have sent to study other planets like Mars,” said Pinchen Fan, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science, the science principal investigator of the NASA grant supporting this research and the first author of the paper. “But a planet like Mars does not block the entire transmission, so a distant spacecraft or planet positioned along the path of these interplanetary communications could potentially detect the spillover; that would occur when Earth and another solar system planet align from their perspective. This suggests that we should look for alignment of planets outside of our solar system when searching for extraterrestrial communications.”

These signals, powerful and directed toward nearby planets, could potentially be intercepted by intelligent life forms located along their path. Similarly, scientists believe Earth could also detect alien civilisations if they send similar signals across space.

This research which was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, opens new possibilities for how we might locate extraterrestrial ,intelligence - by listening for their space communications, just as they might be listening to ours.

"Based on data from the last 20 years, we found that if an extraterrestrial intelligence were in a location that could observe the alignment of Earth and Mars, there's a 77% chance that they would be in the path of one of our transmissions, orders of magnitude more likely than being in a random position at a random time," Fan said. "If they could view an alignment with another solar-system planet, there is a 12% chance they would be in the path of our transmissions. When not observing a planet alignment, however, these chances are minuscule."