Scientists Analyse 12 Billion 'Signals Of Interest' In Search For Alien Intelligence

No evidence can prove that there is life beyond our planet Earth, but scientists keep scanning the vast reaches of outer space in the hope of finding techno signatures. They might have received a breakthrough, thanks to a massive crowd-sourced project, which was aimed at searching for alien intelligence. According to University of California, Berkeley researchers, the project is now nearing completion.

The SETI@Home project was launched in 1999, and millions of volunteers worldwide participated, aiming to identify unusual radio signals in data from the Arecibo Observatory, a massive radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

The huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed in 2020 due to a cable failure, and the project ended abruptly, but citizen scientists have identified more than 12 billion signals of interest in 21 years of data.

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As quoted in the statement on UC Berkeley News, computer scientist and project co-founder David Anderson said that the billion signals were "momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky."

The project focused on radio signals near the 21-centimetre wavelength, commonly used to study hydrogen gas in the Milky Way. The volunteers downloaded the SETI@home software to analyse data chunks, searching for unusual patterns that could indicate intelligent life.

Now, the moment has arrived to check and analyse the results, as after 21 years, the team narrowed down the signals to 100 promising candidates, currently being re-examined using China's FAST radio telescope.

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Although Anderson is pessimistic about the results, the project still paved the way for similar searches in the future. "If we don't find ET, what we can say is that we established a new sensitivity level. If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it," he said.

"Some of our conclusions are that the project didn't completely work the way we thought it was going to. And we have a long list of things that we would have done differently and that future sky survey projects should do differently."

According to Eric Korpela, the SETI@home project director, the most challenging part is identifying signals from a distant civilisation (if there's any), from signals caused by noise or radio interference.

"There's no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs," he said. "We have to do a better job of measuring what we're excluding. Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water? I don't think we know for most SETI searches, and that is really a lesson for SETI searches everywhere."