• yesterday
Chinese scientists' claims that their "Sky Eye" telescope could have picked up signals from intelligent aliens have been met with skepticism by an American colleague.
Transcript
00:00This month, Chinese scientists claimed that their gigantic SkyEye telescope
00:05could have picked up trace radio communications from intelligent aliens.
00:09But it turns out it may have just been a case of mixed signals.
00:17So on June the 14th, Chinese astronomers came out with claims that while they were using China's
00:23gigantic 500 meter aperture Fast or SkyEye telescope, they picked up three signals which
00:31they think could have come from intelligent aliens. One in 2019 and two in 2022. Now,
00:38narrowband radio signals aren't usually produced by nature, but humans use them a lot in satellites,
00:44TVs, cell phones, radar. So when scientists see them coming from space, they think there's a
00:52possibility that there could be some form of intelligent life form that may have been sending
00:57them. Maybe we were just sent an intergalactic what you up to, or we intercepted some alien
01:03daytime TV. Either way, there's a possibility when we see narrowband signals that it comes
01:09from intelligent life. The story quickly started making headlines around the world and appearing
01:15all over social media before Dan Wertheimer and American SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial
01:21Intelligence scientists, who worked closely with the Chinese scientists in finding the signals,
01:26came out to say that they were almost certainly not from aliens, but from human technology instead.
01:32But how can Wertheimer know for sure? Well, Wertheimer said to us that the big problem with
01:39the gigantic radio telescopes that scientists use to intercept all of these radio signals
01:45is that they're so sensitive they can measure radio signals that are beamed from Earth from
01:52light years away. Now that may be amazing for finding things from distance, but it means that
01:57they're also incredibly susceptible to the zillions of homegrown signals that we produce
02:02every second. Now some of these signals, even to a trained scientist, could fool them and appear like
02:09they genuinely came from deep space. We call these errant signals RFIs, or radio frequency
02:17interference, and Wertheimer says that if you haven't been studying them for that long,
02:23then it means that you're much more likely to get hoodwinked by a subtle interference effect.
02:29Despite the error having spread around the world, the scientists need not feel too embarrassed.
02:35This recent false alarm is far from the first time that alien hunting scientists have been
02:41led astray by noise from chattering humans. In 2019, for instance, astronomers thought they
02:48spotted a narrowband radio signal beamed to Earth from Proxima Centauri, which is the nearest star
02:54to our sun. But further studies made two years later revealed that it was most likely from
03:00malfunctioning human equipment. Another famous set of signals, which bewitched scientists between
03:072011 and 2014, was also supposed to have come from aliens, until scientists realised
03:15that it was actually made by their fellow researchers microwaving their lunches.

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