Contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation would be the single biggest news story in human history – but most people won’t hear the news for “weeks, possibly months,” according to a leading researcher from SETI.
SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, was founded in 1984.
The project got a massive boost earlier this year with the introduction of the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometric Cluster [COSMIC], a new protocol that enables astronomers to scan up to 37 stars per minute.
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The astronomers are looking for “technosignatures,” radio emissions that can’t be explained by any known natural process.
Dr Chenoa Tremblay has been using COSMIC in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. She tells the Daily Star that in the three months the system has been active it hasn’t found anything that couldn’t be ruled out as human-created signals – yet.
Chenoa says it’s “challenging to predict” when first contact with another civilisation might be made but, she says, “with our increased searching capabilities with systems like COSMIC, I hope we can find something in my own lifetime”.
But even when the first signal is detected, it won’t be made public straight away. Not because of any conspiracies, Chenoa explains, but simply because such a massive finding would have to be double-and -triple checked before it’s confirmed.
“When we find something we can’t easily explain away, we have a series of telescopes around the world that we can use to try to detect the signal again,” Chenoa says.
The other telescopes – such as he Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), and the Parkes 64m Telescopes in Australia and the Allen Telescope Array in California, would be trained on the area of sky where the “anomalous” signal was detected.
“The reason to use other telescopes is because they are from different locations which can rule a local interference,” Chenoa says, “they have different electronics to process the data to rule a problem with our electronics, and they have different sensitivities, so if a signal does repeat we can gain additional information about the signal style”.
But even then, more checks would be made: “From that point, there would be writing a paper, having that peer reviewed, and then based on the true nature of the signal additional protocols would be enacted,” Chenoa explains.
“In theory this whole process is likely to take weeks to a few months, to ensure scientific rigour”.
At that point, SETI rules say, the discoverer should report the results “in a full and complete open manner to the public, the scientific community, and the Secretary General of the United Nations”.
In practical terms, governments and military authorities would probably be given advance warning of the announcement. The impact on society of a confirmed contact with aliens would be huge, and unpredictable.
The major world religions would probably need a major rethink, although Gabriel Funes, the chief astronomer of the Vatican Observatory, has said in the past that the Catholic Church would be likely to “welcome extraterrestrial visitors warmly”.
The various world governments would need to find a way to come together too. Niklas Hedman, executive director of UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, says that at present there are “no international agreements or mechanisms in place for how humanity would handle an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence”.
That few months of thinking time Chenoa told us about will probably come in very handy.
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