Alien Radio Signals: Scientists Analyze 100 Signals from Arecibo
One of the largest searches for alien intelligence in history is nearing completion, thanks to the help of more than 2 million citizen scientists and the legendary Arecibo Observatory.
Launched in 1999, the SETI@home project enlisted millions of volunteers around the world to help identify unusual radio signals in data from the Arecibo Observatory – a massive radio telescope in Puerto Rico that collapsed in 2020 due to a cable failure. Though the project ended prematurely with the telescope’s demise, citizen scientists nonetheless identified more than 12 billion signals of interest in 21 years of data.
so far, there is no smoking-gun evidence of alien transmissions from any of these radio sources. However,the team is enthusiastic that their vast dataset will help make future hunts for extraterrestrials even more effective.
“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,” computer scientist and project co-founder
Finding a meaningful detection of radio signals from clever aliens among all the cosmic noise is nearly impossible.
To help narrow the search, the co-founders of SETI@Home turned to crowdsourcing. The team asked volunteers to download a free software program to their home computers,using each computer’s processing power to analyze the Arecibo Observatory‘s latest scans of the night sky.
Starting in the mid-1990s, the team initially planned for 50,000 volunteers.Within a year, though, more than 2 million users in 100 countries were running SETI@Home on their computers.
“It went way, way, way beyond our initial expectations,” Anderson said. “I want the community and the world to know that we actually did some science.”