Out there, everything is silent so far. After having scanned a sector of the celestial sphere and listening for potential signals coming from the closest 1327 stars to our Sun, the result is disappointing: nothing.
If indeed aliens of civilized culture and advanced technology exist in our galaxy, so far they have been careful not to show themselves or at least to let us know about their presence. The latest results of the research conducted by SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) in search of signs of intelligent life is not appealing.
"There are no amazingly advanced civilizations trying to contact us with incredibly powerful transmitters," said Danny Price, an astrophysicist at the US University of California, Berkeley, who is also the lead author of the paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Therefore, in his analysis, Price has also tried to find justifications for this silence. The lack of signals from the ETs could be explained by the method so far followed. We could use the wrong frequencies or those signals could be masked and hidden by radio interference from the Earth.
The new research was conducted within the "Breakthrough Listen" project, part of the "Breakthrough Initiatives" program, the $100 million initiative promoted over a span of at least 10 years by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.
Started in 2015, the "Breakthrough Initiatives" involved the most brilliant minds of scientific research on a planetary scale (physicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, had given his support) with the declared goal of finding the "techno-signatures", or objective and tangible evidence of the existence of advanced alien space civilizations - signs or signals that could have been made by intelligent life, and could not possibly have occurred naturally.
The project utilized two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world, namely The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope - with a 100-meter diameter dish positioned in West Virginia (United States) - and the Parkes Observatory - a diameter of 64 meters, in New South Wales (Australia) to precisely intercept communications from other worlds.
During these observations, particular noises were repeatedly picked up, but they were then discarded as simple interferences produced by satellites in orbit around our planet or by other absolutely terrestrial sources. This huge amount of information will soon be made available to all scholars in Milner's project database. It will be the largest publication of its kind in the whole history of SETI.
Jason Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, and a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds comments on how the data is disseminated to the public: "Anyone who thinks that team has missed something will be able to go and see for themselves."
The astrophysicist, in the past, has often been critical of the method used by SETI, I.e "waiting to pick up a signal in the sea magnum of the cosmos".
As He explains, concluding that there are no alien civilizations in space because so far we have not found it would be like saying that there is no life in the ocean because there is not even a fish in a tank of seawater. In short, let's go slowly with the conclusions, we are just at the beginning.
