As government officials in Washington continue working to destigmatize the idea of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, scientists continue exploring the stars for any signs of alien life. A new study from one such group of scientists says the idea of alien contact within the next ten years is possible, with theories suggesting contact could come by 2029.
A new study from a team co-led by the University of California’s Howard Isaacson is at the root of the hypothesis. According to the study, authored by Isaacson and Reilly Derrick, an engineer at the University of California, the messages first beamed by Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 reached two “nearby” stars in 2007. If intelligent life found the signal and sent one back, that could arrive by the end of the decade.
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“These spacecraft have communicated with the Deep Station Network (DSN) radio antennas in order to download scientific data and telemetry data. Outward transmissions from DSN travel to the spacecraft and beyond into interstellar space. These transmissions have encountered and will encounter other stars, introducing the possibility that intelligent life in other solar systems will encounter our terrestrial transmissions,” an abstract for the duo’s study reads.
It adds, “We use the beamwidth of the transmissions between DSN and interstellar spacecraft to perform a search around the past and future positions of each spacecraft obtained from the JPL Horizons System. By performing this search over the Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars, a catalog of precisely mapped stars within 100 pc, we determine which stars the transmissions of these spacecraft will encounter. We highlight stars that are in the background of DSN transmissions and calculate the dates of these encounters to determine the time and place for potential intelligent extraterrestrial life to encounter terrestrial transmissions.”
That said, some skeptics think the odds for a return signal are slim to none. University of California, Los Angeles radio astronomer Jean-Luc Margot tells Popular Science that “our puny and infrequent transmissions are unlikely to yield a detection of humanity by extraterrestrials.”
“The probability that another civilization resides in this tiny bubble is extraordinarily small unless there are millions of civilizations in the Milky Way,” he continues
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CAMBRIDGE, MA – MARCH 27: Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's University's Astronomy Department, poses for a portrait in Cambridge, MA on March 27, 2019. Loeb has ignited an academic firestorm by publishing an article suggesting that Oumuamua, a mysterious object that hurtled close to Earth in 2017, had perhaps been an artificial object sent from an extraterrestrial civilization. (Photo by Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
