00:00This month Chinese scientists claimed that their gigantic sky-eye telescope could have
00:05picked up trace radio communications from intelligent aliens, but it turns out it may
00:11have just been a case of mixed signals.
00:17So on June the 14th, Chinese astronomers came out with claims that while they were using
00:22China's gigantic 500 meter aperture fast or sky-eye telescope they picked up three signals
00:31which they think could have come from intelligent aliens, one in 2019 and two in 2022.
00:37Now narrow band radio signals aren't usually produced by nature, but humans use them a lot
00:43in satellites, TVs, cell phones, radar, so when scientists see them coming from space they
00:51think there's a possibility that there could be some form of intelligent life form that
00:56may have been sending them.
00:57Maybe we were just sent an intergalactic what you up to, or we intercepted some alien daytime
01:04TV.
01:05Either way, there's a possibility when we see narrow band signals that it comes from intelligent
01:10life.
01:11The story quickly started making headlines around the world and appearing all over social media
01:16before Dan Wertheimer, an American SETI or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence scientist
01:23who worked closely with the Chinese scientists in finding the signals, came out to say that
01:27they were almost certainly not from aliens, but from human technology instead.
01:32But how can Wertheimer know for sure?
01:35Well, Wertheimer said to us that the big problem with the gigantic radio telescopes that scientists
01:41use to intercept all of these radio signals is that they're so sensitive they can measure
01:48radio signals that are beamed from Earth from light years away.
01:53Now that may be amazing for finding things from distance, but it means that they're also
01:57incredibly susceptible to the zillions of homegrown signals that we produce every second.
02:03Now some of these signals, even to a trained scientist, could fool them and appear like they
02:09genuinely came from deep space.
02:12We call these errant signals RFIs or Radio Frequency Interference and Wertheimer says that
02:20if you haven't been studying them for that long, then it means that you're much more likely
02:25to 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.
02:45In 2019, for instance, astronomers thought they spotted a narrowband radio signal beamed to
02:51Earth from Proxima Centauri, which is the nearest star to our Sun.
02:55But further studies, made two years later, revealed that it was most likely from malfunctioning human
03:02equipment.
03:02Another famous set of signals, which bewitched scientists between 2011 and 2014, was also
03:10supposed to have come from aliens, until scientists realised that it was actually made by their
03:17fellow researchers microwaving their lunches.
03:20So, thank you very much.
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