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
00:30which they think could have come from intelligent aliens, one in 2019 and two in 2022.
00:37Now, narrowband 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,
00:51they think there's a possibility that there could be some form of intelligent life form
00:56that may have been sending them. Maybe we were just sent an intergalactic what you up to,
01:01or we intercepted some alien daytime TV. Either way, there's a possibility when we see narrowband
01:08signals that it comes from intelligent life. The story quickly started making headlines around
01:13the world and appearing all over social media before Dan Wertheimer, an American SETI or search
01:20for extraterrestrial intelligence scientists who worked closely with the Chinese scientists in
01:25finding the signals, came out to say that they were almost certainly not from aliens,
01:30but 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
01:41that scientists use to intercept all of these radio signals is that they're so sensitive they can
01:47measure radio signals that are beamed from Earth from light years away. Now that may be amazing for
01:54finding things from distance, but it means that they're also incredibly susceptible to the zillions
01:59of homegrown signals that we produce every second. Now some of these signals, even to a trained scientist,
02:07could fool them and appear like they genuinely came from deep space. We call these errant signals RFIs,
02:16or radio frequency interference, and Wertheimer says that if you haven't been studying them for that long,
02:22then it means that you're much more likely to 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 led astray
02:42by noise from chattering humans. In 2019, for instance, astronomers thought they spotted a
02:48narrowband radio signal beamed to Earth 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. Another famous set of signals, which bewitched scientists between 2011 and 2014,
03:09was also supposed to have come from aliens, until scientists realised that it was actually made
03:16made by their fellow researchers microwaving their lunches.
Comments