Closest advanced aliens may be nearer than expected – here’s how we can reach them

Life on Mars might not be viable, according to a study, but aliens might not be as physically far as we first thought – with boffins creating a theory on how to reach them

Scientists think we could be closer than ever to finding alien life on other planets – with a new simple method. This month, Manuel Scherf and Helmut Lammer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences suggested the nearest aliens could be 33,000 light years away.

While that seems quite a distance, another study has revealed that it might be easier than ever to try and make contact with them. Pennsylvania State University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looked into a theory that aliens could be tapping into Earth radio signals.

In order to control a Mars rover from Earth, scientists have to send powerful transmissions towards neighbouring planets in our Solar System. As a result, the target planet doesn’t receive all of the radio waves sent in its direction. Some of the signal would continue into the cosmos, lost forever.

They think that aliens could be picking these up – and learning about our solar systems through our communications.

Pinchen Fan, astronomer at Penn State, said in the study: “Based on data from the last 20 years, we found that if an extraterrestrial intelligence were in a location that could observe the alignment of Earth and Mars, there’s a 77% chance that they would be in the path of one of our transmissions – orders of magnitude more likely than being in a random position at a random time”.

Because our Solar System’s planets orbit within a plane, aliens located in a place that lined up with that plane’s edge would have the best chance of listening in.

The study searched through decades of communications from NASA to rovers on Mars.

Now, scientists think we could flip this, meaning Earth could tap into alien signals being sent from the solar system.

According to experts, there is a clear way to experiment this by looking at neighbouring planets who share the same plane.

We could instead listen to alien frequencies and gain a bigger understanding of life on other planets.

The study continued: “However, because we are only starting to detect a lot of exoplanets in the last decade or two, we do not know many systems with two or more transiting exoplanets.

“With the upcoming launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we expect to detect a hundred thousand previously undetected exoplanets, so our potential search area should increase greatly”.

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