Scientists investigating the possibility of aliens believe they’ve found evidence that could confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life.
Perhaps most excitingly though this isn’t the usual bullshit, like a rock on mars that looks like a skull if you hold it upside down and squint or a screenshot of a water tower on Google Earth. it’s actual evidence.
Last year actual researchers- not people with a YouTube channel and delusions of a grand conspiracy – detected an unexplained signal coming from a distant star called HD 164595 but they didn’t announce it until this week, The Sun reports.
HD 164595 is for the most part identical to our own sun and we know that it’s got at least one planet orbiting it, which led experts to speculate that an advanced alien civilisation could be trying to perform the intergalactic equivalent of a Facebook poke and get in contact with us.
The signal was actually detected by Russians over a year ago but they never got round to telling the rest of the world.
This oversight has led conspiracy theorists to wildly speculate that the information was deliberately lost in an effort to prevent the world from discovering the existence of aliens.
Fears of an international conspiracy by a vague but menacing government agency aside though it’s very exciting news and Douglas Vakoch, the president of METI International, a scientific group who endavour to find evidence of alien life, said there’s ‘a good possibility for some nearby civilisation to be detected’.
Mr Vakoch said:
The signal from HD 164595 is intriguing, because it comes from the vicinity of a sun-like star, and if it’s artificial, its strength is great enough that it was clearly made by a civilisation with capabilities beyond those of humankind.
The signal that SETI detected is super powerful prompting speculation over how advanced the aliens supposedly broadcasting the signal may be compared to us.
Basically imagine these hypothetical alien’s are the space equivalent of Stephen Hawking while we’re the intergalactic Kardashians – basically taking selfies and thinking we’re great.
The senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak, explained this in a slightly more scientific way, saying to send the signal you’d need an extremely powerful transmitter which would require ‘hundreds of times more energy than all the sunlight falling on Earth, and would obviously require power sources far beyond any we have’.
He added:
[This] requires an effort far, far beyond what we ourselves could do, and it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to target our solar system with a strong signal.
This star system is so far away they won’t have yet picked up any TV or radar that would tell them that we’re here.
Unfortunately Seth thinks it’s pretty unlikely that this signal’s alien in origin saying there were other ‘plausible explanations’ for the signal, and that ‘without a confirmation of this signal, we can only say that it’s interesting’.
Not that an expert’s opinion matters much to people with YouTube channels online who are already proclaiming this a s definite proof, then again most of them have never seen a photo they didn’t think had a UFO in it so maybe we shouldn’t pay them any attention.
More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.
Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.
He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.