Space expert Dr. David Whitehouse says despite nearly 70 signal searches in space, not a single confirmed discovery has been made so far.
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00:00I just want to ask you, Dr Whitehouse, I mean, this was found by the James Webb Space Telescope, launched about four years ago.
00:07I mean, there are other space telescopes in, you know, in production, and presumably they're constantly being upgraded and new ones are coming out.
00:16NASA's got one. Europe has something called the Extremely Large Telescope, which I gather will be rolled out at some point in the near future.
00:21Can we expect, therefore, do you think, more and more of these types of discovery, the better our abilities get in terms of the technology?
00:30Well, the technology of observing the sky is increasing all the time in terms of what we can detect, the precision we can measure, is actually quite remarkable, even over a few years ago.
00:42And it is interesting that in the search for signals from intelligent life in space, we have so far had about 70 searches, and we have detected nothing that is unusual or extraordinary.
00:56And that actually tells us something very interesting about searching for life in space, because searching for microbes on a nearby star is the ancillary to searching for intelligences such as our own.
01:09And as I said, they could be, it's unlikely they would be as young or as dumb as we are.
01:14They could be much older than us.
01:16And the question is, and the question should be engaged with more often, because this could happen tomorrow, is will there be billion-year-old cosmic princes of peace who would look on us benevolently?
01:28They could be engaged with more often, because, you know, if you don't have some kind of confidence, you know, whether the technology was going to be as many of us as we are going to be?