An international team of scientists made a big splash this week when Chinese state media reported that a SETI telescope had detected "suspicious signals" from a distant star system.
The team used the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), a gigantic alien-hunting radio observatory in southwest China, to document narrowband signals that one FAST official told Chinese media could be an alien signal.
Some people involved in the project disagree with that conclusion.
Dan Werthimer, a SETI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the authors of a paper about the findings.
Werthimer likened the current research to a down payment on a survey to make sure everything is going well. He said the sky survey will take at least five years to complete.
He said that RFI is a problem while looking at weak signals.
When you look for weak signals from a distant civilization, you get overwhelmed by the pollution on Earth. It's difficult to figure out what's interference and what might be from a distant civilization as television and cell phones are getting worse.
There is a simple explanation for the signal coming from the direction of a star system with several Earth-like planets.
Even though the telescope is looking at the star, signals can get in the telescope from the side. Even though theFAST telescope in China is a long way from most big cities, there are still transmitters that can get in from the side.
Why did some researchers jump to the conclusion that the discovery was a sign of alien life?
Werthimer said that one of the things in SETI is that we look through billions of different signals every second and then find the best things.
It's like flipping a coin a billion times and seeing ten heads in a row.
"I think they're not used to this type of experiment, where you flip a coin a billion times a second," he said.
The astronomer is not giving up hope that we are not alone in the universe.
He said he was positive about life in the universe. If we were the only ones, it would be weird. There are trillions of planets in the Milky Way.
He said that it was just our galaxy. I'm optimistic about intelligence, because there's 100 billion other stars.
Chinese scientists say they may have found signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.
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