Who would have thought it… radio and tv shows are signs of intelligent life!

Speaking about the Breakthrough Listen project’s hunt for extraterrestrial life, announced today, Astrophysicist Alan Duffy told ABC TV’s The Drum:

“Advanced technology, such as radio and tv signals are signs of intelligent life…  The Parkes observatory is leading the search for the radiowave component in this search for extra terrestrial life.”

The $135 million project, financed by Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner will work with scientists world wide to search for signs of alien life, with Australia’s Parkes Observatory and a range of Aussie scientists playing important roles.

The CSIRO has signed a deal for the Breakthrough Prize Foundation to use the Parkes telescope to look for intelligent life on the closest stars to Earth, beyond the Milky Way and into other galaxies. It has been described as the “biggest scientific research” project looking for signs of intelligent life, and will cover 10 times as much of the sky than previous programs.

Alan Duffy (pictured right, in Parkes) says we may have gone unnoticed by Aliens searching for life on our planet until Marconi invented radio. “For aliens listening to us, we’ve only been emitting radio waves for 100 years, we were invisible before that.”
 
“We may or may not get the signal… but in the meantime we will get incredible insights into the galaxy,” he said.
 
radioinfo wonders which planet will yield the next Kyle Sandilands or Hamish and Andy…

And will the Parkes telescope one day pick up the next season of Real Housewives of the Milky Way, or perhaps it will be geoblocked under intergalactic copyright laws preventing streaming of content to region three planets.