Original subtitles

RADIO: We're panning southwest.

We should be in a position to start the survey in 20 minutes.

So we had a tip off, a breakthrough last night that there was an unusual

transmission in the direction of Voyager.

Nasa suspects it's a fault.

But our team here picked up multiple narrowband signals.

I don't think we can discount this being genuine.

Extraterrestrial life,

the scientific basis for extraterrestrial life is so clear.

In the language of the US Department of Defence,

unidentified aerial phenomenon, which add fuel to the belief of

some that we are not alone.

It's looking like most stars may, in fact, have planets.

There may be a tremendous number of possible habitable worlds.

So you see this as a national security issue?

Absolutely.

They're going to have to acknowledge that there is something

there we need to be concerned about.

This is a goal of Nasa - to understand the origin, evolution

and distribution of life in the universe.

It's very important that the facts are heard and fully understood,

and that this body is able to take the appropriate decisions.

If there is a signal out there,

we're getting closer and closer and closer to it.

First of all, your first concern is, is the signal real? Right?

Secondly, is it coming from the sky

or coming from the local environment?

Does it have any information content?

Have we ever seen this before?

And you just work through a whole lot

of different dependent questions.

If nature doesn't give you an explanation,

then you have to be prepared to think about non-natural,

artificial sort of technological civilisation explanations

for the data. You have to be open to that.

If we do detect a signal from somewhere and it looks

like it's of intelligent origin, what's going to happen is an alert

is going to go out and every telescope in the world

is going to turn to that location and start gathering data.

The transmission was picked up at 8.4 megahertz, but extended

analysis has shown it was sweeping through multiple frequencies.

Margaret is probably best placed to give the details.

So our main interest is the power required to simultaneously transmit

across so many frequencies like this.

If it's genuine, it would rule out any current technology we know of.

Voyager is out of sight for us now, so we're putting together requests

for telescope time with Parkes.

We've also seen what looks like complex modulation in the data...

..and a powerful sustained narrowband transmission

at 1420 megahertz.

We've kept it amongst ourselves for now, but I imagine

it's going to be pretty common knowledge by tomorrow.

All right. Suppose that you had an old-fashioned analogue radio

with a dial,

and you turn that dial and you hear a lot of hiss and noise.

And suddenly that noise goes away and you hear a very clear tone.

So that's the kind of thing that we're looking for.

So we're trying to think, you know, where might we all think

was a special sort of frequency to use?

You look out in the universe, what you see is lots

and lots of hydrogen.

And it just happens that there's a natural process where you have

lots and lots of hydrogen.

It produces this radiation.

There's this radio emission at this particular frequency,

1420 megahertz.

So one thought is that this is a place that other civilisations

would observe because they will also be doing astronomy and they will

also be looking at hydrogen in the universe.

So 1420 megahertz, they will have built receivers, but also

probably built transmitters at this frequency.

So 1420 megahertz is a frequency we know about, but it's also a

frequency that the aliens know about.

So right away you can say, "OK, if they're really going to try

"and get in touch with anybody, maybe they would start out by

"broadcasting at that frequency."

CRACKLING

You sort of rendezvous at this frequency that every

technical society in the universe will know.

In all the time we've been listening, we've only picked up

a handful of signals that look promising.

Perhaps the best known of these was back in the 1970s.

ARCHIVE: Over the last 20 years, several groups of radio astronomers

have from time to time taken part in this attempt to tune in

to the Galactic Club.

And for a few of them, it's become a full-time occupation.

So 24 hours a day, seven days a week,

the observatory computers record the sounds of the universe,

and all they ever hear is a hardly changing hiss.

Except once.

We were detecting signals based on their strength.

And we didn't have enough space to store vast quantities of data.

So the idea was we simply printed out.

Kerchunk!

That was how the printer sounded when it printed out

all 120 characters at once.

The whole system was working without anybody

being at the radio observatory.

SLIGHT RUMBLE

There's always background noise.

When this radio signal came through,

starting out at six, that meant six times the background noise.

Now, the next letter E, the E represented a signal strength

of 14 times the background noise.

Q is 26 times the background noise.

At the peak, U was 30 times the background noise.

WHOOSHING, ELECTRONIC NOISES

Then we dropped off J, and then five.

And then the signal was gone.

I recognised immediately,

we've got something very interesting.

I wrote the word "wow"

in the margin of the printout.

Wow, of course, indicates something very interesting, and this turned

out to be the strongest narrowband signal that we ever detected.

So why was the wow signal considered to be a good candidate

for an ET signal?

Because it moved across the sky with the speed of the stars.

And so that tells you that anything that's, you know, a transmitter

up there, it also will move across the sky at the same speed

that the stars apparently move across the sky.

And this did all that, so it looked good.

The director of the observatory wrote a letter after the detection.

He said, "The wow signal is highly suggestive of extraterrestrial

"intelligent origin, but little more can be said until it returns

"for further study."

It was not explained by something on Earth.

It is not explained by something that we know about stars.

It was not explained by something else that we know about in space.

So, as far as we know, this was an anomalous discovery.

It matches many of the hallmarks that scientists expect alien signals

to have, and we still have no other explanation for it.

I've talked to people at Ohio State about this and asked them, what do

they think it is? And they basically sort of throw up their hands.

Nobody knows. Nobody knows.

And that's the problem with finding something only once.

It's very hard to study something that you only see once.

If the wow signal were to come through now, it would be much

different than what we saw.

Technology has changed tremendously.

Well, I'm hoping we actually do discover signals

from extraterrestrial civilisations.

I'm hoping I live long enough to see that.

I've only got a few years left since I'm 82,

and I would like to see something during my remaining lifetime -

however short that may be.

What does this sound like to you?

Random noise?

Radio static?

Maybe a muffled voice.

I'm Anita Kay.

Welcome to The Insight.

Are we alone in the universe?

A new discovery revealed this week has many thinking maybe we aren't.

So Richard Southern joins us...

A mysterious radio signal...

..from outer space? No, Francis, mysterious radio signals

haven't picked up strong radio signals about...

They saw one area that had a signal,

but the signal... ..rhythm, too.

So can we imagine that it's likely that this signal we're picking up

was sent by thinking beings?

Just the idea of intelligence elsewhere in the universe

has set the Twitterverse all a-twitter.

WHINING

That was filth.

Let's turn now to our science editor, David Shukman.

David, these seem like intriguing reports. What do we actually know?

Well, there's a lot of excitement about this around the world.

And with that, a great deal of speculation.

Some of it, frankly, pretty far-fetched,

some sounding more plausible.

What we're pretty certain about is that the signal did indeed

come from space, and that it was really powerful.

But beyond that, frankly, no-one's got much of a clue.

During the course of the day,

I've been talking to a lot of different scientists,

and a few of them are floating the notion that the signal

may contain some kind of data - information, but in a form

that we've never encountered before.

And if that's the case - and it's a massive if - obviously

it may take years before we get to grips with what this is all about.

The question about deciphering messages is always so complicated

if you don't know what you're looking for.

WHALES CALL

Whales are a really good study object.

They are in some ways the closest thing that we have to aliens

here on Earth.

Whales are highly intelligent

and their environment is entirely different from ours.

The patterns that we hear are clearly patterns

that we recognise as music.

They're repeated patterns.

They are pitched.

It is a form of vocalising

that we would think of as the equivalent of singing.

But even at that level, we don't really know what it's for.

Is it music? Is it language? What does it mean?

How is it used? Who responds?

I think at the best of times, it can give us a sense of

how difficult the task at hand is!

And how many layers we have to cut through in order to get somewhere.

When I look at how Hollywood portrays science fiction, connecting

to contacts and so on, one of the things that I think is unreal

is the fact that we so often talk to people like ourselves.

People that can readily communicate, have similar ambitions,

similar responses.

But when I think about intelligent life and the variety of it,

when I think the fact that, you know, intelligent life on Earth,

we've got dogs, we've got apes.

We've got octopi that have their intelligence

in their arms, not in their head.

We can't talk to most of the creatures on Earth

in an intelligent way.

How are we going to talk to the intelligent civilisations?

I'm not sure we'll ever understand them.

That is a big challenge.

You know, one of the things that we often forget is that a sense

of timescale might be incredibly different

for a technological civilisation that evolved somewhere else.

They might think in a much faster time or a much slower time,

and the rate at which things change

and present information, as humans,

we just might not be able to appreciate it at all.

It's not, you know, "Here's a movie!" Right?

It's not going to be that way. It's not going to be,

"Here's a movie of the aliens!"

"Oh, you want to Facetime with the alien?" Right?

That's not what's going to happen.

So it's going to be a mixture of responses.

But for those who are, you know, on team science, it's going to

be incredibly exciting because now we have new stuff

to study that is unlike anything we've seen before.

Hello to everyone new who's joining us today.

So our teams have been running multiple scenarios over the past few

days, and it's looking increasingly unlikely that the signal

would have originated from the Voyager craft itself.

Our best guess is that we picked up a reflection from another source,

or maybe something that actually crossed Voyager's line of sight.

We just started to model different potential transmitting bodies.

But it's too early to draw any conclusions.

I'd say there's decades of work to be done here.

What's the point? I mean, what if the aliens

are living here on Earth already?

Here's my theory. First of all, I love how they say

they also deny it's part of any secret government operation.

Well, it's secret. They're not going to tell us!

Even Nasa people, ex-Nasa people that come out and say,

"Look, mate, aliens..." They retire and they're like,

"Aliens are real, bro.

"Like, they just are. Like, we're fully aware of them." But they don't

tell people because it would cause too much of an uproar.

Anyone that says that in the entire un...

It's been days now,

and the so-called Voyager signal is still puzzling scientists

around the world. Where it came from and what it might mean

are being studied intensely right now.

And in the absence of anything concrete, all kinds of unfounded

ideas - some of them quite unsettling - are being stirred up.

Can everyone please chill out about this alien signal?

Freaking out that they're coming to get us... Call the Avengers...

I hate to break it to you guys, but it's a hoax.

Alexa, do you believe in aliens?

This is one of those things that some people

like to decide for themselves.

I feel like, you know, it's their language we don't really understand

but they're trying to make contact.

And they are coming for us.

We need to be prepared.

Make sure you have enough supplies and get ready for Armageddon,

because this is going to be all out

intergalactic war. Full-scale alien apocalypse.

With such an unclear signal, without a very obvious intent

and message, I think there would be a lot of uncertainty.

And uncertainty breeds anxiety.

We do see disturbance in people's day-to-day routines when big events

happen. We saw this certainly with the global pandemic,

that people rushed out because they foresaw

that there would be circumstances in which supplies would be limited.

I think you'll see an increase in people feeling that there

has to be something I can do, so what can I do to prepare?

And I will go out and I will buy tinned food, I will buy toilet

paper, I'll stock up on water just in case.

And that's a way of reassuring yourself that you still have some

control over the situation.

I'm sure a lot of things would be happening

and many different reactions.

But I can assure you the scientific community would be really focused

on trying to understand the nature of that signal

and its characteristics, and where it was coming from.

Is it far away? Or, you know, maybe it's even in the solar system

or passing through the solar system.

So, you know, we'd be working hard and trying to understand

those kinds of things.

We've had a number of automatic warnings over the last few hours.

It's coming from multiple observatories.

Chile and the Canaries both flagged objects of interest.

We'll keep you updated on the situation.

With the Spaceguard Survey, Congress mandated that we study the

sky and find at least 90% of all asteroids a kilometre or greater.

So because of this, a number of surveys have started.

Right now, there's about seven looking at the entire sky

every night in an automated format to search for moving objects.

Without these surveys, I think it's fair to say that we would

have never made the discovery that we made back in 2017.

We've never seen anything like this before.

We've never seen anything like it.

And we don't really have any idea of how you'd make it.

There's lots of theoreticians scratching their heads

and coming up with ideas.

But at the moment, we've only got a very small amount of data,

so it's difficult to tell what it is.

Could it be aliens?

It could be. Um...

STATION RETUNES, STATIC

It was a visitor from elsewhere in our galaxy.

A relic from another planetary system.

My colleague called me at home and said, "Karen, I think

"we have found an interstellar object."

I was silent for a minute.

I was thinking, "Oh, shit! This shouldn't be today.

"I just want to relax!" But then I got very excited.

So we had about five or six days in which to do all of the science.

You're pulling in long days - 18, 19-hour days.

Everybody was. And I was coordinating everyone,

bringing in the data, analysing the data.

And what this meant was I lived in my office.

Air mattress, sleeping bag - it's quite cosy.

You wake up after a few hours of sleep and get back to the data.

But the first really big surprise, I think, was

how much it changed in brightness.

If you have reflected light coming from the big side of an object,

it will be bright.

And then as it rotates, you will get a small amount of reflected light.

So you can use this brightness measurement as a measurement

of effectively how elongated something is.

I think it is a really unusual object.

The shape, you know, is so extreme.

You know, it's sort of ten times longer than it is broad.

I don't really know what you call the thing because it didn't

really have the normal properties you would expect from a comet.

We were rather shocked.

There's nothing in our solar system that is that elongated.

Typically, if you have elongated things, eventually they'll hit

something and break. So it's just very unusual

to have something that long.

We contacted two people who were specialists in the Hawaiian

language, and we said,

"You have two days to devise a Hawaiian name for us."

And so they did. By Sunday, they came up with a name

and they suggested Oumuamua, which means scout or messenger

from the distant past, reaching out to us.

It came in going very fast, and there were two things

that were different about it that made it quite puzzling.

One was its shape, and it also moved in such a way that it appeared

that there was another force on it other than gravity.

Now, what might that have been?

Comets do this all the time, and the other force is the material

being ejected from their surface.

So was it cometary in nature?

Well, there was no evidence for a cometary tail.

So what was happening was a bit of a mystery.

Not everybody thought it was, you know,

just a natural thing - just an old rock.

Some people thought maybe it was part of an alien craft.

And in particular, it was the fact that it didn't sort of,

you know, move smoothly.

It seemed to be slightly accelerating.

It was picking up speed.

It was moving like it had some sort of engine

connected to it or something.

The jury is out on what 'Oumuamua really was.

Observatories around the world discovered that the object

was a lowly voyager.

Was 'Oumuamua an alien artefact?

Observatories all around and above the world

focused on this approximately half-mile long object

to learn as much as possible about this cosmic visitor

before it moved too far away to see.

The Breakthrough Project decided to take

one of the big radio telescopes - the Green Bank Telescope -

and listen in case there were signals coming from 'Oumuamua.

And several of the press asked me, "Isn't this a silly experiment?"

And I said, "No.

"You know, what if it's alien technology?

"Wouldn't you want to have done the experiment?

"This is your one chance.

"It's a simple, easy experiment."

But nothing was detected from any of the radio experiments.

The idea of aliens, here, is so scary.

I will be very curious and with many questions.

How they think, how they see us.

This thing was terrifying.

I trust no alien.

You know, I think is it time for me to move to another planet yet?

What else is this alien race maybe capable of?

NEWSREADER: The consensus among scientists

is that although the object is moving extremely rapidly,

it does not pose any danger to us here on Earth.

And while this could prove to be one of the most important

scientific discoveries of all time,

it's triggered a frenzy of diplomatic activity.

There have been discussions around the clock

at the UN, and there's due to be an emergency special session.

Debate is likely to be heated as the world's governments

grapple with how best to react to this unprecedented event.

..wishes to make known its support for the proposition

to move all nuclear defences to an elevated level of preparedness

on the condition that a new working coalition....

Transmission is changing shortly.

China is...

Nations sharing all data connected to Interstellar Artefact 1F2SJ U1.

The discussion on air and space at the United Nations

started with the launch of Sputnik by the Russians in 1957.

And there was a fear that,

between Russia and the United States,

there would be an arms race in outer space.

At the 188th meeting

of the Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 1977,

the question was asked that in view of the tremendous impact

any contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation would have

upon our planet, can this committee, its asks,

continue to ignore this possible development?

Most of the time, the Member States do not want to discuss

extraterrestrial intelligence or life

because it's assumed that this issue will trivialise all the other issues

that you're talking about.

Talking about space debris, weaponization in space -

those are very important topics.

But if there is extraterrestrial intelligence, it will trivialise

the other discussions.

So if there was an interstellar object,

that this was obviously emanating radio signals,

we invite the scientists from all over the world

to give its views to the subcommittee

on what we should do next.

What does this mean, actually?

It's very important the facts are heard and fully understood,

and that this body is able to take the appropriate decisions...

You cannot have a quick solution in the United Nations.

You can't. It has to be extraordinary.

And if it's to be extraordinary,

then there has to be an extraordinary effort

from the office of the Secretary General

to decide what to do next.

It feels so surreal to be saying this,

but they're simply calling it The Artefact -

an object that may contain technology

formed somewhere other than Earth.

What's amazing is how this whole extraordinary saga began

with just one signal.

That's all we had to go on.

It took another five or six days before the first image appeared.

And when it did, it was really grainy.

Now, just in the last few hours, the first detailed pictures

have started to appear,

and they'll be vital for helping us understand what this object is

and where it came from.

From what we've seen so far,

the object appears to be tumbling through space.

There's no sign of it moving under any kind of control,

an extraordinary thought given that it's almost 200 miles long

and travelling at speeds we've never seen before.

These images raise so many questions.

Is this a structure in its own right,

or could it once have been part of something larger?

Is it genuinely artificial?

And if so, what created it?

And perhaps most important of all, where did it come from?

If I was on a desert island and a broken bottle washed up on shore,

that would be information that'd be really exciting.

It would mean I am not as deserted on this island as I thought I was,

and I think that's what this would tell us.

It wouldn't tell us everything we wanted to know about the aliens,

but it would tell us we're not as alone as we thought we were.

If there was some sort of alien artefact that would come

through the solar system,

you would do as much to characterise it.

What is it made of? How big is it? How dense is it?

Is it spinning?

These are the things that help you understand what it is.

So you have to rush and get the data first,

and then you interpret the data afterwards.

We'd be able to look at the light that was being reflected off it

and also being absorbed by it.

And that might tell us about the chemical composition

of what we're looking at.

We'd be able to tell if it's a geological object,

if it was made up of rock or if it was made up of metal,

and what kind of material it was.

If it was artificial, we might be able to tell what the different

chemical composition of the artificial material is.

This is absolutely real.

It is something that they just cannot explain.

And it's something that they are taking seriously.

The United States military, which is often blamed

for being the cause of UFOs, is clueless.

They have no idea what it is either.

So the question mark is what is it?

So you see this as a national security issue?

Absolutely.

They're going to have to acknowledge that there is something there

we need to be concerned about from a national security standpoint.

That we don't even understand how you could build something

that would do that. We don't even understand the science behind it.

This is a whole difference of kind, not degree.

In the language of the US Department of Defense,

unidentified aerial phenomena,

which add fuel to the belief of some that we are not alone.

You're back with Anita Kay.

America tonight is split down the middle.

Gun sales have more than doubled across the country,

with many convinced of impending invasion.

For many others, however,

the events of the last few days have been cause

for intense celebration

and represent one of the most significant moments

in human history.

Oh, nice!

Tonight, enthusiasts from all over the state are out in force

with their telescopes attempting to become part of history.

The race is on to identify new features

of this strange object.

Wow!

Amazing! It's...

As you can see, it's a party atmosphere,

but everybody is just enjoying the thrill.

CHANTING

NEWSCASTER: Tonight, the first studies into the Artefact

are being released.

One suggests it could be made of a kind of metal,

supporting the claim that it is indeed artificial.

Another intriguing line of inquiry is working out

where it's come from.

And because Nasa and the European Space Agency

have developed ways of studying distant stars,

it is possible that we could peer back along the object's path

to look for evidence of habitable worlds.

When I started studying science, we didn't know about exoplanets.

The idea that we can detect planets around other star systems

is something within just the last 20 or 30 years

that we've been able to do.

The fact that exoplanets actually exist,

their reality is incredibly recent.

It's in the '90s that we found the first such planet.

BILL CLINTON: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

America's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first pictures

of a planet outside the solar system.

It was found near two developing stars,

450 lightyears from Earth.

Astronomers believe it's the first concrete evidence

there are other planets in deep space.

Up until the last couple of decades,

we didn't know that exoplanets even existed.

We thought they might.

We hoped they might.

And looking at our own solar system, we thought,

"Well, surely they must."

But we didn't have the technology to be able to identify them.

And then Kepler came along, and now we do.

When I was thinking of Kepler and building a mission,

one of the things I recognised was that NASA

had a strategic objective -

determine the extent of life in our universe.

And how would you do that?

Well, if you had planets,

lots of planets in the habitable zone,

Earth-sized planets,

you could have life throughout the galaxy.

When I speak of the habitable zone,

what we're talking about is,

if we take a planet, we move it close to the star,

it's too hot.

If you had water on a planet, it would boil off.

It would evaporate. It would be lost to space. It's too hot.

If you go very far from the star, it's too cold.

Any water there is frozen forever.

So the intermediate region, the Goldilocks zone,

we could have liquid water on the surface,

where we think it would be conducive to the evolution of life.

That's what we call the habitable zone.

Kepler was designed to find out -

are Earth-like planets frequent in our galaxy?

Are they in the habitable zone?

T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven,

six, five, four, three, two.

Engine start. One, zero.

And liftoff of the Delta II rocket with Kepler

on a search for planets in some way like our own.

Chamber pressures are building.

Ground-lit solid motors are building and chamber pressure.

Can you see separation?

And we have ignition of the air-lit solid motors.

When a telescope was launched,

the thing was tumbling in space,

pointing the antenna this way and that way.

It couldn't operate properly.

It's a real cliff-hanger.

We were really worried that mission might not work

if we couldn't get it to stop spinning.

When they found the electronic system was in difficulty,

it shifted to a different system.

It was able to stop the spinning and point the antenna

toward the Earth.

Throw off the cover and what you see is this magnificent image.

82 detectors showing hundreds of thousands of glowing stars.

Every detector working.

It meant that the mission was certain to succeed.

We would find thousands of planets.

It was a beautiful, magnificent image.

I'll never forget it.

So, as the Kepler Space Telescope continuously stares at the stars,

you can see planets moving around these stars.

You can see that the light dips slightly in its brightness,

and we can measure that dip.

So we can tell, potentially, by how big the dip is,

what size the planet is.

We can also look at the orbit of the planet,

how long it takes to go around its star,

and maybe how close it is to its star.

When we combine those with the temperature of the star,

we can start to estimate the temperature

of the planet itself.

And once we know that, we can actually estimate

its habitability potential and whether it's somewhere

that could be capable of supporting life as we know it.

I think the Kepler telescope has been tremendously exciting

because of the number and variety of exoplanetary systems

that have been discovered.

With Kepler, it's - at least in my opinion -

showing that we probably have a potential

for a lot of habitable worlds.

The probability that we have life in the universe goes up.

We know for a fact -

not speculation, for a fact -

our galaxy is full of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone.

It might very well be full of life.

NEWSREADER: Despite assurances from Nasa

that there are no other artificial objects in the solar system,

the last 24 hours have seen air forces around the world

increase their state of readiness.

Meanwhile, troops have been mobilised in parts

of mainland Europe to help alleviate some of the mounting food shortages

and supply chain issues.

Good morning, and thank you for inviting us to present today.

I'd like to start by reiterating what many of you have probably

already heard from your contacts.

We do not believe there are any more of these objects approaching us,

at least not within the timeframe of weeks and months.

So our main focus in the last few days

has been on narrowing down a point of origin.

We'd like to present today what we consider to be

the best candidate star systems.

Using speed and trajectory data, we were able to narrow down

over 5,400 potential candidates.

Then we discarded any systems without an abundance

of the elements seen in the Artefact.

Leaving us with these eight.

Of these, only one we believe might be old enough

to be a potential home to complex life.

21 Sagittarii.

A star system we believe is nearly eight billion years old.

Well, it's quite probable

that something that we would find will be older.

You have to realise that, in our region of the galaxy,

the sun is about a billion years younger

than the surrounding stars.

So our neighbours are quite a bit older than we are.

Well, I think older stars would be interesting

just because they've been around for a longer time.

So there's been a longer sort of period for life to evolve.

And if it takes a long time for intelligent life to evolve...

We know it was something like four billion years

here on our planet.

You know, if you give it another four billion years,

so you have a star that's maybe eight billion years old,

then it's had twice the amount of time to, you know,

potentially produce an intelligent civilisation.

So old stars, I think, are interesting.

When we think about looking for alien technology

or alien life elsewhere in the galaxy,

we're almost certainly going to find things that have been around

a really long time.

Really long time means millions to hundreds of millions

to billions of years old.

If we found technology that was a billion years old,

that means, when Earth was covered with microbes and slime,

there's technology operating on some other planet.

I mean, that to me is quite profound.

Science Q.

This is Anita Kay.

Welcome back to The Insight.

So what exactly is this thing and what do we do now?

Well, based on its erratic and uncontrolled spin,

many now suspect we've likely discovered some kind

of technological debris.

A piece of cosmic junk that originated somewhere

in the Sagittarii system.

The question some are now starting to ask is...

..should we attempt to send a message there?

And if so,

what should we say?

Good evening, and welcome to the 699th meeting

of the Security Council...

An unacceptable risk...

So I think we'd need to gather as much information together

before we transmit.

You know, we've got this thing in our head.

It's sort of limited, you know,

by the physical scale of it.

But, you know, there might be other things out there

that just has a capacity that is completely beyond

what we can even imagine.

And so it's a bit like, you know, ants.

You know, trying to communicate with ants.

The gulf might be enormous between ourselves

and other intelligences.

You'd have to think really hard about that

before you pressed the send button.

It's been decided that space is the common province of all humankind.

And so, when you talk about extraterrestrial life,

then that obviously relates to space,

and therefore no one country in the world should decide on what to do.

Well, it turns out that there actually is a protocol

for what you're supposed to do.

And here it is, actually.

"In the case of a confirmed detection of a signal,

"signatories to this declaration will not respond

"without first seeking guidance and consent of a broadly representative

"international body, such as the United Nations."

Personally, I don't think that there's any reason

to be particularly concerned,

because we're broadcasting all the time anyhow.

All our radio, all our television, all those signals,

they just go right through the ionosphere.

Sure, they're not intended for aliens.

But willy-nilly, they just go off the Earth, out into space.

Freeman Dyson is one of the people that participated

in the past years with us.

And he says, if you ever announce that you've detected a signal,

everyone is going to transmit

and say whatever the hell they please.

Right? And then he chuckles, he says,

"Hmm, and wouldn't that cacophony be about the best

"characterisation of 21st century Earth?"

Yo, what up, guys?

I'm starting the First Contact Challenge.

I want to see what messages you've got for those alien freaks.

So don't forget...

Kind of lonely.

And I would be excited for there to be some other civilisation

out there that we might be able to...

If we didn't contact the aliens then maybe we could learn from them

and we would really lose out on a good situation.

So I think we should just send a message,

tell them that we're friends and we won't hurt them.

OK, so everyone's been asking me recently

what my message would be to aliens.

But some are also scary

as it's civilised enough to send a signal.

You're listening to Talk Box on Joy Radio.

I'm Jen Wright, and we're going to dive straight in with the question

of the day, which is - what message would you send to aliens?

So, my message to aliens would be

those in power don't speak for all of us.

You've heard the sound that they sent us, right?

Just total garbage. Indecipherable...

MUMBLED MESSAGES AND INTERWEAVING VOICES

..so I would send them equally annoying stuff back.

The hold music that drives me mad.

RADIO STATIC, MUFFLED VOICES

They say radio broadcasts travel out into space forever.

Well, if anyone's out there and listening to this,

hello from the people of Earth.

It's nice to know we've got some company at last.

Anyway, here's one of our best, Claude Debussy.

MUSIC: Clair de lune by Claude Debussy

Let us know what you think.

Nasa is sending commands up to the James Webb Space Telescope

to align it perfectly with the 21 Sagittarii star system.

It's a delicate operation a million miles above us,

directing the telescope's intricate mechanisms

to get it into just the right position.

Now, once it's there, it'll deploy what's called a coronagraph

to gather just a few thousand of the photons being emitted.

It's a little bit like the amount of light you'd get from a candle

four-and-a-half-thousand miles away.

But by analysing that light,

it should be possible to see if there are planets there

and to gather clues about what kind of worlds these might be.

If life is out there, the James Webb Space Telescope

is going to increase our probability of finding it

because it's way more sensitive than previous telescopes.

It's in space, which gives it this clear view,

unobstructed by our atmosphere.

And it has the most modern technologies.

What I'm most interested in

is the fact it's going to study exoplanet atmospheres,

and we're going to be looking for biosignature gases.

So a biosignature is effectively a signature of biology.

We use it as a sign of finding something -

it could be a molecule in a rock

or it could be a gas in an atmosphere,

but something that can only be created by life.

It's only there because there is life existing.

You might look for water vapour, oxygen and methane -

that's a classic biosignature

because on Earth those things derive from life.

So on an exoplanet, it would at least suggest to us

the presence of life.

A technosignature is any remotely detectable evidence of technology.

So CFCs are chlorofluorocarbons.

They have a very long residence time in the atmosphere.

There are no sources of these kinds of chlorofluorocarbons on Earth

other than our own industry.

If you go all the way to thinking about a technological civilisation

that creates smog, CFCs, then with a lot of hours

you might in fact be able to detect that smog

and in fact deduce that there was some sort of a technology

on that planet.

For 12 days, the world has held its breath.

Now, finally, we are beginning to get some answers.

The James Webb data has revealed something extraordinary.

Well, there've been no radio signals from it, no sign of activity,

and no planets.

But there are hints about what could be the remains of a planet.

But we do know that if planets get too close to their stars,

they get torn apart by the gravitational forces.

And if that happens...

SPEECH DISTORTS: They get torn apart by the gravitational forces.

..what's left is a ring of dust and debris.

It's a very distinctive shape

and it's similar to what we're seeing

in the latest images released today.

And it's similar to what we're seeing in...

SPEECH DISTORTS

We're also getting clues about what this ring is made of,

and it seems to include chemical compounds

that are unlikely to be natural.

Instead, they look somehow manufactured.

So there are suggestions that this ring and the object

that just passed through our solar system may be relics

of a past civilisation.

Which means that this is no longer a search for life.

It's more about delving into the ancient history of deep space.

Searching for life in our solar system is one thing,

but searching for life beyond, it might be closer to archaeology,

because we're receiving signals

from what may now be dead civilisations.

Searching for extraterrestrial relics is like archaeology.

You know, I hope I'm wrong.

I hope that the first sign we have of life

is aliens come knocking on our doorstep and they're friendly.

But I have to be realistic, too.

I don't think that it's going to be, "Hello!"

"Hello."

"How are you?"

You know, a two-way communication.

I think it's much more likely to be a one-way communication

such as we currently have with Shakespeare or the ancient Greeks

and the Romans.

We can't ask questions of them,

but they have provided us a wealth of information

that we can learn from.

I think if we detect evidence of a single artefact

or a single piece of evidence

that there is another advanced civilisation out there,

well, then I think the floodgates are open.

There must be others out there.

Our main problem right now is we are just one data point.

We don't know if we're unique,

but as soon as we have evidence that it happened somewhere else

and that life and intelligent life evolved,

well, then it could happen anywhere.

Hello, good evening.

Well, straight away let's focus on that all-important cloud cover

tending to break up and translating into clear skies,

which of course is great news if there are any amateur astronomers

out there wanting one last glimpse of this cosmic visitor.

As we know, we're expecting a few million people to mark

the occasion throughout the country over the course of this evening,

and that's anywhere from Snowdon Yr Wyddfa

all the way down to Trafalgar Square.

Pretty mass gathering expected there.

But, a word of warning.

Now, can you just see the telltale signs of that cold front up north?

Well, that's expected to sink southwards at quite a pace.

So if you are attending an outdoor light vigil,

if you're going out tonight,

bear this in mind and please wrap up warmly.

Our best guess is that we've encountered an object

created by an intelligence

that existed over a billion years ago.

But our time with it is fleeting.

Today, the artefact moves out of sight

as it makes its way beyond the Solar System.

It may be over a million years

before it encounters another star or planet.

What we now know beyond doubt

is that the miracle of complex life is not unique to the Earth.

But how long intelligent civilisations last,

and if they ever overlap, remains unknown.

As of right now, there's still every chance we're alone in the universe.

And that means we have a responsibility

to protect what's happened here.

The search for life isn't over.

It's really just beginning.

Exploring space to determine the extent of life in our galaxy

reminds me very much of what the people in the Middle Ages did.

They believed that one of the great things they could do

was build these beautiful cathedrals to worship God.

They knew when they started building these cathedrals

they would not live long enough to see these cathedrals

in their full glory, to go inside and worship God.

But their children or grandchildren would do that.

They had the faith to start, to do the work.

In space exploration, we are doing those first steps.

We are building that foundation.

And it's not something that's done in one lifetime.

It's something that humankind does

because it has faith that we need and want to explore the universe...

..and find life in our galaxy.