The truth might be out there, but ET doesn't appear to be.
The biggest-ever sweep of the night sky for signs of alien life has come up completely empty.
Researchers in Australia pointed the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope at a region of the galaxy known to contain more than 10 million stars, looking for powerful radio emissions that would indicate some kind of intelligent civilization.
"We observed the sky around the constellation of Vela for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times broader and deeper than ever before," said Chenoa Tremblay, an astronomer with Australia's national science agency, CSIRO.
"With this dataset, we found no technosignatures - no sign of intelligent life."
That doesn't mean life isn't out there - it might be too primitive to use radio technology, or perhaps too advanced. Or they were just looking in the wrong place.
"As Douglas Adams noted in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 'space is big, really big'," said Steve Tingay, astronomer at Curtin University.
"And even though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool."
The MWA is a collection of more than 4000 antennas spread across a few kilometres in remote Western Australia, about 800km north of Perth. It will soon be replaced by the Square Kilometre Array, which will have bases in Australia and South Africa and be dozens of times more powerful.
"With the SKA, we'll be able to survey billions of star systems, seeking technosignatures in an astronomical ocean of other worlds," said Prof Tingay.
The area surveyed has six known exoplanets, but it's likely there are millions more, with research suggesting more than two-thirds of stars have them.
"Our results clearly continue to demonstrate that [the search for extraterrestrial intelligence] has a long way to go," the paper, published in journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, concludes.
