NASA to find aliens ‘IN YEARS’: Shock study reveals countdown to alien discovery

This, he says, makes it difficult for us to imagine technology that could have been produced by aliens living on planets older than Earth.

He said: “We need to re-visit even our most cherished assumptions”, including that “interstellar travel is impossible or highly unlikely”.

“Considering further that technological development in our civilisation started only about 10,000 years ago and has seen the rise of scientific methodologies only in the past 500 years, we can surmise that we might have a real problem in predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone 6million times that amount,” the professor explained.

He added: “Even if the speed of light continues to be an unbreakable barrier, over spans of thousands of years civilisations could probably make interstellar journeys.”

In his paper, titled New Assumptions to Guide SETI Research, Professor Colombano said that recent discoveries of Earth-like planets by the Kepler space telescope offered hope.

READ MORE: Mysterious signals 1.5 billion light years away could be proof of alien life