Alien life latest: Could light pollution attract extraterrestrial interest from space?
He said: “In that small volume, it is quite unlikely we will find a civilisation as advanced as ours.
“We are still struggling to directly detect life in planets around other stars – we still cannot do that for Earth-like planets in an Earth-like orbit.
“But in the next few decades it is quite likely we will be able to start doing that.
“It is within the realms of possibilities that reasonably technologically advanced alien civilisations can do this.
“But they have to be near enough, because if they are 1,000 light years away, they will be seeing Earth as it was 1,000 years in the past, and the Earth wasn’t lit with artificial light sources in the Middle Ages.”
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