Aliens ‘will be dead’ long before their messages reach our planet, scientists warn

Why can’t we find any aliens? (Getty)

In a tragic cosmic case of ‘missed calls’, we may never encounter extraterrestrials – because any aliens are likely to be extinct by the time we receive their messages.

The reason? The speed at which radio waves travel, relative to the mind-boggling scale of the universe.

For instance, human beings have been transmitting radio waves for more than a century – but our signals will still only have travelled 0.001% of the size of the galaxy.

Researchers believe that alien civilisations are unlikely to last more than 100,000 years – so the odds are that by the time we receive an alien signal, the creatures who sent it will be long dead.

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Lead researcher Dr Claudio Grimaldi said, ‘If the civilisation emitted from the other side of the galaxy, when the signal arrives here, the civilisation will already be gone.

The researchers wrote, ‘We develop a simple model of the galaxy that includes both the birthrate and detectable lifetime of civilisations to compute the possibility of a SETI detection at the Earth

‘The transmissions arriving at Earth may come from distant civilisations long extinct, while civilisations still alive are sending signals yet to arrive’.