iPad confusion and Tory antics indicate lack of intelligent life on Earth | John Crace

Aliens are unlikely to be impressed by the likes of Annunziata Rees-Mogg and the Conservative party

After three years of training telescopes on 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth as part of the Breakthrough Listen project, astronomers have been met with silence, having failed to detect any signals that resemble intelligent life elsewhere. And yet many scientists still believe such life must exist. Even if they don't accept the premise of the 1961 Drake equation, written by the US astrophysicist Frank Drake, that there are 100m worlds where life has been created through evolution, they still reckon the probability of extraterrestrial civilisations has to be above zero. So what are we doing wrong? The most likely explanation is that either we are looking in the wrong places or we are looking for the wrong things and that our equipment is not quite up to the job. But is it also possible that other civilisations are rather more sophisticated than our own and deliberately maintain radio silence to stop us getting in contact with them? That they've known about us for hundreds - if not thousands - of years and there is an international extraterrestrial alliance hellbent on blanking us out. They've taken a good look at us and concluded we are not intelligent enough to be worth bothering with. Just give us a couple of hundred years more and we'll have probably destroyed the entire planet and ceased to exist, so why make the effort of trying to get to know us?