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| Earth’s Airports Might Be Exposing Us to Aliens from 200 Light-Years Away. |
So, get this—Earth might be accidentally telling the universe, “Hey, we’re here!” And it’s not because of the internet or our favorite Netflix shows, but because of something way more unexpected: airport radar systems.
Researchers from the University of Manchester found out that those radars we use to manage flights and military aircraft are sending out insanely powerful radio signals. These signals are strong enough to travel deep into space—like, up to 200 light-years away. Yeah, no joke.
Turns out, compared to other communication tech like TV or cell towers, these radars are absolute beasts. They work kind of like giant space beacons. Scientists even estimated that all these radars combined are blasting out around 2 quadrillion watts of energy. That’s the kind of power level that could catch the attention of any alien civilization with a decent radio telescope. If they have something like the Green Bank Telescope in the US, they could totally pick up what we’re throwing out there.
And here’s the wild part. Military radars are even more obvious. Their signals are super focused and repeat in patterns, which basically screams “intelligent life” to anyone listening in from afar. It’s like we’re sending Morse code straight into the cosmos without meaning to.
Now think about this. Our nearest star neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is just 4.2 light-years away. And within 200 light-years of Earth, there are over 120,000 stars. That’s a huge number of potential alien eyes on us. According to Ramiro Kaissae Saide, the scientist behind the study, we’re not even trying to send these signals out—but they’re going anyway. He even found out that cellphone towers can be detected from up to 10 light-years away. Yup, even your mobile signal might be part of the broadcast.
So if there are intelligent aliens out there with good enough tech, they probably already know about us. They might even know which direction to fly in if they ever feel like visiting. We’re basically a glowing dot in the middle of the dark, silent galaxy, and all because we need to land planes safely.
Crazy, right? We’ve been reaching out to the stars this whole time, and we didn’t even know it.