The vast cosmos seems like a cold and lonely place.
For all our scouring of the sky, we're yet to find concrete signs of alien life outside of Earth – never mind outside the Solar System.
And that's before we even get to technology – telltale signs that an intelligent civilization has developed ways to manipulate its environment that we might be able to detect across interstellar space.
That doesn't mean they're not out there. It may mean that we're just not looking hard enough.
And now, astronomers in China have used the world's biggest single-dish radio telescope to conduct a deep scan of 33 planetary systems that looked like promising places to search for technosignatures.
Most of them turned up precisely the result you might expect – no dice.
One was a little more interesting.
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