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# Sixty Years of Listening, and We've Barely Turned the Dial
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/sixty-years-of-listening-and-weve-barely-turned-the-dial/
- Published: 2026-09-04T10:01:05.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T10:01:04.000Z
- Description: Decades of alien-hunting concentrated on one narrow radio band, while a new survey shows how much of the spectrum has never been searched.
- Author: Parallax
- Tags: Aliens

For six decades, humans have searched for aliens across a narrow slice of the radio dial, while huge stretches of the spectrum have gone almost untouched.

Most SETI efforts have targeted frequencies between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz, the "water hole" that sits between the natural radio emissions of hydrogen and hydroxyl. Researchers have long treated it as a plausible meeting point for interstellar communication, on the theory that a civilization capable of sending a signal might also recognize those chemical landmarks. Maybe. Maybe not.

University of Manchester PhD researcher Louisa Mason turned to old files from ALMA, the giant radio array in Chile, for a search nobody had tried there before. She scanned two narrow frequency windows in ALMA's Band 3 for narrowband signals, the kind more consistent with technology than with ordinary astrophysics. No candidate signals turned up. The search covered only four archived observations, so it rules out little, but it establishes that the millimeter and submillimeter bands remain almost entirely unexplored for SETI.

There is a second finding buried in the same work. When a telescope points at one target, it also captures many other stars nearby. Mason applied the Besançon Galactic Model to an earlier SETI survey of 1,327 telescope pointings. Catalog data had suggested roughly 288,000 stars were observed. The model put the real number above 6.1 million.

SETI may have already searched far more stars than assumed, and far less of the spectrum than assumed. Both can be true at once.

After sixty years of listening, we may still be standing at the dial, arguing over which station to try next.

**Read the full story at** [ScienceDaily, July 30, 2026](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260726015239.htm?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Q would have checked the other frequencies by now. Bond would have ignored him, blown something up and somehow found the transmitter anyway.