Mr McKinley calculated the strength of the Earth’s radio signals, and found that listening in on us would be feasible, provided an alien civilisation had far superior technologies to our own. Our nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri, is approximately four light years away from Earth.
The MWA telescope is highly sensitive to radio frequencies in the 80-300 MHz range and has been designed to search for the very faint signals from the formation of the first stars in the early Universe. To avoid man-made radio frequency interference from nearby radio and TV stations, the MWA is located in the outback of Western Australia, at CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory
