An expert on extraterrestrial life has said that humans are not advanced enough to read messages from aliens, if indeed they are sending them.
Dr Nathalie Cabrol from the SETI Institute, hinted that basing our search for ET on merely audio and optical signals could be too narrow.
Speaking to DailyMail.com, she said: "If there is a civilisation out there that is only 1,000 years older than we are, who knows what type of technology, or what type of process, they’ve put into communicating with others.
"We’re just scratching the surface here. We’re looking at the universe from our own standpoint.
"We tend to ask questions in the way we do. But what kind of thought process an alien civilisation may have, we really don’t know.
Rather than stick to traditional methods, Cabrol hinted at trying new, more advanced techniques.
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"We have to rely a bit on our imagination right now to figure out what ET will be doing, and not being afraid to develop new research avenues as well."
Her solution however, has everything to do with the destruction of alien planets and the effect of climate change on Earth, the Daily Mail reports.
According to Cabrol, "There is a window in time when you can expect a civilisation to get to this disequilibrium as we are in now.
'During this time, you will find signatures in the atmosphere of a planet that shouldn’t be there. So we can look for that as well. And this is just an example.