Digital television may be hurting our chances of making contact with aliens, claims Frank Drake, the founder of SETI, speaking at the Royal Society meeting in London we told you about yesterday. The problem, he says: Digital transmissions are weaker and harder to detect than analog transmissions, and satellites aim their transmissions toward Earth, which means:

Now the actual amount of radiation escaping into space is about two watts, not much more than you get from a cell phone. If this continues into the future, very soon our world will become undetectable. Using ourselves as an example, it means the difficulty of finding other civilizations will be much greater. We’re going to have to search many more stars and many more frequencies.