Meet the man who will talk to aliens

By day, Dr John Elliott is a professor in Computing and Creative Technologies at Leeds Metropolitan University. But by night, his work takes on a more out-of-this-world nature – he's devising the methods we'll need to talk to aliens. Making first contact with extraterrestrial life by detecting a signal would be one of the defining moments in the history of humanity, but what if we don't know what they're saying? That's where Dr John Elliott comes in - he's been devising methods to decode an alien language for the day he believes we'll receive a message Dr Elliot has been working on decoding languages for two decades. In 1959, Cornell physicists Gieuseppi Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article discussing the potential to use microwave radio to communicate between stars.