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.

A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien "sentient machines". Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth. But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short. Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than "biological" life. Many involved in Seti have long argued that nature may have solved the problem of life using different designs or chemicals, suggesting extraterrestrials would not only not look like us, but that they would not at a biological level even work like us.