THE media was abuzz recently after news broke that an international collaboration using a large radio telescope (four gigantic cylinders in rural British Columbia, Canada) had found evidence of a “repeating fast radio burst (FRB) source.”

In other words, an extremely powerful pulse of radiation from a fixed place in the night sky: not just once, but repeatedly.

The short bursts of powerful radiation lasted just a few milliseconds. Such bursts have been seen before, but only as one-off events. The bursts repeated, but not at regular intervals, and this repetition has led some to wonder: could these be alien signals?

Without spoiling the fun, we suggest: probably not. As is typical for scientific articles written by large research groups, the authors played their cards close to their chest and didn’t comment on the more lurid implications, leaving that for the press release and the journalists.

Mainstream opinion is that powerful but natural astronomical objects are probably responsible. Truth can be stranger than fiction, and there are undoubtedly whole arrays of astrophysical phenomena out there that we’re yet to observe.

There is precedent here. When astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell observed a strange repeating signal of bursts separated by just over a second in the sky in Cambridge in 1967, the fixed pulses seemed so unnatural that the signal was named “LGM-1” — referring to the possibility of “little green men.”

Within a year, others were observed, and scientists decided that the signals came from neutron stars rotating at incredible speed, their beams of radiation only visible when they passed over Earth, like a lighthouse.

Of course, if aliens could transmit such powerful signals to us, or even make it here themselves, they’d have to be far more technologically advanced than we are.

Would they therefore be more socially advanced — a communist or even a (superior) post-communist civilisation?

That’s a hypothesis often associated with the now defunct Fourth International Posadist, a Trotskyist international set up in the 1960s.

J Posadas thought that aliens might already have visited Earth: while he was unsure of the precise details, he concluded that UFOs probably existed.

In 1968 — just as pulsars were in the news — he wrote that “these beings from other planets come to observe life down here and laugh at humans, we who fight each other over who has the most cannons, cars and wealth.”

While we’re yet to see any convincing evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence, we agree with the sentiment.

It seems to us that any aliens worth their salt would be best off taking a detour and leaving us alone until we can sort ourselves out.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem that improved knowledge of science has any necessary connection to the moral sphere.