Finding alien life will not be one discovery. It will be a claim that survives every independent check. This is a plan to put the public inside that checking.
The real sky: 1,637 naked-eye stars, and 536 radio bursts from other galaxies, replayed in the order the CHIME telescope caught them. One year in 45 seconds.
The network does not exist yet. Every figure outside the Worlds tab is a real measurement or a calculation from one, with its source named. The Worlds tab is a simulation and says so. Solar readings are a snapshot from 2026-10-03 01:01 UTC.
What humanity has found so far, how sure anyone is, and the messages already on their way.
In 2021 NASA scientists proposed a seven-step ladder for judging any claim of life beyond Earth, the Confidence of Life Detection scale. A claim starts at the bottom and climbs only as independent checks succeed. Here is the ladder, and where the real cases sit.
Steps paraphrased from Green et al. 2021, Nature 598, 575. The scale was written for biosignatures; radio signals are judged on the separate Rio scale, but the logic of independent confirmation is the same.
A rock nobody can bring home. A spectrum only one telescope can take. A radio signal nobody else was pointed at. In each case the first observation was real, and the second look never came or did not agree.
Second looks are something a worldwide public network can supply. That is the purpose of everything below.
The Perseverance rover found organic carbon and mineral spots that microbes can produce. NASA called it a potential biosignature. The cored sample is still on Mars, and the US Congress confirmed cancellation of the return mission in January 2026.
A team reported a gas that on Earth comes mainly from ocean life. Independent reanalyses of the same James Webb data found insufficient evidence; ordinary hydrocarbons fit as well or better.
A radio-telescope detection of a gas with no known source there. Other teams reprocessed the data and found a much weaker signal or none. Still unresolved.
A 72-second narrow-band signal at Ohio's Big Ear telescope, logged as 6EQUJ5 on the printout. Nobody else was watching that patch of sky and it never repeated. It can be neither confirmed nor dismissed.
A candidate from the Parkes telescope in the direction of the nearest star. The search team's own follow-up traced it to human interference. The checking worked.
No claim has passed step 2. Saying so plainly is part of doing this honestly, and it is why the count at the top of this page reads zero.
Since 1974, radio telescopes have beamed deliberate messages at nearby stars. Each one travels at the speed of light, so its position today is simple arithmetic: the years since it was sent. The bars below update from your clock.
Each transmission lasted minutes to hours and was aimed once. To catch one, a listener would need a large dish pointed at the Sun at the right moment. Nobody should expect an answer. If one ever came, these are the earliest dates it could arrive.
Five checks, on real data, of whether a worldwide network of small stations could do useful work.
The US Air Force runs four solar radio observatories spread around the globe. Each one measures the Sun's radio output near its own local noon. One of their frequencies, 1415 MHz, sits 5 MHz from the hydrogen line that SETI searches favor.
Flux in solar flux units (1 sfu = 10,000 Jy), both axes logarithmic. Hollow markers are readings the observatory itself flagged as uncertain.
Australia read 59, Italy 62, Hawaii 56 sfu. Three stations a third of the planet apart, hours apart, agree within about 5 percent.
The check also catches bad data. Hawaii's 610 MHz reading was 16 sfu against Italy's 52, and the observatory flagged it as uncertain. One station alone could not have known.
Separately, Canada's Penticton observatory measured the standard 10.7 cm index at 92 sfu on October 2 (90-day mean 115). Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
Pick a real target. The lit half of the globe has it above the horizon at this moment, by your device's clock. A flash from that direction reaches each station at a slightly different time, and those gaps are what triangulation measures.
Or click the globe to drop a station. It stays in your browser only.
The flash is a calculation, not a signal: it shows the wavefront crossing Earth and the moment it reaches each station, slowed about 235 times. The darker half of the globe is where it is night right now.
Fast radio bursts are millisecond flashes from other galaxies. Canada's CHIME telescope logged these 536 in its first catalog, between July 2018 and July 2019. They are natural, as far as anyone can tell, and their cause is still not fully understood. Click any point.
Nothing appears below about −11° declination. The bursts are there; CHIME sits at 49° north and that part of the sky never rises for it. One telescope, however good, is blind to the sky under its feet.
Rate matters too. From this catalog, CHIME's team estimated that about 525 bursts bright enough for it reach Earth every day, across the whole sky. The catalog itself averages fewer than two a day.
This is the standard radiometer equation, the same one professionals use to size a telescope. Set the dish, the receiver noise and the bandwidth, and see what clears a 10-sigma detection.
Defaults describe a 1 m WiFi grid dish, a low-noise amplifier and an RTL-SDR dongle: about US$200 of parts. Assumes 1420 MHz, 50% aperture efficiency, one polarization.
A lone receiver is fooled constantly by phones, radar, satellites and its own electronics. A real flash from space must reach every station that faces it within 85 milliseconds, the time light takes to cross the Earth and back. Random glitches almost never line up that way.
Assumes each station's false alarms are random and unrelated to the others, which holds better the farther apart the stations are. Uses the dish settings from Evidence 4. Sky coverage is a best case: stations spread evenly and aimed so that three share each patch.
The places astronomers most want to search, how far they are, and what they might look like.
Pick a destination and a speed, then launch. The map is drawn from real positions: the 4,059 cataloged stars within 100 light-years, in their real colors, and 3,617 stars known to have planets.
This tab is a simulation. Distances, positions and speeds are real. Whether anything lives at any of these places is unknown. No sign of life has been detected at any of them. "Hot zones" here means the places astronomers rank highest for a search.
Travel time is distance divided by speed, with no time spent speeding up or slowing down. Voyager 1 and the Parker probe speeds are measured. The 20% of light speed figure is a design goal for a gram-scale craft that has not been built.
No telescope can yet show the surface of any planet beyond the solar system. What is known is each planet's mass, size, orbit and the light of its star. The picture is built from those, then filled in with one of the surfaces the data allows. Switch between them: every one is still possible.
measured from telescope data in the catalog. calculated from measured values. estimated from a rule of thumb, because the value has not been measured. Oceans, ice, clouds and the shapes of the land are imagined, and no vegetation or cities are drawn because none are known.
This destination is a crowd of stars, not a single world, so there is no planet to draw. Pick one of the candidate worlds to see a rendering.
This is the Drake equation. Astronomers have measured the first three terms reasonably well: about 2 new stars a year in our galaxy, planets around nearly all of them, and a rocky planet in the temperate zone of roughly 1 star in 5. Nobody knows the other four. Set them yourself and see what follows.
The starting positions are placeholders, not findings. Published opinions on these four terms differ by many orders of magnitude.
How to take part now, and what has to be built before the network is real.
Two of these you can start today through projects other scientists already run. The other two are what One Sky Alien Array has to build.
Search real telescope data from a laptop. No equipment and no training.
Give your location. When a real telescope reports a flash, you learn within a minute whether it is above your horizon.
The feeds already exist and are public. CHIME sends burst alerts about 13 seconds after detection, and NASA's General Coordinates Network relays alerts from space observatories. Nothing yet passes them to the public by location. This needs no hardware, so it comes first.
Run a home radio station: a 1 m dish, a low-noise amplifier and a software radio, about US$200, plus a GPS clock. Start by measuring the Sun and the galaxy's hydrogen, the same checks shown above. Later, keep the reply schedule: listen toward each star we have messaged when an answer could first arrive.
The station software and the server that compares arrival times are not written yet.
If a signal is ever confirmed, who answers for Earth? The international SETI protocols, under revision since 2025, say no reply should be sent until there has been international consultation.
No public forum for that consultation exists. Members would have one here, on the record, before anything is ever detected.
Every step ends in something that either works or does not. No step claims more than it has shown.
This page.
Test: every figure traceable to a named source. Done.
A domain, public hosting, sign-up with a city-level location, a privacy policy, a transparent way to give, and the code in an open repository.
Test: 100 members in 10 countries.
Connect to the public CHIME and NASA alert feeds. Tell each member when a real event is in their sky.
Test: a real alert reaches members in view in under 60 seconds.
One documented US$200 kit and free software that logs the Sun and the hydrogen line with GPS time. Ten pilot stations on three continents.
Test: the pilots repeat Evidence 1 with home equipment, measuring the Sun on the same day and agreeing within 20 percent.
A server that keeps only events seen at three or more distant stations with arrival times that fit one direction in the sky. Everything it keeps is published.
Test: a real solar radio burst, which floods the whole daylit side of Earth at once, is caught by three or more stations and placed on the Sun.
Grow toward a few hundred stations for round-the-clock sky coverage. Share data with the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, the SETI Institute and university groups. Open the member forum on whether and how Earth should reply.
Test: a professional observatory follows up one of the network's published events.
Most of this project costs time. Here is where money comes in, and what happens to it.
A Ko-fi page run by the project's founder. Money given there goes to the person building One Sky Alien Array and is his to use for it: time, tools, hosting and new ideas.
It is personal support. It is not a donation to a charity and it is not tax-deductible.
Support on Ko-fiThe link opens ko-fi.com/oneskyalienarray, where payment is handled by Ko-fi. Time helps too: the ways to join that are open today cost nothing.
A separate pot that can only be spent on stations: ten pilot kits on three continents, then the server that compares their signals. It opens when the pilot is ready, as its own campaign or under a nonprofit sponsor.
Estimates, about US$3,250 in all. Real quotes replace them before any money is asked for.
| Part | Listed price |
|---|---|
| 1 m WiFi grid dish | about $50 |
| Hydrogen-line amplifier with filter | $44.95 |
| RTL-SDR software radio | about $21.95 |
| Tripod | $39.99 |
| Cable, adapter, terminator | about $22.50 |
| Guide total | $179.40 |
| GPS timing module (our addition) | about $25, estimate |
Prices as listed in the rtl-sdr.com hydrogen-line guide, which notes that prices have risen since it was written. The GPS module is not in that guide and its price is our estimate.
A planning sum only. Stations are priced at US$250 each with shipping; running costs at US$750 a year are taken out first.