Is there anybody out there in the universe? It’s a question humans have probably always asked but we’ve only really started looking in the last 100 years or so.

Most of us are vaguely familiar with SETI and what it does but what sort of signals are we actually looking for? What messages are we sending to ET? And what are the chances of us understanding each other?

Daniel Oberhaus is a writer with Wired and author of Extraterrestrial Languages