''It's almost as a parallel activity to all the survey work that is being done,'' he said. ''Because as you're surveying the sky, particularly over wide areas of sky, looking for other objects, you are also increasing the search volume for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. So it's not a primary goal of many of these surveys but it is certainly a secondary goal that you almost get for free.''

Scientists had so far documented almost 1000 planets beyond our solar system, he said, ''so it looks like the universe is certainly teeming with planets''.

''It is very unlikely that we'll detect any [but] the impact if we do is pretty high.''

The Australian SKA Pathfinder project has been made possible by about $400 million in federal government and Western Australian government funding. Its 36 dishes will in time be joined by 60 more, all of which will be incorporated into phase one of the international SKA project, hosted jointly by Australia-New Zealand and South Africa.

The project is capable of detecting low and middle-level frequencies, while a sister project in South Africa will focus on high frequencies.