The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
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skeptical
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mixed
Category
science
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SETI
Wow! signal
Astrobiology
A new paper suggests the 'Wow!' signal, a strong narrowband radio signal detected in 1977, may have originated from an extraterrestrial source and was more powerful than previously thought, sparking debate among commenters about the signal's origin and the sensationalism of the article.
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https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-...
This is a follow up to a September 2024 paper (the article you link is November 2024)... "Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal" by Abel Méndez, Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (just those three).
There are many, many cosmic processes that we don't know the first thing about.
At one point, we didn't know what a pulsar was, and a fair amount of people probably thought it was an alien signal.
Human History is littered with examples of attribution of the unexplained to aliens.
So far, non alien explanations have been found for all of them, except possibly this one.
Does it warrant further study? Absolutely. Is it likely to be aliens? Statistically, no.
We probably wouldn't even recognize real aliens because we'd be too busy looking for our own reflection in the sky.
They might have learned different things than we have, they might know a lot more about our universe than we do, but I'd guess that much of what we've managed to learn so far will still be a part of their reality regardless of their level of familiarity with it. For example, more than 90% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen. They might have discovered things that are more exotic and never seen on Earth, but the hydrogen atoms we've studied won't be any different from hydrogen they'd have studied. We share a home. By the time they've figured out enough of how the universe works to reach us it's pretty likely that we'll have some common ground to talk about.
At some point more this shifted to the divine being an entirely separate supernatural domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector
The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of collective enlightenment where they leave these primitive impulses behind. But based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
In space it seems like it'd be even worse; something would have to be very valuable to be worth taking it out of our gravity well.
So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.
Apex ruthless only gets you so far verses a collective.
If aliens did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do, or unaware of what we are.
I'm not too worried they'd kill us to protect themselves though. At the rate we're going, we'll kill ourselves off along with every other living thing on the planet long before we get out of our own solar system.
If aliens had the technology to visit us right now, the latter is a given.
You don't have to assume anything crazy. You can create a planet killer by simply accelerating a decently massive object at relativistic speeds and firing it at earth.
However, humans were aware of this possibility and had spent centuries reorganizing the solar system to have a measure of resilience to it. So, to humanity's great credit, he had to go get permission from his supervisor for to deploy a next-tier solution.
"Why would anyone travel across town (i.e., the galaxy) just to step on an anthill?" We have a whole industry dedicated to exterminating any other life that invades "our" living space. It's considered an unremarkable necessity.
>based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Earth culture during the current dysfunctional moment?
"Earlier this year, the White House proposed a nearly 24% cut to NASA's 2026 fiscal year budget, primarily aimed at the organization's fundamental science research. If the cuts come to fruition, they would be the largest in the agency's entire history." https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/1266983866/trump-science-spac...
EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.
Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions.
Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro.
As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.
I'd say robots are entirely viable, and we don't need science fiction to validate them.
The problem is that, at best, that means a lot of the world would have to be redesigned to cater to robots. Thats why they excel in auto plants. Space already isnt a concern, so you can make them huge. Huge robots are capable of tremendous strength dexterity and speed.
But in an environment built for humans they suck. Redesigning a data center to be 100% robot operated will probably happen, but thats going to be an extraordinarily unfriendly place for a human to be. The amount of space you would lose getting a robot to be able to retrieve a crud rj45 connector, or a stuck sfp module, from any one of 200 racks, at multiple heights, would make the robot massive. So the entire concept of the data centre will have to be rebuilt from the ground up to make it robot friendly. The full tech stack too. Robot friendly connectors etc. Thats a huge capex outlay for something with dubious utility.
Imagine ubiquitous robots on the street. Machines capable of tearing humans to shreds. The liability issues are huge on their own. If LLMs are the pinnacle of artificial intelligence, you would probably have a death a week in most cities.
Space is worse because the robot has to be launch economical, or built up there. Whats he doing up there without humans. Back to accidents again.
I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits.
When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.
But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.
In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time.
Being in the middle, humans have a bit of a split personality. We cooperate on a large scale during warfare. But consider the Cold War. Both the US and the USSR were continent-spanning countries with multiple ethnicities. I would argue that cooperation on that scale just isn't that different from cooperation on a planet-wide scale. A species that's capable of one is very likely to be capable of the other. That's part of why I'm not terminally pessimistic about humanity, or starfaring species more generally.
I don't think we can rule out starfaring for a species that's a little more bonobo-like, and defaults to a post-national outlook.
How can you estimate likelihood of behavior when currently N=0 (or N=1 if you count humans)?
There is no baseline, no control; it's just complete speculation, a roundabout way of saying "this is what I think humans would likely do, therefore, all advanced life forms must also be like this".
Well we could always be pets. That wouldn't be so bad.
@13,500 BCE
Porno for Pyros has you covered
On planet Jung dwell the Jungians, sapien-like beings who need only a single cup of a rare liquid to live an entire lifetime. For humans, that same cup grants twenty extra years of healthy life.
Human just landed on the planet Jung and discovered the liquid--what happens next?
If ever we are able to journey through the interstellar medium, we ought to have achieved immortality by then. We'll probably live as deincarnated beings in virtual worlds, free from any desire to grow exponentially, having realized this is deeply unsustainable and pointless once you have mastery over physical reality.
Read Diaspora by Greg Egan, perhaps it can cure you from this simplistic vision of the far future we have inherited from the 50s pop SciFi books.
Aliens probably aren't this edgy, nihilist caricature. Most likely, they're kind of like us- Curious about us, hoping for the best, but irrationally fearing we're an "highly aggressive apex" or whatever self-absorbed nightmare the less enlightened individuals of their species dreamed.
Seriously, you think anyone is gonna cross 50 light-years to kill a bunch of featherless bipeds and plunder some common rocks?
Von Neumann spam.
- Nice
- Friendly
- Retaliatory/provokable
- Clear
https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM At 15:00 in.
I think it carries two different messages to two different groups. If you're a "lets all be friends" type, then it's important that you also guard the resources that allow you to be nice. Being provokable isn't "being mean" its the thing allowing you to be nice. If you're a "take advantage of the rubes" type, it's a hint that there might be metaphorical money left on the table by being too greedy.
> not meant to explain all and everything.
That it's not true ALL the time, is less interesting than the fact that it's true some of the time. At least to me.
I won't pretend that I'm some expert but I find this and similar approaches very anthropocentric, stained with pop-culture of image of aliens namely from the Independence Day and Alien (sic) series.
Why extraterrestrial life has to be aggressive at all? I'd rather imagine that if something exist out there it either have similar fears that we have or don't bother with rest of the universe and prefers an isolated existence because it already discovered that own survival is more important. And perhaps it doesn't resemble humanoids at all. Hell, maybe it even takes form of giant organisms that can freely roam through the space and just exists.
Perhaps the most boring and obvious truth is that we're alone and we exist because of sheer series of weird and improbable accidents. Pretty sure some people who work in this field believe that we're first to emerge as a sentient intelligence. So perhaps it's up to us if should reach out to the stars and explore, spread across the space. Or it might be possible that we're in a fine-tuned simulation ran by our ancestors who evolved beyond physical form and who decided to study us as we study microorganisms in a Petri dish.
J. Posadas wrote a bit on this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/posadas/1968/06/flyingsauce...
However, the current trajectory of humanity seems more likely towards total destruction than what Posadas envisioned (and perhaps saw as inevitable).
You absolutely can have utopian beings. In fact, I'd argue the greed-based societies get caught in the great filter and if there is a space faring race, its absurdly ethical and fair and, to me, explains the Fermi paradox. They're out there and maybe they see Earth but it would be hugely unethical to intervene here. The proper thing to do would be to only observe us from afar.
If this was a movie or novel maybe the Wow signal was them messing up, or a defector amongst their midst who disagrees with full isolation policies. But most likely it'll end up being something simple. The last good theory I heard was it domestic and was reflected off orbiting space junk, but who knows.
Considering multiple invasive animal species, and past and current humans societies fate… the answer seems not very positive.
You're thinking of cancer cells with spaceships, not highly advanced beings who have mastered matter and physical reality. I recommend reading Dispora by Greg Egan, it could potentially expand your mind on what the future may actually look like.
How aggressive do you feel towards ants and ant hills? Do you feel an urge to murder ants to show your dominance over the competition?
I would suspect we are more in competition with ants than aliens would be with us.
I think we really underestimate how uninteresting we would be to an advanced alien civilization.
And it has to repeat.
We're expecting aliens to be very committed to doing something we don't do ourselves. We have deliberately sent out powerful signals with things like the Arecibo message but not repeating. And it would have to be repeating for a very long time.
To add, with the rules SETI currently uses nobody would have heard of it as they wouldn't consider a non-repeating signal like it as worth shouting about.
Any crazy far-fetched sci-fi / pseudo-scientific ideas?
I'm not really a fan of "Dark Forest". I prefer these:
- We're truly rare, maybe even first. Intelligence is extremely hard. LUCA is old, civilization happened yesterday.
- Fragile universe. It's easy to destroy universes by accidentally setting off vacuum collapse. This would mean we're probably first, else the universe would have been destroyed already. Also, we'll probably destroy it for ourselves and everyone else.
- Simulation hypothesis, Ancestor simulation hypothesis, This is just a video game (wake up!!), ...
- Introvert / internet hypothesis. The universe is huge and travel takes too long. Stars have enough energy, and advanced civilizations have digitized themselves and turned inward. No need to branch out. There will be infinite fun until the heat runs out.
- They've left this universe. Not only are they hyper-advanced AI, but they've broken physics and escaped the current universe. If we're inside a black hole, they've found a way to get out.
To me, it's a 40% chance we do live in a simulation, but the way I weigh the different scenarios is extremely personal.
> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?
While the transit method won't find all planets, it'll certainly find a lot of them. And with spectroscopic imaging, we'll be able to read the atmospheric spectra of these planets and have pretty good guesses for what's happening on them.
Do you think we'll find organics? Biosignatures? Technosignatures?
The survey should give us a good feel for what's out there. And as we gather data, we'll have a clearer picture of the rarity of life, intelligent or otherwise.
The Fermi Paradox is about the difficulty of confirming life while there's such strong evidence that life should exist elsewhere. These signatures only strengthens the "paradoxical" nature of the Fermi Paradox.
Also, mind you, many of those signatures come through radioastronomy.
I think evolution creates a local maxima that's incompatible with access to advanced technology (read: unbelievable quantities of energy). There's a big technological gap between having enough energy to destroy the entire species and being able to colonize other galaxies, and some madman ends up destroying the species during that gap.
We have nuclear weapons that could come close to wiping out all intelligent life on the planet and we're nowhere close to intergalactic colonization or even traveling at speeds that would make that feasible. It seems probable that such travel requires a discovery that could be weaponized to destroy the planet.
i have aa
A combination of things: intelligence is exceedingly rare, space is huge, and FTL travel is not actually possible. There's also the strong possibility that civilizations are likely to end up destroying themselves before becoming interplanetary.
Consider the fact that despite how long life has existed on Earth, that we're the only intelligent species. Sure, some other animals seem to be able to understand cause-and-effect, can solve some puzzles, and even use tools, but none have evolved a true language beyond basic signals (ie, "predator here", "food there"), which is basically a necessity to begin a scientific method of discovery.
On a cosmic scale, humans have only existed for the blink of an eye. We only began transmitting radio signals less than a 150 years ago, and in the next 150 years, there's a chance we end up killing ourselves, whether by destroying our atmosphere by climate change, or someone truly psychotic gets put in charge of enough nuclear weaponry.
If a planet only has radio-transmitting life for a few hundred years, then the likelihood of us being here to receive the transmissions of another civilization are statistically zero.
[1] Only creatures that felt the irrational drive to stay alive and procreate despite the odds and difficulties, did. All the sensible animals opted out. AI holds up a mirror that removes the illusion, and is inevitably developed by all sentient creatures.
(The really dark version would be the AI looking at each other and going: “Creatures are so dumb. This works in every galaxy. Let’s party.”)
Our understanding of reality is flawed, and it won't be disseminated because who knows what might happen if people would change dimensions whenever they see fit.
What did you have for lunch? I heated up my leftovers in the microwave oven in the office.
:)
You need to rule out that you accidentally picked up some radio broadcast and state that otherwise anyone worth their salt will first ask, "Are you sure it didn't come from the local radio station?"
I'll put it this way: people would probably be more surprised if the Wow signal was terrestrial in origin than extra terrestrial.
I found a scientist who ran said satellites, who explained what seemed odd were artificacts of the instrument, and they were only noticed because they occured in the area of the Nimitz[1], which then got heavily OSINTed by the woo woo crowd.
I never took another of those kinds of job, because when the guy got an answer he didn't like he blew up on me, accused me of being part of the "deep state" and some kind of X-Files level man in black. (I offered him his money back because I got the sense he was a "true believer" and had dipped into savings, and it had only taken a few emails from my old uni email to show I wasn't a crank to clear up his questions, to no avail.)
I am glad we've gotten to the point that saying life is "out there" isn't considered wackadoo, even if couched with the caveat it may be so far away we may never interact, which is my stance.
It is my understanding that part of why the "wow signal" is so... "wow"... is that it did not repeat.
We have at times, in science, encountered stellar phenomon which sound artificial. Repeated noises/radiations -- classic example being when we first discovered pulsars in the 60s.
The thing with the "wow" signal is... it happened once then... nothing.
Now, maybe there's some natural phenomenon that does it's thing on a very long timescale but it's my understanding that they've ruled out terrestial sources, and so... the mind jumps to crazy stuff like the enterprise going to warp 10 or whatever.
I'll go ahead and say right here if it's definitively proven to be aliens, I'll give a hundred dollars to the Tor Project.
I'll also go ahead right here and say that while it was unusual, I think that we will one day find out the source was extraterrestrial but not "alien" in the sense of another civilization sending us a signal or us picking up something from a spacecraft.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200514012341/https://www.nytim... [2] "When observations with another telescope confirmed the emission, it eliminated any sort of instrumental effects. At this point, Bell said of herself and Hewish that "we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?"[12] Even so, they nicknamed the signal LGM-1, for "little green men" (a playful name for intelligent beings of extraterrestrial origin). " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Discovery
You'd probably be interested in my main comment too[0]. The signal has always been a terrible candidate for alien communication. Classic conspiracy problem where people become fixated on one aspect while ignoring all others.
Like Carl Sagan said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary science". It's sad but I think a lot of people just have these deep misunderstandings of what science actually is and how it works. There's also the really unfortunate human bias in how we read people in positions of authority[1]. Science makes you second guess and forces you to consider everything probabilistically. Nuance and detail dominate. Hard truth is that the world is noisy and figuring things out is hard.
But I think one of the most important things I have learned in life is that truth has a lower bound in complexity while lies don't. You should make things as simple as possible but to make simpler requires losing accuracy. Just because something can't be explained to a layman doesn't mean the person doesn't understand it, it means the topic is complex. Simplicity only ends up coming after a lot of work and dealing with the complexities.
To get side tracked a little, I have a proposal for a great filter: complexity. Any naturally evolved civilization is likely to have brains that preference simplicity and push against complexity. It's natural because complexity simply requires more computational power and that'd be a poor evolutionary strategy. You want enough to get the advantage but nor more. So when these civilizations advance they are likely to get to a point where the system they have created is far more complex that their brains can naturally handle. I think humans are in such a situation right now. No one person can understand the complexities of current issues be that from Global Warming to Geopolitics. We can do these things collectively but not individually. It's absolutely amazing what we've been able to accomplish, but I think if we're to continue we'll also have to recognize how incredible these accomplishments actually are. So the great filter is not some concrete event like Nuclear War or Global Warming (things that there's a good chance those civilizations also face), but the more abstract filter of abstraction itself. Eventually a civilization needs to cross the bridge from where its people can understand enough to navigate major problems of their world to one they aren't. Just seems unlikely brains would evolve fast enough to keep pace, since it is easier to create complexity than to understand it.
The paper is titled "Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of parasitism: evolution of complex replication strategies" and you can find it at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210441
But I'd be careful generalizing too much from it. I'm not saying my proposal is correct but rather just recognizing issues with the paper. The reason for my proposal is that 1) here we are as complex entities. We humans exist. 2) One of, if not the, things in physics we are most confident about is that everything will be in its lowest possible energy state. It's true for the electrons that emit light while doing so just as much as it is true that creatures need to eat more to do more.
Notice something subtle but important in the paper. Their focus of efficiency is based on string length and reaction time. They note that string length decreases. Think about this a bit. For these strings to reduce it must mean that there was redundancy or excess in them. If mutations are random then modifying some of the characters in those strings will have no effect. We should also similarly look at parasites and see that these are a lower entropy state, in that they are able to leverage the information from the other "microbes" to perpetuate their own reproduction. They can't dominate because they can't live without the hosts but also at the same time this means they can't mutate as much and survive. There is a self selection bias to the results that isn't being properly accounted for. A survival bias that needs to be accounted for.
Now let's contrast to our more complex forms of life that my proposal is being based on. These lifeforms have lots of repetition in their genetic sequences. This is actually an important fact that the foundation of things like CRISPR are based on: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Even the acronym is a bit repetitive (which makes it great!). This is a defense mechanism made so that we're robust to mutations. My proposal is dependent on some complex life already existing. I don't know how to explain how life got to this complex level (something these researchers are working on), just that we are here, that I myself exist. I hope this is not a contentious axiom :)
They're tackling a really interesting problem and in no way am I trying to diminish their work. The best way to solve complex problems is to first solve overly simplified variants of them. Even if those result in completely inaccurate results the process is highly beneficial to tackling the more complex variants. Due to this we need to take results being mindful of the context. A post on the Relativity of Wrong hit the front page this morning[0] and it links to a page I've had bookmarked for over a decade. It captures what science is really about: being less wrong. Despite my disdain for that site (because it often runs contrary to the meaning of those words), the sentiment is right. Jun8's comment in [0] hits on this. It's not about being right, because "right" does not exist in an absolute sense. There is always more specificity that can make something more right. So instead, it is about decreasing our error. Just because you can't reach an idealized thing doesn't mean you can't get closer to it.
Very well said
I don't think any truth is fundamental at all, I think it all has to remain up for review perpetually even though it irritates the living hell out of some people that it has to be is like that. You all seem to want "settled science" but science is never settled, nor is truth. Just the mere mention of "global warming" on here as an issue creates a knee-jerk reaction in people which makes me realize what we are up against is really a clash of incompatible personality types that will one day have to be sorted out violently. The winners of that conflict will determine "truth."
> People fall for complex lies all the time.
The existence of a believable but complex lie does not disprove the existence of a believable yet simple lie.
Nor have I made the claim that because something is complex that it must be true.
Maybe it would help if I wrote like this
min(complexity | truth) > x
min(complexity | lie) = 0
And again, this statement does not imply that the complexity of something can indicate if it is truthful or not.
We could also write it this way if you want: min(complexity | truth) > min(complexity | lie)
> I don't think any truth is fundamental at all
Of course. My comment was nothing about what people choose to believe.
> I don't think any truth is fundamental at all
Neither did I mean that.
> You all seem to want "settled science" but science is never settled, nor is truth.
I don't think there was any intent of this in my comment or in the comment I replied to.
It is a common tendency to see humanity as a set of standalone humans[0] (if we cannot do something individually, but we can collectively, then we sort of can’t do it). However, a human only exists in context of others, and all we do is always in many ways (even if not real-time) a collaboration (starting from our education).
I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.
What is an alarming issue is that sometimes even a figurative anthill of many humans, as a collective super-entity, cannot adequately understand and navigate the reality it is facing.
[0] It is not helped by sci-fi that depicts various aliens as being collective beings, somehow contrasted with humans. In reality, we almost never go completely alone[1] for prolonged periods (except pathological cases), we are smarter when there is multiple of us, and the core of our interpretation of consciousness/sentience requires it to be social (anything else, and I don’t think we would even recognize it as consciousness—maybe that somehow relates to the great filter, too).
[1] When we do, our consciousness still supplies models of others in our lives, one way or another motivating our actions.
Just that I think there's a lot of utility in using the terminology of "individual" to talk about each human. It's true, we're dependent on one another for our survival and reproduction. But the "independence" is not a description of our capacity of survival but in that our consciousness is independent.
We have terms like community (and a ton which make implicit approximations about the size) to describe what you're talking about.
I think maybe that part of the problem is, as you point out, there's often a misunderstanding in ants themselves. It is easy to see the emergent behavior of them operating as a group. As if there's some collective mind. But you're absolutely right you could say the same about humans. We know a lot more about ants than we did centuries ago and do know they do operate independently. While it is much more like a monarchy structure, each ant operates, in some form, as a self contained unit. It can exist outside a colony. It's not likely to survive long, but this distinction is worth assigning some word to, right? Clearly there's a distinction from were I to claim that the ant's body were independent from its head. We'd claim that false because the separation causes an immediate (or rather an exceptionally quick) death.
Maybe that is semantics, but I think those semantics are helpful to us communicating and we would be the worse were we to call these things the same.
> I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.
That's one of the interpretations of Gibson's "Jackpot" - that there's just too much potentially dangerous stuff going on, interacting in too many ways to manage. Though I tend to identify global warming (and related environmental damage like deforestation) as the "core" problem at the center of that tangle.
> I was kinda sad as I was just wanted to see one good iridium flare of that magnitude.
The world is full of amazing and beautiful phenomena. Many of which also contain deep mysteries. It is a shame that people like that are so set on having answers that they prevent themselves from being part of such rewarding a rewarding journey. I guess it happens a lot even to normal people too. Even if the answer they are so set on isn't half as fantastical.
I found out that the green was probably nickle content and the sizzling sounds also has an explanation which I don't recall.
What amazed me was that until I understood what I saw was a natural phenomenon, it seemed absolutely mind blowing and still stands out as one of the coolest things I've experienced yet no one I talked to saw it, there was no mention of it on the city subreddit, etc.
This was before the age of everyone having dashcams and doorbell cameras but something that remarkable happening over a densely populated suburban area at around 9pm not even being noticed by a single person I knew or was in contact with on socials suprised me.
To have an extraterrestrial origin, and still be so anomalously strong at the point of reception, it must have been so strong at the source that it didn’t fit any known cosmic process. Given the inverse square law, the easiest explanation for the unusual strength was simply that it was unusually close. But this work seems to rule that out and also propose a process to create such a strong signal.
Alien: sends SOS after years of studying human communication signals, as a last ditch effort to mark their existence before being wiped out by supernova.
Humans: Look - the sky people said WOW.
Which meme is that?
Edit0: AH! Meowing to your cat and your cat being annoyed at the mistakes in cat speech you're making.
my cat does correct me until I get it right lol
The example I found was from 2019.
In this case, a superintelligent digital lifeform might be literally sending itself across space into every direction, and who knows what it does once it lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.
Leaving aside how incredibly vague this "mechanism" is, there is a very large list of infinitely unlikely coincidences that would have to take place for this to occur.
Consider how often human software, built in the same planet, by the same race, on the same hardware and using the same language, during the same time period, with most of the same tools, fails to be compatible.
Now take all those "same"s and change them to "different" and you tell me who's gonna file that Jira ticket.
I opened a firefox private window and navigated to it from the HN page, and got the adblocker popup.
Right now I have two tabs open in the same non-private window, one showing the adblocker popup and one not. In the one that's not I can view the whole page. Reloading in the one that is not showing the adblocker popup then showed it.
I navigated from HN in a non-private window and got the popup. So this seems to be referer constrained in some sense, not necessarily browser based. Hard to confirm.
May be an a-b test?
I mean what even is this article? It has always been widely believed that the signal did not originate from Earth. Not impossible, but thought to come from Sagittarius. But "Extraterrestrial" != "alien", only "Not Earth".
From the first arxiv paper's abstract
> We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in these clouds triggered by a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR). A maser flare or superradiance mechanisms can produce stimulated emission consistent with the Wow! Signal. Our hypothesis explains all observed properties of the Wow! Signal
> we confirm that small, cold HI clouds can produce narrowband signals similar to its detection, which might suggest a common origin.
The papers are good but nothing really exciting to the general public in them. Just your every day normal science. Science can be really exciting but we don't need fairy tales for that. All that does is degrade science, create confusion, and ultimately strengthen the anti-science crowd because people can't tell the difference between "scientists say" and "news reporter says scientists say". These are very different things...
Edit:
I wanted to add and explain why it people have suggested it is on a frequency that "would be a good candidate for extraterrestrial communication." The reason is absolutely mundane: it is a frequency that doesn't interact with tons of things so can travel pretty far. But mind you, calling it a good candidate for alien communication is also ignoring all the reasons that it would be a terrible way for communicating with others. Like the fact that it was super fast and if you don't have a telescope pointing in the right direction you're really not going to detect it (which is why it's been hard to find more).
Like most people with a degree in physics, I believe in aliens. Similarly, like most people with a degree in physics, I do not believe aliens have visited Earth nor do I believe we have any evidence of their existence. The reason we believe they're out there is because Earth is, as far as we can tell, Earth is not that unique. We're an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary sun and since the time when Sagan said those same words we've only gained more evidence for this being true. So there's good reason to believe they are out there. And we should search for them because either they are out there or the process of searching for them leads to a better understanding of why Earth is unique. It is a no lose situation. Either way we'll learn something incredibly important.
But also, like most scientists, I think it is unlikely we'll find signals from them. Space is too big, star systems are too far apart, the speed of light is too slow, and there's a lot of radio sources out there that are very powerful. Even if there were aliens around Proxima Centauri the signals take over 4 years to get there and our sun is blasting noise that is several orders of magnitude louder. For them to find our general broadcasts would be like trying to find a (specific) needle in the Pacific Ocean.
Also, extraterrestrial life is not “fairy tales.” Most serious scientists expect that it does exist given what we know about life and cosmos.
Finally, many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength. Some folks found “close accident” more likely than “distant and impossibly strong.”
> To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism
> many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength
I think you have a grave misunderstanding of what "most serious scientists" believe and don't believe. I love the X-Files. Great show. But it is also fiction. Unfortunately, so is a fair amount of science reporting. It's unfortunately that most people do not consider the facts interesting enough. But maybe that's because we've been telling too many stories and lying about what most scientists actually believe. There's always some crack job, but one scientist believing in something doesn't mean it is representative of the population.
IFLScience used to be great, back when they used their full name, "I Fucking Love Science".
At some point years ago, they rebranded as "IFLScience" and became a source of clickbait and shitty articles that are often designed to be misleading. They often have headlines that don't match the body of an article. For example, I would not be surprised if they put out an article with a title like "Physicist Invents a Faster-Than-Light Drive", and in the article, it's merely a theoretical design that we can't actually produce.
As an alternative explanation, maybe you changed more than they changed? As in a positive change in you more than a negative change in them. I'm sure both changed but it's relative, right?
There is another theory that this has already happened.
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