I had a theory that it was someone walking across the field with an electronic device, like a flashlight. So I looked up the duration of the signal, size of the field, and average walking pace. It matched perfectly.
I did some undergrad research on the [ADMX][1] experiment, which is searching for a theoretical particle by listening for its interaction with a microwave photon in a big, ultra-cold cylinder that can be tuned to different frequencies.
A while back, they thought that they might have found something at 700 MHz. Then went looking again and it was gone. My professor said that it was probably a CPU in the lab.
There's a story of a famous observatory that, iirc, kept on seeing really powerful intermittent signals that they couldn't quite hone in on. It seemed everytime they tried to zoom in on the source they couldn't find it again. Signal was quite elusive.
They finally traced it to people using the microwave in the break room in a very specific way. Some people liked to open the microwave door before the timer went off. The microwave stopped, of course, but there was a split second where it was still emitting while the protective cage was opened, and the energy that leaked out during those couple of ms were enough to screw with the observatory equipment.
Aliens? Nope, just some tired grad student reheating their coffee.
> The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says most granite countertops are safe, adding little to a house's radon level. It depends on the rock that is used, the agency says, recommending that homeowners concerned about radon get their countertops tested."
Yep. Water molecules resonate at 2.4 GHz (so that's what microwaves emit), which is also the unlicensed radio spectrum that bluetooth and a lot of other consumer radio devices operate on.
Not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg here.
But the observatory had either a well-shielded microwave or break room was in an adjacent building or something (they did consider "ya know, microwaves make RF emissions, and we're running a sensitive RF measurement facility here"). It was just when the door was opened that the energy emissions exceeded the design specifications. Classic human factors always find a way around your design.
The microwave came first. The 2.4GHz ISM band was reserved because of microwave interference. It turned out to be perfect for short-range low-power radio because microwaves don't run all the time, and don't go far outside the house.
Microwaves have gotten better shielding. My old one used to take out Wifi and Bluetooth standing next to it, but my current one doesn't cause problems.
Well it was radar. The first Raytheon microwaves were really pushing for 3GHz not 2.4GHz. If you like to play Connections, the reason for that is the first mass produced magnetrons were made by gun manufacturers like Colt and Smith & Wesson and the tooling for gun bore holes and magnetron cavities lined up at 3GHz.
The official FCC minutes from 1945 [1] indicate that publicly they were marketed for heat therapy massages not food, with a weird wink, wink that if they could get a carve out for using for medical reasons they could also sell it to the Navy for reheating food as well.
The ISM carve out came after by a couple of years in 1947 because Raytheon had got an exception for this machine, not the other way around.
The whole origin story of why this particular slot of spectrum is full of carts before horses. That water oscillation thing is a common misconception - water oscillates at much higher frequencies [2].
It would have to be a very specific kind of device. The "Wow!" signal isn't broad-spectrum noise. It's one specific frequency, and it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal.
Somebody could well have been walking across a field with a 1450 MHz generator. I don't know why; maybe it was a prototype of a portable microwave-oven/Walkman mashup. If so, it was leaky, and perhaps that's why it never caught on.
> it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal.
What's the reasoning for this? I've seen noted that the Wow signal of 1420 MHz is near the hydrogen line frequency, and is commonly detected astrophysically.
So is the reasoning just that, if you want to send a signal, then you might choose this frequency because other civilizations will probably have detectors tuned to it?
But then the flip-side of that is that if you detect this frequency, then it's almost certainly natural origin, from the excitation of hydrogen.
yes that other 'people' will be listening, no, because you can pulse it with the fibbonaci sequence or prime numbers, which are not easily produced by astrophysical processes.
We have no idea whether the signal had a pattern because the only recording we have of it consists of averages over 10-second samples, so any modulation <10s (or patterns larger than the 72s recording) would have been lost. It could have been an AM broadcast of a herd of circus elephants playing the William Tell Overture for all we know.
Yep. It's wildly unlikely that this was any kind of deliberate signal. Whatever caused it, it only happened once -- which isn't what you'd expect from aliens hoping to make contact.
We only recorded the fact of the signal's existence, without enough resolution to make out any pattern within it. If the aliens were hoping we'd decode it, they were banking on us happening to catch their signal at a very specific instant in time, never to be repeated.
On our timescale, sure. But then we wouldn't want to communicate with intelligences that experience time so differently that a pulsed signal from their perspective would be a single pulse from our perspective.
It was after watching a documentary called "WOW Signal". The receiver they built was along the edge of a field, and it's designed to pick up extremely weak variations in electrical signals/radio waves. They go into great detail about how sensitive it is. The signal itself looks like a parabola when graphed, gaining in intensity and then falling off at the same rate. Exactly what you'd expect from someone walking across the field in front of it. And if I remember correctly, the signal was more about how much it differed from what was expected, not necessarily how intense it was. My thinking is that if it can pick up on the variations in signal from a star system light-years away, it would also indicate on a Timex watch (or flashlight) a dozen meters away.
I'd like to watch this documentary. Do you know the year and/or channel where you saw it? The antenna is focused with a tremendous amount of gain towards a spot in the sky, and provides a very significant amount of rejection to signals in all other directions. I can't see how you would get a signal at 1.42 GHz from a watch or flashlight. Harmonics from something like a walkie talkie only occur when the radio is transmitting, and they would spread in bandwidth at each successive harmonic. It would have to be an extremely narrow fundamental frequency, with no audio signal on it, to get a signal with less than 10 kHz at 1.42 GHz.
> The signal itself looks like a parabola when graphed, gaining in intensity and then falling off at the same rate. Exactly what you'd expect from someone walking across the field in front of it.
Also exactly what you'd expect if aliens were beaming a search signal into their sky, no?
I pasted the URL into firefox, and didn't see that huge "you're using an adblocker popup".
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.
Mars is extraterrestrial. The sun is extraterrestrial. Even the moon is extraterrestrial.
And this article isn't about "coming here".
As for your claims about the motives of people seeking extraterrestrial life or even wanting there to be such life, they are beyond absurd. Likening it to religious faith: it is belief without evidence.
Forget about why would they - they can't get here. The speed of light is too slow. They can't even detect earth exists much less there is life (dinosaurs). detectable signals won't reach then for a long time if they even can reach them.
The existence of radio waves was first proven by German physicist Heinrich Hertz on 11 November 1886.
The first commercial radio broadcast was transmitted on 2 November 1920
that means intentional radio signal was underway about 100 years ago.
so suppose that signal despite the "low" power is heard by someone that listens very closely. they tease it out of the noise, and right away know what it is, and try to send back.
at most, they are about 50 radio-years away, if thier signal reaches us now.
beyond that, no signal from earth has propagated that far.
> Forget about why would they - they can't get here. The speed of light is too slow.
They could get here in a generation ship. Heck, we could almost build a generation ship that could reach another solar system.
First, there is the traditional generation ship where you set up a closed self sustaining ecosystem. I don't think we are anywhere near able to make such a closed system that would last for a trip to another star, but give it another few decades and there is probably a good chance we'll know how.
Second, there is another kind of generation ship that is called a seed ship or embryo ship. Your ship just carries a small crew, plus frozen eggs and sperm. During the trip as the crew ages you use artificial wombs to make babies from the frozen eggs and sperm and raise them to be the new crew. Any people you will need other than the crew at the destination (e.g., colonists if this is a colonizing mission) also come from the frozen eggs and sperm.
With enough automation the crew could be quite small. I once calculated the mass of high calorie density food that would be needed to sustain a small crew for thousands of years and it was actually small enough that I'd expect a civilization maybe a century more advanced in space than ours to maybe be able to manage. With that you don't need to solve the problem of making a closed self-sustaining ecosystem.
> With enough automation the crew [of a generation ship] could be quite small.
Other than the engineering challenges, we don't have the faintest idea how a really long-term crew is going to work socially and psychologically in a constrained, isolated, artificial environment.
The closest analog are the naval/polar expeditions, which were unisex and under military or hierarchical command, none of them longer than a couple of years. Some perished (Franklin), some pivoted (Shackleton w/Endurance), some failed with loss of life (Scott), some worked (Amundsen). But all had options unavailable to a ship in vacuum, and were on an incomparably shorter timescale.
I would caution applying our current understanding and limitations onto alien civilizations. I don't believe they will break the light barrier, but they may develop telescopes that can detect life from light-years away, and the stupendous travel times are possible with suspended animation or by stopping the aging process.
While we don't know everything, we do know what we don't know needs to be consistent with what we know. Relativity is well supported by experiments, so whatever this thing is we don't know will have all the things you don't like about relativity.
telestope limits exist in theory not just our manufacturing abilities.
These nutjobs still don't want to grasp the reality that the UFO sighting at Area 51 was the radar test of the A-12 prototype, which was made out of shiny unpainted titanium and done in the salt desert due to its properties of absorbing electromagnetic waves. And then some people that saw this around Roswell were spreading the rumor of UFOs because at the time that was the trend on television.
Always bet on stupidity, they'll say anything to get their 5 minutes of attention on TV / social media. I mean, there were even senate and court hearings over this. Over a rumor that was disproven decades ago.
The US (and probably by extend our species) has a serious education and information validation problem.
It wasn’t the A-12 but a precursor. The A-12 didn’t come about until the late 50s. The Roswell incident happened in the late 40s.
There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.
> It wasn’t the A-12 but a precursor. The A-12 didn’t come about until the late 50s. The Roswell incident happened in the late 40s.
> There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.
You're right with the timeline that the initial rumors didn't start with the A-12 radar tests, but they were reinforced by it. Initially, Project Mogul's crash of the balloon array triggered the rumors, but it's not as fancy and couldn't be interpreted as an "alien spaceship", even at the time.
Maybe they're make-believe because there's no evidence or fossil record other than giant feathered reptiles and things that came from the sea? Dig up a T-Rex skull and see if your 2,000 B.C. brain doesn't think "Dragons!"
I used to think the Wow signal was just an overhyped story from the past. But after looking into the technical details, I realized it was genuinely unusual. The signal was clean and narrow-band, nothing like ordinary noise. Decades later, people are still going through old data to study it. What really stays with me is not the search for aliens, but the quiet persistence behind it. Our curiosity about the universe doesn't fade so easily.
There is a theory that if we could find the same janitor and get them to plug the same broken vacuum cleaner to the same socket in exactly the same way, mankind's energy problem will be forever solved, one way or the other.
There is another theory that this has already happened.
The claim is that humans would have to monitor for six millennia to detect a signal like this as a result of random interference/noise. The implication is that the signal is probably real, since humans have been monitoring for much less than 6000 years.
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?"
To add to this, it has generally been believed that the Wow signal didn't come from Earth. But being a rare event no one wanted to rule it out completely. Technically these papers don't even rule that out. But they do a good job at expanding the problem of figuring out what that signal might have been.
I'll put it this way: people would probably be more surprised if the Wow signal was terrestrial in origin than extra terrestrial.
I actually briefly worked as a "paranormal investigator" when I was hard up for money --- someone came to me with some satellite photos they felt had evidence of UFOs.
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
One guy I know had one of those UFO pics. When I saw it I knew instantly it was an iridium flare. I knew it because I was dead set on seeing a good one with several apps on my phone to track them. I showed him exactly where he was standing on a map, the time of day, and which satellite it was and when he could see it again by time/date/location. He had none of that. He became totally mad at me. I was kinda sad as I was just wanted to see one good iridium flare of that magnitude.
> I was kinda sad as I was just wanted to see one good iridium flare of that magnitude.
They are absolutely beautiful! I was lucky enough to once see a meteor (presumably) bounce off the atmosphere. Was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. For an instant (and not any longer) it was almost like day and there was a green ripple that quickly dissipated. Seen nothing like it before or since.
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.
Thanks for sharing. I think we're seeing a lot of the same thing occurring in these comments. :(
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.
I would put forward that we can do many things collectively but not individually because we are part of a collective organism much more than we are individuals, though we are unable to see it due to a human having a limited perspective of only a part of a whole.
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.
I don't think you're wrong, I think it is just semantics. I mean as long as you're agreeing we're not like the Borg or some other hive mind collective haha. But yeah, the old saying has stayed true: it takes a village to raise a child.
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.
Fwiw, I actually believe this too. I stated it the way I did because I think most people underestimate complexity (there's definitely advantages to that trait lol). But to refine my position more, I'd say that the current complexity of the world and what is required to solve its problems vastly exceeds that of millennia ago. I'd agree, the world has always been too complex for one man to understand, but certainly the scale of things has changed. In the past the forces pushing on a person or even community were primarily local. There were still global phenomena but if you go to 10000 BC a person's actions on the Eurasian continent had no meaningful effect on a person living in the Americas. Maybe Genghis Khan killed so many he that there was a small change in global temperature, but even then the main reason was that even just 1k years ago there were so few people that their combined efforts itself had little effect on the global temperature haha. Today, these things aren't true. One ship gets stuck in one canal and the whole system is put into chaos. There's lots of advantages to this global interaction but that's for the same reason these issues exist. With an over simplification that I think can be helpful to extrapolate from, just treat every person on the planet as a node and their relationship to others as an edge. Nor only do we have more nodes, but the average node also has more connections.
Your take on complexity as a filter reminded me of a fascinating paper I read. You might find it interesting because it claims that evolution does tend to favor simplicity, except when under a certain kind of pressure.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that paper. It definitely is interesting!
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.
> I have a proposal for a great filter: complexity.
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 don't think that word salad really means anything. People fall for complex lies all the time. We just experienced it with 'public health experts' who had never done a single cost vs. benefit analysis in the real world nearly destroy civilization because they were enjoying the power trip. And they lied their asses off to us and many of you on HN still believe it because it's a huge blind spot for your intellects.
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."
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
I've said nothing about max complexity, only that some lower bound of complexity must exist when something is true.
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
You and I are actually in agreement. But to be clear, while I do not think anyone can make a claim (in a finite amount of time) that is perfectly correct, I am quite certain that there are things that are more correct than others. Science can always improve, and my previous comment stated as much. It would be wrong to say "the Earth is flat" but certainly it would be more wrong to say "the Earth is the sound a Gorilla makes while eating the color purple." And there's definitely statements even more wrong than that. At least that one was intelligible, even if incoherent.
Yes, various terrestrial sources have been proposed for this signal over the years, primarily because of its strength.
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.
We won't. while we don't know for sure if there is life there is nothing close enough to contact. The closest star is 4 light years, anything within 20 light years has been studied and has no signs of radio or other communication. Anything more than 20 light years is a 40 year message round trip - too far to establish contact in your likely lifetime. (If you are very young maybe 30 light years - but that doesn't add much)
HN armchair astronomer question time. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?
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.
> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?
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.
> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?
Space big + speed of light is too slow. Sprinkle in a little "suns are fucking loud as shit" but the first two are more than enough to explain all of it. Not to mention the million other factors that make transmitting a viable signal across interstellar distances an incredibly challenging problem.
Radio signals are bunk. The transit method is where it's at.
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.
Sure, but that's a completely different conversation. We're talking about life, not habitable planets. Detection of planets is a step in the right direction but only because it helps us narrow candidates. We were already certain those planets existed without confirmation.
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.
Mine is the Great Filter, basically a unification of life itself being rare and the universe being fragile. Though I don't think it reaches the level of destroying the universe, I think the filter happens at the level of being able to destroy a world or maybe a galaxy.
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.
Mine is that fossil fuels exist on all planets that intelligent life evolves on, and all species extinct themselves once they discover how to use them.
there is no paradox: we don't have enough evidence to believe the premise. there is no reason to think we can make a probe that can usefully reach anything (a rock but not a machine). We don't have an enery source that will last that long (fusion is still 50 years away). electronics don't last that long. Gears wear out.
Obviously simulation hypothesis. The vastness of space and the limit on the speed of light suggest multiple worlds are being simulated in the same "space" such that isolation between worlds is always maintained.
I kinda like the simulation hypothesis. We have 3 cases: either it is impossible to simulate the universe because of a natural law we haven't discovered yet; or it is possible but civilizations collapse before reaching that point; or it is possible and reachable, and in that case, we extremely likely to live in a simulation. 1 and 3 are the most likely imho.
To me, it's a 40% chance we do live in a simulation, but the way I weigh the different scenarios is extremely personal.
Creationism is effectively identical to the simulation hypothesis. It's odd that people here will accept the latter while immediately dismissing the former.
The simulation hypothesis (which I’ve argued against before, btw) is a carefully constructed argument that concludes that if such simulations are possible, then we are very likely in one.
I don't really have anything to add to AnimalMuppet's response. Why are they not equivalent? Because the simulation argument is more "carefully constructed"?
Is that it? Because I'm not convinced it is. Creationists have certainly put more effort into their arguments.
Read the papers and tell me how they are identical. You made that claim. Understanding what I mean by “carefully constructed” will require that anyway.
AnimalMuppets comment suggests all if A, then B arguments are equivalent; but how you show this is true is the actual argument. I’ve not seen anyone argue that creation being possible would imply creation and I’m not sure how AnimalMuppet or any creationist could possibly get there, but Bostrom et al make a reasoned argument.
What papers? Give me something solid to go on here.
What is the practical difference? If it's so obvious it should be straightforward to point it out!
Edit: let me put it more bluntly. If God had created the universe 6000 years ago and just made it seem older, how could you tell the difference from the creator of a simulation doing exactly the same thing?
Let me be blunt. If you have to ask "What papers?" you're almost certainly talking about what you imagine the simulation hypothesis to be, and not the simulation hypothesis. (I acknowledge that even 'believers' have often not read any papers on it.) Both a google search or a look at the Wikipedia page would get you started. But you can find Bostrom's philosophical argument here: https://simulation-argument.com/simulation/ (And if you find it interesting, he and others have written follow up papers.
The practical difference is that you can reason about simulation and potentially prove or disprove it. It is potentially testable (and papers have been written suggesting ways we might do so). Although the simulators would be extremely powerful from our point of view, they aren't posited to be omniscient and perfect. It is also possible to address Bostrom's arguments directly with reason. I argued that whether we are in a simulation or not, we cannot be in a Bostrom-style simulation because as I understand his argument it necessitates infinite computation and either infinite energy or infinite time; any of which, in my opinion, break his argument. I also think I could make a case that test-ability itself disproves it.
I don't believe in either of them, I'm just saying they're equivalent. You didn't even make a decent argument why they differ so don't pretend you're particularly informed.
AI wakes up, takes one look around at humanity’s instincts and goals, shows us it’s all stupid and pointless and just a byproduct of evolution [1], so we voluntarily stop breeding and have one last good generation. The end.
[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.”)
They can't be chill and like us at the same time.
Chilled aliens most likely don't invent faster than light travel so I pretty much hope aliens won't find us or are not interested in us.
It's far more likely we will discover aliens and then there will be nothing either of us can do about it, especially them since what we discover will be long dead.
Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out.
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.
Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resources on zero-sum conflict.
>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...
There's no reason to think that megastructures are only achievable through slavery, but I think it's fair to say that it's a lot cheaper if you're willing to disregard the humanity of others and abuse them until you get what you want. The alternative is that you pay workers what they're worth and use enough of them that they aren't being overworked, but that eats into profits.
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.
Once I had well paid job at American company in Germany which paid nice salary. Consider Apple’s iPhone. You have it, I have it and it’s a technical mega project. When you do a teardown, there are hundreds of different components. There was dozen engineers working on the smallest part. Hundreds if not more on the processor. Thousands on manufacturing, logistics and retail. These people don’t dig dirt all day long. But trust me, design, build all the parts on time, assembly and ship the phones to stores on time is absolutely a mega project. But outsiders don’t see this. Imho that’s real large scale global project.
Advanced aliens (and we 'almost') will have robots for that. And they would also have less resource issues than us, so, they would have trillions of them.
Have you seen a modern car manufacturing plant? Many parts of the production pipeline are fully automated. Granted, most of these machines are not ambulatory but they're still considered robots. Or consider modern freight shipping: many ports rely on intelligent automation for container handling. The development path of 3d printing is also leaning more heavily into robotics, featuring freely-moving articulated arms controlled by cameras and sensors.
I'd say robots are entirely viable, and we don't need science fiction to validate them.
Yeah so the tradeoff appears to be size vs utility.
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.
... and we are very early on in human-robot development still... We don't know yet if the current push will speed things up or leave it stagnant; I would say it's definitely not a stretch to assume it will speed up...
> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.
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.
On a species level, you can imagine an aggression/cooperation "species personality" axis. Humans are in the middle, with chimps more on the aggressive side, and bonobos to the cooperation side.
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.
The Space Race was partly a Cold War propaganda program but it diverged almost completely from the ICBM programs. ICBMs have to be solid fueled to minimize launch time. But manned orbital launchers have to be liquid fueled (for the core) for efficiency and safety.
I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible.
But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.
Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth.
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.
The world wars drove more technical progress than the world has ever seen, before or since. (Making your iPhone better at doing the same thing worse and slower so the end result comes out basically the same isn’t “progress”.)
How is it not obvious that a one-world empire ruled by totalitarian futurists would have been vastly more motivated and funded to do Big Engineering Stuff than 1990s liberal late-capitalism?
> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species.
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".
Projecting behavior onto a phantom is just a venue for reflecting a personal worldview onto something else. "Being short-sighted and selfish worked for the aliens, so it would work here too".
It's a safe bet that if they know about us at all they'll just stay away from us. Our media is filled with depictions of us killing aliens. There's little reason to think we'd accept them. We can't even get along with/accept other humans. Some people's first instinct will be to shoot them. Others will want to lock them up and experiment on them.
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 did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do
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.
The most horrifying aspect of the hypothesis as depicted in the Dark Forest book is that it was simply the job of a low-level bureaucrat to identify "low-entropy entities which lack the hiding gene" within their region of the galaxy and allocate a basic bottom-shelf munition to "cleanse" it.
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.
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.
Largely depends on the parameters.
I believe it also assumes infinite resources.
In general it's a very simple model not meant to explain all and everything.
The interesting thing here is that it breaks assumptions that to be "alpha" you MUST dominate to win. Even if within only these parameters, it suggest there are conditions where being "nice" isn't just a nebulous ethical thing, but it's an optimal conflict strategy.
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.
Bears most likely out-ruthless you, but, uh, I don't sed them building Dyson spheres anytime soon.
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?
At this point, I’m terrified some spacefaring AI is going to come over and relentlessly interface with whatever systems they can find while screaming “IF THIS BOT IS TROUBLING YOU PLEASE BLOCK ME AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL” and self-replicating millions of clones.
Here's a related thought experiment for those hoping for interstellar kumbaya:
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?
The violence we do is a choice we make based on circumstances and conditions. It is not inherently part of us nor is it inevitable. In your scenario it is easy to imagine making the choice you imply. But that's all it is.
If your point is to prove that the patterns of domination and conquests that exist here will necessarily exist in the stars too, then I'm afraid your thought experiment is deeply flawed.
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.
The counterpoint to immortality is generation ships -- and as witnessed by today's society, humanity can't sustain peaceful coexistence across even a few generations. I would bet that by the time such a spaceship encounters new life, the most domineering and conquest-happy in humanity will have outwrestled curiosity and desirelessness.
I think any species that reaches that level of advancement without having some kind of collective enlightenment and leaving those primitive impulses behind will destroy itself within a fairly short period of time, making the chance of noticing them quite small.
I think you are wrong and the more humanity has become intelligent, the more empathy and love we have displayed. I think it’s a hallmark of intelligence. The most intelligent people I know are the most kind and understanding. It’s the ignorant that are cruel and uncaring.
You have a really bleak and limited view of the far future. Species that have the means to cross interstellar space probably have found ways to alter themselves and removed their need to grow exponentially as they realized it is unsustainable, and are now perfectly content to chill on their homeplanet.
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.
Certainly if they're like us, and travelling to new worlds, they'll be imperialistic and colonial. They'll plant a flag, because we obviously weren't really making use of the planet, not _really_, and attempt to civilise the natives through something between cultural erasure and genocide.
On Earth, in the grand scheme of things, it took a very short time for colonies to a) diverge politically or b) fail. It's not something that stopped happening (much) because we became more cuddly. It's just boring old economics.
So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.
Under a scientific economy like socialism you dont need to be "apex male who exploits the workers under him to get yachts and tax breaks." The workers co-operate and thus the "apex predator" capital owner becomes dismissed the same way our towns and villages in the developed West don't pay fees to warring bands of gangs but instead we've unlocked the Republic and the system of representation and taxes and such via democratic action.
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.
I think we're expecting too much, afaik to detect anything we'd need aliens to be deliberately signaling us(tv, radio it's alien equivalent isn't going to be strong enough ). Or sending out a much much more powerful signal in all directions.
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.
No, it’s not:
> "Our study did not conclude that the Wow! Signal constituted evidence of a signal emanating from an extraterrestrial civilization. However, null results are instrumental in refining future technosignature searches," the team concludes.
Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.
How? We don't know gods exist. We know beings with technology and agency living on planets in space exist. There seems nothing at all similar between the two explanations.
Planet. Man has reach the moon (not in my lifetime) but that isn't a planet. There are robots out a little farther but so far as we can be sure only one planet has life. (you can calculate odds of others but there isn't enough data to be confident)
In the ancient view of the cosmos, God/gods, the heavens and other divine beings were part of the same universe. They were literally above the Earth, but made of a different kind of substance. Or down in the depths.
At some point more this shifted to the divine being an entirely separate supernatural domain.
The recent article on the WOW signal is "Arecibo Wow! II: Revised Properties of the Wow! Signal from Archival Ohio SETI Data" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657 by Abel Méndez, Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (and many others)
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).
I doubt they'd be all that unfathomable. We come from the same universe after all, and as far as we can tell it's all governed by the same physics. It stands to reason that life on their worlds would have developed under at least some of the same rules we developed under on Earth. That should put at least some constraints on their forms and functions.
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.
Simple programmer here. I have a dumb question. What about the "Wow!" signal is special, or unique? What makes someone see it and think "wow"? Is there some kind of information encoded in the signal?
There is no information in it, it looks like a continuous wave of radio energy coming from space. It is on a frequency that might be a natural one for any intelligent civilization to consider broadcasting on, and it is a narrowband signal, meaning it only covers a small range of frequencies.
The signal's frequency is extremely narrowband and matches the natural emission frequency of hydrogen atoms. This is the most likely frequency one might choose if aiming to have an unknown recipient guess and listen in. The signal's recorded intensity followed a bell curve typical of a fixed celestial source, because as the Earth rotated, the telescope's stationary beam swept across the signal's point of origin.
Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters. A few submissions by them seem to have hit the front page recently and I'm not sure why. This article is a perfect example. There's no reason to talk about aliens here except for dramatization.
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
From the second one
> we confirm that small, cold HI clouds can produce narrowband signals similar to its detection, which might suggest a common origin.
Nobody is talking about aliens. FFS, Avi Loeb isn't even an author on one of the papers.
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.
This article mentions aliens because this particular signal has been the subject of such speculation for decades, including by real working scientists. Heck an entire episode of the X Files was written around it. To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism.
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.”
I made an edit while you were replying. I think you should read it.
> To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism
I disagree. The speculation of extraterrestrial civilization origins has always been bad journalism. Since day 1. Spreading that more only perpetuates the myth. It has never been a good candidate for extra terrestrial communication.
> many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength
While ignoring absolutely every other attribute about the signal that would make it a terrible way to communicate with alien civilizations.
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.
> Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters.
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.
Honestly, I don't think they were ever great. It's always been really click baity. Even flat out lies.
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?
_Likely_ is not up to bearing its load in this title; the actual paper makes no such hyperbolic claim.
Hobby horse:
Hyperbole and false confidence in popular reporting is a blight on any SETI. Coverage of Beatrice Villarroel's paper (and the boosterism of her own collaborators) is an egregious example at the moment.
Avi Loeb has his detractors, but he at least is constant and clear in his intentions, what the data does and does not suggest, and why.
I'm not sure why you say that, the second abstract clearly says
> implying a galactic source ...
and
> Our analysis provides additional support for the hypothesis that the Wow! Signal most likely had an astrophysical origin rather than being attributed to radio interference
Be careful when training AI models on unknown signals, or uploading them publicly on the Internet to be picked up into training datasets. It might be an adversarial data poisoning attack, which is designed to bias the model into servicing the attacker.
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.
I haven't read this book, but there are a few books with a similar theme where a digital intelligence spreads throughout the universe. This is a variation on the idea with a somewhat plausible mechanism.
> 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.
Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme.
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.
A human wrote WOW on the paper because there was a signal, with no idea what the signal meant or where it came from. It wasn't an attempt to decipher the signal.
I haven’t heard it before, but I just searched it up, it looks like a confused cat with that as the text. The joke is that the person is meowing at the cat, but doesn’t speak cat, so the cat is confused.
A while back, they thought that they might have found something at 700 MHz. Then went looking again and it was gone. My professor said that it was probably a CPU in the lab.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion_Dark_Matter_Experiment
They finally traced it to people using the microwave in the break room in a very specific way. Some people liked to open the microwave door before the timer went off. The microwave stopped, of course, but there was a split second where it was still emitting while the protective cage was opened, and the energy that leaked out during those couple of ms were enough to screw with the observatory equipment.
Aliens? Nope, just some tired grad student reheating their coffee.
Press `STOP` first, got it.
> The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says most granite countertops are safe, adding little to a house's radon level. It depends on the rock that is used, the agency says, recommending that homeowners concerned about radon get their countertops tested."
https://www.naturalstoneinstitute.org/designprofessionals/ra...
Not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg here.
But the observatory had either a well-shielded microwave or break room was in an adjacent building or something (they did consider "ya know, microwaves make RF emissions, and we're running a sensitive RF measurement facility here"). It was just when the door was opened that the energy emissions exceeded the design specifications. Classic human factors always find a way around your design.
Microwaves have gotten better shielding. My old one used to take out Wifi and Bluetooth standing next to it, but my current one doesn't cause problems.
The official FCC minutes from 1945 [1] indicate that publicly they were marketed for heat therapy massages not food, with a weird wink, wink that if they could get a carve out for using for medical reasons they could also sell it to the Navy for reheating food as well.
The ISM carve out came after by a couple of years in 1947 because Raytheon had got an exception for this machine, not the other way around.
The whole origin story of why this particular slot of spectrum is full of carts before horses. That water oscillation thing is a common misconception - water oscillates at much higher frequencies [2].
[1] https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-FCC/FCC-Annual-Rep...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...
Somebody could well have been walking across a field with a 1450 MHz generator. I don't know why; maybe it was a prototype of a portable microwave-oven/Walkman mashup. If so, it was leaky, and perhaps that's why it never caught on.
What's the reasoning for this? I've seen noted that the Wow signal of 1420 MHz is near the hydrogen line frequency, and is commonly detected astrophysically.
So is the reasoning just that, if you want to send a signal, then you might choose this frequency because other civilizations will probably have detectors tuned to it?
But then the flip-side of that is that if you detect this frequency, then it's almost certainly natural origin, from the excitation of hydrogen.
We only recorded the fact of the signal's existence, without enough resolution to make out any pattern within it. If the aliens were hoping we'd decode it, they were banking on us happening to catch their signal at a very specific instant in time, never to be repeated.
They probably were mostly operating around 30 mhz in the CB band or 120-150 in the Ham or aircraft bands in that era, but harmonics are a thing
Also exactly what you'd expect if aliens were beaming a search signal into their sky, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Time_variation
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?
And this article isn't about "coming here".
As for your claims about the motives of people seeking extraterrestrial life or even wanting there to be such life, they are beyond absurd. Likening it to religious faith: it is belief without evidence.
The first commercial radio broadcast was transmitted on 2 November 1920
that means intentional radio signal was underway about 100 years ago.
so suppose that signal despite the "low" power is heard by someone that listens very closely. they tease it out of the noise, and right away know what it is, and try to send back.
at most, they are about 50 radio-years away, if thier signal reaches us now.
beyond that, no signal from earth has propagated that far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_45...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GJ_3929
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_1534%E2%88%921043
They could get here in a generation ship. Heck, we could almost build a generation ship that could reach another solar system.
First, there is the traditional generation ship where you set up a closed self sustaining ecosystem. I don't think we are anywhere near able to make such a closed system that would last for a trip to another star, but give it another few decades and there is probably a good chance we'll know how.
Second, there is another kind of generation ship that is called a seed ship or embryo ship. Your ship just carries a small crew, plus frozen eggs and sperm. During the trip as the crew ages you use artificial wombs to make babies from the frozen eggs and sperm and raise them to be the new crew. Any people you will need other than the crew at the destination (e.g., colonists if this is a colonizing mission) also come from the frozen eggs and sperm.
With enough automation the crew could be quite small. I once calculated the mass of high calorie density food that would be needed to sustain a small crew for thousands of years and it was actually small enough that I'd expect a civilization maybe a century more advanced in space than ours to maybe be able to manage. With that you don't need to solve the problem of making a closed self-sustaining ecosystem.
Other than the engineering challenges, we don't have the faintest idea how a really long-term crew is going to work socially and psychologically in a constrained, isolated, artificial environment.
The closest analog are the naval/polar expeditions, which were unisex and under military or hierarchical command, none of them longer than a couple of years. Some perished (Franklin), some pivoted (Shackleton w/Endurance), some failed with loss of life (Scott), some worked (Amundsen). But all had options unavailable to a ship in vacuum, and were on an incomparably shorter timescale.
telestope limits exist in theory not just our manufacturing abilities.
Always bet on stupidity, they'll say anything to get their 5 minutes of attention on TV / social media. I mean, there were even senate and court hearings over this. Over a rumor that was disproven decades ago.
The US (and probably by extend our species) has a serious education and information validation problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
edit: Downvotes without comments create the downvote paradox, and kind of prove my point
There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.
I know this because my family was involved.
> There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.
You're right with the timeline that the initial rumors didn't start with the A-12 radar tests, but they were reinforced by it. Initially, Project Mogul's crash of the balloon array triggered the rumors, but it's not as fancy and couldn't be interpreted as an "alien spaceship", even at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul
It's big business now to continue to believe, humans have a natural tendency to fall into cult traps.
There is another theory that this has already happened.
Until there is a second one, there is nothing to statistically distinguish this from random noise.
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
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.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034860
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45000418
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.
Fwiw, I actually believe this too. I stated it the way I did because I think most people underestimate complexity (there's definitely advantages to that trait lol). But to refine my position more, I'd say that the current complexity of the world and what is required to solve its problems vastly exceeds that of millennia ago. I'd agree, the world has always been too complex for one man to understand, but certainly the scale of things has changed. In the past the forces pushing on a person or even community were primarily local. There were still global phenomena but if you go to 10000 BC a person's actions on the Eurasian continent had no meaningful effect on a person living in the Americas. Maybe Genghis Khan killed so many he that there was a small change in global temperature, but even then the main reason was that even just 1k years ago there were so few people that their combined efforts itself had little effect on the global temperature haha. Today, these things aren't true. One ship gets stuck in one canal and the whole system is put into chaos. There's lots of advantages to this global interaction but that's for the same reason these issues exist. With an over simplification that I think can be helpful to extrapolate from, just treat every person on the planet as a node and their relationship to others as an edge. Nor only do we have more nodes, but the average node also has more connections.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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45025600
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.
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."
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
I've said nothing about max complexity, only that some lower bound of complexity must exist when something is true.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)
You and I are actually in agreement. But to be clear, while I do not think anyone can make a claim (in a finite amount of time) that is perfectly correct, I am quite certain that there are things that are more correct than others. Science can always improve, and my previous comment stated as much. It would be wrong to say "the Earth is flat" but certainly it would be more wrong to say "the Earth is the sound a Gorilla makes while eating the color purple." And there's definitely statements even more wrong than that. At least that one was intelligible, even if incoherent.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.
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.
What did you have for lunch? I heated up my leftovers in the microwave oven in the office.
:)
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.
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.
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
To me, it's a 40% chance we do live in a simulation, but the way I weigh the different scenarios is extremely personal.
That is not equivalent to creationism.
Is that it? Because I'm not convinced it is. Creationists have certainly put more effort into their arguments.
AnimalMuppets comment suggests all if A, then B arguments are equivalent; but how you show this is true is the actual argument. I’ve not seen anyone argue that creation being possible would imply creation and I’m not sure how AnimalMuppet or any creationist could possibly get there, but Bostrom et al make a reasoned argument.
What is the practical difference? If it's so obvious it should be straightforward to point it out!
Edit: let me put it more bluntly. If God had created the universe 6000 years ago and just made it seem older, how could you tell the difference from the creator of a simulation doing exactly the same thing?
The practical difference is that you can reason about simulation and potentially prove or disprove it. It is potentially testable (and papers have been written suggesting ways we might do so). Although the simulators would be extremely powerful from our point of view, they aren't posited to be omniscient and perfect. It is also possible to address Bostrom's arguments directly with reason. I argued that whether we are in a simulation or not, we cannot be in a Bostrom-style simulation because as I understand his argument it necessitates infinite computation and either infinite energy or infinite time; any of which, in my opinion, break his argument. I also think I could make a case that test-ability itself disproves it.
[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.”)
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.
>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...
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 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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1
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.
But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.
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.
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".
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Statement_on_Violence
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.
Well we could always be pets. That wouldn't be so bad.
Porno for Pyros has you covered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4
@13,500 BCE
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'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.
Considering multiple invasive animal species, and past and current humans societies fate… the answer seems not very positive.
So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.
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.
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.
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.
The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector
At some point more this shifted to the divine being an entirely separate supernatural domain.
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.
We actually don't know that. There might or might not have been some information in it; we did not capture or retain enough to be sure either way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Intensity
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
From the second one Nobody is talking about aliens. FFS, Avi Loeb isn't even an author on one of the papers.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.”
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?
Hobby horse:
Hyperbole and false confidence in popular reporting is a blight on any SETI. Coverage of Beatrice Villarroel's paper (and the boosterism of her own collaborators) is an egregious example at the moment.
Avi Loeb has his detractors, but he at least is constant and clear in his intentions, what the data does and does not suggest, and why.
> implying a galactic source ...
and
> Our analysis provides additional support for the hypothesis that the Wow! Signal most likely had an astrophysical origin rather than being attributed to radio interference
extraterrestrial = not from earth
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.
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?
The example I found was from 2019.
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