8 ms·
Extraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.
by treetalker 1y ago
Extraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.
- TillE 1y agoSpace 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.
- recursive 1y agoMost things aren't known. The lack of a known alternative is hardly evidence of anything in this domain.
- FatalLogic 1y ago>but for now there's not really any known alternative The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
- zamalek 1y agoIt could just as easily be known, or unknown, physics.
- lawlessone 1y agoThere was something a few years ago saying it was likely hydrogen getting lased or something by starlight and emitting the signal. https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-explained https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-...
- shagie 1y agoThe 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 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).
- ghurtado 1y agoNot really. 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.
- cmrdporcupine 1y agoIndeed. Human history is riddled with anthropomorphism and people here trying to argue for more of it. We probably wouldn't even recognize real aliens because we'd be too busy looking for our own reflection in the sky.
- ghurtado 1y agoThe real aliens were the friends we made along the way.
- autoexec 1y agoI 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.
- krapp 1y agoSpace aliens are also not a known alternative.
- djrj477dhsnv 1y agoThat's like saying God is the best explanation for any newly described natural phenomenon.
- fallat 1y agoGod is an extraterrestial or not? :)
- goatlover 1y agoIn 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.
- amenhotep 1y agoHow? 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.
- bluGill 1y agoPlanet. 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)
- pndy 1y agoMay I interest you in "Calculating God" by Robert J. Sawyer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- moomoo11 1y agoEither way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.
- NoGravitas 1y agoDepending on your age, the hard part is surviving WWIII so you're still around in 2063.
- moomoo11 1y agoso many haters lol
- this_user 1y agoAny 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.
- NoGravitas 1y agoI 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. J. Posadas wrote a bit on this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/posadas/1968/06/flyingsaucers.html 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).
- xenobeb 1y agoI just don't agree with this at all. 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.
- cookiengineer 1y agoAnyways What did you have for lunch? I heated up my leftovers in the microwave oven in the office. :)
- dtgriscom 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)
- jameslk 1y agoWas this signal suspected to be from earth? Otherwise why point out the signal was “extraterrestrial origin after all”?
- irjustin 1y agoIt's not, but interference is a big problem. 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?"
- godelski 1y agoTo 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.
- firefax 1y agoI 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.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Discovery
- binary132 1y agoTFA is suggesting it’s aliens.
- __david__ 1y agoNo, 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.