11 ms·
Wow signal
- adrianonantua 13y ago"In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages" Oh, man, what will they think of us now? Couldn't we have sent Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and similar content?
- yukichan 13y agoThe tweets must have been specific replies. They probably weren't just sending a random popular hash tag or something.
- i386 13y agoBut if they were random, now the universe knows about twibbons and Kony.
- ekianjo 13y agoWhat's more ridiculous is the assumption that other life forms may somehow understand the messages we send them in our own language. It's so preposterous I don't even know where to begin.
- taternuts 13y agoWhat do you suppose we beam to them other than our codified way of communicating? You can only hope they could potentially decipher it to grok some meaning.
- unclebucknasty 13y ago>What do you suppose we beam to them other than our codified way of communicating? Something mathematically-based?
- ekianjo 13y agoHow can they even hope to decipher something which is language/culture based ? We even hard a seriously hard time to understand egyptian hieroglyphs (on Earth! From a culture we knew of from many other texts in Antiquity!) until we found a stone where the text was translated into something intelligible. If they have no reference, all communication we send them will seem like garbage to them. Assuming anything else would be foolish.
- vinkelhake 13y agoMaybe, just maybe, this is done more for the authors of those 10k tweets rather than any potential extraterrestrials.
- iLoch 13y agoI love the messages we sent in Voyager 1 and 2 - they were quite capable of explaining our methods of communication.
- ekianjo 13y agoYeah, so capable, that most people on Earth would not be able to decipher them. You must be joking, seriously.
- Houshalter 13y agoIt was more of a ceremonial thing that a practical attempt to communicate with aliens. However they would be able to infer a lot of information from them, albeit not fully translate it. Reminds me of That Alien Message (http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/).
- Oculus 13y agoReminds me of the scene in Contact when they realize that the signal is a video of Adolf Hitler making an address.
- ACow_Adonis 13y agoThey sent tweets? Oh jesus. Not only do have to worry about whether there is intelligent life to receive our message, or whether they understand it, but we also have to worry about the certainty that they will now either be hostile, or else not very intelligent...
- S_A_P 13y agoIts the 2012 equivalent of beaming an episode of Jerry Springer to aliens...
- phy6 13y agoI'm just going to post what everyone was thinking when they saw the headline. http://i.imgur.com/BNDIpy3.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BNDIpy3.jpg
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoAnd more importantly - will they be looking? We are only looking at small portion of the sky at a time. At the same time in order to send messages to other stars powerful telescopes need to be utilized. You can't simply build a telescope per star with a planet that is thought to contain life and broadcast all the time. Thus, if civilization is not capable to monitor all of the sky at the same time with low powered telescopes and quickly point high powered telescopes when something interesting is detected, there is extremely small chance that it would be able to communicate effectively. That is retransmitting the signal to the same star is worth inherently less when compared to trying to transmit to a new star. If interstellar travel is not viable, what we would want to do is transmit wikipedia[0] to all stars that could contain life. Traveling time for information would be long enough that we can't expect confirmation or two way communication. So what you would want to do is make a really powerful telescope beaming wikipedia to one star at a time (or many telescopes transmitting to different stars). Idea is - you do not want to repeat yourself. If you sent information once, and it have not been received, you would not want to try again for a long while. That is due to the fact that chance that civilization would develop that can listen to your signals in relatively short amount of time is unlikely. So I would say that if this is logic transmitting civilization would use then a signal would not be repeated for thousands of years. While writing this I though of algorithm that might work better to maximize amount of civilizations you reach. This would require a relatively stable space transmitter, or series of coordinated ground transmitters: 1. Pick a set of stars S that potentially can support advanced civilization and are located closely in a region of space (so you do not have to reposition telescope a lot). 2. Start sending signals primer signals to stars. For signal S[x], temporal difference between S[x] and S[x+1] would a set amount shorter than temporal distance between S[x-1] and S[x]. Primer signals are short and cheap, transmitting entire Wikipedia should take way longer (Weeks, months, maybe years?). 3. Once time between primer signals reaches some threshold start transmitting data set. Idea is that this will give advanced civilization potentially listening a chance to prepare to receive full transmission, while avoiding costly repeats of big data set. [0] Wikipedia is chosen as sufficiently large volume of knowledge about human civilization that we would potentially want to transmit.
- vlasev 13y agoActually, if we get to a point where we strongly suspect an alien world contains life, it would probably be a good investment to spend a lot of time pointing a telescope in its direction. I imagine almost all (useful) telescopes will point in its direction.
- quahaug 13y agoScientists say that if the signal came from extraterrestrials, they are likely to be an extremely advanced civilization, as the signal would have required a 2.2-gigawatt transmitter, vastly more powerful than any on Earth. What if we inadvertently witnessed the climactic end of two rival civilizations as they unleashed massive energy weapons upon each other, due to some kind of political unraveling of a dangerous arms race? That would certainly explain the intensity, brevity and lack of repitition for this particular signal? One might expect residual evidence of destructive forces at work, such as a debris field or hot gas clouds, but that assumes that the weapons are of a conventional nature we might readily understand.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoWould not explain narrow spectrum nor uniform intensity of the signal.
- quahaug 13y agoConsider that a specific communications channel for a civilization/culture-specific technology were being jammed, as part of a hostile operation.
- wglb 13y agoInterstellar DDoS?
- quahaug 13y agoWell, at the very least, if it seems to be a diliberate signal originating from an organized intelligence AND anomalous, then it might be useful to consider the intersection of those two characteristics. Where do we see intelligence and anomalies converge? - War, and other forms of political conflict - Accidents, even if non-destructive, like when the cat sits on the keyboard - Experimentation, and research into novel discoveries, unfamiliar to a civilization - Distress, final acts of desperation, where no hope is provided by circumstance, but behavior is engaged in anyway, because there is no consequence
- wglb 13y agoBeing into radio, this is one of my favorite stories. A great line from the article: "drawing vast conclusions from half-vast data". Would all HN stories avoid this as well.
- duffdevice 13y agoAs far as I understand this article, there's no reason to believe that the signal was of constant amplitude, only that it hit Big Ear's detection threshold when we pointed directly at it. So it could have been something super non-uniform and noisy, which would make the intelligent origin seem less likely. But whatever it was, it was super loud. Also: why haven't we built a dedicated radio telescope to just watch that spot all the time? Surely this is the biggest lead generated by the SETI program so far?
- 4ad 13y agoThe bandwidth was extremely narrow, 10kHz. That means it wasn't non-uniform, nor noisy.
- acheron 13y agoI read this article every so often when I remember about it. So fascinating. Yet something we will probably never know the truth about.
- cpayne 13y agoI just love little stories like this. Can you imagine the emotion in the room? What it was like to see the characters and wonder WTF? Then thinking was it an error? Did something go wrong? Is E.T. on its way? Awesome!
- johnvschmitt 13y agoSomeone with better #'s can correct me please, but: With so many emitting bodies in the universe, wouldn't we expect to receive the complete works of shakespeare from ~1 remote body/month? I mean, you could find the "WOW" signal in PI somewhere too, right?
- marcosdumay 13y agoCelestial bodies are not random, otherwise the Sun could raise blue tomorrow.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoSolar nucleosynthesis is deterministic? Random doesn't mean without any limitations. You can have random variations in frequency that nonetheless remain red.
- marcosdumay 13y agoA star behaves like a star, a pulsar behaves like a pulsar, etc. Of course, there's some random component, but those bodies do not go out emitting any random wave you can think about. You won't get a WOW signal out of any know phenomenon. It does not matter how many of them you measure.
- eru 13y ago> With so many emitting bodies in the universe, wouldn't we expect to receive the complete works of shakespeare from ~1 remote body/month? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_content_.E2.80.94_number_of_atoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...) says we have around 10^80 hydrogen atoms in the observable universe. That's a huge number, but there are 10^80 different decimal numbers with 80 digits alone. Shakespeare's works are considerably longer.
- kamaal 13y agoFirstly the observable universe is nothing compared to the whole universe. Secondly what the above comment means is that with so many bodies emitting some thing random for such a long period of time. You are inevitable bound to notice something that you could make some meaning of. And yes the 'WOW' signal is present some where in Pi.
- Luyt 13y agoThere's a Skeptoid episode about the WoW Signal: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4342 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4342 The podcast starts with: "It was August 15, 1977, when astronomer Jerry Ehman was examining data coming from Ohio State University's radio telescope, which was engaged in listening for signals from deep space, hoping to find something of intelligent origin. In a moment that's since become one of the most famous events in astronomy, he saw a sequence of six characters on the printout — 6EQUJ5 — which caught his attention. So much so, in fact, that he circled the text, and wrote "Wow!" in the margin. It was, apparently, a signal from outer space. It came from the direction of Sagittarius. The strength of the signal was represented by the digits 0-9 and the letters A-Z, a scale of 36 levels of intensity, rising with 6EQ and falling with UJ5, a near-perfect bell curve of signal strength spread over 72 seconds. All speculation and hype aside, Wow! remains the strongest candidate ever detected for an alien radio transmission."
- hernan604 13y agoin the middle of so many 1, 3 and 2s, to see a 6EQUJ5 plus a 6 and a 7 is sure a "Wow signal"!
- lukifer 13y agoMy pet hypothesis: with the vast scale of the universe and the light-speed limitation, when it comes to potential conversational partners, the universe selects in favor of extremely long-lived life-forms (possibly "artificial"). Such life forms would be only be interested in interacting on highly protracted time scales; think "Space Ents". Given also that sending signals into deep space is extremely expensive and energy will always be finite, communication with new worlds is sought only rarely, perhaps one targeted ping per world every 10,000 years, each an attempt to start a dialogue to be carried out laboriously over millions of years.
- etfb 13y agoI have two hypotheses, both untestable (and therefore worthless): 1. The distance between stars is too huge, so there has to be a trick to beating it easily, like FTL travel or wormholes, because otherwise it's just crap. 2. If any supervillains want to destroy the universe, they're too late: it's already been done, and this is all that's left.
- ckoepp 13y ago> Given also that sending signals into deep space is extremely expensive and energy will always be finite, communication with new worlds is sought only rarely. I totally agree to this statement. Even though I guess there is no need to actively sent too many information out in space as we do already have a kind of "frequency pollution" broadcasting TV channels, TCP packets etc. There are many signals travelling from earth to space all the time - communication with satellites doesn't end on them, remember: it's radio we use for communication! You can easily imagine what it must be outta there when aiming at the earth with some kind of antenna: just imagine a world on which air isn't throttling voice-signals (aka shouting/talking). Those signals would keep floating around until they are reflected by some kind of object. Well, in space there aren't that many objects so our little earth is already looking like a big frequency mess and a kind of big light bulb for other guys out there. We just have to wait until all our civilization-generated signals are arriving at other parts of the galaxy.' You can argue whether this is a wise thing to do this so naively but it's already too late to stop this from happening and to be honest: we can only do assumptions based on things we do know, so we simply have to speculate when it comes to aliens. The only thing which makes me a kind of sad is, that we humans seem to had a quite clear pattern when it comes to "exploration" of new geographical areas by external people (Northern/Southern American Natives, Africans, Australian Natives the list goes on and on). In this sense it's quite good that space-travels are that hard to do over a fast distance. Just my 2 cents :)