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Wow signal
- dquadraat 11y agoWhy is this news now at this moment?
- dang 11y agoThe N in HN doesn't mean news a la CNN. Intellectual interest is the only reason needed to post here. Historical submissions are welcome.
- cgriswald 11y agoI don't read the GP as questioning the worth to HN, but simply asking if the article is a general interest article or if there is some specific reason the article is especially relevant at this moment in time. Yes, it's possible this was simply a "historical submission", but that possibility alone doesn't answer the question. We shouldn't be in such a hurry to protect HN from degenerating into (say) /. that we make assumptions about intent or silence relevant and potentially interesting questions.
- hellbanner 11y agoThis has been discussed previously, 4 months & 2 years ago. Wouldn't it make sense to group re-posts automatically into the prior discussion so users can track comments? https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWow!_signal&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2...
- dang 11y agoI don't see any previous discussion there. We only bury posts as dupes if the story has had significant attention in the last year or so. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html We merge threads when two or more are active at the same time, but not when one is months old or more.
- hellbanner 11y agoOk, with the lack of comments that makes sense. Thanks.
- robodale 11y agoI agree. Someone here said HN is like a gym. Sometimes people chit-chat, some show off, some 'talk shop', some quietly just do their thing.
- idlewords 11y agoWelcome to Sunday afternoon on a holiday weekend
- Mithaldu 11y ago> In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages, in the direction from which the signal originated. What. Receive possible signal from intelligence in other star system. Send back tweets. What.
- cgriswald 11y agoThey are really sending two messages. To anyone listening out there: "We are here." To humans on Earth: "Pay attention to us." Although it is kind of ironic using tweets to show that a signal is not just random noise.
- mkr-hn 11y agoThis edge is so sharp you cut a portal through time from 2010.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoHeck yeah he did. That was great.
- api 11y agoA relativistic velocity kinetic weapon is already on its way.
- Mithaldu 11y agoThat would be an amazingly impressive turnaround time given that our tweets likely haven't physically made it even a promille towards where that signal came from! :D
- nickpsecurity 11y agoWhat if they're only pretending to be that far away? And it's a probe right in or near the solar system? Could these people really tell the difference?
- dopeboy 11y agoI hope I'm alive to see the day we meet extraterrestrials.
- captainbenises 11y agoWell, if someone is born on mars in the next 20 years and then flies back to earth, I guess your wish will be granted.
- keithgabryelski 11y agothere is no reason to believe intelligent extraterrestrials will be at all polite -- predators and scavengers are the best guesses or to put it in the words of Zoe: If we meet aliens they will probably rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing – and if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order
- gala8y 11y agoInterstellar (Nolan) and Fiasco (Lem) - juxtaposition is thought provoking and sad conclusion for me is Lem (and you) might be right.
- userbinator 11y agoAlso, it is problematic to propose that the 1420 MHz signal originated from Earth since this is within the "protected spectrum": a bandwidth reserved for astronomical purposes in which terrestrial transmitters are forbidden to transmit Really? The fact that something is forbidden does not mean that it won't occur... I'd say classified research involving microwave satellites - maybe a transmitter was mistuned - is more plausible than ETs. It also reminds me of this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/microwave-ovens-posing-as-astronomical-objects http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/mi...
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI agree. It's a strong, not as fun, possibility here. There's all kinds of unauthorized and unusual radio transmission on Earth for about as many reasons. There's also pranks to consider. That ended up being a possibility in the Contact movie and a team proved it could be the case for weird, crop-circle phenomenon. A smart, devious engineer might love to be the cause of decades of confusion and debate about extraterrestrial life. It's actually one of the top 5 possibilities for me. Note: Thanks for the link. It was hilarious.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoGoing with extraterrestrial hypothesis, the source and non-repetition are what I find interesting. First, it's in an area that contains basically nothing. Maybe they draw energy off of matter present near them or are highly efficient. Another possibility is that it's an outpost used for communication, maybe to hide their homeworld. I have a friend who wrote a whole treatise on how hiding one's location would be essential to interstellar warfare or survival given how nukes, weaponized asteroids, etc can lay waste to whole planets worth of life. Mass Effect's Reapers also used "dark space" for concealment between attacks. The other thing is non-repetition. If it was purposeful, it should've been repeated to ensure we'd catch it. Maybe it was done as a one-off burst (eg like EMP w/ structure) that would go all over the place. Maybe it was a rebellious individual violating the radio-silence policy. Maybe they do a periodic burst to each area figuring a civilization smart/wise enough will catch it and be watching for the next. Who knows. These two things stand out to me, though.
- reidacdc 11y agoSo apparently in the 1997 paper on the 20-year legacy of the signal, Ehman wrote that he resisted "drawing vast conclusions from half-vast data." That's a bit of a hidden signal too, I think.
- zw123456 11y agoOr perhaps it is a case of the "10,000 Monkeys" effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
- wavesum 11y agoHmm. Maybe someone can debunk this idea: Could it have been some harmonic frequency of a terrestial lower frequency radio signal (such as 710MHz) that bounced off ionosphere? That frequency range is currently assigned to mobile, but I suppose it could have been in TV/Broadcast use back then as it's right next to that spectrum. TV broadcast truck?