Wow signal | Hacker News Reader

Wow signal

en.wikipedia.org

43 pointsThorondor31 comments

Going 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.

Also, 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/mi...

I 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.

> 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.

A relativistic velocity kinetic weapon is already on its way.

That 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

What 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?

We only know the two possible RA and dec, not the distance. So a probe in or near the solar system is possible. It could also explain why we did not detect the signal again; the probe's position would not be as fixed as a distant star.

There we go. So, it could be the one's that are allegedly already here just trying to get our attention. I'm still for exploring those underground caverns in the moon. Might catch them sleeping.

I was in shock reading this too. It's possible that the extraterrestrials read that stuff, determine our intelligence to be extremely low, and not bother with us again.

Or they'll send Andromeda earlier. ;)

Well not possible yet. Even Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

Another commenter already acknowledged the possibility that it only appears to be that far away and the signal could come from the edge of the solar system (maybe passing through it). Would explain why it was brief and appeared to come from a place having about nothing.

The comment you replied to was a joke, though, so it doesn't really matter.

They 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.

This edge is so sharp you cut a portal through time from 2010.

Heck yeah he did. That was great.

Seems like a good encoding of what we are: a babbling throng of socially connected low-level cognition nodes, occasionally galvanized or sent off in some direction by a smaller set of higher cognition control nodes. Maybe it was a very intentional communication...

So 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.

Hmm. 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?

Or perhaps it is a case of the "10,000 Monkeys" effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

I hope I'm alive to see the day we meet extraterrestrials.

Well, if someone is born on mars in the next 20 years and then flies back to earth, I guess your wish will be granted.

there 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

Interstellar (Nolan) and Fiasco (Lem) - juxtaposition is thought provoking and sad conclusion for me is Lem (and you) might be right.

Why is this news now at this moment?

The N in HN doesn't mean news a la CNN. Intellectual interest is the only reason needed to post here. Historical submissions are welcome.

I 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.

This 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%2...

I 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

We merge threads when two or more are active at the same time, but not when one is months old or more.

Ok, with the lack of comments that makes sense. Thanks.

I 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.

Welcome to Sunday afternoon on a holiday weekend

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