Wow!
The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
41–50 of 279 posts
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#42Quite 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. Humans: Look - the sky people said WOW .
Which isn't what happened, the WOW signal is just because the person who saw it scribbled wow on the printout and that's the picture we have.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.
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 co…
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.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#44Be 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.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There 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-...
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).
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not 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? Absol…
Indeed. 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.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#47Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.
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 co…
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.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.
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 co…
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?
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#50Extraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.
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.
[deleted]