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The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

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Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#101

Post by Geee »

rozab wrote: post #62
Geee wrote: post #44

Be 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…

Although this comment is of course silly, this is a theme in Peter Watts' Echopraxia

I haven't read this book, but there are a few books with a similar theme where a digital intelligence spreads throughout the universe. This is a variation on the idea with a somewhat plausible mechanism.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#102

Post by echelon »

bluGill wrote: post #70
moomoo11 wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

We won't. while we don't know for sure if there is life there is nothing close enough to contact. The closest star is 4 light years, anything within 20 light years has been studied and has no signs of radio or other communication. Anything more than 20 light years is a 40 year message round trip - too far to establish contact in your likely lifetime. (If you are very young maybe 30 light years - but that doesn't add…

HN armchair astronomer question time. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?

Any crazy far-fetched sci-fi / pseudo-scientific ideas?

I'm not really a fan of "Dark Forest". I prefer these:

- We're truly rare, maybe even first. Intelligence is extremely hard. LUCA is old, civilization happened yesterday.

- Fragile universe. It's easy to destroy universes by accidentally setting off vacuum collapse. This would mean we're probably first, else the universe would have been destroyed already. Also, we'll probably destroy it for ourselves and everyone else.

- Simulation hypothesis, Ancestor simulation hypothesis, This is just a video game (wake up!!), ...

- Introvert / internet hypothesis. The universe is huge and travel takes too long. Stars have enough energy, and advanced civilizations have digitized themselves and turned inward. No need to branch out. There will be infinite fun until the heat runs out.

- They've left this universe. Not only are they hyper-advanced AI, but they've broken physics and escaped the current universe. If we're inside a black hole, they've found a way to get out.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#103

Post by snowwrestler »

godelski wrote: post #94

Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters. A few submissions by them seem to have hit the front page recently and I'm not sure why. This article is a perfect example. There's no reason to talk about aliens here except for dramatization. I mean what even is this article? It has always been widely believed that the signal did not originate from Earth. Not impossible, but thought to come fro…

This article mentions aliens because this particular signal has been the subject of such speculation for decades, including by real working scientists. Heck an entire episode of the X Files was written around it. To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism.

Also, extraterrestrial life is not “fairy tales.” Most serious scientists expect that it does exist given what we know about life and cosmos.

Finally, many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength. Some folks found “close accident” more likely than “distant and impossibly strong.”

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#104

Post by nradov »

Telemakhos wrote: post #65
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resources on zero-sum conflict. >based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic. Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Ear…

> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bom…

The Space Race was partly a Cold War propaganda program but it diverged almost completely from the ICBM programs. ICBMs have to be solid fueled to minimize launch time. But manned orbital launchers have to be liquid fueled (for the core) for efficiency and safety.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#105

Post by firefax »

godelski wrote: post #98
irjustin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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?"

To 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…

I 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.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

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#106

Post by binary132 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #103
godelski wrote: post #94

Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters. A few submissions by them seem to have hit the front page recently and I'm not sure why. This article is a perfect example. There's no reason to talk about aliens here except for dramatization. I mean what even is this article? It has always been widely believed that the signal did not originate from Earth. Not impossible, but thought to come fro…

This article mentions aliens because this particular signal has been the subject of such speculation for decades, including by real working scientists. Heck an entire episode of the X Files was written around it. To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism. Also, extraterrestrial life is not “fairy tales.” Most serious scientists expect…

One reasonable interpretation of the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life does not exist elsewhere in the universe.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#108

Post by reactordev »

cookiengineer wrote: post #73
reactordev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

These nutjobs still don't want to grasp the reality that the UFO sighting at Area 51 was the radar test of the A-12 prototype, which was made out of shiny unpainted titanium and done in the salt desert due to its properties of absorbing electromagnetic waves. And then some people that saw this around Roswell were spreading the rumor of UFOs because at the time that was the trend on television. Always bet on stupidity…

It wasn’t the A-12 but a precursor. The A-12 didn’t come about until the late 50s. The Roswell incident happened in the late 40s.

There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.

I know this because my family was involved.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#109

Post by binary132 »

echelon wrote: post #102
bluGill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't. while we don't know for sure if there is life there is nothing close enough to contact. The closest star is 4 light years, anything within 20 light years has been studied and has no signs of radio or other communication. Anything more than 20 light years is a 40 year message round trip - too far to establish contact in your likely lifetime. (If you are very young maybe 30 light years - but that doesn't add…

HN armchair astronomer question time. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox? Any crazy far-fetched sci-fi / pseudo-scientific ideas? I'm not really a fan of "Dark Forest". I prefer these: - We're truly rare, maybe even first. Intelligence is extremely hard. LUCA is old, civilization happened yesterday. - Fragile universe. It's easy to destroy universes by accidentally setting off vacuum collapse. This woul…

Creationism.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#110

Post by godelski »

snowwrestler wrote: post #103
godelski wrote: post #94

Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters. A few submissions by them seem to have hit the front page recently and I'm not sure why. This article is a perfect example. There's no reason to talk about aliens here except for dramatization. I mean what even is this article? It has always been widely believed that the signal did not originate from Earth. Not impossible, but thought to come fro…

This article mentions aliens because this particular signal has been the subject of such speculation for decades, including by real working scientists. Heck an entire episode of the X Files was written around it. To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism. Also, extraterrestrial life is not “fairy tales.” Most serious scientists expect…

I made an edit while you were replying. I think you should read it.

  > To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism
I disagree. The speculation of extraterrestrial civilization origins has always been bad journalism. Since day 1. Spreading that more only perpetuates the myth. It has never been a good candidate for extra terrestrial communication.

  > many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength
While ignoring absolutely every other attribute about the signal that would make it a terrible way to communicate with alien civilizations.

I think you have a grave misunderstanding of what "most serious scientists" believe and don't believe. I love the X-Files. Great show. But it is also fiction. Unfortunately, so is a fair amount of science reporting. It's unfortunately that most people do not consider the facts interesting enough. But maybe that's because we've been telling too many stories and lying about what most scientists actually believe. There's always some crack job, but one scientist believing in something doesn't mean it is representative of the population.

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