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

iflscience.com

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

#221

Post by ianburrell »

floatrock wrote: post #198
metalliqaz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even when my microwave is closed, the interference it generates while running blocks my bluetooth headphones

Yep. Water molecules resonate at 2.4 GHz (so that's what microwaves emit), which is also the unlicensed radio spectrum that bluetooth and a lot of other consumer radio devices operate on. Not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg here. But the observatory had either a well-shielded microwave or break room was in an adjacent building or something (they did consider "ya know, microwaves make RF emissions, and…

The microwave came first. The 2.4GHz ISM band was reserved because of microwave interference. It turned out to be perfect for short-range low-power radio because microwaves don't run all the time, and don't go far outside the house.

Microwaves have gotten better shielding. My old one used to take out Wifi and Bluetooth standing next to it, but my current one doesn't cause problems.

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

#222

Post by griffzhowl »

exe34 wrote: post #216
griffzhowl wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal. What's the reasoning for this? I've seen noted that the Wow signal of 1420 MHz is near the hydrogen line frequency, and is commonly detected astrophysically. So is the reasoning just that, if you want to send a signal, then you might choose this frequency because other civilizations will probably have detectors tuned to it? But then the fl…

yes that other 'people' will be listening, no, because you can pulse it with the fibbonaci sequence or prime numbers, which are not easily produced by astrophysical processes.

Of course if there's a pattern like that it would change things. This signal seems to have been a single pulse though

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

#224

Post by olddustytrail »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #223
olddustytrail wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic is just another name for altering a simulation.

[flagged]

I don't believe in either of them, I'm just saying they're equivalent. You didn't even make a decent argument why they differ so don't pretend you're particularly informed.

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

#225

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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…

> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?

A combination of things: intelligence is exceedingly rare, space is huge, and FTL travel is not actually possible. There's also the strong possibility that civilizations are likely to end up destroying themselves before becoming interplanetary.

Consider the fact that despite how long life has existed on Earth, that we're the only intelligent species. Sure, some other animals seem to be able to understand cause-and-effect, can solve some puzzles, and even use tools, but none have evolved a true language beyond basic signals (ie, "predator here", "food there"), which is basically a necessity to begin a scientific method of discovery.

On a cosmic scale, humans have only existed for the blink of an eye. We only began transmitting radio signals less than a 150 years ago, and in the next 150 years, there's a chance we end up killing ourselves, whether by destroying our atmosphere by climate change, or someone truly psychotic gets put in charge of enough nuclear weaponry.

If a planet only has radio-transmitting life for a few hundred years, then the likelihood of us being here to receive the transmissions of another civilization are statistically zero.

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

#226

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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…

> Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters.

IFLScience used to be great, back when they used their full name, "I Fucking Love Science".

At some point years ago, they rebranded as "IFLScience" and became a source of clickbait and shitty articles that are often designed to be misleading. They often have headlines that don't match the body of an article. For example, I would not be surprised if they put out an article with a title like "Physicist Invents a Faster-Than-Light Drive", and in the article, it's merely a theoretical design that we can't actually produce.

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

#227

Post by yencabulator »

metalliqaz wrote: post #197
floatrock wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a story of a famous observatory that, iirc, kept on seeing really powerful intermittent signals that they couldn't quite hone in on. It seemed everytime they tried to zoom in on the source they couldn't find it again. Signal was quite elusive. They finally traced it to people using the microwave in the break room in a very specific way. Some people liked to open the microwave door before the timer went off. T…

even when my microwave is closed, the interference it generates while running blocks my bluetooth headphones

I bought a new microwave to stop wrecking my wife's videoconferencing over 2.4 GHz wifi.

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

#228

Post by cgriswald »

olddustytrail wrote: post #181
HumanOstrich wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Creationism is effectively identical to the simulation hypothesis. It's odd that people here will accept the latter while immediately dismissing the former.

The simulation hypothesis (which I’ve argued against before, btw) is a carefully constructed argument that concludes that if such simulations are possible, then we are very likely in one.

That is not equivalent to creationism.

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

#229

Post by wolfgang42 »

griffzhowl wrote: post #222
exe34 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes that other 'people' will be listening, no, because you can pulse it with the fibbonaci sequence or prime numbers, which are not easily produced by astrophysical processes.

Of course if there's a pattern like that it would change things. This signal seems to have been a single pulse though

We have no idea whether the signal had a pattern because the only recording we have of it consists of averages over 10-second samples, so any modulation <10s (or patterns larger than the 72s recording) would have been lost. It could have been an AM broadcast of a herd of circus elephants playing the William Tell Overture for all we know.

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

#230

Post by throwway120385 »

griffzhowl wrote: post #222
exe34 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes that other 'people' will be listening, no, because you can pulse it with the fibbonaci sequence or prime numbers, which are not easily produced by astrophysical processes.

Of course if there's a pattern like that it would change things. This signal seems to have been a single pulse though

On our timescale, sure. But then we wouldn't want to communicate with intelligences that experience time so differently that a pulsed signal from their perspective would be a single pulse from our perspective.
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