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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

#251

Post by xenobeb »

this_user wrote: post #7
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.

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…

I just don't agree with this at all.

How aggressive do you feel towards ants and ant hills? Do you feel an urge to murder ants to show your dominance over the competition?

I would suspect we are more in competition with ants than aliens would be with us.

I think we really underestimate how uninteresting we would be to an advanced alien civilization.

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

#252

Post by paulgerhardt »

ianburrell wrote: post #221
floatrock wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well it was radar. The first Raytheon microwaves were really pushing for 3GHz not 2.4GHz. If you like to play Connections, the reason for that is the first mass produced magnetrons were made by gun manufacturers like Colt and Smith & Wesson and the tooling for gun bore holes and magnetron cavities lined up at 3GHz.

The official FCC minutes from 1945 [1] indicate that publicly they were marketed for heat therapy massages not food, with a weird wink, wink that if they could get a carve out for using for medical reasons they could also sell it to the Navy for reheating food as well.

The ISM carve out came after by a couple of years in 1947 because Raytheon had got an exception for this machine, not the other way around.

The whole origin story of why this particular slot of spectrum is full of carts before horses. That water oscillation thing is a common misconception - water oscillates at much higher frequencies [2].

[1] https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-FCC/FCC-Annual-Rep...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...

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

#253

Post by merelysounds »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #234
ProllyInfamous wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: Good enough reason to never just open the microwave to stop heating. Press `STOP` first, got it.

Meh, it's less dangerous than granite countertops

Interesting, I didn’t know.

> The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says most granite countertops are safe, adding little to a house's radon level. It depends on the rock that is used, the agency says, recommending that homeowners concerned about radon get their countertops tested."

https://www.naturalstoneinstitute.org/designprofessionals/ra...

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

#254

Post by raflemakt »

griffzhowl wrote: post #209
jfengel wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have to be a very specific kind of device. The "Wow!" signal isn't broad-spectrum noise. It's one specific frequency, and it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal. Somebody could well have been walking across a field with a 1450 MHz generator. I don't know why; maybe it was a prototype of a portable microwave-oven/Walkman mashup. If so, it was leaky, and perhaps that's why…

> 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…

In Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, the aliens chose to transmit their signal at «hydrogen times pi» — which is around 4462 MHz.

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

#255

Post by [deleted] »

thwarted wrote: post #89
bcrl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks... The fact that websites are now blocking Firefox by default as an "ad-blocker" is saddening.

I pasted the URL into firefox, and didn't see that huge "you're using an adblocker popup". I opened a firefox private window and navigated to it from the HN page, and got the adblocker popup. Right now I have two tabs open in the same non-private window, one showing the adblocker popup and one not. In the one that's not I can view the whole page. Reloading in the one that is not showing the adblocker popup then showe…

[deleted]

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

#257

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

34679 wrote: post #170

I had a theory that it was someone walking across the field with an electronic device, like a flashlight. So I looked up the duration of the signal, size of the field, and average walking pace. It matched perfectly.

I did some undergrad research on the [ADMX][1] experiment, which is searching for a theoretical particle by listening for its interaction with a microwave photon in a big, ultra-cold cylinder that can be tuned to different frequencies.

A while back, they thought that they might have found something at 700 MHz. Then went looking again and it was gone. My professor said that it was probably a CPU in the lab.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion_Dark_Matter_Experiment

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

#258

Post by pyman »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #239
entropicdrifter wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, it's less dangerous than granite countertops

In terms of radiation?

Not sure about radiation, but I once tried to boil an egg in the microwave and the microwave exploded. For a second, I thought the chicken had secretly developed human-level intelligence and planted an explosive inside the egg to get back at those stealing its babies. That was my "wow" moment. Then my dad confirmed it was my fault and compared my intelligence to the chicken's.

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

#259

Post by [deleted] »

yencabulator wrote: post #227
metalliqaz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#260

Post by pyman »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #245
anikom15 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What handheld electronic devices existed in 1977? A flashlight would have been incandescent.

Handheld radios (walkie talkie) predate that by at least a decade. They probably were mostly operating around 30 mhz in the CB band or 120-150 in the Ham or aircraft bands in that era, but harmonics are a thing

Or the government was planning to cut funding, and to stop that from happening someone deliberately created the interference.

Statistically speaking, that's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.

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