[deleted because nonsense]
The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
151–160 of 279 posts
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#152[deleted because nonsense]
Misleading? Maybe, I don't think so though. "Extraterrestrial" is just "not from/on Earth", it means nothing beyond that.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#153Simple programmer here. I have a dumb question. What about the "Wow!" signal is special, or unique? What makes someone see it and think "wow"? Is there some kind of information encoded in the signal?
It's an _insanely_ powerful signal. It'd be like watching for fireflies in a field and suddenly seeing a stick of dynamite go off.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remain unconvinced of the viability of robots, as much as I love scifi renditions.
Have you seen a modern car manufacturing plant? Many parts of the production pipeline are fully automated. Granted, most of these machines are not ambulatory but they're still considered robots . Or consider modern freight shipping: many ports rely on intelligent automation for container handling. The development path of 3d printing is also leaning more heavily into robotics, featuring freely-moving articulated arms…
... and we are very early on in human-robot development still... We don't know yet if the current push will speed things up or leave it stagnant; I would say it's definitely not a stretch to assume it will speed up...
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#155Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#156Earlier 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…
> a highly aggressive apex species
I won't pretend that I'm some expert but I find this and similar approaches very anthropocentric, stained with pop-culture of image of aliens namely from the Independence Day and Alien (sic) series.
Why extraterrestrial life has to be aggressive at all? I'd rather imagine that if something exist out there it either have similar fears that we have or don't bother with rest of the universe and prefers an isolated existence because it already discovered that own survival is more important. And perhaps it doesn't resemble humanoids at all. Hell, maybe it even takes form of giant organisms that can freely roam through the space and just exists.
Perhaps the most boring and obvious truth is that we're alone and we exist because of sheer series of weird and improbable accidents. Pretty sure some people who work in this field believe that we're first to emerge as a sentient intelligence. So perhaps it's up to us if should reach out to the stars and explore, spread across the space. Or it might be possible that we're in a fine-tuned simulation ran by our ancestors who evolved beyond physical form and who decided to study us as we study microorganisms in a Petri dish.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#157Simple programmer here. I have a dumb question. What about the "Wow!" signal is special, or unique? What makes someone see it and think "wow"? Is there some kind of information encoded in the signal?
It's an _insanely_ powerful signal. It'd be like watching for fireflies in a field and suddenly seeing a stick of dynamite go off.
Thanks. This answer and the answers from bertman and verzali are great.
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#158Earlier 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.
That's like saying God is the best explanation for any newly described natural phenomenon.
May I interest you in "Calculating God" by Robert J. Sawyer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme. Which meme is that?
I haven’t heard it before, but I just searched it up, it looks like a confused cat with that as the text. The joke is that the person is meowing at the cat, but doesn’t speak cat, so the cat is confused. The example I found was from 2019.
This one? https://ibb.co/RTshY7k9
Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Obviously simulation hypothesis. The vastness of space and the limit on the speed of light suggest multiple worlds are being simulated in the same "space" such that isolation between worlds is always maintained.
I kinda like the simulation hypothesis. We have 3 cases: either it is impossible to simulate the universe because of a natural law we haven't discovered yet; or it is possible but civilizations collapse before reaching that point; or it is possible and reachable, and in that case, we extremely likely to live in a simulation. 1 and 3 are the most likely imho.
To me, it's a 40% chance we do live in a simulation, but the way I weigh the different scenarios is extremely personal.