Quite 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.
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 training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.
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 from Sagittarius. But "Extraterrestrial" != "alien", only "Not Earth".
From the first arxiv paper's abstract
> We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in these clouds triggered by a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR). A maser flare or superradiance mechanisms can produce stimulated emission consistent with the Wow! Signal. Our hypothesis explains all observed properties of the Wow! Signal
From the second one
> we confirm that small, cold HI clouds can produce narrowband signals similar to its detection, which might suggest a common origin.
Nobody is talking about aliens. FFS, Avi Loeb isn't even an author on one of the papers.
The papers are good but nothing really exciting to the general public in them. Just your every day normal science. Science can be really exciting but we don't need fairy tales for that. All that does is degrade science, create confusion, and ultimately strengthen the anti-science crowd because people can't tell the difference between "scientists say" and "news reporter says scientists say". These are very different things...
Edit:
I wanted to add and explain why it people have suggested it is on a frequency that "would be a good candidate for extraterrestrial communication." The reason is absolutely mundane: it is a frequency that doesn't interact with tons of things so can travel pretty far. But mind you, calling it a good candidate for alien communication is also ignoring all the reasons that it would be a terrible way for communicating with others. Like the fact that it was super fast and if you don't have a telescope pointing in the right direction you're really not going to detect it (which is why it's been hard to find more).
Like most people with a degree in physics, I believe in aliens. Similarly, like most people with a degree in physics, I do not believe aliens have visited Earth nor do I believe we have any evidence of their existence. The reason we believe they're out there is because Earth is, as far as we can tell, Earth is not that unique. We're an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary sun and since the time when Sagan said those same words we've only gained more evidence for this being true. So there's good reason to believe they are out there. And we should search for them because either they are out there or the process of searching for them leads to a better understanding of why Earth is unique. It is a no lose situation. Either way we'll learn something incredibly important.
But also, like most scientists, I think it is unlikely we'll find signals from them. Space is too big, star systems are too far apart, the speed of light is too slow, and there's a lot of radio sources out there that are very powerful. Even if there were aliens around Proxima Centauri the signals take over 4 years to get there and our sun is blasting noise that is several orders of magnitude louder. For them to find our general broadcasts would be like trying to find a (specific) needle in the Pacific Ocean.
> 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.
Simple 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?
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.
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. The microwave stopped, of course, but there was a split second where it was still emitting while the protective cage was opened, and the energy that leaked out during those couple of ms were enough to screw with the observatory equipment.
Aliens? Nope, just some tired grad student reheating their coffee.
Believe me, I'm as angry about this as you will be, but TIL that the correct term is "to home in," which makes sense, but nowhere near as pleasing, or visual, as "hone in."
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 never caught on.
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.
The claim is that humans would have to monitor for six millennia to detect a signal like this as a result of random interference/noise. The implication is that the signal is probably real, since humans have been monitoring for much less than 6000 years.
_Likely_ is not up to bearing its load in this title; the actual paper makes no such hyperbolic claim.
Hobby horse:
Hyperbole and false confidence in popular reporting is a blight on any SETI. Coverage of Beatrice Villarroel's paper (and the boosterism of her own collaborators) is an egregious example at the moment.
Avi Loeb has his detractors, but he at least is constant and clear in his intentions, what the data does and does not suggest, and why.
I used to think the Wow signal was just an overhyped story from the past. But after looking into the technical details, I realized it was genuinely unusual. The signal was clean and narrow-band, nothing like ordinary noise. Decades later, people are still going through old data to study it. What really stays with me is not the search for aliens, but the quiet persistence behind it. Our curiosity about the universe doesn't fade so easily.
30 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadAlien: 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.
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.
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 from Sagittarius. But "Extraterrestrial" != "alien", only "Not Earth".
From the first arxiv paper's abstract
From the second one Nobody is talking about aliens. FFS, Avi Loeb isn't even an author on one of the papers.The papers are good but nothing really exciting to the general public in them. Just your every day normal science. Science can be really exciting but we don't need fairy tales for that. All that does is degrade science, create confusion, and ultimately strengthen the anti-science crowd because people can't tell the difference between "scientists say" and "news reporter says scientists say". These are very different things...
Edit:
I wanted to add and explain why it people have suggested it is on a frequency that "would be a good candidate for extraterrestrial communication." The reason is absolutely mundane: it is a frequency that doesn't interact with tons of things so can travel pretty far. But mind you, calling it a good candidate for alien communication is also ignoring all the reasons that it would be a terrible way for communicating with others. Like the fact that it was super fast and if you don't have a telescope pointing in the right direction you're really not going to detect it (which is why it's been hard to find more).
Like most people with a degree in physics, I believe in aliens. Similarly, like most people with a degree in physics, I do not believe aliens have visited Earth nor do I believe we have any evidence of their existence. The reason we believe they're out there is because Earth is, as far as we can tell, Earth is not that unique. We're an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary sun and since the time when Sagan said those same words we've only gained more evidence for this being true. So there's good reason to believe they are out there. And we should search for them because either they are out there or the process of searching for them leads to a better understanding of why Earth is unique. It is a no lose situation. Either way we'll learn something incredibly important.
But also, like most scientists, I think it is unlikely we'll find signals from them. Space is too big, star systems are too far apart, the speed of light is too slow, and there's a lot of radio sources out there that are very powerful. Even if there were aliens around Proxima Centauri the signals take over 4 years to get there and our sun is blasting noise that is several orders of magnitude louder. For them to find our general broadcasts would be like trying to find a (specific) needle in the Pacific Ocean.
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.
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. The microwave stopped, of course, but there was a split second where it was still emitting while the protective cage was opened, and the energy that leaked out during those couple of ms were enough to screw with the observatory equipment.
Aliens? Nope, just some tired grad student reheating their coffee.
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 never caught on.
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
Hobby horse:
Hyperbole and false confidence in popular reporting is a blight on any SETI. Coverage of Beatrice Villarroel's paper (and the boosterism of her own collaborators) is an egregious example at the moment.
Avi Loeb has his detractors, but he at least is constant and clear in his intentions, what the data does and does not suggest, and why.