
Wow signal - joering2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
======
adrianonantua
"In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory
beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages"

Oh, man, what will they think of us now? Couldn't we have sent Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony and similar content?

~~~
ekianjo
What's more ridiculous is the assumption that other life forms may somehow
understand the messages we send them in our own language. It's so preposterous
I don't even know where to begin.

~~~
taternuts
What do you suppose we beam to them other than our codified way of
communicating? You can only hope they could potentially decipher it to grok
some meaning.

~~~
ekianjo
How can they even hope to decipher something which is language/culture based ?
We even hard a seriously hard time to understand egyptian hieroglyphs (on
Earth! From a culture we knew of from many other texts in Antiquity!) until we
found a stone where the text was translated into something intelligible. If
they have no reference, all communication we send them will seem like garbage
to them. Assuming anything else would be foolish.

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quahaug

      Scientists say that if the signal came from 
      extraterrestrials, they are likely to be an extremely 
      advanced civilization, as the signal would have required a 
      2.2-gigawatt transmitter, vastly more powerful than any on 
      Earth.
    

What if we inadvertently witnessed the climactic end of two rival
civilizations as they unleashed massive energy weapons upon each other, due to
some kind of political unraveling of a dangerous arms race?

That would certainly explain the intensity, brevity and lack of repitition for
this particular signal?

One might expect residual evidence of destructive forces at work, such as a
debris field or hot gas clouds, but that assumes that the weapons are of a
conventional nature we might readily understand.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
Would not explain narrow spectrum nor uniform intensity of the signal.

~~~
quahaug
Consider that a specific communications channel for a civilization/culture-
specific technology were being jammed, as part of a hostile operation.

~~~
wglb
Interstellar DDoS?

~~~
Zigurd
My theory is that it encoded the uploaded consciousness of their best minds,
along with a compelling argument that the only way to escape our gravity well
is to upload our minds via a multigigawatt transmitter, along with
instructions on how to build one (except those instructions won't work unless
we propagate their signal). It might drive our civilization to the brink of
our resource capacity to undertake this project, but it's the only way to
propagate ourselves and survive, so what choice would we have?

~~~
quahaug
You can't upload consciousness. At best, all you can upload is a
representation of personality and memories.

~~~
vinceguidry
If one created a physical substrate that neurons could transmit to and from,
then embedded it in the brain, you could create consciousness in that
substrate. A primitive analogue of this has been done where they attach
electrodes to the tongue and fired them in a pattern suggestive of a video
feed, eventually the brain started to understand it as another 'sense'.

Should one start brain-interacting directly with a substrate, the substrate
could be powered independently and persist after separation. If separation
occurred after natural death of the host, you could say that it 'uploaded'
it's consciousness to the substrate.

~~~
quahaug
That's just a replay attack. The consciousness is still bound to the cells. No
new, unique information is generated without the presence of the cells.

The term "uploaded" is being subjected to special semantics in this case.
Consciousness is not transferred over to the receiver by the act of
transmitting a signal.

If I make a telephone call, and leave a voicemail message, the answering
machine does not get up and walk around. Even a sufficiently advanced
voicemail recorder would only be an interpretation of artifact left behind by
a creature, and not the original being.

~~~
vinceguidry
But if the substrate had artificial neurons, that could do everything normal
neurons could, then it's plausible that consciousness could copy everything
over. At that point, the only thing binding consciousness is the 'idea' that
it belongs to the cells.

If you separated them before the host dies, then you'd have copied the
consciousness into the substrate, and they would exist separately until you
reattached it.

Wait until the host dies, then the consciousness would experience that death
yet still persist. It would carry on experiencing through whatever senses the
substrate offers.

Notice that it's not just a signal being transferred, it's the actual
mechanics of consciousness, neurons firing and communicating. When the
substrate, connected to the brain, communicates, it's just as if you added
brain cells. So it's not just a signal, it's actual thought.

------
TrainedMonkey
And more importantly - will they be looking? We are only looking at small
portion of the sky at a time. At the same time in order to send messages to
other stars powerful telescopes need to be utilized. You can't simply build a
telescope per star with a planet that is thought to contain life and broadcast
all the time.

Thus, if civilization is not capable to monitor all of the sky at the same
time with low powered telescopes and quickly point high powered telescopes
when something interesting is detected, there is extremely small chance that
it would be able to communicate effectively. That is retransmitting the signal
to the same star is worth inherently less when compared to trying to transmit
to a new star.

If interstellar travel is not viable, what we would want to do is transmit
wikipedia[0] to all stars that could contain life. Traveling time for
information would be long enough that we can't expect confirmation or two way
communication. So what you would want to do is make a really powerful
telescope beaming wikipedia to one star at a time (or many telescopes
transmitting to different stars). Idea is - you do not want to repeat
yourself. If you sent information once, and it have not been received, you
would not want to try again for a long while. That is due to the fact that
chance that civilization would develop that can listen to your signals in
relatively short amount of time is unlikely. So I would say that if this is
logic transmitting civilization would use then a signal would not be repeated
for thousands of years.

While writing this I though of algorithm that might work better to maximize
amount of civilizations you reach. This would require a relatively stable
space transmitter, or series of coordinated ground transmitters:

1\. Pick a set of stars S that potentially can support advanced civilization
and are located closely in a region of space (so you do not have to reposition
telescope a lot).

2\. Start sending signals primer signals to stars. For signal S[x], temporal
difference between S[x] and S[x+1] would a set amount shorter than temporal
distance between S[x-1] and S[x]. Primer signals are short and cheap,
transmitting entire Wikipedia should take way longer (Weeks, months, maybe
years?).

3\. Once time between primer signals reaches some threshold start transmitting
data set.

Idea is that this will give advanced civilization potentially listening a
chance to prepare to receive full transmission, while avoiding costly repeats
of big data set.

[0] Wikipedia is chosen as sufficiently large volume of knowledge about human
civilization that we would potentially want to transmit.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Trying to notify intelligent life that we exist has a high probability of
being the worst idea in all of human history, because there's a high
probability that there will be no more human history after we meet them.

But radio emissions swiftly degrade after not too long of a distance, so
unless we build some kind of extremely high-powered transmitter then any
scheme like this is doomed to failure. Luckily.

~~~
Zigurd
That conjecture is much less certain than it is portrayed. Let's say we found
a civilization of oyster-like creatures on a oceanic moon of a gas giant
planet of a nearby star. Are we really going to go that far for a raw bar?

"Conquering" stellar civilizations only happens in space operas.

~~~
spacehome
The fact that your first thought is about the feasibility of eating aliens
lends tonnes of support to the idea that it's in the aliens' best interest to
wipe us out.

~~~
Zigurd
It looks like the greater danger is the inability to spot satire. They'll come
and and prank us and we'll humorlessly launch nukes on them.

~~~
wmeredith
Almost did a spit take while reading that first sentence, thanks!

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duffdevice
As far as I understand this article, there's no reason to believe that the
signal was of constant amplitude, only that it hit Big Ear's detection
threshold when we pointed directly at it. So it could have been something
super non-uniform and noisy, which would make the intelligent origin seem less
likely. But whatever it was, it was super loud.

Also: why haven't we built a dedicated radio telescope to just watch that spot
all the time? Surely this is the biggest lead generated by the SETI program so
far?

~~~
4ad
The bandwidth was extremely narrow, 10kHz. That means it wasn't non-uniform,
nor noisy.

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Luyt
There's a Skeptoid episode about the WoW Signal:

[http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4342](http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4342)

The podcast starts with: _" It was August 15, 1977, when astronomer Jerry
Ehman was examining data coming from Ohio State University's radio telescope,
which was engaged in listening for signals from deep space, hoping to find
something of intelligent origin. In a moment that's since become one of the
most famous events in astronomy, he saw a sequence of six characters on the
printout — 6EQUJ5 — which caught his attention. So much so, in fact, that he
circled the text, and wrote "Wow!" in the margin.

It was, apparently, a signal from outer space. It came from the direction of
Sagittarius. The strength of the signal was represented by the digits 0-9 and
the letters A-Z, a scale of 36 levels of intensity, rising with 6EQ and
falling with UJ5, a near-perfect bell curve of signal strength spread over 72
seconds. All speculation and hype aside, Wow! remains the strongest candidate
ever detected for an alien radio transmission."_

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wglb
Being into radio, this is one of my favorite stories.

A great line from the article: _" drawing vast conclusions from half-vast
data"_. Would all HN stories avoid this as well.

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lukifer
My pet hypothesis: with the vast scale of the universe and the light-speed
limitation, when it comes to potential conversational partners, the universe
selects in favor of _extremely_ long-lived life-forms (possibly "artificial").
Such life forms would be only be interested in interacting on highly
protracted time scales; think "Space Ents". Given also that sending signals
into deep space is extremely expensive and energy will always be finite,
communication with new worlds is sought only rarely, perhaps one targeted ping
per world every 10,000 years, each an attempt to start a dialogue to be
carried out laboriously over millions of years.

~~~
etfb
I have two hypotheses, both untestable (and therefore worthless):

1\. The distance between stars is too huge, so there has to be a trick to
beating it easily, like FTL travel or wormholes, because otherwise it's just
crap.

2\. If any supervillains want to destroy the universe, they're too late: it's
already been done, and this is all that's left.

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acheron
I read this article every so often when I remember about it. So fascinating.

Yet something we will probably never know the truth about.

~~~
cpayne
I just love little stories like this. Can you imagine the emotion in the room?
What it was like to see the characters and wonder WTF?

Then thinking was it an error? Did something go wrong? Is E.T. on its way?

Awesome!

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johnvschmitt
Someone with better #'s can correct me please, but:

With so many emitting bodies in the universe, wouldn't we expect to receive
the complete works of shakespeare from ~1 remote body/month?

I mean, you could find the "WOW" signal in PI somewhere too, right?

~~~
eru
> With so many emitting bodies in the universe, wouldn't we expect to receive
> the complete works of shakespeare from ~1 remote body/month?

Wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_content_.E2.80.94_number_of_atoms))
says we have around 10^80 hydrogen atoms in the observable universe. That's a
huge number, but there are 10^80 different decimal numbers with 80 digits
alone. Shakespeare's works are considerably longer.

~~~
kamaal
Firstly the observable universe is nothing compared to the whole universe.

Secondly what the above comment means is that with so many bodies emitting
some thing random for such a long period of time. You are inevitable bound to
notice something that you could make some meaning of.

And yes the 'WOW' signal is present some where in Pi.

~~~
ethanbond
Something you make meaning of yes, probably. The complete works of
Shakespeare, no, probably not.

And no, that's not necessarily true with regards to Pi.

~~~
eru
Depends on whether Pi is a normal-enough number.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number))

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S_A_P
Its the 2012 equivalent of beaming an episode of Jerry Springer to aliens...

~~~
phy6
I'm just going to post what everyone was thinking when they saw the headline.
[http://i.imgur.com/BNDIpy3.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/BNDIpy3.jpg)

~~~
jjgreen
So $\exp^{-x^2}$.

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hernan604
in the middle of so many 1, 3 and 2s, to see a 6EQUJ5 plus a 6 and a 7 is sure
a "Wow signal"!

