The WOW signal (6EOUJ567) first contact

Radio transmissions that make it through our atmosphere and propagate omnidirectionally or broadly will diminish in usable strength until they become indistinguishable from the cosmic background radiation after several light years.

That's why active SETI efforts attempt to send very powerful, highly focused signals directed at specific locations.

Originally posted by Pinkarella
reply to post by GobbledokTChipeater

 

So if this was just the intensity of the signal, did it have any information in it? And if so was it "translated"?

OT love your kitty! Looks just like mine.

As far as I can tell, no data was actually received. We just received a very narrow-band carrier wave at a specific frequency.

Not to take anything away from this thread, as it is still very significant.

Originally posted by DaddyBare


The signal’s original discoverer Jerry Ehman doesn’t care to speculate on its source, and he remains scientifically skeptical. “Even if it were intelligent beings sending a signal,” he said in an interview, “they’d do it far more than once. We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times.”

Perhaps. But consider that when humankind used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message out into space in 1974, it was only sent once.


[edit on 4-5-2010 by DaddyBare]

Read in the bold text.

Now how does this Jerry Ehman know about the methods of communication of an Advanced/Intelligent Extra Terrestrial Race? They would most surely have a different way of dealing with things, and or seeing things, compared to we humans. Knowing us, over the years many have grown skeptical to the point where if there was an alien invasion on the other side of the world, it would mean nothing but CGI to people. I can see why this man stated "We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times."

Who knows. This might be the most valuable piece of evidence we have of contact right now, in public hands, but it most likely will be bumped by people in which skepticism has ravaged their minds all their life.

Always thought this would be relevant to threads such as this;

Alien life will be discovered within next 20 years

Originally posted by QuantumDeath

Now how does this Jerry Ehman know about the methods of communication of an Advanced/Intelligent Extra Terrestrial Race? They would most surely have a different way of dealing with things, and or seeing things, compared to we humans. Knowing us, over the years many have grown skeptical to the point where if there was an alien invasion on the other side of the world, it would mean nothing but CGI to people. I can see why this man stated "We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times."

Who knows. This might be the most valuable piece of evidence we have of contact right now, in public hands, but it most likely will be bumped by people in which skepticism has ravaged their minds all their life.

I'm a skeptic and would never make the same assertion that Mr. Ehman did, nor would I assert that an alien invasion was CGI. Those are pseudo-skeptical assertions. A true skeptic cannot make assertions without irrefutable proof... not even the assertion that something is not true or real.

The statement that, "they'd do it far more than once," is not a scientific or honestly skeptical statement in my opinion. It is an unscientific assumption based only upon the evidence of our own species, and ignoring even some of that (instances during which we have sent transmissions only once, and never again.)

Since it is impossible to prove a negative in and of itself, the only way to prove that the signal was not intelligent in origin would be to prove definitively that it was the result of a natural phenomenon. That has not occurred to date.

Skepticism doesn't ravage the mind in my opinion. It is a philosophy of analytical open-mindedness, allowing for all possibilities save for those which have been unequivocally, irrefutably proved false.

[edit on 5/5/2010 by AceWombat04]

reply to post by AceWombat04


I have no problem with that my friend

It's just that only those that do it constantly, like the one man ( I forget his name) was hired to hush the people up in 1947 or maybe it was later, on the UFO subject. He was told to say, hush them up, give them an explanation even if it is bogus, just get it done. Eventually the man listened to all their stories and maybe he thought it was wrong to be doing what he did, and became interested in the subject of UFO's.

It's only those skeptics that want people to shut the hell up about it and accept a logical/bogus explanation when there is more to the story.

reply to post by QuantumDeath


I understand your frustration with those people and their "efforts" completely. I share it. But they are not skeptics. They are pseudo-skeptics. In most cases they may be merely misinformed, or confusing personal opinion with facts that they feel can be asserted as the latter. Or they may be dogmatic debunkers. In some cases, they may be hired shills.

You can identify a true skeptic by their refusal to make any assertions - including the sort you and I are so frustrated by - without absolute, undeniable proof. For example, if someone says, "all unidentified flying objects are mundane in origin, and there are no extraterrestrial intelligences visiting Earth," they are not being skeptical. The most a skeptic can say is, "I have seen no absolute proof that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, or that they pilot the small fraction of truly unexplainable UFOs witnessed by human observers." They cannot make an assertion of fact without proof, either for or against a hypothesis.

They can hypothesize, but that's not the same as stating a fact.

Originally posted by DaddyBare
There is only one thing I want to point out to all those who asked why we didn't respond to this WOW signal...

There is a business in Florida (or was) with a transmitter and antenna mounted to the top of a truck where you can record and send your own message to aliens for a few hundred dollars. I saw it on a TV show but don't recall which one, maybe it was UFO hunters? Though I tend to agree with Hawking, maybe sending transmissions isn't too bright until we have better planetary defenses in place.

Originally posted by m0r1arty
But I suppose if we all continue our merry game of pretend aliens and continue letting moderators let 11 year olds post here even though it's against the rules then I'm sure there will be huge scientific breakthroughs from our community...

Is there a rule against 11 year olds posting here? If so, I'm not aware of it. For all I know some 11 year olds make better posts than some 31 year olds, though some may be worse too.

We've been hearing about first contact a lot,but nothing came out of it.

isn't it obvious ? god wants someone to win the lottery

SETI - The Wow! Signal Fans T-shirt!

Is Available Here :

roswellboutique.wordans.com...

The Wow! Signal of SETI Project

The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected by Dr. Jerry R. Ehman on August 15, 1977, while working on a SETI project at The Big Ear radio telescope of Ohio State University.

Perhaps. But consider that when humankind used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message out into space in 1974, it was only sent once

True... Maybe they (like us) realized that while they may be saying "Howdy", they may also be ringing the dinner bell....



Still though, the other issue is that it was still pretty new at the time, and for all we know, it was some kind of more local interference, that we weren't capable of identifying at the time.

But, I do have something to say to SETI critics.

1. Even if the Universe was teaming with life, and EVERY civilization used radio communications for say, 200 years....we'd STILL be hard pressed to find a signal...

Sounds silly, huh?

Not when you really think about it. Thing is, such signals could take many thousands of years to reach us, by which time they could have either arrived way before we had radio, or are still on their way (even if the civilization is dead, or has moved on to quantum communications, etc.).

So, even if they are (or were) all chatting up a storm, we'd STILL be hard pressed to actually intercept a message as it would have to be a real timing coincidence...

It's like trying to find a particular grain of sand on a beach, when you don't even know which beach, or if the tide has already gone out and taken it.

Does that mean we should give up? Heck no...we're masters of coincidence....

[edit on 20-5-2010 by Gazrok]

I am vehemently against the idea of dinging the galactic dinner bell to let "others" know where we are.

ARGH!

Compose a lengthy post taking time to get facts correct and word my thoughts into something that actually comes across on screen, only to see the thread locked and directed here on submit.

But here there is not the same discussion, and to post now would be random.

RAAAANT...

Couple comments...

If it was an intelligent signal....what was the message? I would have thought that a civilization advanced enough to send a signal out would send out something more than just the WOW signal. I would have expected something along the lines of prime number bursts...that sort of thing. A universal sign of "hey, I'm intelligent life".

It is rather disheartening that SETI has only had one "interesting" find so far. I would have hoped for more to at least investigate further. I mean even our oldest transmissions have been heading away from the Earth for nearly 100 years now, that's a decent chunk of our local stellar neighborhood. No ones sent a reply that we have received.

I guess SETI has found some other interesting results:
3 Hits in the same spot of sky

Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away 190 01 September 04 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.

In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky. The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger. This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself. But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.

Absorb and emit

“It’s the most interesting signal from SETI@home,” says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. “We’re not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it.” Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy. Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum. SHGb02+14a seems to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1000 light years. And the transmission is very weak. “We are looking for something that screams out ‘artificial’,” says UCB researcher Eric Korpela, who completed the analysis of the signal in April. “This just doesn’t do that, but it could be because it is distant.” Unknown signature The telescope has only observed the signal for about a minute in total, which is not long enough for astronomers to analyse it thoroughly. But, Korpela thinks it unlikely SHGb02+14a is the result of any obvious radio interference or noise, and it does not bear the signature of any known astronomical object. That does not mean that only aliens could have produced it. “It may be a natural phenomenon of a previously undreamed-of kind like I stumbled over,” says Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath, UK. It was Bell Burnell who in 1967 noticed a pulsed radio signal which the research team at the time thought was from extraterrestrials but which turned out to be the first ever sighting of a pulsar. There are other oddities. For instance, the signal’s frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. “The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that’s rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet,” Korpela says. This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.

Fishy and puzzling

The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is “fishy”, he says. “If [the aliens] are so smart, they’ll adjust their signal for their planet’s motion.” The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second. What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. “It just boggles my mind,” Korpela says. The signal could be an artefact that, for some reason, always appears to be coming from the same point in the sky. The Arecibo telescope has a fixed dish reflector and scans the skies by changing the position of its receiver relative to the dish. When the receiver reaches a certain position, it might just be able to reflect waves from the ground onto the dish and then back to itself, making it seem as if the signal was coming from space. “Perhaps there is an object on the ground near the telescope em

Our signals aren't leaving the solar system. They essentially disintegrate before getting very far.

The idea that we are blasting the universe with bits of Andy Griffith is just Hollywood wishes.

We're very noisy locally. Galactically, we're as silent as space still.

That's what makes WOW so interesting. Lots of power to make a sustainable signal that lasts with a simple possibly intelligent message over many light years.

Pick a few candidate planets/systems, and blast them every couple of hundreds of years. If the WOW signal is a signal, what it implies maybe is that that system has a METI. And they scan the skies and send out signals to candidate systems. But the sky is a very big place. SETI has only scanned a tiny tiny amount of the sky for a very short period of time. This isn't a fast system. Every time you look at some piece of empty space you'll find billions of galaxies to look at and send a signal to or listen to a signal from. How long till you sweep through again to send another signal? What if interest in the return message is gone in the mean time?

Originally posted by Aeons
Our signals aren't leaving the solar system. They essentially disintegrate before getting very far.

The idea that we are blasting the universe with bits of Andy Griffith is just Hollywood wishes.

We're very noisy locally. Galactically, we're as silent as space still.

I was wondering about that......so no "Contact" like transmissions from us with radio and TV transmissions, eh?

reply to post by pavil


Nope. Wouldn't that be cool though? "To The Moon Alice!"

It would be interesting to know if we've ever put out a sufficient powerful transmission that it remains coherent over a large amount of space.

This is one of the reasons why I've started considering that maybe a truly intelligent would NOT be sending signals via radio waves. They'd be sending signals on the fastest mode of communication that we know of - photons. Or on quanta - no travel time required.