Posted on 11/29/2022 7:29:32 AM PST by BenLurkin
On August 15, 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope on the campus of Ohio State University recorded a 72-second narrowband signal onto a paper tape. Several days later, Jerry Ehman, an astronomer at the university, studied the tape and found the signal so unusual that he scrawled the word Wow! next to the data points.
Since that time, the signal has been discussed at great length in the astronomy community, but nobody has been able to explain its origin.
The researchers focused their efforts on that star system using two telescopes, the Green Bank Telescope and the Allen Telescope Array. Both were pointed at the star system on the same day. The Green Bank studied the star for two half-hour periods, while the Allen array conducted six observations that were each five minutes long. There was also one period when the observations overlapped.
The researchers found no sign of a signal, much less one worthy of a "Wow!"
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
This may fall under the “100 monkeys with typewriters writing Shakespeare.”
Not sure if watching for 30 minutes is going to yield anything. I mean the message may have been “What’s this button do…?”
The problem is that even if ninety nine out of one hundred space alien civilizations are all about peace and love, it only takes one warlike civilization to do us in....
WOW! Earth is probably the only planet in the universe with intelligent life. After decades of searching for signals (SETI) indicating intelligent life in the rest of the universe, we have still found... NOTHING.
It might have been their brand new superconducting superdeeduper particle accelerator going high order ...
“ You get to be the top of the heap on your own planet by being the baddest badasses in the joint”
The idea that Joe Biden is the baddest badass in our joint…or even a contender for such…makes me gag a little - and think we aren’t going to make it very far.
If there are 99 civilizations of Space Hippies and one civilization of Space Orcs ... pretty soon there won’t be 99 civilizations of Space Hippies. They’ll either become Space Samurai or get wiped out.
We’d best be prepared to be Space Samurai.
Joe Biden is a dolt ... and a puppet. But there’s something to be said for the people pulling his strings. They certainly do know how to seize power and use it to their advantage.
The signal intensity was measured as signal-to-noise ratio, with the noise (or baseline) averaged over the previous few minutes. The signal was sampled for 10 seconds and then processed by the computer, which took 2 seconds. The result for each frequency channel was output on the printout as a single alphanumeric character, representing the 10-second average intensity, minus the baseline, expressed as a dimensionless multiple of the signal's standard deviation.
In this particular intensity scale, a space character denoted an intensity between 0 and 1, that is between baseline and one standard deviation above it. The numbers 1 to 9 denoted the correspondingly numbered intensities (from 1 to 9); intensities of 10 and above were indicated by a letter: "A" corresponded to intensities between 10 and 11, "B" to 11 to 12, and so on. The Wow! signal's highest measured value was "U" (an intensity between 30 and 31), that is thirty standard deviations above background noise.
Finally, an explanation that makes sense!
They only looked for a few hours. If they are serious, they’ll need resources camping out for a few days, unless they are just doing this for the press.
It was probably just a butt dial. They’ll call back when it’s important .
So I can put the Chuck Berry records away?
Thank you both for your explanations.
The Space Hippies will be fine—as long as they are not dumb enough to send out those radio signals giving their location....
Even the most primitive animals know that camouflage is the first rule of survival.
WOW was just a leak from a normally quiet world, hiding from competitors, lest they be destroyed.
Silence now means they have succeed in going back into hiding, or they were discovered because of the leak and have been destroyed. Pick one.
Alien: Hello? Can you hear me now?
LOL. Well, it depends upon your mood. Chuck Berry is always good.
Ya that was my first thought... I’m not sure how fast these radio waves are, but how many light years away is this star system?? So in actuallity, that would be 45 years, plus the math on the travel time of the radio waves...
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