A hundred years from now the Vogon Constructor Fleet arrives: "Did you get our message about the hyperspatial express route we're building through your solar system?"
And every single one of them are just a hypothesis. My favorite argument against the wow signal is that it happened only once. And for some reason aliens wouldn't do that. Also, arecibo sent our own "wow signal", and we (and by "we" I mean scientists) did it exactly once. 🤔 Never expect an academic to see the patterns in multi-domain problems. Specialists become too specialized.
@@vileluca whats annoying about it is that scientist are like maybe its aliens, then they invent a new theory which has odds of 1 in gazzillion of being possible, but since its not aliens they just accept that theory.
I wish there could be an afterlife in which you get to explore the universe as a ghost. Since you'd be an immaterial ghost, you wouldn't be limited to the laws of physics, so you could travel at any speed you wanted and be able to go anywhere without worrying about radiation exposure or being hit by astroids. You'd be able to explore gazillions of solar systems at various stages of their life, see how things were at the very beginning and how they are toward the end. You'd have all the time in the world. You'd be able to find out what kind of life is out there, how common it is, etc. You'd be able to look inside a black hole, and be right up close to a supernovae. There would be no end to the worlds you could explore and the things you could learn and observe.
Your describing an intelligent species 1 billion years more advanced than us. A C Clarke said that the tech of a very advanced civ would seem like magic.
I think you would really enjoy a very old science fiction novel, arguably the very first space exploration novel, called "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon.
I had a dream once that was almost exactly like that. I was floating in empty space, I had the ability to travel as fast and as far as I wanted and it was the loneliest experience ever. In the dream space was as vast as it is in reality and with no map, no information, just the stars, it was impossible to do or get to anything. Just endless space. I can't fathom what the dream meant, if anything, but it was kind of scary in an abstract, maximally lost kind of way.
@@Nefville I've had a lot of flying dreams, but never flying in space. I can see how it would be disorienting, though, because there's no fixed points of reference. I can see how it would be easy to get lost. I have had dreams where I kept flying higher and higher trying to get over all the power lines, and if I flew too high, I would start to get disoriented.
It would like "I wonder if in the future, there will be reporting about how certain things we thought were meteorological events were indeed Gods showing their anger". That's not the way history point at...
I came to discuss this as well. I can’t find any evidence the signal was recorded in any other way, only that RSSI was measured on a 12 second interval, which was always my understanding of how big ear worked. If there is some way to infer no modulation from that I’d love to know more, but I think we just have no evidence of modulation (because we weren’t looking for it).
@@jfutheytheres no point, like you said we werent looking for it, and that is pretty much that. However if I was told to try to communicate with an alien species i would use a bunch of different frequencies because I have no clue how others perceive time
this is a good point. In sensors and data acquisition class, we were told not to connect the dots of samples, cause it implies a smooth transition as opposed to a lack of resolution of the sensor.
I wasn't wildly interested in watching this video but then I realized how easily this news could have been clickbait material and how "non-clickbaity" the thumbnail was and I wanted to reward Anton for his honesty and for just being such a great guy. So I watched it anyway. And you know what? He actually made this story very interesting! What a wonderful person he is! Thanks Anton! ♥
I honestly found this extremely click bait-y, especially when compared to some of his older videos. He essentially sold a recent, unconfirmed hypothesis as a definite answer to an astronomical mystery. That's just horrible Science. I don't care how unlikely he thinks aliens is, selling an uncertainty as a definite solution is just intellectual dishonesty. Not knowing the answer to something is totally valid and key to earnest skepticism.
I'm always happy to see questions answered, but in this case, a 50-year-old, mysterious, one-off radio signal turning out to be a glowing cloud of cold gas might be a touch underwhelming.
Thanks Anton for the great Video. I am not directing this at you, but these kinds of papers that are just released to the Public without any kind of serious peer review are pretty much worthless. The Author gets a lot of attention for a few months until someone else Peer reviews it and shows that many of the assumptions are wrong. I worked with large satellite dishes for the better part of 15 Years in the Telecom industry and there are several issues that while pointed out are not emphasized enough to give people a clear understanding. The 90 seconds that the Signal took to rise and fall was (as you stated) because the Dish itself was stationary and not tracking signals. It was just looking for signals as the Earth rotated. If the Dish had been tracking the Signal the worst case Scenario is that they would have seen a Square Wave that just suddenly ramped up to the highest level and then stayed there for 90 seconds and then suddenly dropped off. The reality is that because no tracking was happening we have no idea how long the signal actually lasted. Even at 90 Seconds that is an incredible length of time for a carrier wave to be On and stable. For context as you know FRB's only last for Milliseconds! The Modulation aspect of the Signal is also not a clear. This signal would have been suffering from the Doppler effect. If someone was trying to send a message it would make sense that they send very few but extremely long pulses to first get someones attention. For example one Pulse for 5 minutes then a break and then two more 5 minute pulses closely spaced and then 3 and so on. Basically counting from 1-10 over a period of an hour or more. It is just to let you know we are here and this is not a natural signal. Then they come back to listen in the calculated minimum time for a Reply from that location in space and start waiting for a similar reply.
I have to wonder why it didn't repeat though. If I were trying to send a general hail that would differentiate itself from natural phenomenon, I wouldn't just do it once. I'd think it should repeat at least a few times. Was it never heard from again because it didn't repeat, or because we just never listened to that patch of sky again? (Genuinely asking, because I'm not at all familiar with radio astronomy.) Wouldn't their first instinct have been to train the dish on the source for a while afterward?
@@jfangm It is not worthless, why do you think everything we accept as fact is heavily Peer Reviewed before it is accepted as Fact? It is the examination of the Methodology the Author used to examine the raw data and the calculations he used based on the Data. It typically reveals that the assumptions the Author made are wrong because they made either made errors in the calculations or they ignored parts of the data because it was invalidating their theory. That is typically the problems with most scientific papers, the Author goes in with a Bias in his head and tries to prove he is right.
@@Deletirium I am not sure but I get the feeling that back in the old days these receivers and printers were not really well manned and there was not any good software to alert people to a sudden find. It is possible that it was hours or days later that someone noticed the signal on the print out. (I am not sure as I have never heard the full back story)
Except he has not answered it. We always knew the clouds would amplify it. He has not proven either way whether it was aliens or not that triggered the maser.
Pretty sure Baron Harkonnen was attacking Arakus at the time and missed. Sadly the ricochet hit Earth and in our ignorance we said "Wow!" Joking aside, thanks Anton, appreciate your perspectives.
You won't see that any time soon. There's a huge trend of "we're alone/it's not aliens" in pop-sci circles for reasons I don't understand. Maybe groupthink.
Yes it does. People keep going on about the fermi paradox, there should be life all over the place but we can't detect any, that must mean it doesn't exist! It's because there's no way for us to do so in the first place. There could be a million civilizations at our current level of technology active in the milky way RIGHT NOW and we still wouldn't be able to detect a peep from them.
Relax, no dreams were destroyed. The paper "debunking" the signal is pure conjecture. Rest assured that the signal is still safely in the category of "nobody knows".
It blows my mind how many teams are looking for habitable planets around red dwarfs. Last I checked Red Dwarf stars gave off way too much radiation and had a habitable range that was so close any planet in it would almost certainly be tidally locked.... both things not conducive to life, what do they know that most of us don't? Or do they do it just because they are so common and easy to observe.... seems a waste of resources to be looking for something where you are almost certain it can't be.
Actually not necessarily not all red dwarfs are the same. Even the smol ones vary. And title locking can be a blessing and a curse. As there's no day. But it allows planets to be habitable with slightly lower sunlight due to the day time side. Not to mention red dwarfs range from 8-50% of the mass of the sun
Flares may not be as bad as we thought. "A 2021 study lead by Ekaterina Ilin (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, Germany) presented evidence that M dwarf flares tend to emanate from their polar regions, possibly sparing close in planets from direct hits. Their initial data was taken from a small sampling of M dwarf stars from TESS observations, and further studies showed that this may well be the norm." (from Universe Today 8/7/21)
@@ARWest-bp4ybSo far Trappist-1b and c have no atmospheres. d has been observed by J-WST but the M8V (Trappist-1 star) is fully convective making it a flare star which interfered with observations (per Fraser Cain's interview with a researcher on the Trappist-1 priject.)
They're so common and easy to observe so it's worth a shot. It's not possible to directly image an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star (yet), so they're going for the low-hanging fruit. That said, I think there's been this bias among scientists over the past 400 years (going back to Herschel, I think) that life *must* be common in the universe. Dr. Sagan famously described our Sun as a "ho-drum" star, which is now known to be false (it's quite unusual). If life *must* be common, then it also *must* exist around at least *some* red dwarves because 75% of *all* stars in the universe are red dwarves. Moreover, they take longer than the age of the universe to die, so - even assuming it takes at least as long to get to our point as we have (4.5 billion years) - then the red dwarves are the ones that have the most amount of time to allow that to occur.
This is under the assumption that life elsewhere in the uniform will look like and require the same comdition as life on earth, which seems very unlikely.
The SETI Institute's Seth Shostak has said they have debunked way better candidate signals, and this one was just famous because it has a cool name. He will be glad when it is finally dead.
Hey Anton, love the channel. Can I suggest that you label your images as CGI when you use them. Astrum started doing this and it's important when you have such a mix of real science images & stock animations.
Tbf u do need an open mind to beginn make sense of it in the first place. Cant have u be convinced after hearing one random thing after the other, gotta make a pattern illustrating the connections between all of it
@@centura86 yet they come up with these theories that have billion to 1 odds then say yup...that seems legit. Meanwhile they still can't agree on things in our own backyard that can be studied everyday. Examples: they are arguing about whether or not venus has phosphine, and they say it can only be produced by life. watch them come up with another trillion to 1 odds theory for it. Also for years they said mars lost its water due to the thin atmosphere, now they say mars has a vast subsurface ocean.
How crazy would it be if we couldn’t find anything because we were actually one of the first technological species in the universe. Someone has to be first when you think about it.
And considering it already took earth about 1/4 of the universe’s current age to go from bacteria to multicellular life, it’s easy to imagine life just hasn’t had time or materials to develop in a lot of cases
@@alexsiemers7898 If this is true we have an incredible opportunity to become the first galactic civilization. Imagine being a pioneer of the universe!
This stuff fascinates me. I love his delivery and no fluff BS while simplifying the sciency stuff for the masses. But my favorite video of his has nothing to do with science, astronomy, or cosmology; it was an April fool’s day upload (a couple years ago) which was a fun parody of mukbang featuring noodles, the history of noodles, etc., and it was actually very informative.
When I was a kid, my parents used to go right to a slaughterhouse and buy a half cow twice a year. My mother had trouble chewing so when we got ready to stuff our upright freezer with beef, she would take the most tender cuts and write "MOM" on the butcher paper wrapper with a magic marker so that we knew that it was reserved for her. My brother came home from college on a break once. He got into the freezer for something to eat and he pulled out one of these marked packages and asked what's this package marked "WOW"? Our mother told him that it's upside down and marked "MOM".
@@cretinousswine8234 ...I thought you were gonna say your brother asked who butchered mom up into pieced and put her in the freezer... That came later after she pissed me off. Not really. She passed from lung cancer in 1996.
4:15 no modulation? How do we know that? Cool Worlds said we don't know if there was modulation because the telescope wasn't looking for it. The only record we have of it is those letters, right?
Jerry Ehrman would be the one to ask but afaik there was no test for modulation, so the claim that none existed is false. What is with the recent trend of all science channels getting so excited to declare "ITS NOT ALIENS!!!"?
There is more evidence that we are alone in this part of the galaxy at the very least. Probably unique to the milky way. So many new sloutions to the fermi paradox are pointing to us being very very very rare
@@Dadbro_ You don't really need a citation for a general comment like that. If you go back and review this particular channel, you'll see many attempts to explain the Fermi Paradox.
Absence of evidences are not evidences of absence. Not saying that we are not alone in our small corner of the galaxy. But solving some mysterious signal as natural occurence is not more evidence of us being alone.
@@Dadbro_ if you accumulate the solutions proposed for the Fermi Paradox in support for and against Alien life, there are more reasonable theories for the against. I don't want it to be true. I would absolutely love to find other intelligent life. But just the vast distances, the slow speed of light, and the more we discover how many things to go exactly right for intelligent life with technology to exist just don't seem promising. Every time there is a scientific solution that says "It's not aliens" really bums me out :(
One day, if aliens show up instead of acting scared our first reaction would be "F#@$&^g finally! Do you know how many false positives we've had so far?" That is, if we find a moment to lift our heads from our phones ...
It's like that service worker who was asked how he was doing and answered that he was actually not doing that good, and then the manager cut him off and said everything was fine. Some alien broke the universal gag order towards Earth and got cut off and fired.
So, this would be a reason advanced aliens would NOT use hydrogen emission lines for their contact signals. We're finding that communicating with distant star systems is EXCEEDINGLY difficult with all known techniques. Signals fade, become randomized, or are too similar to natural phenomena. As others have already suggests, advanced aliens, if they do exist, use communication methods we currently do not possess the means to detect.
Maybe quantum entanglement? There's definitely been a theorized way to transmit FTL information near instantaneously, so hopefully within our lifetimes we could also consider looking for these types of signals too.
@@BishopStars Oh lol, I was aware I wasn't very sure of that anyway lol, so that definitely answers my question. We still need some kind of method that doesn't violate the known laws of physics by bending spacetime to transmit information, and I'm sure at a very tiny scale we could using "less than" obscene amounts of energy.
I think we need to get used to the fact that either we are alone, or that ET is so far away from us, that we will never be able to confirm their existence. Much less communicate.
It actually makes a lot of sense. Because I doubt any civilization would use the hydrogen line, where there's so much noise... And, above all, who would announce their position without knowing what is out there?
I agree with your first statement. As for who would announce their position? We already have done that with the Arecibo message, among others, so it's definitely not a safe assumption that no one would do it. Civilizations are composed of a whole bunch of private actors doing things for their own reasons. What the sum total of "one civilization" would choose to do is not necessarily correlated with what a random group of scientists and engineers do with taxpayer-funded grants.
@jeffbenton6183 Good point. But most of our radio transmissions become indistinguishable with the background noise after around 2 lightyears. The only ones that could scape are the Arecibo signal and some communications with deep space probes. Like the Voyagers, probes around Jupiter and Saturn and so on.
@@jeffbenton6183I'm not sure that it's safe to assume that other civilizations on other planets are as selfishly motivated and independently acting as our own. I wouldn't be surprised if global cooperation is a necessity for a more civilized civilization's continued existence.
@@user-Aaron-There’s no reason to assume anything with a sample size of one. For all you know, Earth could be the most peaceful of all civilizations to ever exist, the others being savage and brutal organizations that make little sense to us.
Anton! I was hoping, this would have been one of your vids, that was on the comedy route. Where you'd wear a tinfoil hat. You know, those UFO & Space Alien Exteremist, are chomping at the bit, ready to tell you, you are wrong. I have suggested THREE of those Content creators that they'd interview you, since, they keep asking scientific questions, but then answer it with the whole "I'm not saying it was aliens but it was aliens." ~ Giorgio A. Tsoukalos narrative. Thank you Anton for keeping us informed.
I know many other say the same, but seriously Anton your channel’s consistency and quality is among the best on the platform. Beyond that, it’s you. You are, and trust that other people can be, wonderful, and it just gets across. Thanks!
00:33 -- Tiny correction: you said Megahertz in place of Gigahertz. The correct value was displayed. ps. the quality of your content is amazing, I am in awe. Truly.
Thank you Anton! Another example of our observational skills exceeding our theoretical skills. I've always thought it was some kind of a technical glitch from the ancient electronics of the day.
You know, I've been following your channel for years under my main profile, and I just can't square how wonderful, personable, and brilliant you are in your scientific videos, and how appallingly unscientific, and brainwashed you appeared in your political posts. I would give anything to have your brain, or your understanding of the universe, but emotion can cloud even the most brilliant of minds.
We haven’t ruled out that it was a beam sent directly from god as a sign of his existence either but it’s redundant to say it. We have a better explanation that fits that data
I really hate that 3 Body Problem used the wow signal as the basis for it's entire premise. We already had a pretty good idea that this wasn't an alien message, so the show was kind of immediately outdated, especially now. They could have just made something up so that a new explanation for previous events don't kill the vibe. Still love the show, just feels weird.
I was confused until you said show. If I recall correctly, the book didn't say it was the Wow signal that was aliens, but a modulated signal using this frequency
focus on the "what"... If you have 50 or so identical signals, the first os "Wow" only because it is the first one, not becuse it is a special one. Then try to understand statistics. Statstical significance against what? the background. But the background is the big assumption, meaning "you/we don't know anyhing about it". And guess what: not the background changed, and the statistical signicance just disappeared completely.
If an Alien sent out a signal 1000 years ago and the signal originates from 2000 light years away. We won't detect that signal for another 1000 years. If an alien sent out a signal 1000 years ago, and it originated from a location 1 light year away (and it was not continuous), we would not have had the technology in the year 1024 to have detected it. In either case, we would still see nothing.
"first, just a little bit of a background, so that we know we all are in the same page" I'm gonna use this in the literature review of my next paper. 😂
Excellent work by the researchers, but I on occasion have issues with how Anton presents conclusions. I'd say that the WOW signal is "likely" solved. He always goes a little overboard on the declaratives, certainly in the thumbnails, and that's not what science is about. He undermines his credibility when he does that.
don't know where you see it. This channel is not a course about how to read and retell science papers. Any communication about science is more or less expressing an opinion, for quite obvious reasons. And he clearly says: "I guess that". On the other side, you are chasing a pseudo objectivity that does not exist in tthe first place
@@SugaSharp as a mystery it is solved, because it is not a mystery any more, it changed its location into science. but in science nthing is ever "solved". you can solve in math and logics and in the mafia, but not in science. ...and kind of...its like you do not read precisely.. and a title is a title is a title.... in the text it sounds more nuanced, of course... But if you wanna stick to titles. go... they are more easy to read
The problem here is assuming how aliens would think. Why would we assume anything about how they would think of the hydrogen line? This is anthropomorphic thinking that skews how we interpret things we don't understand. We have no idea whatsoever whether aliens would be conscious in the same way we are, let alone intelligent in a way we can define. I somehow really really doubt aliens would try to contact us with radio.
It’s probably in the same vain as the hydrogen symbol on the Voyager spacecraft; regardless of species, the laws of physics act the same everywhere in the universe, and thus using some property of matter that’s consistent (such as some of the properties of hydrogen, the most common and basic element in the universe) to convey time or mass is a good unifying tool
@alexsiemers7898 So I understand that makes sense to you and to me, but that's because we're human. My point is more that we humans shouldn't assume anything about how an alien wiuld conceive of science or the universe. We have no clue what consciousness is, much less how it arises from the brain (can you have consciousness without a brain? Not to our knowledge) So we have no clue on how intelligence could vary in an alien or what they would understand about the abundance of hydrogen as a tool for communication etc. I think it overtly anthropomorphic to make any assumptions on that
@@ThePresident001The thing is, communication relies on assumptions. You have to make some kind of assumption in order to have a baseline axiom that you can proceed to use to send any meaningful information. So, if we're going to try and speak, or to try and listen, we have to make some kind of assumption. We can either try and assume that they'd use something that will work anywhere in the universe, and hope they'd come to the same assumption in trying to communicate with us, or we can assume something that isn't fundamental to the universe and gamble on it coincidentally also being what they use, essentially arbitrarily. There's not a particularly fantastic chance of the first assumption being correct, necessarily, but there is pretty much no chance of the second working out.
@@ThePresident001 I mean, I think the odds do lie on the side that we've chosen poorly in what kind of signal to focus on searching for. We are of course searching for quite a few different things, but I would definitely not say you're wrong to think as you do. I do think we're doing the best we can with the information and capabilities we have, though.
You never know for sure. It is just that the avalanche of evidence becomes overwhelming. All scientific theories are provisional, and that is a good thing.
At the risk of my inner Dunning-Kruger shining through, I don't think there is any advanced culture out there in our brief window of being able to detect them. There may have been, there may yet be, or we will snuff ourselves out before we know. From all that I've read and watched on the topic, we are the outcome of a whole series of low-probability events, and as you know, once you begin multiplying probabilities together, the product gets very tiny very quickly.
Hears a signal that could potentially be artificial. "we can't locate the source and it doesn't repeat. Cannot be aliens." Explanation decades later: "here's what happened, its natural, we cannot find the source though, and it doesn't repeat. But we're right. Everyone: "Seems legit."
I've little great comment of this situation, but in reply to what you've said; if you've worked in scientific academia you will find this is an extremely common way of doing things. When of course you are not working to get more funding. Clever ones will roll this sort of thinking (let's call it, making new science with no new facts) into their funding scheme, and it works. The most puzzling thing is the fact that at the location of the "WOW" signal, there seems to be nothing. Not a magic magnetar, but also not a solar type star, to my knowledge. There are a lot of weasel words in the presented explanations by Mendez et al. "may have been caused"...."could have been" and so on. So the proclamations that it is solved, and that "its not aliens" are completely false and are NOT science. Nothing has been proven, or disproven. The paper itself has been described as vague by another astrophysicist, and he is completely correct. I'm sure the paper generated interest ---> funding, and the TH-cam headlines thus produced are great for monetization. This is the state of modern science, to use the term loosely. Cheers.
I dunno why the default explanation was ever aliens anyway, even initially, there were natural explanations being offered and aliens likely would be communicating in ways that humans would not even recognize.
I have an issue with you posting the title as a matter of fact, when in the video itself you say it's only a "potential" solution at 6:36. I am making no assertion that the "wow signal" isn't what has been proposed, I only have an issue with saying "Wow! Signal Mystery *_Solved_* After 37 Years" when it hasn't. Sure, you reference in the video that it is a proposal, but the title alone will cause plenty of nit and midwits to get an inaccurate understanding of the topic, and I guarantee, just because of this title, someone out there will be like 🤓 "WeLL AcHtuAllY" and either argue this as fact, or reference this video as a source and think they're right because the title says it. The internet is already full of people who think they're right about everything because they only read headlines.. why add to that? And for the 🤓 "WeLL AcHTuaLLy" people who are offended and probably already typing a response before getting to this point.. stop it. I don't care.
This is one of the purest, most consistently informative, no BS channels on TH-cam. Been watching for years. Thank you!
and, as a consequence, very sad.
Almost nothing in this world and even this universe is reliable. But Anton is. Thank you, Anton.
Yassir 😊
yeah though i wish he could do like 4 hours per day. kinda like the science alex jones show
Should look at the most recent post lolol warming breast milk with intergalactic lasers my guy lol
A hundred years from now the Vogon Constructor Fleet arrives: "Did you get our message about the hyperspatial express route we're building through your solar system?"
"Hyperspace Bypass".
better grab a towel!!
@tohellorbarbados4902 "hyperspatial express route" as per Vogon's message/announcement to the people of Earth.
Probably better than listening to their poetry...😅
Yes! And I invested in your company! I got 25 shmeckles!
If they ever do find aliens I think Anton should be the one to announce it.
He’ll probably pull of his skin and say I’ve got some news.
Hello wonderful aliens
Already found. 1976 in Mars.
“So…uh…ya, aliens, you read the title”
He won’t admit it even when we do fine aliens. Anton my friend is a none believer
Someone needs to make a video of all the times anton says "sorry, not aliens"
And every single one of them are just a hypothesis.
My favorite argument against the wow signal is that it happened only once. And for some reason aliens wouldn't do that.
Also, arecibo sent our own "wow signal", and we (and by "we" I mean scientists) did it exactly once. 🤔
Never expect an academic to see the patterns in multi-domain problems. Specialists become too specialized.
It's DeGrasse Tyson levels of obnoxious at this point. It's like he delights in being a spoilsport.
Breaking my heart each time
@@vileluca whats annoying about it is that scientist are like maybe its aliens, then they invent a new theory which has odds of 1 in gazzillion of being possible, but since its not aliens they just accept that theory.
@@vileluca when you read through the comments it becomes clear it's a neccessity to remind some people 🥲
I wish there could be an afterlife in which you get to explore the universe as a ghost. Since you'd be an immaterial ghost, you wouldn't be limited to the laws of physics, so you could travel at any speed you wanted and be able to go anywhere without worrying about radiation exposure or being hit by astroids. You'd be able to explore gazillions of solar systems at various stages of their life, see how things were at the very beginning and how they are toward the end. You'd have all the time in the world. You'd be able to find out what kind of life is out there, how common it is, etc. You'd be able to look inside a black hole, and be right up close to a supernovae. There would be no end to the worlds you could explore and the things you could learn and observe.
Your describing an intelligent species 1 billion years more advanced than us. A C Clarke said that the tech of a very advanced civ would seem like magic.
I think you would really enjoy a very old science fiction novel, arguably the very first space exploration novel, called "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon.
@@AndrewJohnson-oy8oj Thank you for the suggestion.
I had a dream once that was almost exactly like that. I was floating in empty space, I had the ability to travel as fast and as far as I wanted and it was the loneliest experience ever. In the dream space was as vast as it is in reality and with no map, no information, just the stars, it was impossible to do or get to anything. Just endless space. I can't fathom what the dream meant, if anything, but it was kind of scary in an abstract, maximally lost kind of way.
@@Nefville I've had a lot of flying dreams, but never flying in space. I can see how it would be disorienting, though, because there's no fixed points of reference. I can see how it would be easy to get lost. I have had dreams where I kept flying higher and higher trying to get over all the power lines, and if I flew too high, I would start to get disoriented.
I wonder if in the future there will be TH-camrs reporting about how certain things we thought were astronomical events were indeed aliens.
It would like "I wonder if in the future, there will be reporting about how certain things we thought were meteorological events were indeed Gods showing their anger".
That's not the way history point at...
Sorry. It is just aliens.
@@mecha-sheep7674 sorry, Just Aliens.
Always were.
Nah
@@mecha-sheep7674Oh, snap 🫰!
I don't think the 'no modulation' can be asserted because the sampling rate was extremely low, only that 'no modulation' was found.
I came to discuss this as well. I can’t find any evidence the signal was recorded in any other way, only that RSSI was measured on a 12 second interval, which was always my understanding of how big ear worked. If there is some way to infer no modulation from that I’d love to know more, but I think we just have no evidence of modulation (because we weren’t looking for it).
@@jfutheytheres no point, like you said we werent looking for it, and that is pretty much that. However if I was told to try to communicate with an alien species i would use a bunch of different frequencies because I have no clue how others perceive time
this is a good point. In sensors and data acquisition class, we were told not to connect the dots of samples, cause it implies a smooth transition as opposed to a lack of resolution of the sensor.
I wasn't wildly interested in watching this video but then I realized how easily this news could have been clickbait material and how "non-clickbaity" the thumbnail was and I wanted to reward Anton for his honesty and for just being such a great guy. So I watched it anyway. And you know what? He actually made this story very interesting! What a wonderful person he is! Thanks Anton! ♥
That sounds paradoxical….
I honestly found this extremely click bait-y, especially when compared to some of his older videos. He essentially sold a recent, unconfirmed hypothesis as a definite answer to an astronomical mystery. That's just horrible Science. I don't care how unlikely he thinks aliens is, selling an uncertainty as a definite solution is just intellectual dishonesty. Not knowing the answer to something is totally valid and key to earnest skepticism.
1:25 I love how he's pointing at the word "ass"
Does anyone else want to eat mademoiselle craballeta with some butter??
Nice
It’s QSS, but I literally thought the same and had to double check 😂
Sorry to spoil the joke but it looks more like QSS.
Pointing at it with his middle finger no less. Lol
Wow!
Signal
@@whatdamath Mystery
Solved
Solved
After
People who want a specific answer are disappointed by having mysteries solved. Those who want *any* answer are excited by having mysteries solved.
I'm always happy to see questions answered, but in this case, a 50-year-old, mysterious, one-off radio signal turning out to be a glowing cloud of cold gas might be a touch underwhelming.
I want any answer and I'm disappointed
@0pyrophosphate0 You must not keep up with astronomical mysteries that have been solved. It is almost always clouds of gas and or dust.
The mere mention of the Arecibo observatory makes me cry 😔
It was sad how it was left to deteriorate and fall apart.
@@Duendito And the fact that me and Dad went there in 2006.
What do you mean there's no aliens? You showed them at 0:24 (irrefutable proof)
wow signal -> meh signal
Thanks Anton for the great Video.
I am not directing this at you, but these kinds of papers that are just released to the Public without any kind of serious peer review are pretty much worthless. The Author gets a lot of attention for a few months until someone else Peer reviews it and shows that many of the assumptions are wrong. I worked with large satellite dishes for the better part of 15 Years in the Telecom industry and there are several issues that while pointed out are not emphasized enough to give people a clear understanding.
The 90 seconds that the Signal took to rise and fall was (as you stated) because the Dish itself was stationary and not tracking signals. It was just looking for signals as the Earth rotated.
If the Dish had been tracking the Signal the worst case Scenario is that they would have seen a Square Wave that just suddenly ramped up to the highest level and then stayed there for 90 seconds and then suddenly dropped off. The reality is that because no tracking was happening we have no idea how long the signal actually lasted. Even at 90 Seconds that is an incredible length of time for a carrier wave to be On and stable. For context as you know FRB's only last for Milliseconds!
The Modulation aspect of the Signal is also not a clear. This signal would have been suffering from the Doppler effect.
If someone was trying to send a message it would make sense that they send very few but extremely long pulses to first get someones attention. For example one Pulse for 5 minutes then a break and then two more 5 minute pulses closely spaced and then 3 and so on.
Basically counting from 1-10 over a period of an hour or more. It is just to let you know we are here and this is not a natural signal. Then they come back to listen in the calculated minimum time for a Reply from that location in space and start waiting for a similar reply.
Well said.
I have to wonder why it didn't repeat though. If I were trying to send a general hail that would differentiate itself from natural phenomenon, I wouldn't just do it once. I'd think it should repeat at least a few times.
Was it never heard from again because it didn't repeat, or because we just never listened to that patch of sky again? (Genuinely asking, because I'm not at all familiar with radio astronomy.)
Wouldn't their first instinct have been to train the dish on the source for a while afterward?
Peer review has, for a very long time, been entirely useless, as it only examines methodology, not results, and is prone to subjective biases.
@@jfangm It is not worthless, why do you think everything we accept as fact is heavily Peer Reviewed before it is accepted as Fact?
It is the examination of the Methodology the Author used to examine the raw data and the calculations he used based on the Data. It typically reveals that the assumptions the Author made are wrong because they made either made errors in the calculations or they ignored parts of the data because it was invalidating their theory. That is typically the problems with most scientific papers, the Author goes in with a Bias in his head and tries to prove he is right.
@@Deletirium I am not sure but I get the feeling that back in the old days these receivers and printers were not really well manned and there was not any good software to alert people to a sudden find. It is possible that it was hours or days later that someone noticed the signal on the print out. (I am not sure as I have never heard the full back story)
It's nice to finally get answers to some of our mysteries! Good going Anton 👏🎉😊
Except he has not answered it. We always knew the clouds would amplify it.
He has not proven either way whether it was aliens or not that triggered the maser.
Fell to my knees when I saw that title 😫😔
7:14 spaceman
Spacebussy
Lol
Sorry, not spaceman.
Put a jumpscare warning next time, jumped out of my chair. Smh my head...
Pretty sure Baron Harkonnen was attacking Arakus at the time and missed. Sadly the ricochet hit Earth and in our ignorance we said "Wow!"
Joking aside, thanks Anton, appreciate your perspectives.
Nah that's thousands of years from now. The whole idea behind Dune is that eventually the aliens will be other Humans that sent off to colonize stars.
Anton IS the Kwisatz Haderach. He will teach us about the stars, with his weirding way.
@Deletirium 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Just once I’d like to see a headline: Distant star activity reclassified as alien technology
You won't see that any time soon. There's a huge trend of "we're alone/it's not aliens" in pop-sci circles for reasons I don't understand. Maybe groupthink.
If all these signals are natural. Wouldn't that mean there's to much interference over light years to send a clear message
there are certain wavelengths of light that interact with very little matter so they are ideal for long range communications.
Yes it does. People keep going on about the fermi paradox, there should be life all over the place but we can't detect any, that must mean it doesn't exist! It's because there's no way for us to do so in the first place. There could be a million civilizations at our current level of technology active in the milky way RIGHT NOW and we still wouldn't be able to detect a peep from them.
It’s been solved and debunked many times. Just sit and wait.
@@Cobbido It is a statistical argument with the chances of any other civilization being at our same level of technology as vanishingly small.
@@shantiescovedo4361 What is?
I don’t want to watch this … but I have to watch Anton destroy my dreams!
Relax, no dreams were destroyed. The paper "debunking" the signal is pure conjecture. Rest assured that the signal is still safely in the category of "nobody knows".
“We’ve been trying to contact you about the warranty on your spaceship.”
About extending the limited warranty of your spaceship 😂.
Impossible, they only called once!
Wonderful as always Anton. Thank you. 🙃😊
DANGIT! I had “New Wow! Signal” on my 2024 bingo card, I should’ve gone for “Wow! Signal explained”
Technically, new wow signals were found this year.
@@coast2coast00 True!
you're the best one at describing new discoveries & answers. Thanks for compiling everything in under 15 minutes.
It blows my mind how many teams are looking for habitable planets around red dwarfs. Last I checked Red Dwarf stars gave off way too much radiation and had a habitable range that was so close any planet in it would almost certainly be tidally locked.... both things not conducive to life, what do they know that most of us don't? Or do they do it just because they are so common and easy to observe.... seems a waste of resources to be looking for something where you are almost certain it can't be.
Actually not necessarily not all red dwarfs are the same. Even the smol ones vary. And title locking can be a blessing and a curse. As there's no day. But it allows planets to be habitable with slightly lower sunlight due to the day time side. Not to mention red dwarfs range from 8-50% of the mass of the sun
Flares may not be as bad as we thought.
"A 2021 study lead by Ekaterina Ilin (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, Germany)
presented evidence that M dwarf flares tend to emanate from their polar regions,
possibly sparing close in planets from direct hits. Their initial data was taken from
a small sampling of M dwarf stars from TESS observations, and further studies showed
that this may well be the norm." (from Universe Today 8/7/21)
@@ARWest-bp4ybSo far Trappist-1b and c have no atmospheres. d has been observed by J-WST but the M8V (Trappist-1 star) is fully convective making it a flare star which interfered with observations (per Fraser Cain's interview with a researcher on the Trappist-1 priject.)
They're so common and easy to observe so it's worth a shot. It's not possible to directly image an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star (yet), so they're going for the low-hanging fruit.
That said, I think there's been this bias among scientists over the past 400 years (going back to Herschel, I think) that life *must* be common in the universe. Dr. Sagan famously described our Sun as a "ho-drum" star, which is now known to be false (it's quite unusual). If life *must* be common, then it also *must* exist around at least *some* red dwarves because 75% of *all* stars in the universe are red dwarves. Moreover, they take longer than the age of the universe to die, so - even assuming it takes at least as long to get to our point as we have (4.5 billion years) - then the red dwarves are the ones that have the most amount of time to allow that to occur.
This is under the assumption that life elsewhere in the uniform will look like and require the same comdition as life on earth, which seems very unlikely.
It's the first time I see this signal explained like this and now I realise it's not even a signal, it's just a single peak.
This was like SETI’s biggest event to date. Expect this won’t help their funding.
Radio SETI is mostly privately funded.
It’s been “solved” many times, and debunked each time. This will be no different.
The SETI Institute's Seth Shostak has said they have debunked way better candidate signals, and this one was just famous because it has a cool name. He will be glad when it is finally dead.
I love your work, you're incredibly consistent and you explain things well. Thanks for all you do, Anton!
learning about space and science with Anton is a pure pleasure
This starts to sound like a cheating spouse on the phone...
"No, honey, it was just a prank laser call... (whispers) got to go, all hail zorgon!"
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Hey Anton, love the channel. Can I suggest that you label your images as CGI when you use them. Astrum started doing this and it's important when you have such a mix of real science images & stock animations.
WoW! Finally an answer to this former mystery. Thanks for passing that along Anton.
You’re not sorry, Anton!
Back to ancient aliens, I guess.
Someone said alien, she thought they said illegal alien and signed up.
Agggggghhhhh ...
Tbf u do need an open mind to beginn make sense of it in the first place. Cant have u be convinced after hearing one random thing after the other, gotta make a pattern illustrating the connections between all of it
@@centura86 yet they come up with these theories that have billion to 1 odds then say yup...that seems legit. Meanwhile they still can't agree on things in our own backyard that can be studied everyday. Examples: they are arguing about whether or not venus has phosphine, and they say it can only be produced by life. watch them come up with another trillion to 1 odds theory for it. Also for years they said mars lost its water due to the thin atmosphere, now they say mars has a vast subsurface ocean.
@@sillysafe pppppt!😆😆😆
How crazy would it be if we couldn’t find anything because we were actually one of the first technological species in the universe. Someone has to be first when you think about it.
And considering it already took earth about 1/4 of the universe’s current age to go from bacteria to multicellular life, it’s easy to imagine life just hasn’t had time or materials to develop in a lot of cases
@@alexsiemers7898 If this is true we have an incredible opportunity to become the first galactic civilization. Imagine being a pioneer of the universe!
@@smellthel The first species to create Pringles - beat that, universe!
This stuff fascinates me. I love his delivery and no fluff BS while simplifying the sciency stuff for the masses. But my favorite video of his has nothing to do with science, astronomy, or cosmology; it was an April fool’s day upload (a couple years ago) which was a fun parody of mukbang featuring noodles, the history of noodles, etc., and it was actually very informative.
OR,
They specifically target and ignite hydrogen clouds, so they act like galactic beackons...
When I was a kid, my parents used to go right to a slaughterhouse and buy a half cow twice a year. My mother had trouble chewing so when we got ready to stuff our upright freezer with beef, she would take the most tender cuts and write "MOM" on the butcher paper wrapper with a magic marker so that we knew that it was reserved for her. My brother came home from college on a break once. He got into the freezer for something to eat and he pulled out one of these marked packages and asked what's this package marked "WOW"? Our mother told him that it's upside down and marked "MOM".
I thought you were gonna say your brother asked who butchered mom up into pieced and put her in the freezer
@@cretinousswine8234 ...I thought you were gonna say your brother asked who butchered mom up into pieced and put her in the freezer...
That came later after she pissed me off.
Not really. She passed from lung cancer in 1996.
I thought you were gonna say he saw "wow" written on it and thought it was some amazing cut of meat then purposely are all the "wow" pieces
Mom is WOW!
@@pxolqopt3597 He did think "WOW". That's why he was confused.
4:15 no modulation? How do we know that? Cool Worlds said we don't know if there was modulation because the telescope wasn't looking for it. The only record we have of it is those letters, right?
Jerry Ehrman would be the one to ask but afaik there was no test for modulation, so the claim that none existed is false. What is with the recent trend of all science channels getting so excited to declare "ITS NOT ALIENS!!!"?
"Its just gas, nothing to see here." Sounds oddly familiar....
It's a freaking magnetar. Probably created by Aliens for some nefarious reasons, that's why they hid it behind the cloud.
Stop talking politics.... 😂😂😂
@@jamesogden7756 Keep scrolling bozo.
I wonder how many children/young adults will become astronomers just because of Anton
There is more evidence that we are alone in this part of the galaxy at the very least. Probably unique to the milky way. So many new sloutions to the fermi paradox are pointing to us being very very very rare
Source?
@@Dadbro_ You don't really need a citation for a general comment like that.
If you go back and review this particular channel, you'll see many attempts to explain the Fermi Paradox.
@@M167A1I was just curious what information predicted your general comment. I didn’t need a page number and paragraph.
Absence of evidences are not evidences of absence.
Not saying that we are not alone in our small corner of the galaxy. But solving some mysterious signal as natural occurence is not more evidence of us being alone.
@@Dadbro_ if you accumulate the solutions proposed for the Fermi Paradox in support for and against Alien life, there are more reasonable theories for the against. I don't want it to be true. I would absolutely love to find other intelligent life. But just the vast distances, the slow speed of light, and the more we discover how many things to go exactly right for intelligent life with technology to exist just don't seem promising. Every time there is a scientific solution that says "It's not aliens" really bums me out :(
It’s scary to think that we are alone in an infinitely huge universe
One day, if aliens show up instead of acting scared our first reaction would be "F#@$&^g finally! Do you know how many false positives we've had so far?"
That is, if we find a moment to lift our heads from our phones ...
ok boomer
It's like that service worker who was asked how he was doing and answered that he was actually not doing that good, and then the manager cut him off and said everything was fine. Some alien broke the universal gag order towards Earth and got cut off and fired.
That's right, Anton. It's not aliens 😎
...until it is.
@@conradmirafuentes and always were.
WOW! very nice explanation and summary. thanks !
Physics and astronomy are neat partly the mundane explanations are just as fascinating as the non-mundane ones.
Thank you, wonderful sir.
When someone has proof of extraterrestrials, the government instantly cuts off all their communi
So, this would be a reason advanced aliens would NOT use hydrogen emission lines for their contact signals.
We're finding that communicating with distant star systems is EXCEEDINGLY difficult with all known techniques. Signals fade, become randomized, or are too similar to natural phenomena.
As others have already suggests, advanced aliens, if they do exist, use communication methods we currently do not possess the means to detect.
Maybe quantum entanglement? There's definitely been a theorized way to transmit FTL information near instantaneously, so hopefully within our lifetimes we could also consider looking for these types of signals too.
@@KatSpicertI suppose the only problem with that is QE isn't a communication method.
@@BishopStars Oh lol, I was aware I wasn't very sure of that anyway lol, so that definitely answers my question. We still need some kind of method that doesn't violate the known laws of physics by bending spacetime to transmit information, and I'm sure at a very tiny scale we could using "less than" obscene amounts of energy.
@@KatSpicert you just use lasers
@@KatSpicertQuantum entanglement cannot be used for ftl communication.
I think we need to get used to the fact that either we are alone, or that ET is so far away from us, that we will never be able to confirm their existence. Much less communicate.
It actually makes a lot of sense. Because I doubt any civilization would use the hydrogen line, where there's so much noise... And, above all, who would announce their position without knowing what is out there?
I agree with your first statement. As for who would announce their position? We already have done that with the Arecibo message, among others, so it's definitely not a safe assumption that no one would do it. Civilizations are composed of a whole bunch of private actors doing things for their own reasons. What the sum total of "one civilization" would choose to do is not necessarily correlated with what a random group of scientists and engineers do with taxpayer-funded grants.
@jeffbenton6183 Good point. But most of our radio transmissions become indistinguishable with the background noise after around 2 lightyears. The only ones that could scape are the Arecibo signal and some communications with deep space probes. Like the Voyagers, probes around Jupiter and Saturn and so on.
@@jeffbenton6183I'm not sure that it's safe to assume that other civilizations on other planets are as selfishly motivated and independently acting as our own. I wouldn't be surprised if global cooperation is a necessity for a more civilized civilization's continued existence.
@@user-Aaron-There’s no reason to assume anything with a sample size of one. For all you know, Earth could be the most peaceful of all civilizations to ever exist, the others being savage and brutal organizations that make little sense to us.
@@user-Aaron-That‘s not a good assumption to make.
GREETINGS WOW-DER-FULL PERSON! 👽🛸👽🛸
@whatdamath I believe the mother ship called Oumuamua was the "Wow Signal" source too! What do you think?
Anton! I was hoping, this would have been one of your vids, that was on the comedy route. Where you'd wear a tinfoil hat. You know, those UFO & Space Alien Exteremist, are chomping at the bit, ready to tell you, you are wrong. I have suggested THREE of those Content creators that they'd interview you, since, they keep asking scientific questions, but then answer it with the whole "I'm not saying it was aliens but it was aliens." ~ Giorgio A. Tsoukalos narrative. Thank you Anton for keeping us informed.
Imagine one of those alien signals trickling in from a pulsing neutron star and it spells out -a-n-t-o-n-t-h-i-s-i-s-n-o-t-e-l-l-i-j-u-n-s-
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I know many other say the same, but seriously Anton your channel’s consistency and quality is among the best on the platform. Beyond that, it’s you. You are, and trust that other people can be, wonderful, and it just gets across. Thanks!
A video a alien would make
Remember in Stargate SG-1? That was so cool...
00:33 -- Tiny correction: you said Megahertz in place of Gigahertz. The correct value was displayed. ps. the quality of your content is amazing, I am in awe. Truly.
Captain Janeway: Sensors indicate coffee in that nebula, Mister Tuvok.
Tuvok: If I was human, I would exclaim, "WOW!" Again, if I was human.
Thanks Anton. Thank-you too for explaining the letters and numbers associated with the 'Wow' signal.
Thank you Anton! Another example of our observational skills exceeding our theoretical skills. I've always thought it was some kind of a technical glitch from the ancient electronics of the day.
You know, I've been following your channel for years under my main profile, and I just can't square how wonderful, personable, and brilliant you are in your scientific videos, and how appallingly unscientific, and brainwashed you appeared in your political posts. I would give anything to have your brain, or your understanding of the universe, but emotion can cloud even the most brilliant of minds.
The aliens want us to believe it wasnt them. This is a cosmic conspiracy!
Anton, shame on you, we didn't rule out aliens, just have an alternative explanation. Remember a few years ago when it was comets... Same was said.
We haven’t ruled out that it was a beam sent directly from god as a sign of his existence either but it’s redundant to say it. We have a better explanation that fits that data
Thank you. I was always curious about the "Wow!" signal
Decades ago: There aren't enough satellites to create spurious reflections.
Elon Musk: Hold my ketamine.
12 000 starlinks
And 12 000 MORE starlinks!!!
I don’t know what you just talked about but I enjoyed it and I listened to the whole thing. thank you.
I really hate that 3 Body Problem used the wow signal as the basis for it's entire premise. We already had a pretty good idea that this wasn't an alien message, so the show was kind of immediately outdated, especially now. They could have just made something up so that a new explanation for previous events don't kill the vibe. Still love the show, just feels weird.
I was confused until you said show. If I recall correctly, the book didn't say it was the Wow signal that was aliens, but a modulated signal using this frequency
David Kipping will be heartbroken
13:02 ok who put "weed" up there? thats hilarious
Friendly heads up. You have a typo in the title. Wow signal was 1977 which was 47 years ago not 37.
I spotted that, too. It happened the day I was born.
@@davidwood9966 So cool
@@DrogoBaggins987 I am the Wow Signal!!! Although really I’m not.
11:40 plot twist: it's aliens who are generating energy near hydrogen clouds to send messages through space :D
Could it be a black hole acting as a lens, magnifying a normal hydrogen cloud further?
37 years? But the WOW signal was *47* years ago...
So who caused the time anomaly? 😅
@@uNiels_Heart Whoever wrote the title and was unable to do simple math I would say. I just hope to God that wasn't Anton himself.
Wow. That's so cool. I had't heard much about Astrophysical Masers since university! Good to see them being put to good use.
Someone wrote a paper, doesn't mean it's solved (for the 2nd time in 5 years).
focus on the "what"... If you have 50 or so identical signals, the first os "Wow" only because it is the first one, not becuse it is a special one. Then try to understand statistics. Statstical significance against what? the background. But the background is the big assumption, meaning "you/we don't know anyhing about it".
And guess what: not the background changed, and the statistical signicance just disappeared completely.
That was a "Wow!" video, hehe! Thank you, Anton!
If an Alien sent out a signal 1000 years ago and the signal originates from 2000 light years away. We won't detect that signal for another 1000 years. If an alien sent out a signal 1000 years ago, and it originated from a location 1 light year away (and it was not continuous), we would not have had the technology in the year 1024 to have detected it. In either case, we would still see nothing.
recommended channel : cool worlds. He discussed those issues many years ago
Damn it... I hoped it was my green Prince Charmes answering me...
😢 Devastating to my heart, because I really wondered and hoped for it to be extraterrestrial in origin. But that's life.
Same here, i'm devastated.
It is extraterrestrial, (as in from outside Earth) just not from an intelligence.
"first, just a little bit of a background, so that we know we all are in the same page" I'm gonna use this in the literature review of my next paper. 😂
Excellent work by the researchers, but I on occasion have issues with how Anton presents conclusions. I'd say that the WOW signal is "likely" solved. He always goes a little overboard on the declaratives, certainly in the thumbnails, and that's not what science is about. He undermines his credibility when he does that.
don't know where you see it. This channel is not a course about how to read and retell science papers. Any communication about science is more or less expressing an opinion, for quite obvious reasons. And he clearly says: "I guess that". On the other side, you are chasing a pseudo objectivity that does not exist in tthe first place
@@monnoo8221 oh you dont see it? its when he says its solved right in the title hahaha. its not solved. we just have a somewhat likely explanation.
@@SugaSharp where did i claim that it is solved, or he said that it would be solved ???
@@monnoo8221 Anton…..in his title….says it’s solved….
@@SugaSharp as a mystery it is solved, because it is not a mystery any more, it changed its location into science. but in science nthing is ever "solved". you can solve in math and logics and in the mafia, but not in science.
...and kind of...its like you do not read precisely..
and a title is a title is a title.... in the text it sounds more nuanced, of course... But if you wanna stick to titles. go... they are more easy to read
The problem here is assuming how aliens would think. Why would we assume anything about how they would think of the hydrogen line? This is anthropomorphic thinking that skews how we interpret things we don't understand. We have no idea whatsoever whether aliens would be conscious in the same way we are, let alone intelligent in a way we can define. I somehow really really doubt aliens would try to contact us with radio.
It’s probably in the same vain as the hydrogen symbol on the Voyager spacecraft; regardless of species, the laws of physics act the same everywhere in the universe, and thus using some property of matter that’s consistent (such as some of the properties of hydrogen, the most common and basic element in the universe) to convey time or mass is a good unifying tool
@alexsiemers7898 So I understand that makes sense to you and to me, but that's because we're human. My point is more that we humans shouldn't assume anything about how an alien wiuld conceive of science or the universe. We have no clue what consciousness is, much less how it arises from the brain (can you have consciousness without a brain? Not to our knowledge) So we have no clue on how intelligence could vary in an alien or what they would understand about the abundance of hydrogen as a tool for communication etc. I think it overtly anthropomorphic to make any assumptions on that
@@ThePresident001The thing is, communication relies on assumptions. You have to make some kind of assumption in order to have a baseline axiom that you can proceed to use to send any meaningful information.
So, if we're going to try and speak, or to try and listen, we have to make some kind of assumption. We can either try and assume that they'd use something that will work anywhere in the universe, and hope they'd come to the same assumption in trying to communicate with us, or we can assume something that isn't fundamental to the universe and gamble on it coincidentally also being what they use, essentially arbitrarily.
There's not a particularly fantastic chance of the first assumption being correct, necessarily, but there is pretty much no chance of the second working out.
@ryanhodin5014 Yeah to a certain extent you have to work with what you have. I just don't feel confident we are thinking about this in the right way.
@@ThePresident001 I mean, I think the odds do lie on the side that we've chosen poorly in what kind of signal to focus on searching for. We are of course searching for quite a few different things, but I would definitely not say you're wrong to think as you do.
I do think we're doing the best we can with the information and capabilities we have, though.
It's just a theory. We don't know for sure.
You never know for sure. It is just that the avalanche of evidence becomes overwhelming. All scientific theories are provisional, and that is a good thing.
It's a hypothesis, not a theory.
At the risk of my inner Dunning-Kruger shining through, I don't think there is any advanced culture out there in our brief window of being able to detect them. There may have been, there may yet be, or we will snuff ourselves out before we know. From all that I've read and watched on the topic, we are the outcome of a whole series of low-probability events, and as you know, once you begin multiplying probabilities together, the product gets very tiny very quickly.
Hears a signal that could potentially be artificial. "we can't locate the source and it doesn't repeat. Cannot be aliens."
Explanation decades later: "here's what happened, its natural, we cannot find the source though, and it doesn't repeat. But we're right.
Everyone: "Seems legit."
Likeliest truth: we don't know and probably never will.
I've little great comment of this situation, but in reply to what you've said; if you've worked in scientific academia you will find this is an extremely common way of doing things. When of course you are not working to get more funding. Clever ones will roll this sort of thinking (let's call it, making new science with no new facts) into their funding scheme, and it works.
The most puzzling thing is the fact that at the location of the "WOW" signal, there seems to be nothing. Not a magic magnetar, but also not a solar type star, to my knowledge. There are a lot of weasel words in the presented explanations by Mendez et al. "may have been caused"...."could have been" and so on. So the proclamations that it is solved, and that "its not aliens" are completely false and are NOT science. Nothing has been proven, or disproven. The paper itself has been described as vague by another astrophysicist, and he is completely correct.
I'm sure the paper generated interest ---> funding, and the TH-cam headlines thus produced are great for monetization. This is the state of modern science, to use the term loosely. Cheers.
Yep, no aliens out he- there. You're- I mean we're all alone.
WOW, is right. I have to say it feels like someone popped my universe....
Thanks for this very interesting report!
I dunno why the default explanation was ever aliens anyway, even initially, there were natural explanations being offered and aliens likely would be communicating in ways that humans would not even recognize.
........i thought Jodie Foster heard the signal.....👽
Us expecting signals over electromagnetic spectrum is like savages on an island expecting us to send them smoke signals to announce ourselves
"savages"
As opposed to signals over what?
Funny enough, the hacked ad Anton posted lead me back to his channel
conjecture is fine.. as long as its not E.T lol
anton - there was more than one wow signal. that's just the one the public got to see...
I have an issue with you posting the title as a matter of fact, when in the video itself you say it's only a "potential" solution at 6:36. I am making no assertion that the "wow signal" isn't what has been proposed, I only have an issue with saying "Wow! Signal Mystery *_Solved_* After 37 Years" when it hasn't. Sure, you reference in the video that it is a proposal, but the title alone will cause plenty of nit and midwits to get an inaccurate understanding of the topic, and I guarantee, just because of this title, someone out there will be like 🤓 "WeLL AcHtuAllY" and either argue this as fact, or reference this video as a source and think they're right because the title says it. The internet is already full of people who think they're right about everything because they only read headlines.. why add to that? And for the 🤓 "WeLL AcHTuaLLy" people who are offended and probably already typing a response before getting to this point.. stop it. I don't care.
You doing too much
@@Kingzzxepic Great self report.. really top notch.
@@IdiocracyIsAProphecy ok 🤓
7:13 WOW! Signal!