Why Didn't We Hear the Full Wow Signal?

[@vomm]

You didn't mention one important thing about radio signals, which is that they get weaker the farther they travel. Our TV and radio signals are already indistinguishable from the background radiation after a few light years. Targeted radio signals travel farther, but can only be directed to single points/stars, and they too become weaker and thus require extreme amounts of energy to travel far.

[@randybaumery5090]

This is very true and I have discussed the wow signal for many years with people. I studied Electronics in school and I played with radios as a hobby and through the years I've come to the conclusion that if the wow signal was not some weird explosion of the star then it could be a very depressing sign. It was not a signal from an advanced civilization something went very wrong and that was one of the last things they experienced as in some sort of a great explosion. That has in fact become my default Theory having watched so many man-made disasters just in our little primitive civilization.

[@monnoo8221]

yep, and if you ask someone of the physicists HOW strong the sender needs to be for a directed beam in order to cross 20'000 LY.... usually they turn alien, meaning they stop sending. I asked many people, no-one of those folks dared to calculate and to respond

[@dannymcnamara2554]

@@randybaumery5090 Good possibility Randy.Thanks for sharing!!👍🏼🇨🇦😀

[@randybaumery5090]

At times I'll look in the direction of Sagittarius and wonder.

[@MrJay_White]

@@randybaumery5090 my guess, presuming it to be an actual tech signature, is that it'd be an alcubierre drive borne vessel using a gas giant to degauss/deionise their ship.

[@OddSee.]

Have you heard of the Dark Forest theory? It could be theorized that if there are other intelligent civilizations in our cosmic neighborhood (Calculations suggest up to 20 plausible civilizations nearby), then potentially they are remaining quiet, as if they know something we don’t. That sending signals out could be lighting a torch in a dark forest, revealing ourselves to undesirable outcomes. Truly chilling to think about.

[@MGavin]

Was about to comment about this - I've had a similar theory for a while, but instead of "they are keeping quiet" my idea is that "they have already been overrun" by whatever is out there. If we aren't at the very very beginning of intelligent life, and if a species has even a thousand years on us in evolution and technology development; it'll be more or less Columbus and the Indians, on a planetary scale. Very minor advantages have often turned the entire course of wars and become the catalysts for mass cultural expansion/subjugation. I worry less that we are alone, and more that whatever is out there is so foreign, armed with both advanced technology and an understanding of the universe that may as well just be unintelligible nonsense to our monkey brains, will not even bother to make first contact in a position of equal footing, and instead strip us for resources to fuel whatever needs beyond our understanding that they have.

[@nirbhay_raghav]

The dark forest theory is absolutely fluke. If these so called civilizations are on radio silence because they are scared of something even more "powerful" then explain to me how come these powers have not found us earthlings who are carelessly sending radio waves all around to Aliens. On top of that if those ~20 civilizations are spread throughout the galaxy and still silent then the so called powers that they are afraid of should also be spread throughout the galaxy. In that case they should have already found and annhilated us and not wait for us to evolve further and take all the resources that Earth had to offer.

[@oilersridersbluejays]

I agree. I think sending signals out to space could spell trouble. If a more advanced race has a way of reaching us, and has bad intentions, that would be the end of us.

[@zionismisterrorism8716]

​@@MGavin There are more resources in space already than on Earth. Earth doesn't have any rare resources. Even 1 asteroid in the Asteroid Belt can have more gold and precious metals than the whole Earth.

[@nguyenhoang6702]

So we are distancing from each other, scared of some potential threats to our only homes.

[@soundsoffiction2456]

Sad Theory: The wow signal was the last ditch attempt by an alien civilisation sending a distress signal to communicate with whoever recieved the signal to try and save them from extinction

[@warpdriveby]

If they were clever enough to build such a transmitter, they were more than smart enough to know the message wouldn't be heard in time, like not even close! It would require at least a whole planet's worth of matter and energy too, resources they'd not have to spend if facing an imminent cataclysm. Maybe if we were 5 or even 10 LY away from the origin, and even then that's light! To send anything but a "yeah, bummer" back would take tens of thousands of years with our best tech now and many thousands with the most advanced tech we can imagine! This signal came from way farther than that, or we would have noted a star system precisely on the path it took.

[@kathykline7202]

So they just say F--k It right. Thats what it says. YOu take the 5 and 6 , turn them into 5th and 6th letter of english alphabet, and put the whole thing in google translator and you translate Czech to English. It says F ---K It. It does, try it., they wrote with several languages.

[@warpdriveby]

@@kathykline7202 You realize we could find all sorts of correspondences to other codes/value holding systems, right? Say they were 250 light years away, which is very close on the 100,000 light year scale of our galaxy. Their message would have been sent before electric light, radio, or lasers, no other form of information could be sent at light speed so there isn't any physical way for them to have learned languages to encode values for here on earth. If you're about to say they can travel faster than light, then they would have brought the message not beamed it!

[@fivemjs]

What could we have done anyway. Even if we got an SOS, it’s not like we could do anything about it

[@LeoH3L1]

@@kathykline7202 ... and how exactly would they know any of our languages?

[@Baleur]

11:30 we did detect another "Wow-signal", from Tabby's star. Shortly after we detected the unusual light dimming, they also detected a radio signal very similar to the wow-signal coming from that same star. Yet the gyroscope in the observing telescope had an untimely malfunction the same weeks, so they lost track of it, and then it seems the entire world and every news channel just "forgot" about this. I vividly remember watching the national news here in Sweden talking about it, and precisely mentioning how astronomically unlikely it is to see TWO anomalies, previously unseen, from one singular source (the light dimming, and then the patterned radio signal). But then, they all forgot about it, and nobody talks about it anymore. Nobody seems to remember the radio signal, only the light dimming. Shrugs.

[@magichands135]

tudududu dudududu dudududu, next werk on the x-files...

[@stillhammered3060]

Lol

[@Reubachi]

The supposed radio waves and visible light waves would face reached at entirely different times though

[@DistinctiveBlend]

@@Reubachi nope, radio waves travel at light speed as they're electromagnetic radiation too.

[@shirrin08an]

Hmm intressant

[@gautamkabra8665]

During nearly 200,000 years of existence, humans only had capacity to communicate through radio waves for only 130 yrs. So for only 130 out of 200,000 yrs, we could communicate to Alien. After all this progress, now if nuclear war happens today, whole human race will come back to original starting point within a moment. So although we were here for 200,000 yrs, we were only visible for mere 100-200 yrs. Probably same could have happened to Alien race also.

[@xBINARYGODx]

and were not even really visible via the radio we have sent out once you get even a little far away.

[@patreekotime4578]

Out of that time we have only been listening to space for 90 years. And its impossible for us to listen in all directions and all bands all the time.

[@bugstomper4670]

Then with the advent of the internet, there are even less radio signals to detect.

[@nerd9347.]

Valid argument.

[@lombardo141]

You make a great point but I think we should stop assuming that alien civilizations have similar existence to us. We just don’t know until we find them.

[@Ashalmawia]

apparently, the signal lasting for 72 seconds and rising and then falling is precisely what you would expect if Big Ear hit a continuous signal. the 72 second rise and fall is Big Ear passing over the source.

[@stargazer7644]

Actually, it's half of what you'd expect. It had two receiving antennas slightly offset. They should have heard the signal twice with that pattern, once from each horn, slightly offset in time.

[@dafoex]

@Star Gazer I could just be fabricating this, but wasn't it also a thing with Big Ear that you couldn't tell which antenna a signal was coming from? If the signal was going as the telescope sweeped across it, then turned off in the middle, it would look the same as the signal starting in the middle then being swept past, hence there being two places in space the wow signal could have come from.

[@stargazer7644]

@@dafoex That's correct. That's why they don't know for sure which part of the sky the signal may have come from. They have two different target locations.

[@EinsteinsHair]

@@dafoex The star map at 10:45 shows the two locations the WOW signal could have come from, in red, depending on which horn received it. The diagram has to expand a small region of the sky so you can even see the tiny locations next to each other. We don't know if the signal began or ended between the two detection opportunities.

[@MrTonaluv]

​@@stargazer76443 minutes apart. The signal obviously didn't last 3 minutes. But lasted at least 72 seconds...

[@markoyamashitach]

4:22 I'm old enough to remember my science teachers in school saying this type of thinking was impossible and "I watched too much Star Trek." And, now here we are in 2022 with communication devices as small as comm badges, medical diagnosis devices as small as tricorders, and Quantum mechanics moving into the forefront of thinking since we've slowly but surely begun to probe into "the unseen" parts of space. It's amazing that even as far back as the 60s, they were already thinking about these things when dreaming up a sci fi TV show and through the advent of TNG, Voyager and DS9, they were able to expose an entire generation to the possibilities which we're discovering one by one.

[@randybaumery5090]

True but what we need now is a way to go faster than light

[@robertnewhart3547]

Your "teacher" made 30k/yr though also.

[@averylawton5802]

There is no science fiction only science eventuality Gene Roddenberry.

[@ninz_0]

@@averylawton5802 where theres an idea, theres an invention. and where theres a will theres a way. we wanted to communicate across enormous distances, and we have. we want to explore the stars, so we will.

[@tedkaczynskiamericanhero3916]

@@robertnewhart3547 My grandmother retired as a third grade teacher within the last decade and retired at a salary of almost $82,000 a year. Your assumption of teachers salaries are significantly off course of reality, unless you're talking about teachers in the 70s and earlier?

The problem is in the signal we're focusing on: narrow band cw. Our own communications moved from cw to voice to wide band digital in a few decades. Now, listening to human communications on a radio telescope would yield nothing short of pure noise. An advanced civilization would put massive amounts of information inside a millisecond worth of transmission spread across hundreds of gigahertz. Only if actively trying to reach out they would do something like a digital handshake where it starts as a cw carrier, ot is slowly modulated to teach the other end which is 1 and which is 0, move on to simple examples, like a binary representation of hydrogen then maybe the entire periodic table, some constants like C and so on, gradually moving towards something like 56k modem link, then pump the interesting stuff at high speed and efficiency like how to build a radio that can bend spacetime or entangle photons.

[@davidt8087]

It's so human centric to think aliens would use radio for vocal communication like we do. Advanced aliens who have interstellar travel or even if not wouldn't use radio it's too slow. Plus earth has broadcast it's em radiation since it was formed. Why is the radio spectrum more special than the ir of visible light earth emits anyway. Its astonishing that "intelligent" minds are so fixated on radio communication especially this fixation on the hydrogen line as if aliens thinks just like us. How idiotic of humans to be this human centric

@@davidt8087 and I was saying...?

[@vomm]

Why would aliens communicate across stars at all? The time one would wait for an answer is so gigantic that this simply makes no sense. A species that spreads in the galaxy would communicate only locally, each colony would be quasi completely self-sufficient. If we receive signals from aliens, then in the form of radio signals or infrared waves that are emitted by drives, power plants, etc.. And these would not make it far because they become weaker at a distance and blur with the background radiation.

[@friendlyone2706]

@@vomm Because they are out exploring the universe for the fun of it -- and for self preservation. The interstellar neighborhood affects each star. The intergalactic neighborhood affects each galaxy. Knowledge is survival. Interstellar civilization requires interstellar communication.

[@vomm]

@@friendlyone2706 Why does an interstellar civilization need communication? And how is communication supposed to work if every answer has to wait, say, 10,000 years?

[@undyingjin5968]

I imagine if there is intelligent life relatively near by, the problem would be not that they’ve chosen not to communicate with us, but rather they simply don’t know we’re here, despite trying, just like how we don’t know they exist. Being how difficult it truly is to combat the laws of the universe and break away from even one’s own planet, I think if there is intelligent life, they likely are in a similar situation; trying to figure out how to break away.

[@ronny2shoes]

If that life form has looked at Earth through a telescope, they would know something is here. I am just guessing & say either they’ve been here to check us out or they have decided that we are harmless to the rest of the galaxy and should be left alone. Earth is a beautiful planet & any intelligent life form could see it has oceans, therefore they would come inspect for life.

[@NealGutierrez]

It might be that we don't recognize each other as life forms due to being so different.

[@ItSpooling_]

If we posit a creator, the universe exists as it does not simply to humble but abuse, denigrate, and humiliate the minds it was so expertly commissioned to birth. This is malevolence on an unfathomable scale, expressed through immeasurable waste stretched out between distances and times that cannot be understood. It is cruel but not hateful. Depraved but not vengeful. This can be considered pain, carefully presented in careful proportions to blister and disgrace anyone or anything that might momentarily dare to ever privately contemplate it is in control

[@VisibletoanyoneonYoutubes]

I think we will discover each other at the same exact time. Maybe our particles here are quantum-connected (don’t know the actual term) to them- and we have a huge awakening. This is just a wild hypothesis from a little human though, so don’t take it too seriously. Wouldn’t that be neat though, if you found each other at the same time, it’d be so interesting because maybe we’d start to realize that we are one with them. Since we are one with the universe ❤it will be beautiful I hope

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

It's like being in a dark cave listening for footsteps, but everyone else is also standing still and listening.

[@dante7228]

The most plausibile reason we don't hear anything is because we aren't able to listen correctly. Looking at our own technical evolution it's also plausible to think that there might be a lot more possible ways for effective interstellar communication than radio signals, like quantum field modulation or whatever we don't even have the slightest clue about yet...

[@itsd0nk]

We need those handy subspace channels!

[@chipngo9758]

Finally the sane comment.

[@la7era1u54]

This is my thoughts exactly and doesn't get brought up enough in discussions like this

[@MikeB12800]

I think because the light spectrum is relatively easy to gain knowledge of and use. Like when you call your dog your not gonna use cellular data to a phone on its collar, your just gonna whistle.

[@todmillard5812]

Spot on. We are infants in technology.

[@carpemkarzi]

Yep. I firmly believe that there are many other civilizations out there but the old issue of time and distance will always keep us apart. It’s a lonely universe.

[@rozzgrey801]

"I never see her face, between us there's too much space." Poor Boy, Split Enz

[@crunchbite005]

Don't you mean Fermli?

[@magichands135]

@Han Boetes If another planet with life on it, is a thousand lightyears away, a thousand years would still pass if you went there, no matter how much faster than light you go and however short the travel will be for you. The life you were looking for might already be gone by the time you'd arrive. It should be impossible to find intelligent life on a planet more than a hundred thousand lightyears away.

[@IsHeHigh]

Man there are some bad takes in this thread lol... other civilizations? Faster than light? Lol...You people are reallllllllly reaching.

[@blinded6502]

@Han Boetes ftl is impossible

[@antiprohibit]

I'm reminded of two quotes that I heard whenever people talk about the Fermi paradox: "The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." And... "One of two possibilities exists: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." Sweet video, Alex. I enjoyed it.

[@aranthos]

Would love a video on the various unexplained signals captured over the last few years.

[@Youtube_Stole_My_Handle_Too]

No need. If the signal is not explained it is too complex to be from an intelligent origin and must be natural. There's no need to send out a probe or a signal and wait for an answer. If there's life out there it is more likely to be much older than earth because the universe has existed much longer than it took to make life on earth. Because signals attenuate very fast the message will need the power of a star to reach us. A simple way of doing it is by making a sail that blocks light from a star and turns it on and off like morse code with a message containing the Fibonacci sequence or something even more clever. We have looked at all the stars in our galaxy and there is no such message from any star. Thus, there's no intelligent life in our galaxy except for Earth. Stop wasting time looking. Rather look in the asteroid belt for a body like an egg, 5 km long and 3 km wide, and spin at a rate of one revolution about its own axis and contain mostly metals and can be turned into a starship housing ten thousand people by hollowing it out. That would be good for something. Trips to Mars are even dumber than looking for aliens. Mars can never be the second body humans occupy. It has either too little mass to give enough gravity or too much mass to produce artificial gravity.

[@Man_fay_the_Bru]

What unexplained signals?

[@Fishgod1216]

@@Man_fay_the_Bru The many that have happened in the past

[@JavSusLar]

13:29 "there are numerous signals..." WHAT??? quite general for such an extraordinary claim... No signal is even a bit as extraordinary as the wow signal.

[@JusNoBS420]

Think that idea is best left to “other” KZbin channels

[@NeroNyte]

Purely fantasy, but imagine if we really did get a signal that was just a voice talking in an unknown language or something. Just imagining how mind blowing it'd be

[@FeedMeSalt]

Far too many people would claim demons magic or god. Untill we purge this garbage we are not ready.

[@cold_Lightning9]

@@FeedMeSalt Agree. I'd go as far as say that it's certainly possible that actual contact has happened in secret, but due to the hysteria it'd cause amass, it's been kept a secret. Conspiracy theory, I know, but like you said, all of humanity isn't ready for a revelation like that.

[@NaimHrustanovic]

@@FeedMeSaltYou really don't want to use the word "purge" when describing other people and their behaviors/biases.

[@joemariejames4757]

@@FeedMeSalt sadly purging these won't happen cuz its in us now especially those evangelicals but I wonder what woud happen if somehow the state and church became as one in the U.S

[@FeedMeSalt]

@@NaimHrustanovic Oh no I do. The world would be better in a single generation if they all found a ditch. I'm a firm believer that the majority religious people don't actually hold true values and just claim it as death insurance for comfort. So leaving faith behind isn't hard for them. And the minority who are pure evil are sheltered by them. Fact is if I wore an SS arm bad you would hate me for what it represents. I feel the same way about crosses and such. I grew up in a residential school. Google that if you don't already know. More evil has been done in the name of faith and such then any good has ever been done ten times over. You hold the icon of evil, you get laughed at when you die. End of. I hold absolutely no shame in saying I find religious people disgusting. All of you.

[@NexVoidGaming]

One of the best micro stories I ever read dealt with decoding the WOW signal. It simply read "STOP TRANSMITTING OR THEY WILL FIND YOU."

[@2tears943]

I’m interested in this where can I read it

[@DanteTimberwolf]

I like to imagine finding alien life would be like War of The Worlds. If other intelligent lifeforms are anything like us, they'd look down on us just how we looked down on less advanced cultures in the past. In War of the Worlds, the first reaction of the aliens is to kill. They were so advanced that to them, human life was the equivalent of insect life. In the 1953 film, the US military throws everything they have at the invaders; even using nuclear weapons. Only to find that our weaponry had absolutely no effect on them. If aliens were to come to earth with war on their minds, there would be absolutely nothing we could do. Any technology more advanced than ours would be seen as magic.

[@camillavonmila9600]

Nice one 👍🏻

[@Bingo_the_Pug]

Jesse Eisenberg is in a jail cell somewhere repeating *DINGDINGDINGDING* to himself with snot dripping from his nose

[@am_i_aaron]

3 body problem?

[@snoripper]

I would suggest reading 'The Three Body Problem'. The author has a simple and brilliant reason why we see no other civilization in our galixay. He calls it the Dark Forest hypothesis and it makes a lot of sense. The short of it is dont send signals into the void as we might give our location away and risk annihilation by a more advanced civilization.

[@MalcolmTown]

I believe this is the theoretical but more speculative answer alluded to at the end of the video. Like for Astrum Dark Forest Theory!

[@kimmuckenfuss2284]

True. Hawking eluded to the very same thing.

[@kimmuckenfuss2284]

I meant alluded...sorry about that.

[@Johninadelaide2022]

But if they were coming here anyway why would that matter?

[@PoppinPsinceAD33]

@@Johninadelaide2022 it would be harder to find us if we didn’t constantly send stuff out

[@davesidious2845]

The WOW signal was narrow band, and at the hydrogen line. They're the most interesting bits about it and not mentioned here.

[@davidt8087]

It's so human centric to think aliens would use radio for vocal communication like we do. Advanced aliens who have interstellar travel or even if not wouldn't use radio it's too slow. Plus earth has broadcast it's em radiation since it was formed. Why is the radio spectrum more special than the ir of visible light earth emits anyway. Its astonishing that "intelligent" minds are so fixated on radio communication especially this fixation on the hydrogen line as if aliens thinks just like us. How idiotic of humans to be this human centric

[@Js-rq9uj]

and there's a black hole in sagitarrius

[@altrag]

They're only interesting to viewers who know what those words mean. And viewers who know what those words mean probably already know those interesting bits. Including those bits would therefore have necessitated a nice long tangent into the esotera of astrophysical signal processing, elemental spectral lines, etc. All good topics for their own videos (and there are many out there) but would have probably been a bit too much of a deviation for this one.

[@nuggetospaghetto]

​@@altrag Good evening, this is nuggetospaghetto coming in with another destructive comment on Altrag, the pinnacle of modern society's eloquence, the absolute eminent authority in spoken as well as written language, the only person in the uni-, no the MULTIVERSE, that mastered the art of being far, far superior and the one and also only human being that favors using difficult words to sound "smart".

[@thesysop4998]

@@altrag 🤓 Or just a short 5 minute explanation you overly eloquent toilet seat

[@GarageSupra]

The game Elite Dangerous (which has the biggest map of all games) really gave me an idea of how big the Milky Way really is. The odds of us finding aliens are so low it's crazy

[@Windrake101]

And then to find out, we've since found out, since Elites release, that the galaxy is actually twice as big as we used to think.

[@prabkunvar10]

Just a correction bro. The game with the biggest map of all games is NO MAN'S SKY

[@derpcade]

@@prabkunvar10 Yesn't? No Mans Sky's universe isn't continuous, it's seperated galaxies acting as their own instances So technically ED and NMS are tied

[@prabkunvar10]

@@derpcade well if u take continuity in account then maybe yeah its a tie But if u take playable area and/or size in totality then NMS is bigger

[@lordirish3054]

No Man's Sky has entered the chat

[@Allan_aka_RocKITEman]

I have known about the *_"WOW"_* signal for many years, but did NOT know the antenna is limited in movement as described in this video. I always thought the signal just started and ended on its own.

[@BasicStealthcamping]

I like to think of the Aricebo message when thinking of the WOW signal: We only sent that message for 3 minutes. If it is ever recieved, it might be dismissed just like the WOW signal because it was never seen again. I dont think the WOW signal should be dismissed as artificial in origin purely because we never heard it again.

[@peterkelley6344]

That seems to be our weakness. Send a blast; and move on, send a blast; and move on, send a blast; and move on. We need to choose a point and really listen.

[@dannygelbart6827]

@@peterkelley6344 It's called resources and lack thereof.

[@SatanEnjoyer]

And now the Arecibo radio telescope is dead

[@dannygelbart6827]

@@SatanEnjoyer Been a few years now. China's Eye of Heaven is the largest now.

[@neutrino78x]

Yep. I feel like we're more likely to find accidental signals such as alien weather radar. A corollary to my position is that SETI is probably not sensitive enough yet to be able to make any statements. Doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying. 🙂

[@johneygd]

The clever design of big ear is just simply ingenious,making it cheap but effective by taking advantage of the moving earth,just brilliant🙏

[@EinsteinsHair]

The Big Ear was designed by John D Kraus, who wrote books on antennas

[@muhfknkwin1399]

When I heard Earth's (and our system's) location described as a rural area of the Milky Way, I always imagined humans as that one kid from Middle, Nowhere trying to reach the rest of the world through a dial-up connection.

[@stahppls2293]

They're all partying in the capitals 😢

[@Beryllahawk]

I'd be fascinated to hear a bit more about what kinds of signals we've "heard." I recall reading some speculative fiction discussing the possibility that gamma ray bursts are actually alien signals - or at the least, flashes from alien civilizations. (That particular author also said the Earth would make our solar system look like a binary, sending off so "loud" a radio signal, but I expect that's an exaggeration.)

[@patreekotime4578]

Not very loud at all. Maybe atomic detonations would be detectable, but those are just blips.

[@LudwigVaanArthans]

Also Cool Worlds is a channel to watch if you like Astrum

[@Aaron-zu3xn]

think about it how would you send a message @ light speed or faster(the gamma/xrays slightly outrun the light we've found this in nuclear bomb detonations). a species that advanced can influence a star and make it go supernova or even create their own neutron star

[@221b-l3t]

@@patreekotime4578 Atomic detonations would be detectable a very long way off. Especially with a bit more advanxed tech than we have. And they have a very distinct signature.

[@darkracer1252]

@@Aaron-zu3xn xray and gamma rays ARE light. and lightspeed is only constant in a vacuum. moving through air or thicker mediums slows it down. this would also mean that the higher energy xray and gamma ray light would go faster through those mediums. but in a vacuum there is no benifit what so ever. only if they wanna send out a sort of time capsule. sending a signal of all their knowledge so far away that they need to take the redshift into account

[@chaceedward]

Alternatively, the ‘Wow’ signal could have been an attempt by an advanced civilization in a distant galaxy to communicate through a wormhole. This hypothesis would account for the signal’s complexity and its extended (although relatively quick) yet distinct outburst. The fact that such a signal has not been detected again in the years since its discovery suggests that this civilization may lack the necessary energy resources to reproduce the event.

[@g4viscon]

I could listen to this calm voice all night long. He's very relaxing.

[@Greippi10]

Hmm. I often think the "radio bubble" is a little misleading when it comes to us detecting aliens or aliens detecting our signals. The antennas we've used are much more focused on broadcasting to Earth than the universe. Most signals very quickly fade into background noise. Our bubble is more like a sea urchin with spikes of high power directional broadcasts to deep space spacecraft.

[@bigguy7353]

They've been here for millenia, so.....

[@insidetheuniverse2777]

Yeah... That's true

[@stargazer7644]

While you're mostly correct, I'd just like to point out that antennas that broadcast to Earth (such as Radio and broadcast TV) are usually pointed at the horizon. Those signals eventually shoot straight out into space at a tangent to the Earth's surface. The signals that aliens would likely hear from Earth at any appreciable distance are military and commercial radar. It is very high powered, narrow beamwidth that is constantly swept across the sky in a repetitive pattern.

[@oldman2800]

Radio transmissions degrade exponentially according to the inverse square law. In short radio is fairly useless as a means of communicating over the mindboggling distances of space

[@JohnJ469]

The thing to remember is that even if our closest neighbour, Proxima Centauri had a technological civilisation (with radio and TV and all the rest) that lived for 10,000 years but was wiped out by a plague in our year 1890 we wouldn't know about it. Their final signals as their planet died arrived here 2 years before we discovered a way to hear them. And we live on a planet some 4.5 billion years old in a 13 billion year old universe. Who knows how many radio signals passed through the space and dust that would someday become our homeworld?

[@j.biscuit9828]

Excellent video. One major objection I have to the fermi paradox is the assumption that an advanced alien civilization would cast a large enough signature in the sky to be noticed, or that they would choose to leave their home and populate the galaxy. I think it's far more likely, that they'd stay home, and make it as good as they could. So yes, I think there may be alien civilizations out there, and yes I think we may communicate with them one day. I think they're just, likely, very hard to find, and we really haven't been looking for very long.

[@bigguy7353]

They've been here for millenia, so.....

[@Zreen001]

It depends on the propagation of their species. If it's balanced then they don't need to leave like you said. But if they continue to grow then in order to avoid collapse they have to spread out to maintain things, and that most likely requires getting more and more resources, leading to more spreading out for increased population and so on.

[@hunterwilk]

It's a dark forest..."shhh, they'll hear you..."

[@hazzard_destroyer]

I love to think that there are Alien civilizations out there and they are like ours with family’s and games and holidays of there own and not wanting to take over but just live there lives. And the they probably either don’t have the tech to reach out or they are just scared that if they do something bad might happen. Kinda like how some people fear aliens taking over earth

[@神林しマイケル]

Well if humans have the technology to travel outer space, we'd be the one colonizing other civilizations who are less technologically advance and probably breed with them. Or just wipe them out of the galaxy.

[@kuuro_7712]

There's probably plenty of civilizations of "people" a lot like us. And there are probably many out there that would be difficult to categorize as "people". One thing's for sure, natural selection probably still exists out there, and aggressive aliens might have garnered significant success over those who stay home

[@aurelia8028]

Yeah, no. We're 99.9% the first life in this galaxy. Otherwise we would've seen them

[@sequoyahrice6966]

@@aurelia8028Yeah, no. While its true that we might be the first its equally likely that making anything big enough to see from far away is just a stupid idea and nobody does it.

[@神林しマイケル]

@@aurelia8028 Except that the universe is impossibly vast, your arguement would hold up true if the universe is not vast.

[@jasonsmith6106]

Wonderful series. Keep them coming. Learning so much.

[@Gilbert_Dice_Gottfried]

The most horrifying thought is an endless universe with only one tiny planet of life. It would make the universe feel somewhat finite

[@jim2lane]

The old quote is "If there really isn't anyone else out there then universe is an amazing waste of space"

[@bigguy7353]

They've been here for millenia, so.....

[@RamsesTheFourth]

I would feel safer, knowing that there is no intergalactic conqueror searching for another planet to take.

[@monnoo8221]

This would be much less horrifying, if at all, than the opposite: an alien civilization with completely different values, setup, and so much more capable that the difference is like from us to flies...

[@SalmonBeach]

Maybe the Wow signal if it was a Extraterrestrial Alien signal maybe it was a distress call the the cosmos that their civilisation is in danger, a great plague? a rogue black hole?

[@justinwhitchurch9860]

Hey Astrum, your videos have given me an incredible interest in space. Keep up the content :)

[@Gilgaemesh]

"The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him." -Liu Cixin

[@Forbidden-Pre-Workout]

It’s only natural for superior beings and civilizations to impose themselves onto weaker ones.

[@Matt_328]

No matter if it was aliens or not, I still want to believe that there is something or someone out there. It makes life more fun, it would be really boring and sad if we were alone in the universe.

[@Destroymaster100]

we are not alone. theres definitely other intelligent life forms out there. and maybe not even so far away.

[@PainterVierax]

Let's be real, life certainly exists out there but evolution and civilizations like ours must be so rare and vastly distanced that it's unlikely we even get signals from each others. And don't forget we have to be hearing in the right window of technological time to be able to capt any signal. Those other civs have to have invented radio coms yet and still widely use that for large amplitude coms instead of more effective or efficient techs like those photonic coms and landline broadcasts we've started to switch to.

[@adamarmstrong5780]

It abso fucking lutely will not be fun when the world learns of extra terrestrial life. Especially if it is intelligent, sentient life. Collapse of civilization type of fun. Lol

[@pacefactor]

It always comes to the same problems for me - the assumptions that another sapient/intelligent lifeform out there might even use methods/perceptions similar to our own. There is the entire possibility that they stumbled into a universal secret entirely abstract from our own, something we haven't even theorized yet and that discovery shaped their whole society - much like how radios have shaped ours. In other words, they may not even know what a radio signal is. Hell, the kind of technological advancement that other species end up going down may be on an entirely alternate branch than our own, meaning we not only be yelling at each other in different languages, but in entirely opposite directions and trying to use that to find the other while not even sure the other exists - possibly mistaking attempts at communication as natural phenomena or vice versa - unable to distinguish anything from the noise of the universe. Couple that with the immense distances and things like square-cube law, and the incredible amount of energy it would take to just communicate clearly over those distances, not even considering the cost to travel there. We might both very well be doing the same thing - throw out fishing lines, hoping for a catch while spinning around rapidly on a ball screaming through space and thinking we are going to find something tangible that way. I often think what kind of advancements a sapient species might make if their whole ecosystem was fully blind. Would light even be a consideration to them? Or would they continue to find more and more effective ways of using sounds to interpret their environment? Could print or books exist there, in some kind of tactile communication system? How would a society like that function? Its when I think of stuff like this that really enlightens me to the possibility that we may be swimming in fellow lifeforms out in the cosmos - hell they might even look like us - but for that one variable that makes them different can make the entire possibility of ever meeting them nearly impossible.

[@altrag]

> might even use methods/perceptions similar to our own This is.. only kind of a problem. Its true they might not use radio frequencies specifically, but there's still good reasons to look for them there: First, it was what we knew how to do. That alone would fall squarely into your methods argument but its not alone. Second, radio is low frequency - that is, its to the red end of the spectrum. So it could potentially capture higher-frequency signals sent from further-away alien species that has been redshifted down into the radio range. Of course its certainly possible that some aliens were using frequencies below radio, or so far above radio that they wouldn't have gotten redshifted that far, but it allows for at least a wider possibility than picking a higher frequency to start with. Third, we only _started_ with radio. We have dozens and dozens of telescopes capturing wide swaths of the spectrum these days. While not all of those are dedicated to looking for aliens by any means, any one of them has the possibility of detecting unusual signals within their detection range, and the scientists using those telescopes certainly wouldn't just discount a new WOW signal simply because its not what they were "supposed" to be seeing. Now certainly we are making the assumption that they would be communicating using electromagnetic signals. But that's a fairly safe assumption as there are only two forces capable of transmitting over long distances, and gravity is a pretty unlikely choice given how difficult it is to detect and that its likely impossible to control. And no, a fifth fundamental force wouldn't solve the problem either. If such a thing exists, it is necessarily either weaker than gravity or shorter range (and weaker) than the strong force. Because if it wasn't one of those two things, we would have seen it already in some form. > the kind of technological advancement that other species end up going down may be on an entirely alternate branch than our own Almost certainly will be, but there are limitations imposed by the universe itself that no species and no amount of technology can really overcome - like only one of the fundamental forces really being usable as a communications mechanism. If they're sending signals, they pretty much have to be using the electromagnetic spectrum to do so. Doesn't have to be the same part of the spectrum we use in for example our cell phone network, but its pretty inconceivable to not be using the EM spectrum at all. It would pretty much require physics as we know it to be a completely local phenomena. Yet that's also pretty unlikely because we're able to look at the universe across vast distances (and vast amounts of time) and see pretty much exactly what we'd expect to see. Even things that are "unexpected" is usually only a few months of work for astrophysicists to find a solution to Einstein's equations that describes the phenomena. > Couple that with the immense distances This is certainly a problem in our search for ET, but its not so much an "assumption" as a "known limitation of the universe that we can't do anything about". > the incredible amount of energy it would take to just communicate clearly Not really. We don't need it to be clear. Its not like we'd understand anything they're saying anyway. All we need it to be is recognizably different from background noise and other natural phenomena. And that doesn't require all that much power, at least within our galaxy. The signals we produced in the early 20th century should be recognizable to whoever is living on the other side of the galaxy in a hundred million years or so (well not the _exact_ other side - the black hole and surrounding bulge in the center would easily block it, but as close to the other side as possible while maintaining line-of-sight around the bulge). Intergalactic civilizations are another story though to be fair. I'm not sure what our detection limit is there, but it will definitely be drastically lower than within the galaxy. > not even considering the cost to travel there One step at a time. I don't think anyone's expecting aliens to literally show up on our doorstep (well other than conspiracy theorists). If FTL travel is possible, then we're almost certainly the first technologically advanced species in our galaxy.. possibly in the universe. Because we'd be able to colonize the entire thing ourselves within a (relatively) very short period of time, and the fact that nobody beat us to the punch suggests that, at the very least, nobody's figured out FTL yet. > and thinking we are going to find something tangible that way. As opposed to what? Since we have no idea what to look for or where, our options are pretty limited. Sure its easy to say "we should have just pointed a telescope at the source of the WOW signal continuously for 40 years", but that may just have easily been 40 years of nothingburger while at the same time we may have missed another signal from a different location. That turned out to not be the case (so far), but we live in a world with limited resources and choices have to be made, and the times we have pointed a telescope back at the WOW location we've seen nothing. Even if there is something out there, pointing a telescope at it isn't helpful if they don't ever send another signal.

[@altrag]

> I often think what kind of advancements a sapient species might make if their whole ecosystem was fully blind Likely just wouldn't exist. Vision is far and away our most useful sense, and for good reason: Light bouncing around (and eventually into our eyes) produces the most detailed representation of the world around us. Echolocation can work of course, but by comparison its very imprecise. Certainly "something" could potentially exist without vision, but I have a hard time imagining it becoming advanced. Likewise, I would expect any advanced species to have some form of digits akin to our fingers, regardless of what kind of weird appendage those digits happens to be attached to. I just can't imagine any sort of industrial development without the ability to manipulate objects in a fairly precise an dexterous manner. > Would light even be a consideration to them? Assuming they somehow get over the hurdle above, yes it probably would. For the same reason the weak and strong forces are a consideration to us despite not being able to directly sense them. If they can find electromagnetism, light will eventually fall out of whatever equivalent to Maxwell's equations they come up with. > Or would they continue to find more and more effective ways of using sounds to interpret their environment? Depends what you mean by "interpret their environment". I mean, they'd definitely evolve better echolocation than humans, which is not surprising since our ability to locate things based on sound is pretty terrible at best and we have almost zero ability to produce a useful echoing sound. But in terms of technology, no. They would learn to use electricity, same as us. And they would eventually figure out how to use light for fiber optics, whatever equivalent of cell networks, etc. Its not like our eyes allow us to "see" the current in our wires either. > Could print or books exist there Uhh yes? It exists here. Its called braille, and is extensively used by blind people in our own world. I imagine a world where the entire population was not only blind but evolved blind, would figure out how to use bumps on a page. > How would a society like that function? Very, very slowly. Braille is really good at its job for those who need it, but there's a reason us sighted people haven't taken it up. > hell they might even look like us Extremely unlikely, though I suppose it depends how wide you're willing to accept when you say "like us". Other hominid species on our own planet (even those in our own lineage) don't really "look like us" by most peoples' opinion (though to be fair, a lot of that is just cause they had more hair, making them look more ape-like as we expect humans to be mostly hairless). > but for that one variable that makes them different can make the entire possibility of ever meeting them nearly impossible Out of all the reasons we may never discover an advanced extraterrestrial species despite it existing, this is somewhere around the least likely. Certainly there's some wiggle room for your definition of "advanced", but if we assume they're capable of mass communication then we pretty much have to assume they've gained mastery over electromagnetism, in which case they will be emitting some sort of signal we could detect if it happened to pass our way. And it seems pretty unlikely they'd turn on their fancy new equipment for less than one Earth day and then shut it all off again forever.

[@pacefactor]

​@@altrag Just to clarify, I both understand and relatively agree with your arguments. These represent much of what I already understand about the ET debate. I do think you are overanalyzing my statements a bit, though, such as my statement on an alien species being 'like us' being more of a joke (considering popular science fiction) - personally, I think that and other species that we encounter, if we encounter them, is going to be so different and abstract from us due to their unique 'growing' environment that we would struggle to even understand them beyond 'living thing'. In fact, that particular point is a key element to my perception of the extra-terrestrial problem. My arguments are based far more on a philosophical/theoretical basis - to question our own hubris as a species as opposed to thinking that we really have a complete grasp on what we call 'reality'. Hell, for all intents and purposes, it can be assumed that the universe is intrinsically probabilistic and relative which really creates a conundrum in what we can call absolute in our knowledge. Its a rather fun thing to think about. I am not claiming that there would be some 'fifth' fundamental or otherwise, but information comes out all the time that rocks the very basis of the standard model. Its like that "6 or 9" meme where we can only see one side of it at any time. Its often that scientists are able to find some way to fit it in, but there is plenty of historical evidence on 'what they human do' that really illustrates the 'mind cage' problem people can develop about our current understanding of reality. There could be properties of gravity, or even the other fundamental forces, that could exist but we have no reference frame to actually observe it, making it functionally invisible and immaterial to us. Much of what we understand in based around the principle of light being what it is - the theoretical speed limit and the basis for how we can interpret things due to this principle it demonstrates. I intentionally simplify what I am saying to try and illustrate the idea, which I think may have caused some issues here. I think you might have taken my use of 'advancement' in the wrong direction - I am not necessarily saying they are advanced more so or less so than us, just different. In the great game of civilization, they picked a different tech tree entirely from ours, and thus developed in a different direction. Maybe they use giant mechanical computers and send information through pressure differentials or something - I don't know. May seem impractical or outlandish to us, but maybe it works for them. The idea is to think what could be different and how rather than assuming that everything would be the same. The very idea that they would use the same knowledge the same way as us is intrinsically problematic as well - even in our own reality, we have a myriad of methods to accomplish the same task but most of our efforts typically follow one direction or idea and thus making it more efficient, effective, and ultimately functional when it comes to how we use them. You didn't read my whole statement on "Could print or books exist, using some kind of tactile communication system?" Yes I know braille exists, and I considered it. All of which annoys me, and makes me think you really didn't think about/look at what I was saying, but intentionally looking for flaws that could be explained away or ignoring the intention outright. This may be just a fluke and a misinterpretation on my part. Same as my use of the word 'radio' - which I am using as a catchall for EM communications and sensing in general - I am not specifically talking about a limited frequency or band of communication methods. Maybe not the best choice, but my assumption here was that most people would have understood that simplification. The point of saying that a species was 'blind' had a lot to do with removing light as a principle. We, as a species, make a lot of assumptions from the understanding of light - as its such and important sense for us and forms the basis for our understand of the universe as it is. Its entirely possible and probable that anything we would recognize as life might come to the same conclusions as we do - general relativity, standard model, and all that - and thus would know what light is. Thing is, when a species with similar intelligence/sapience to our own, but have far more evolved ears and non-existent eyes - would they really be looking all that hard in that direction? All of this really is not an answerable question, as there is no relative understanding for what else could exist out there. And for all intents and purposes, the method we look for ET is the best we got. That I know. The point, as always, is to take a step back and really observe what you are doing, and also to try and think what another species might be doing. It could be very well that we are driving in each other's 'blind spots' while we keep going in circles looking for the other one - as an extremely simplified illustration of the matter. You also touched on something I left out of my fist post, that being its entirely possible that we are the 'first' - first species, first to develop EM communications, or even the first to try and extend our existence into the stars. That's another thing I think about, but if its true it basically means the search for ET is pointless; which makes me unhappy, thus I hope its not the case. I always enjoy the discussion, and it illustrates the depth of 'finding ET' as a problem - a problem I think is extremely important. I will admit, however, that it seems some of your arguments are made in bad faith - such as claiming that I am calling things assumptions that are a reality and known limitations, as if I didn't have the ability to reason that out myself. Again, this may just be a misinterpretation on my part where two people are talking about two entirely different things and its not getting translated properly.

[@troller504]

@@pacefactor agreed. Well said.

[@altrag]

@@pacefactor I do think you are overanalyzing my statements a bit, I disagree. Its an interesting thing to ponder :D. > to question our own hubris as a species Need to be careful here though. Physics is _descriptive,_ not _prescriptive._ We observe and describe things that happen in nature, with or without our involvement. There's not really a lot of room for hubris in there (at least not when the science is done properly). Which is kind of the whole point of the way we do science - nothing is considered right until it is proven out by experiment (ie: nature actually works that way and its not just hubris). And after its proven out by experiment its only considered right until a better experiment is devised. > it can be assumed that the universe is That kind of assumption is what we would normally call "hubris" ;). Science works on hypotheses, not assumptions. The difference being that hypotheses can be proven false through experiment while assumptions are necessarily "true" by.. well by assumption. > a conundrum in what we can call absolute in our knowledge Not really. Our experiments include error bars to account for the fact that we cannot ever be 100% sure that there isn't some tiny effect being overlooked. But that's not really a conundrum, its something we've wrangled a couple centuries ago with the introduction of statistical analysis. > but information comes out all the time that rocks the very basis of the standard model The basis of the standard model hasn't been "rocked" in 60 years. We've confirmed a few things that had previously only been hypothesized (the top quark, the Higgs boson) but nothing has fundamentally altered the basis of the model in a long, long time. We occasionally see papers written _claiming_ that they've found some new previously unseen effect (such as the FTL neutrinos a few years ago, but those have pretty much all been disproven once the wider world had a chance to dig into them and (fail to) repeat the experiments. The fact that nothing "interesting" has happened in over half a century is itself one of the biggest problems in physics right now. We know our current models (standard model and general relativity) don't work together, but they only don't work together in the most extreme conditions (black holes, sub-Planck interactions, the first few nanoseconds of the big bang, those kind of things). And sure that's a gap in our knowledge, but it seems pretty unlikely that there could be any life existing close enough to a black hole for our theories to run into those known problems. > the 'mind cage' problem people can develop about our current understanding of reality The difference now is the level of detail we have. The standard model is so absurdly well-tested at any sort of "reasonable" scale (up to and including the temperatures needed to induce quark-gluon plasmas, which we regularly do at the LHC), that there's very little room for weird effects - especially weird effects strong enough to be useful for things like communications - to arise. Gravity may still have some thin hope, but its very thin. Mostly because gravity is so incredibly weak. Even if we found some special previously-unknown feature of gravity, it again falls into that category of "took weak to really be useful". You previously referenced the inverse square law for signals getting weaker over great distances, and that's absolutely a thing. Its also the rule gravity follows, so you'd have to imagine starting your signal 40 orders of magnitude weaker. You'd be lucky if it was detectable it across the room, never mind the galaxy. > I think you might have taken my use of 'advancement' in the wrong direction I'm taking it to mean "capable of sending and receiving signals across interstellar distances". Because if they can't do that, then we don't have much of a discussion. There could be trillions of lifeforms in the universe that aren't capable of long-distance communication, but we'll never know about them because well.. they can't communicate. > and send information through pressure differentials or something We also do that. Its called "sound". And as noted before, it doesn't really work in space. Arguably one could claim that our early mechanical computers followed that model. Pushing a rod does, in a sense, send a pressure wave from one end to the other (at absurdly high speeds that we certainly can't see just by eyeballing it, but some of our modern ultrafast cameras can capture all kinds of weird pressure waves going through materials that we typically think of as "instant". The videos of glass smashing at stupidly high fps are particularly fun imo). OK so I'm stretching the definition a bit there. Main point though is that no such system could ever be used for interstellar communications (and wouldn't really work for terrestrial communications either - pressure waves move slowly and dissipate fast. Sure you can invent materials with better propagation properties but getting it to go around a planet the way we do with light and electrons is.. very unlikely). > The idea is to think what could be different and how rather than assuming that everything would be the same I guess the question is more "are you talking about something that may exist somewhere" or "are you talking about something that we could ever find out about"? Because the latter is definitely a lot more restrictive than the former. That requirement for interstellar communications is very limiting. Oof this is getting long already and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through your post.. I'll maybe see about responding to more in a bit ;).

[@Toyotajunkie]

I believe we are not "alone." But as you stated (essentially) we can't listen to every single possible spot 100% of the time. Also those civilizations might not be transmitting on radio waves. Or they might just not be that advanced yet. But the most saddening option is they treated their planet like us and are no longer there. I would love to know before I pass that there is/was other life in that great expanse, but I certainly won't hold my breath. Thanks again!

[@bapiivxx8868]

It might be also that we're the first one to get this far considering our oasis of a planet

[@randomonlinecat5478]

Second point is, the amount of energy it would require for any civilisation to create a signal powerful enough to travel through space. Unless if they do it intentionally, which would not be a common occurrence. They would only try once or twice maybe. Why would they divert their energy production towards a "futile" at trying to find out if there are other civilisation. Moreover, technological evolution is based on increased efficiency and accuracy. You would want to design an intra-planetary communication system that uses as little energy as possible, that doesn't bleed into empty space and efficiently reaches its intended pathway. So, it could be that this postulate could be flawed. Try getting world governments to divert a sizeable chunk of our energy to send intermittent signals to space and people would riot. Our own comfort is more important than these endeavours. Economic considerations would dictate our response.

[@MikeB12800]

Doesn’t take a lot of energy to send signals through space, we’ve been doing it for decades with TV towers!

[@vortex_1336]

Nah. At some point you'd start putting out high powered signals just for your own use. Like beacons for ships or signals to your colonies.

[@filonin2]

When you control the power of thousands of suns the power of a beacon seems less than insignificant. Look up the Nicol-Dyson Beam. With a single star you can make a laser than can sterilize every system in the galaxy. You underestimate the power of advanced civilizations.

[@oldman2800]

@@MikeB12800 the strength of any radio signal degrades according to the inverse square law. Meaning by the time a targeted signal even reaches our nearest star it would be so pathetic in strength and definition it would be undetectable and undecipherable

[@sneeringimperialist6667]

Also, there may be only a short period of a few ceturies when any civilization uses radio waves before switching to faster than light communication. The amount of time radio waves take would be ridiculous by comparison. They wouldn't bother with obsolete communication methods for very long...

[@johndmacqueen]

I love your videos. I really enjoyed your coverage of the Drake Equation. Thank you for providing such high quality content! Every time I hear about Fermi’s Paradox, I imagine two men from an uncontacted tribe standing on the bank of the Amazon River. There is a contrail overhead, and both men would tell you that the Gods make those clouds because why else would they be perfectly straight. The first man says to the second, “Do you think there’s anyone out there?” The second man shakes his head. “If there was someone out there, why haven’t we met them? Why is there no evidence of them?”

[@johannageisel5390]

Btw. Frank Drake passed away yesterday. :/

[@stargazer7644]

Then a coke bottle falls from the sky and nearly hits one of them in the head.

[@morgan0]

i think that if we want to tell aliens we’re here, we should encode binary counting in radio signals with each number in a few encodings (AM, PWM AM, FM, and maybe there are other good methods), and broadcast for longer periods of time. it would be much harder for skeptical aliens to dismiss because binary counting would be unlikely to be natural, and it would be unlikely for one natural object to make all the encodings itself, even if a signal like each could be produced from a natural object. and then after some time just counting up normally, we could switch to the fibonacci sequence and other sequences it would be likely for aliens to know or be able to figure out. and then figure out some way of encoding language could tell them how to interpret, but still interspersed with counting if they miss the initial broadcast

[@PancreasThief]

That plan requires the hypothetical alien race in question to have developed Arabic numerals

[@morgan0]

@@PancreasThief no it requires them be able to understand binary. i’ve seen transmitted data for this (or suggestions of stuff to send) that made a low res 1 bit image (sent line by line) and that has the issue that it would require them to figure out what the symbols mean. binary numbers should be the easiest to figure out, as it’s the smallest base, most resilient to noise and low signal strength because it only needs two values, and by counting in the signal, we literally show them how it works.

[@NukelearFallout]

Extraterrestrial beings already know we're here.

[@rubiksmath7938]

The Aricebo message solved this problem by using a semiprime number for the number of pixels, meaning there is physically only 2 ways to ever arrange them.

[@MoAndAye]

I've always wondered about the Drake Equation, and all the conversational equivalents. They seem to do the function of being additive to the potential population, but they don't seem to do the work of engaging all the destructive forces: gamma ray bursts, novae, quasars, pulsars, x-ray jets, etc.

[@stargazer7644]

The term for "Lifetime of civilization" takes that into account.

[@peabrain6872]

The Drake equation: “when the hotline = bling, it can only mean one thing”

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

What if the universe is full with advanced civilization, but they wait for us to pass a threshold. Perhaps there is a filter that we have to pass. Maybe most civilizations destroy themselves at a certain part of their development and the aliens don't want to waste contacting pre-filter populations. So they're just looking at us, waiting if we make it.

[@CZ350tuner]

We could be surrounded by hundreds of alien civilisations who haven't yet invented radio technology.

[@Bluepeter62]

Or hundreds of alien civilisations that don't use radio signals anymore as we do not communicate with fire and smoke as our stone age anchestors did.

[@MrSladej]

Universe is to vast to even talk about speed of light. Seems rather barbaric and ancient

[@justinthome1688]

Doubt it

[@filonin2]

@@MrSladej Nonsense statement.

[@justasmallltowngirlll]

A couple quick things. Where is our binary sun? Is it that far away that we only see every thousands of years? What people call planet X which could easily be true and be our sister star. Also what if we are in a black hole hense no other earth.aybe we are on a gigantic black hole that's so very old that planets formed and life started. Hence who life started all that material sucked in for so long it had time to form and evolve? Or the most unlikely possible, we are in the matrix per say. Maybe not like the movie but more like a game. Were our senses are co tools used by so.eone or something else making us move see smell hear etc. There are so any possibilities out there. Also instead of being young we are old. Not much left. Look how many times life had to start again after a catastrophe? Maybe we came from VENUS after we destroyed it and onky very few made. Maybe Adam and Eve per say but two ships that brought very few people to become cave people and evolved into us. Who knows. There is just so many things. Who really knows 🤔

[@mist3279]

I love how people speak about the chance that "aliens might exist", like it's highly improbable. The chance of there not being life, let alone cic8lizations is incredibly, unimaginably low.

[@pandoraeeris7860]

To date, the best possible explanation I've found for the Fermi Paradox is John M. Smart's "Transcension Hypothesis", which basically states that since all advanced civilizations will go through their own computer revolution (sooner or later, all intelligence discovers computation), and this inevitably leads to their own technological singularity (as computers themselves become the primary feedback loop for all science and discovery, thus leading to runaway exponential computational progress), and then they decide, for all of the limitations listed in this video (speed of light, lag time, etc.) that it would be unethical to send out signals into the universe. Think of it this way: what are we going to do with any signals we intercept, anyway? By the time we get them, the civilization that sent them is long gone - either because they migrated away from their home planet to colonize somewhere else, because they destroyed themselves, or because they merged with their technology and are no longer the same 'civilization' they were when they sent those signals. Imagine aliens coming to Earth expecting to find humans still living like we did in the 1950's because that's what our tv signals portrayed, only to find us as a Type 1 or 2 civilization on the Kardashev scale. Given how inordinately long the trip itself takes, one also has to factor in the additional research and development that the target civilization will undergo from between the time their signal left their planet, was received by another planet, and then acted upon and someone sent out to actually meet them. The entire process can take thousands, if not millions of years, and so where's the guarantee that anyone will still be there when you arrive? Since it's safe to assume that all intelligent civilizations will consider the points I just made, it's also pretty safe to assume that they'll reach the same conclusions that it might not be ethical to send out signals which could possibly disrupt developing civilizations that intercept those signals. In other words, the Prime Directive, but also applied to electromagnetic signals. Responsible civilizations might go radio silent on purpose, just so that they aren't inadvertently sending bait to younger civilizations. Instead, we might find the older, more advanced civilizations, crowded around the longer lasting power sources that are black holes and supermassive black holes. It would seem that these objects are our long term destiny anyway, given how long they'll last in the universe's timeline (trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of years, and then some...) The black holes will be here long after all the stars burn out. Civilizations in it for the long, long haul will know this, and so they are likely already clustering around black holes, and so will we once we develop the capability to get there. Given how difficult it is to even detect objects around black holes, let alone the black hole itself, this may be why they are currently "invisible" to us, in addition to the fact that they aren't actively sending out any signals either. It may be that we won't experience "first contact" until we ourselves migrate to the vicinity of a black hole for our long, long hibernation until the end of the universe. Alternatively, they may have probes waiting somewhere in our solar system (or even here on Earth) for the moment when we become technologically advanced, in order to guide us to these supermassive black holes so we can join them. Like shepherds bringing us home.

[@dsmccolgan]

Wow, I like your thoughts on this. I'm not sure I would agree that an intelligent species would come to the conclusion that it's unethical to send out signals. I think intelligence often overlaps with curiosity, because a species that is curious about the universe around them will learn more. That curiosity also means though, that they might try to find other life-forms in the far reaches of space, simply because they want to know, and they feel others deserve to know too - even if it means taking the risk of wasting resources etc.

[@Deciheximal]

I think a more sensible explanation is that 1) intelligent life is rarer than we think and 2) civs end themselves pretty quickly with CO2 once they reach the industrial era.

[@pandoraeeris7860]

@@dsmccolgan Imagine that in the 50's we received a signal from an alien civilization saying something along the lines of, "We're here!" or "Send envoys!" along with coordinates to their star and planet, which happens to be a mere 200 light years away (relatively a hop, skip and a jump from us in cosmic terms). Then, for the next 50 years, the entire world devotes all of it's energy to building a generation star ship capable of supporting enough humans to create a colony somewhere else, and we'll also assume it solves all issues related to space based health issues, like constant radiation bombardment. Let's just assume it's "safe" for the sake of argument. But it can't break the laws of physics, and there's no warp drive. We can probably get it up to around 20% the speed of light fairly easily, maybe even 40%. At 20% the speed of light, the trip will take 1,000 years. At 40%, 500 years. So, quite a few generations of kids growing up on a spaceship, in the middle of nowhere. Unless they decide to use stasis instead. The civilization that sent those messages never stops it's own scientific advancement. Even though at the time it sent them, it may have been about where we are today, it certainly won't be by the time we get there. Think about how far we've come since 1950. Computers now dominate the world. We are beginning to gain total control over biology with tools such as CRSPR genetic editing (and genetically edited children have even been born in China). The planet is covered by a global, persistent communication network called the Internet, and we even have virtual reality (though still at kind of an early stage). Robots are real and actually do real jobs now - although in limited numbers (this is about to grow exponentially too). Ok, so now imagine us in 500 years (or 1000, but minimum trip time here is 500 years). Wait. Actually, scratch that, because the signal took 200 years to reach us. So actually, imagine where we'll be in 700 or 1,200 years from today. Assuming the current pace of technological progress remains constant. Imagine the difference between 1950 and today, now multiply that by 100 or more. Actually, even more than that, because the rate of progress itself is speeding up due to the positive feedback cycle of better and better computers. That's how advanced those aliens will be by the time we get there. And that's assuming that we are close enough to intercept their signal exactly 200 years after they send it. So much can happen in that time, including that species leaving it's home system for somewhere else, destroying itself, or turning into a machine civilization that controls all of the energy in it's star system. The truth is that intentionally sending out those signals could trigger cosmic scale wild goose chases in younger civilizations before they've had the time to sort all this out and reach these conclusions. Even today, we still have people who think we're going to colonize Mars as biological humans one day. We still have people who think our only purpose is to spread throughout the cosmos as far as physics will allow us to. We have people who do not think through even the most nuanced consequences of doing this stuff. Now imagine if those signals were intercepted by humanity 70 years ago, and the response it might have triggered. We might have "colonists" stranded in space, right now, on a multi-generational fool's errand that will end in bust when they get to their target star only to find it abandoned, or occupied by a species which doesn't resemble anything like what the signals suggested (since they've evolved even more over 100's of years of technological progress). No responsible civilization would want to cause that.

[@vickiatabi4235]

Optimist☑️🌚

[@ellatroy]

I want to talk with you over a cup of coffee, and some beers. Theories about unknowns are fascinating to converse about after all. Especially if the other person involved in the conversation is up for any hypothesis, no matter how unlikely, simply for the fun of it.

[@Mike-fg9tx]

I don’t think there’s any question that there either does exist, once existed, or will one day exist, something else out there. Whether or not we will ever find it or be able to prove it’s existence is another question. Space is just too big, I don’t know that we’ll ever develop the means to cross whatever gaps may exist between us and some other intelligent entity.

[@tdsdave]

Hard enough on the internet :)

[@davep8221]

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[@stargazer7644]

There's so much habitable real estate out there that has been around for billions and billions of years that the possibility that we're the only intelligent life in the universe is essentially zero. And that's just counting life like us. There may be other viable life other than carbon and DNA based. But the incredible distances between the stars and the laws of physics and the limitations of economics pretty much guarantee visits are completely impossible. Proving the existence might not be that hard though. The detection of oxygen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet would easily prove the existence of life on another planet. The detection of radio signals would easily prove the existence of intelligent life on another planet.

[@tdsdave]

@@stargazer7644 There is an interesting sci-fi book called the Dark Forest . In it there is suggestion that interstellar life will be mutually and inevitably hostile , based on very few logical premises. So making yourself known makes you a target . Perhaps if we'd considered this before we'd broadcast our presence to some ~100 light years radius of systems , maybe we'd be keeping quiet as well. The universe could be full of life making every effort to hide it's presence.

[@stargazer7644]

@@tdsdave There is essentially zero chance that anyone would eventually come here due to the laws of physics and economics. It is essentially too expensive to actually visit interstellar distances. Nobody is coming to visit. So making yourself a target is really not a problem.

[@MaybeSomeday833]

The most important part that is not being addressed is #1 The alien civilization needs to be "up and running", as well as near or just beyond our level of development, RIGHT NOW. #2 That civilization has to be reasonably close enough to communicate with. A thousand or more light years away won't do at all, because 2000 years will pass round trip, more than enough time for us and them to destroy ourselves or evolve beyond radio signal communication. Similarly, If they were very close by, but reached our current level 5000 years ago, or vice versa, wouldn't matter at all. No "signs of life", at least the way we're measuring it currently. I do love the points brought up in the video, esp about the methodology perhaps causing us to miss the very signals we're looking for.

[@peasant8246]

14:30 Alien have not spoken to us because the first thing they happened to see was an episode of Teletubbies.

[@HeatherSaltas]

I think there has to be alien life out there in some form or another. Out billions and trillions of stars and galaxies and even more planets, it only makes sense to me that we can’t be the only life in our universe. It seems silly that we are searching for radio signals from possible alien life, but when they’re found we don’t follow up with these signals. I mean, what’s the point of all their work if they don’t follow up. I’d love to see more videos on this topic!

[@dingdong1456]

There has to be life. But maybe not near us or not at the same time. We might be one of the first or we might have already missed a prior nearby civilization. So many variables :S

[@vryusvin3905]

Sure, there must be alien life. That is almost without doubt- but lining up with it, even if they are transmitting on the Hydrogen line, is such a vastly odd cosmic occurrence. Plus, as Ding said, they might have existed far in the past and are now just wreckage. Remember that those signals we receive are at least hundreds, if not millions, of years old. Those civilizations would likely be long gone when we get a signal. If we ever detected a signal with some intelligence behind it (one that was so anomalous we couldn't explain it), we WOULD follow it. But these flashes in the pan- we can't find them again. Whatever they were, it wasn't something trying to communicate with us. As far as following up with signals, I beg you to look up the Dark Forest theory, or read the Three Body Problem series of books. We must be very cautious about what we do.

[@gilbertgauger3380]

TIME.

[@xyreniaofcthrayn1195]

The reason we dont follow up on every signal of interest from beyond our star is we still are stupid enough to not get into an arms race for anything that isnt scarce or able to be monopolized such as fuel.

[@TylerSolvestri]

Considering we are not able to capture information from light years away in the right time nor with accuracy, I don't think we are even able to detect any kind of life yet. That tells you how primitive we are in terms of space travel and knowledge. The only thing that might change this radically is proving the theory of the Wormholes to be actually true. I see no other way in which we by our technology be able to find other civilizations.

[@GoodnotGreat88]

The time aspect is the number one reason we havent found anything yet. We have only been a space race for 100 years in a universe thats billions of years old. This is such an incredibly small blip of time in such an incredibly vast area to search that its no wonder we havent found anything yet. on top of that, you briefly touched on the relatively low chance of life to form, evolve, become advanced enough for space exploration. But one thing you didnt mention is full extinction events. Its entirely possible our race goes extinct sometime in the next 100 years for any of a thousand reasons. Meaning our window for finding other life would be just 200 out of 13 billion years. The odds that another species is out there or were out there but experienced the same fate is very real. Our first contact of radio signals might very well be from a species that has been extinct for billions of years by time it gets to us.

[@NoPulseForRussians]

That is 100% true, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, that for a particle with mass greater than that of a photon of light, it would require all of the energy of all the stars in the entire Universe to propel that partical equal to light speed. That is insane if you think about it! The universal speed limit for objects with mass are set in stone.

[@happalula]

to quote Arthur C. Clarke: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” i think if we really were alone in the universe, it would be a sad reality and even more important for us to survive and migrate to the stars in hope of finding possible life in the future if we arent alone and aliens spotted us, i fear they wouldnt contact us based on our primitive behaviour so they wouldnt have to deal with such an annoyance... i just hope we are not alone in the universe - its the more optimistic thought

[@Aledharris]

I don’t like the “they wouldn’t contact us because we’re dumb” theory. If you saw a blue bug which looks like it has human ears (tried to think of something weird!) would you just leave it alone because it’s not as clever as you? Probably not. It would be super interesting. Let alone a planet with millions upon millions of different life forms.

[@dimbulb23]

"It's more likely that we will join the uncounted billions before us and never have an answer to that mystery nor to countless other mysteries. Arthur C. Clarke died without knowing. Relax, don't panic... Don't take life so seriously... no one gets out alive. " RCW 9/2022

[@carnyzack]

This is literally my favorite quote of all time. I think about it everyday. As a Star Trek fan, I believe there might be some prime directive happening; we're simply not prepared to hear them.

[@davidt8087]

It's so human centric to think aliens would use radio for vocal communication like we do. Advanced aliens who have interstellar travel or even if not wouldn't use radio it's too slow. Plus earth has broadcast it's em radiation since it was formed. Why is the radio spectrum more special than the ir of visible light earth emits anyway. Its astonishing that "intelligent" minds are so fixated on radio communication especially this fixation on the hydrogen line as if aliens thinks just like us. How idiotic of humans to be this human centric

[@specialnewb9821]

I go back and forth. Currently I find it more positive to be alone. Maybe I'll think differently next week!

[@tinobemellow]

What if aliens have been trying to talk to us for a while, but they just misinterpret our messages as being challenges for war, so they just avoid us thinking we're nuts?

[@PainterVierax]

They just need to watch our TV signals to see we are a crazy and violent specie.

[@francismunozcoll4490]

If they have come and see us, yeah they would think we are crazy. Trowing bombs and killing each other, no guess they don't want to talk to us

[@mariemelansongundy-vx4ox]

I believe that with advanced surveillance on us they have already come to that conclusion.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

The first question is, are they further developed than us? If they are and know about our level, we aren't a threat. Can they even come here?

[@SilentWalker-if4nc]

There are tribes less developed than us, and far more dangerous@@HappyBeezerStudios

[@dnwiebe]

There are a number of problems with this account. The Big Ear was just a few miles from my house, and one of the guys who was working with it when the Wow Signal was received is in my ham radio club. If all you're interested in is having a little shiver of excitement at the thought that we might have received a signal from aliens, this video's account of the event is fine. But if you're more technical and find that this video leaves you with questions, you might want to do some additional exploration and research.

[@stargazer7644]

The pros: The signal was narrowband (

[@chistinelane]

@@stargazer7644 we never repeat our transmission, why should they?

[@stargazer7644]

@@chistinelane It's the reception of the signal that should have repeated, not the signal itself. The antenna had two horns slightly offset from each other pointing at slightly different areas of the sky. One horn would sweep through an area of the sky for about a minute, then a minute or so later the second horn would sweep the same area, thus causing two bursts from the same signal. Since that didn't happen, we don't know which horn heard the signal, and therefore we don't know exactly where the signal came from on the sky. That means either the signal just happened to coincidentally cut off exactly when one horn completed its sweep, or it didn't come from space.

[@queentrinicorn9441]

@@stargazer7644 you explained this really well, thanks!

[@Kuro_Tsuki]

@@stargazer7644 Contact prank in real life. lol

[@yourbudmanicc8665]

To think of it, when or if we discover life on other worlds, Astrobiologist will become one of the most important jobs by then

[@groveri2]

astrobiologist might have to get sub-sections for different planets.

[@yourbudmanicc8665]

@@groveri2 astrobiologist will probably have to be split into flora-astrobiologist and fauna-astrobiologist

[@Foogi9000]

I'll be joining that field if it happens in my life time!

[@groveri2]

@@yourbudmanicc8665 sub-sub-sections....

[@sequoyahrice6966]

@@yourbudmanicc8665 Youre assuming that whatever life we find will be arbitrarily split into plant and animal like it is on earth

[@Shiraanri]

Love these videos about signals ❤ more please, would love to see 😊 thank you

[@dylanhaugen7875]

Bot

[@randomonlinecat5478]

Try listening to encrypted fibre-optic based communication or microwave-based communication. The truth is we could be surrounded by vast amount of communication that aren't the same as ours and that we can't tap into. Or that we can't decipher their encoded information. We still can't read some earth-based human languages. It's better to be pragmatic than dismissive.

[@itsd0nk]

They have fiber optic cables going through space? Well let’s just follow those to see where they’re plugged in at the other end! /s

[@israel963]

You’d still see the encoding

[@gustavlicht9620]

The signals designed for local reach won't have anywhere near the signal to noise ratio necessary to be detectable by the time they propagate over 1 lightyear.

[@pablovi77]

Fiber optic is wired by definition.

[@mattferrigno9750]

We might have aliens hidden in our solar system. Look into the story about Arawn in the kuiper belt. NASA even tried to check it out but couldn't because when our probe got close enough it mysteriously stopped working and then came back online when it went far enough away from it.

[@zibbitybibbitybop]

As always, I subscribe to Occam's Razor and go with the idea that the simple explanation is the best one: space is absurdly huge, cosmic time scales are equally vast, radio signals degrade into noise way too quickly, and the odds that any advanced aliens would be close enough to us and deliberately point a high power radio signal straight at us within the tiny time frame in which we've been listening are essentially nil. This is all basic logic, and personally I doubt much advanced life exists at all. Earth-like does not equal Earth.

[@Anastaecia]

Yes, yes, and yes. The big one that many forget is the time scales. We may not be looking at the right time in history because we can't. Maybe a civilzations last signal got to us 150 years ago. Oops.

[@JQ3B94]

although via probability there has to be aliens somewhere

[@daydey9403]

@@Anastaecia u ghh

[@daydey9403]

@@Anastaecia u ghhhhGgghvvg

[@mikeellchuk3787]

To think life could only exist on earth-like planets is quite naïve. There are creatures deep in our own ocean that defy what we thought all organisms needed to sustain life. We look at things through a human lens but the universe is vast and life is eager. While I don't think there are currently any intelligent civilizations out there within range, I think its highly possible there's life out there somewhere.

[@tetsi0815]

I think the questions that are not asked often enough in this context but should be explored when talking about Fermi Paradox solutions are more along the lines of: What civilisations could we actually see? How "chatty" would they need to be? For example, from how far away could we see ourselves using our technology. Would we even be able to detect technology on earth from 60ly away using the tech we have at the moment?

[@Dudleymiddleton]

Our 100+ year old "radio bubble" is just a tiny speck on one of the spiral arms of our galaxy let's not forget that! It's big out there. Thank you for another great video, Alex!

[@Dudleymiddleton]

Yes you say 60 year old bubble - but all the old transmissions from radio and tv make it 100 or so?

[@olencone4005]

And unfortunately, most of those signals have degraded so badly that they won't even be distinguishable from the background noise of the universe itself :(

[@stargazer7644]

Most of those signals have already dropped below the background noise and are undetectable. Only the strongest most directional ones can be heard at any appreciable distance (radar, mostly). And we're only talking dozens or hundreds of light years at most. A tiny drop in the galactic bucket when you consider the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. Though that 100 light year bubble likely encompasses over 10,000 stars.

[@eamonahern7495]

Also, given how language evolved differently on different parts of our planet, perhaps alien language is far more complex (or indeed relatively simplistic) than we anticipated. Another reason why we need years to decipher what they're saying, if we decide any of those wow signals are indeed from advanced alien life similar to our own.

[@bigguy7353]

They've been here for millenia, so.....

[@nathanjacob0459]

Sometimes I wonder if they’d possibly have a language so complex/different to ours, and a biology, that makes it impossible to communicate with each other without a medium

[@inbaconwetrust4519]

Just like different regions of earth have different linguistics, an alien planets opposite regions would also have different linguistics. So they would already be aware of linguistic barriers as the forefront of communication issues. Ideally a universal language on an interstellar level would be mathmatics, patterns or elements.

[@edwinvillalobos7159]

Or maybe the universe is teeming with life but just that everyone’s afraid of giving away their position and hiding place in the cosmos

[@stargazer7644]

We're not talking about language yet. Right now we're simply looking for carrier waves. The most basic of radio signals. Once we find one, then we can worry about what they might be saying.

[@ErikRoot]

With all the millions of galaxy's I find it hard to believe that other planets in some far away galaxy didn't evolve just as our own. Perhaps 1000

[@radiantstarlight0428]

i could honestly reasonably believe there’s no other *intelligent* life in our galaxy, only animals with similar brain capacity to our own. but people who are confident there’s no other intelligent life in the whole universe i will never understand. there are realistically more planets in the universe than we can count. there’s no way out of every galaxy in the universe that we are the only intelligent life out there

[@trevordick272]

I’m definitely not 100% confident that there is no life out there, but I feel very confident that we’ll never find it if it does indeed exist. The timeframes it would take to travel to other stars; the ever increasing speed of universal expansion; the relatively finite amount of physical materials to create the items we would need for travelling the cosmos, all of these things limit us to our tiny bubble of existence. The question becomes utterly pointless once you consider that we will likely never have definitive confirmation one way or the other.

[@robertblanc7578]

10,000 years ago we hunted and gathered and created gods as explanation of nature. We have no idea where we will be in 10,000 years. Hopefully a Galaxy of humans

[@Last_Resort991]

"Reasonably" without any evidence for that. So ironic.

[@jonharrison3114]

I love space and all the possibilities it has for us, let’s just hope we have the opportunity to explore the galaxy as a species and not kill ourselves first.

[@RosieIsNosie56]

I'm most hopeful I live to see what's in Titans oceans!!

[@jonharrison3114]

@@RosieIsNosie56 yeah I think that’s where we are most likely to find animalistic life.

[@cloudnimble]

-"You ever wonder what's up there?" -"like what?" -"Maybe someone up there is wondering what its like here." -"I guess. Do you think we'll ever meet them?" -"I hope so. Don't you?" *Roll ear popping screech*

[@MarjorainMD]

Excellent job and narrative, I’m learning more and more with your channel, very compelling and visually satisfying. I’ve read also that the known Universe is much older than the assigned 13.7 billion years, the reason is that the speed of light reaches into the infinite distance a limit of 13.7 billion years. The scientific hypothesis however is that the Universe has always been there. (Personally I subscribe to the latter)

[@Dan5482]

Imagine if the researcher who found the Wow signal had written "Fuck!" instead of "Wow!" on that sheet of paper.

[@lemonstealinghorsdoeuvre]

I'd imagine that detail might be left out of the story

[@goneguy9442]

Thank you for the hard laugh. That concept is hilarious.

[@PrinceTae]

they’re already here my friend

[@todmillard5812]

I believe some higher force in the universe knows we can't get along with each other, and will invade anywhere for its resources. So we have been put at a distance away from the nice aliens who are peaceful.

[@stargazer7644]

Based on absolutely nothing.

[@chrisbelos2834]

James Webb just took the first ever picture of a planet outside our solar system. We are now officially in the new era of space exploration outside our solar system.

[@creatorshorizon5125]

Thanks for mentioning the Alcubierre drive. So few do this. As if they’re hopelessly stuck with current technology. I like to dream and imagine the currently unimaginable. More so, if there is the smallest realistic possibility of something could be reality.

[@lyn3902]

The Heavenly Father is right to be angry, call upon King Jesus, repent, follow Him! He is our salvation and our redeemer ❤ Psalms 25

[@stargazer7644]

The laws of Physics must be obeyed.

[@Life_42]

Maybe the Wow signal was aliens but moved to a different location to see how we react to the signal. Glad no one shot a laser beam in that direction lol

[@ekothesilent9456]

We are here

[@funkydisciple]

It is my belief that there are other beings out in the universe. Some may be more technologically advanced. Some aliens may live primitively, growing their own foods, raising their offsprings and enjoying life. I believe the reasons we haven’t yet discovered any other life out there is simply because we can’t see them. The universe is massive. We can only focus on a dot and study it for a while.

[@quazar912]

that highly impossible...we all waiting to discover aliens from a Star Trek movies, but scientist will be jumpin of joy if they discover algies or simple single cell lifeforms...but on the other hand it is more likely to meet aliens like in a "Inepedence day" or "War of the worlds" rather than in a "ET" or "Close entcounters 3rd kind" movies

[@jennyjohn704]

I think it is notable that you use the word 'belief' so often. The belief in the existence of alien races is becoming more of a matter of faith than one of science.

[@funkydisciple]

@@jennyjohn704 yes, well spotted. I used it twice. Perhaps it was used because none of us truly knows.

[@wesieboy56]

this just makes me realize how utterly limited we are, we think so highly of ourselves but here we are still trying to reach out

[@krist6074]

Great video!! In my opinion, we are "fishing" the wrong. If you're calling someone, you don't just hang up after letting it ring once. You'll wait for the person to answer, then call again until you hear from them. I think we need to send radio telescopes out into space who are looking for these weak and faint signals. I bet you, when they do, they'll find hundreds, if not thousands of signals!!!

[@ImadogGarcia]

Just wait 400000years for an answer

[@tinobemellow]

Or, we could wait until such things like childhood cancer, neonazis, war, famine, disease, and environmental destruction no longer exist, and then dedicate ourselves to trying to talk to the aliens. I am all for trying out here and there now, but over-dedicating our resources to the task of trying to talk to others in space is kind of putting the cart before the horse.

[@krist6074]

@@tinobemellow I totally agree with all the points you named that need to be addressed and solved. However, there’s over 8 billion people in the world. There’s no reason why we can’t do both.

[@RobinBlood]

There are several hundred "Fermi Paradox" Videos, Noone ever considers that dinosaurs don't use radio-telescopes ... Dinosaurs have been here for over 230 million years, and they would have been for hundreds more. We needed several mass extinction events to get here, and only a single creature managed to survive all of them: --- A Tardigrade or a water bear is this minuscule little thing that is pretty much indestructible. This creature is so small that it is only visible under a microscope. The water bear is the only animal to have survived all five extinctions known to man --- Not sure how many radio messages they sent :) And I don't believe all Planets had the same mass extinction events to create the same kind of creatures as we are. If the other earth-like planets only had a single mass extinction less, then we had on earth, we are waiting for signals from Dinosaurs :) Top Five Extinctions: Ordovician-silurian Extinction: 440 million years ago. Devonian Extinction: 365 million years ago. Permian-triassic Extinction: 250 million years ago. Triassic-jurassic Extinction: 210 million years ago. Cretaceous-tertiary Extinction: 65 Million Years Ago.

[@leveljoe]

You are right, we are lucky to exist. You could look at it this way, all life here could have been wiped out multiple times and even on an extremely habitable planet such as ours, life shouldn't exist. Life has only started here once. My belief is that we are alone.

[@johnjames1374]

And just for fun, there are dinosaurs flying around your house right now (birds).

[@element5999]

Excellent points. Perusing the comments here and on similar videos elsewhere, the overwhelming majority WANT there to be intelligent ET, some are totally convinced of this despite zero evidence, and they make even bigger assumptions as to why we're not detecting them or they want to remain hidden - as if there's some cosmic community law that every other potential civilization abides by, but us. Too many of these videos dumb people down on the subject, and leave casual viewers with a default hypothesis of "they're actually are out there, but we just need more time to find them". After some 70 years of constant TV programming and entertainment features projecting human conceptions of space aliens and the default assumption that intelligent aliens are everywhere out there in our galaxy - or in galaxies far, far away - there's now a default common belief that evolving technological species are a cosmic law of nature wherever life arises. Somehow there's no other EM signals from maybe dozens or hundreds of other radio-capable civilizations echoing around the galaxy from thousands of years ago when they first stumbled upon this convenient technology, but we've just not detected a convincing signal, ever. Somehow all of those signals have been suppressed by other aliens or are just too weak for us to detect. Suppressed would be a huge leap of assumptions. Too weak is more plausible, but then leads to more assumptions that require even more complicated explanations for their persistent absence. Or maybe... The simpler answer with fewer assumptions overall is that Earth won the great Cosmic PowerBall - despite its "astronomical" odds - where larger lifeforms evolved from single-cells, and through freak events such as you described, and the millions of other chance events eventually leading the the emergence of just one, ONE species out of the hundreds of millions to come before it to discover technology and then to have the curiosity factor to search for others. So many extraordinary convergences, chance events, and great biological filters would have to take place to go from evolving a single-celled algae from randomly available elements forming molecules (which is astonishing in itself) to figuring out that E = mc2. Most unlikely in the extreme. One thing that nature has proven beyond any doubt is that human-level intelligence is not required to successfully survive and reproduce. Plenty of species have survived for far, far longer with only cockroach level intelligence. And some for far longer longer than that as simple dumb bacteria. Humans won this Cosmic PowerBall on their first ticket purchased (Earth), but now mistakenly believe that it's so easy to have done it here on the first try, that it must be happening as easily elsewhere too. My default position is null, that we have a sample of one here on Earth, and we are learning just how rare we are. There's certainly a possibility of life elsewhere, but technological life may be such a cosmic freak occurrence that actually winning the Cosmic PowerBall of intelligent ET is paced at right next to impossible.

[@MalcolmTown]

Quick shout out to the trilobites!

[@zanussidish8144]

@@element5999 Interesting post. However, if everyone had my level of intelligence for generations on end I don't think we'd ever have invented the telephone nevermind the massive jumps in the century and a half since. The maths of the size of the universe suggest that intelligent life within the same timescale (allowing for the vast distances) is extremely unlikely and paradoxically at the same time life not existing at all elsewhere is similarly unlikely. I suspect we (and I don't mean you and I) will never know.

[@scottys1423]

Keep in mind that if we did detect a signal, it may or may not be intended for us; possibly just intercepted.

[@kathykline7202]

Oh, its for us all right, they used languages from all over earth. They knew what we named them 581D

[@ItSpooling_]

@@kathykline7202what

[@clapped7848]

I always had a thought that aliens might have completely different signals compared to us like signals that we can’t even pick up

[@skeetsmcgrew3282]

Effectively impossible. The electromagnetic spectrum is fully understood/mapped, and any signal with a too-small wavelength would degrade far before it got here. The reason radio waves can be picked up through your house walls, car doors, etc, is because it travels long distances with very little degradation, relative to other forms of light. It's very long frequencies allow it to pass through solid matter fairly easily. If they don't communicate via the EM spectrum, we have no hope of seeing their signal period. And if they do use the EM signal, it has to be in the radio-range or it can't physically get to us. So while you might be correct, if you are it means the signals literally can't get to us, not that we can't pick them up

[@trutwhut6550]

@@skeetsmcgrew3282 what if they don't use electromagnetic systems, fully biological or symbiotic species could exist undetected naturally for billions of years, something that is far more reliant on light/light spectrum would communicate and interact with the universe entirely differently, what if "magic" or some other force does exist in some part of space that said species learned to master, we are not the base of all species, we are just the only sapient species we know.

[@skeetsmcgrew3282]

@@trutwhut6550 Certainly possible. There's no reason to think a form of telepathy is impossible, allowing them to exist without any need for long-range communication. There are many many solutions to the Fermi Paradox, I don't think we are alone in the universe simply because Seti is sorta pointless

[@TheBaglee]

"Dark Forest" is probably my favourite theory regarding the Fermi Paradox. And why we should listen for first contact, but not to be the ones to make first contact.

[@adb888]

If you ask me, and no one did, the elephant in the room is ALWAYS distance. You can talk about and around everything, but distance is always the limiter. With distance you have to worry about signal strength (radio waves), bending of light (focused lasers signals), travel speeds/time and energy requirements, and a host of other issues. Even if the numbers in the Fermi Paradox turned out to be somewhat accurate, the great distances involved means that there could be civilizations out there that we just haven't seen and possibly never will. The next issue, which I don't think even deserves a long explanation, is that we assume that if someone else is out there attempting to communicate, that we'll even know what that will look like.

[@roccobierman4985]

Humans think in human time scales. The universe is not on our schedule.

[@hugodesrosiers-plaisance3156]

It would seem reasonable, as soon as an "anomaly" is found at some coordinate in the sky, to focus a battery of instruments on that point and just wait. I'm actually surprised that that's not how it's done. Sweeping the sky is good for finding beacons at a glance and maybe that's exactly what the Wow signal is. Bleep, bleep, bleep, look here! We look, and we eventually get an actual broadcast.

[@Beryllahawk]

I feel the same, that the best method would be to catch a hint and then "stare" at that spot for a while. But as he said - resources are very limited. Maybe if we could launch hundreds of thousands of space telescopes - cubesat sized "Big Ears", flung across a HUGE amount of our local space... But let's be real, that would cost billions, all on what could reasonably be called a cosmic long shot. And many, MANY people would also be asking "and then what?" Because really, then what? Yes we found a signal, yes it's alien intelligent life, but uh.....now what? At the same time, I look up into the night sky and I can't help but think about that bit from the movie Contact. If no one's out there, seems like an awful waste of space.

[@londonspade5896]

@@Beryllahawk Then we send our own signals to them and wait for a reply

[@stargazer7644]

What kind of anomaly would you be expecting?

[@Brian_Equator]

The WOW signal was most probably a fast radio burst. There are many now known, including one that repeats. No need to involve aliens in the case of the WOW signal or indeed any of the FRBs. All the best, Brian.

[@King_10087]

Good video brother.

[@craigfrance3561]

It is either our foolishness or hubris/arrogance not to recognize that there other life forms in the universe, we are not the only intelligent species that exist. That is the truth.

[@MangyMagi]

The best part is that you won't know until you know, and no one knows. What I find more interesting is the theory that life exists in ways we can't comprehend and there's always a possibility that some of these amazingly far fetched stories might be true, but can never be proven because of the possible nature of advanced life. If you can think it, it's possible, mathematically the universe as we know it is nowhere near realizing all that potential, so if infinity exists in nature, it exists in a compartmentalized way. Like how we each experience reality according to our own perspective, how we may experience reality as a species in a way that makes experiencing other realities entirely different from ours, impossible, as far as we know. We have lots of theories all built from what we consider prehistoric man's brains and genetics, yet these ideas far exceed what one would expect to find from some animal that kills it's own kind and only "recently" started living in large groups and using advanced tools.

[@bnthern]

i find it difficult to believe that ONLY ONCE has the multitude of needs arisen for life to form and we are it - the vastness of space and our less then 100 years of radio (on a large scale) makes the worlds of "star trek" and others just a farther shore away and may someday become real!

[@mysryuza]

I like to think that the alien societies either use tech beyond ours that either allowed them to venture the cosmos without being detected or tech our own can’t interact, or don’t have advanced tech out of fear of something bad happening if they did.

[@mudgetheexpendable]

Are we alone in the Universe? Life's pretty tenacious here, getting going in some really rough conditions, so why wouldn't it start somewhere else with similar ones in the past 10bn or so years? Are we alone in this galaxy, at this moment, is a different question...assuming one means "as intelligent life" not simply as living matter.

[@bigguy7353]

They've been here for millenia, so.....

[@just2812]

“To search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.” Terence Mckenna Who says we'll still be using radio waves in a million years? Maybe we'll use quantum rascallion waves or whatever.. Maybe they all found outward exploration too much of a hassle and turned inward instead? I think there's much to overlook when it comes to the Fermi Paradox, considering these civilisations would surely be more alien to us than we can even conceive.

[@gustavlicht9620]

Radio signals are not a smart idea. Better put a lightweight shade in front of your star and turn in around to modulate the light. That way you don't need to generate all the necessary energy. Kinda how fiberoptic transceivers are designed - with a CW laser and a modulator. The data rates will be low - probably bits per week. The data rate will be limited by the Shannon capacity theorem - data rate = bandwidth*log2(signal_to_noise_ratio +1).

[@astrumspace]

Interesting concept!

[@gustavlicht9620]

@@astrumspace We also have the capability to detect such signals today - the transit method of exoplanet detection is basically the same thing. The shade doesn't need to be a single spacecraft - it can be formed by a number of smaller solar sails flying in formation. To generate radio signals you would need first to build a massive solar array, because ultimately your nearest star is your main energy source, then you need to power a massive radio transmitter. The energy losses will be anywhere between 50% and 90%. On top of that you need to spend a lot more materials and energy building a radio based transmitter. Launching a swarm of solar sails sounds like a much more logical solution. It's not like civilizations wouldn't need energy for other important things like growing their food, their industry, environmental management etc.

[@S-T-E-V-E]

@@astrumspace As possibly the only sentient life with the ability to send out probes loaded with primitive life such as extremophiles, is it our responsibility to do so and seed the universe like? Is it ethical? Is this possibly how we life started on Earth?

[@DeathMetalDerf]

I like to think these somewhat out of the ordinary signals we're picking up with radio telescopes are the sounds made by pulsar, quasars, and stars going supernova. It would be awesome if you could do the same style of radio telescope, but put it on a locking gyroscope so that it still moved with the rotation of the Earth, but you could unlock the gyroscope so the telescope could stay fixed on a signal that's picked up. The Earth keeps rotating, but the telescope stay in place. It's totally impossible, but that'd be pretty cool.

[@stargazer7644]

Impossible? That's how most telescopes work. They are steerable and can stay pointing at a target for as long as it is above the horizon. And we know what those natural phenomena sound like - we hear them all the time. That's primarily what radio telescopes listen to. Natural sources don't send narrowband signals.

[@zerofire9479]

The source of the wow signal is a neutron star exploding around the Sagittarius sector of space, it was 30 times the power of a radio burst because of impact and subsequent explosion of the neutron star, there was a lot more than just a radio frequency sent out, but the Big Ear can only hear radio bursts, newsflash, radio waves are caused by heavy gravimetric anomalies in space. Aka, sun wave, supernova, brown dwarf stars ect. The Big Ear just happened to hear the tail end of the bang, like an echo.

[@onederdude]

source?

[@zerofire9479]

@@onederdude check out the news article

[@onederdude]

@@zerofire9479 what news article are you referring to?

[@zerofire9479]

@@onederdude just google it numb nuts

[@awkwardllama0509]

I'm horrified at the thought that we're basically banging pots into the unknown in the hopes that something notices. Could be overly cautious, but I think that we should focus on finding life before trying to make noise since we may not like what we find.

[@gravoc857]

Too late to not make noise. We’ve already had our artificial radio waves wash over 75 of our nearest neighboring stars. It’s not too late to prevent us from sending highly powerful and concentrated waves at specific star systems. But it’s too late for total containment.

[@olencone4005]

Even if we stay quiet, any civilization advanced enough to have an astronomy program can detect the presence of Earth and know that it's habitable from the spectroscope alone. A civilization just a few decades more advanced than we are now could even filter through the Sun's glare to directly observe Earth, albeit just as a pixel, and could readily detect the spectroscopic emissions of agriculture, industrialization, and even artificial lighting. Earth has been "broadcasting" the existence of oxygen, ozone, water, and vegetation in its spectography for several billion years to anyone who intentionally or coincidentally happens to be looking our way. Once you have the technology to observe it, there's no hiding a civilization that easily in the universe.

[@stargazer7644]

The thing nobody talks about is we're listening for aliens around the hydrogen line frequency. But yet if an alien is pointed at Earth listening for exactly the same thing, they'd hear nothing, because planet-wide we intentionally don't transmit around that frequency. We don't want to interfere with radio astronomy. Isn't it reasonable that other intelligent beings would be doing the same thing, and the hydrogen line is the LAST place you should look for them?

[@Last_Resort991]

So if you know you are listening to the hydrogen line and now you wanted to send a signal to other intelligent life what would you choose as a signal? Hmmmm Hmmmm. Maybe the hydrogen line? And every telescope and astronomer on the planet knows when these signals were send so they don't interfere with the own astronomy??? Nah that would be way to intelligent.

[@stargazer7644]

@@Last_Resort991 And yet, we aren't sending signals on those frequencies. Radio astronomy is constantly being done. We pass laws making it illegal to transmit on or near these frequencies.

[@Last_Resort991]

@@stargazer7644 Yes we aren't. We also aren't sending on other frequencies. 'What is your point? If we would send a signal, it would be on these frequencies.

[@stargazer7644]

@@Last_Resort991 My point is quite clearly stated in my original post. I'll repeat it just for you. We don't transmit around the hydrogen line frequency for a good reason. Why would we think it likely that other intelligent civilizations would? Also, we did send a signal once. The Arecibo message was sent toward M13 at 2380 MHz. Nowhere near the hydrogen line at 1420 MHz.

[@SaintMartins]

Aliens arrive on Earth..... U.S. Military: "Why are you here?" Alien: "Promised my kid i would take her to a Taylor Swift concert" U.S. Military: "She's a Pop music fan ?" Alien: "She's a "Swifty"

[@mysticthecatninja]

So interesting as always! Personally I always think about how aliens must be so different from us. I think that we always assume that they're like us, that they would create and build like us and then search like us. I feel that (especially because we haven't yet found any aliens) the aliens that are out there are simply not in the same mindset. I have a hard time even comprehending what kinds of things an alien would prioritise or think about on the daily. But anyway I hope we find something someday, would be very cool.

[@bigguy7353]

They've been here for millenia, so.....

[@justasmallltowngirlll]

A couple quick things. Where is our binary sun? Is it that far away that we only see every thousands of years? What people call planet X which could easily be true and be our sister star. Also what if we are in a black hole hense no other earth.aybe we are on a gigantic black hole that's so very old that planets formed and life started. Hence who life started all that material sucked in for so long it had time to form and evolve? Or the most unlikely possible, we are in the matrix per say. Maybe not like the movie but more like a game. Were our senses are co tools used by so.eone or something else making us move see smell hear etc. There are so any possibilities out there. Also instead of being young we are old. Not much left. Look how many times life had to start again after a catastrophe? Maybe we came from VENUS after we destroyed it and onky very few made. Maybe Adam and Eve per say but two ships that brought very few people to become cave people and evolved into us. Who knows. There is just so many things. Who really knows 🤔

[@stargazer7644]

We aren't just looking for aliens. We're looking for TECHNOLOGICAL aliens. By definition, they'd have radio.

[@paullitchfield2651]

Maybe, just maybe, intelligent life will be found on planet earth, but I'm not optimistic about it.

[@ianbattles7290]

By our own requirements, the Arecebo message was not an E.T. candidate *because it did not repeat.* For all we know, we picked up the alien version of the Aracebo message - a powerful, ONE-TIME transmission from a distant civilization...

[@miura_vs]

They’d like to come and meet us, but they think they’ll blow our minds. I recently finished the Three Body series by Cixin Liu. I found the Dark Forest nature of the universe to be quite chilling. It’s quite a pessimistic view of things, but looking at nature on our own planet, it isn’t hard to imagine.

[@yeetandrepeat4251]

"You can't imagine the beauty of a 10th dimensional garden of eden" or something to that effect. Been a long time but I loved that series as well! Have you read The Foundation Series yet?

[@MagnusQuake]

I bet it was a test from the aliens, they can see us live time, and pointed a signal beam at us to see if we would react to it, thus explaining why the signal abruptly ends. They spotted we had a fascinating machine and someone was like ,"hey, watch this, ima mess with them and let them know someone is watching them"

[@nutbastard]

Interstellar ding-ding-ditch.

[@kathykline7202]

I believe they know more about us, than we about them. From the things that are in the wow signal.

[@Zakumei]

The same reason we dont constantly transmit into space. Anything capable of going out that far knows better than to call attention to itself, or is strong enough to destroy anyone who made their presence known.

[@c.s.hayden3022]

The Wow Signal gets too sensationalized. We still have so little to go by and for all we know it’s an odd fluke. If that repeated in any way it would be totally different. My imagination is always stirred though. I want to believe but I want more of what’s real.