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How the Wow! Signal Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
0:04
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
0:13
Speaker 1: There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So it's
0:16
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know. Wow. Uh, first of all, I
0:21
Speaker 1: think we should go ahead and apologize to eight Stuff
0:28
Speaker 1: you Should Know fans. And there were more than who
0:30
Speaker 1: have already heard this. Yeah, we went to the World
0:34
Speaker 1: Science Festival. We were invited to the World Science Festival
0:36
Speaker 1: in New York City, and we want to give a
0:39
Speaker 1: little special shout out to Ben in the Ace Hotel
0:41
Speaker 1: for putting us up while we were there. Yeah. We
0:43
Speaker 1: did a live podcast short form on Washington Square Park
0:48
Speaker 1: on a Sunday afternoon. It was kind of a neat thing.
0:51
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, I hate everybody who came out to
0:53
Speaker 1: see us. We appreciated the support. Yeah, actually I thought
0:56
Speaker 1: I knew everyone by name. There were actual Stuff you
0:58
Speaker 1: Should Know fans. Yeah, I was gonna apologize to them directly.
1:02
Speaker 1: There were some people who clearly were not familiar with us,
1:05
Speaker 1: and we're just mind blown walking around glazed look in
1:09
Speaker 1: their face. They look kind of defeated. I was like, oh,
1:14
Speaker 1: you like Stuff you Should Know? Now. Yeah. I had
1:16
Speaker 1: a couple of people come up and be like, hey,
1:17
Speaker 1: what do you guys do? This is neat and said, well,
1:19
Speaker 1: you just saw a short version of it. My friend,
1:21
Speaker 1: if you want a lot more side stories and anecdotes,
1:26
Speaker 1: then tune into the long version. Yeah, we had twenty minutes.
1:29
Speaker 1: We had twenty minutes that boy, we had to get
1:31
Speaker 1: down to business. Didn't and we did too. It's not bad.
1:34
Speaker 1: We didn't talk about tire stores or anything like that.
1:36
Speaker 1: We just talked about the Wow signal. Yeah, this is um.
1:41
Speaker 1: I think this is fascinating stuff because this is something
1:45
Speaker 1: that even the most hardened skeptic hasn't been able to
1:48
Speaker 1: fully debunk. Yeah, that's that's a good point. It's pretty
1:51
Speaker 1: neat that you know they're they're upset, probably, so we
1:55
Speaker 1: should say that. We keep saying the wild signal, and
1:58
Speaker 1: Chuck's talking about skeptics and everything. There is evidence of
2:04
Speaker 1: a potential transmission from an alien civilization here on Earth,
2:11
Speaker 1: and it's been here on Earth, printed out sitting in
2:14
Speaker 1: the Ohio State University Archives since the nineteen seventies. Yeah,
2:19
Speaker 1: and potential is the key word there. I think that's
2:21
Speaker 1: where most skeptics head will pop off. But you got
2:24
Speaker 1: you gotta say potential you and I did. Yeah, I
2:27
Speaker 1: don't want anybody's head to pop off, you know. Um,
2:30
Speaker 1: the thing is, like you said, Chuck, no skeptic has
2:34
Speaker 1: been able to say, here's your explanation, dumb, dumb, And
2:38
Speaker 1: they've tried. There have been plenty of explanations, but every
2:41
Speaker 1: single one has been systematically addressed and reduced the rubble basically. Um,
2:48
Speaker 1: so the whole thing finds its roots. Um, like I
2:52
Speaker 1: said back in the seventies, but actually goes further back
2:54
Speaker 1: than that. There's a lot of Um. There's been a
2:59
Speaker 1: lot of talk starting in the twentieth century over aliens.
3:03
Speaker 1: Are we the other other people? Are we the only
3:05
Speaker 1: life out there? Um? Are there other people on other planets?
3:10
Speaker 1: And if so, can we communicate with them? And astronomers
3:15
Speaker 1: started crunching the numbers and doing the math and said,
3:19
Speaker 1: we basically have two things we can do here. We
3:22
Speaker 1: can try to go visit aliens and look for them
3:25
Speaker 1: in the flesh, expensive, expensive, and potentially impossible. It's like
3:32
Speaker 1: looking for a needle in a haystack. Yeah, but also
3:34
Speaker 1: it's the closest, um, the closest planet to us is
3:37
Speaker 1: like a few hundred light years away. I believe four
3:42
Speaker 1: hundred plus, right, which means that, um, we take four
3:48
Speaker 1: hundreds something years traveling at the speed of light to
3:50
Speaker 1: reach that planet. So we couldn't go find them. Instead,
3:55
Speaker 1: we decided that we would try to listen out to
3:58
Speaker 1: see if anybody was really leasing any transmissions out there
4:01
Speaker 1: and find traces of alien civilizations that way. Yeah, and um,
4:06
Speaker 1: did we do a show on set. No, we've talked
4:10
Speaker 1: about it before, all right, the Search for Extra Oh yes,
4:13
Speaker 1: did we? We did. I don't remember when it came in.
4:18
Speaker 1: We definitely have talked about it before. Now that you
4:21
Speaker 1: say that, I think with one of our south By
4:25
Speaker 1: Southwest or comic cons might have had something to do
4:27
Speaker 1: with Oh yeah, the UFOs SSETTI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
4:34
Speaker 1: It's not a single organization, although there is the SETI
4:37
Speaker 1: Institute now since the early nineteen eighties. But SET is
4:41
Speaker 1: a bunch of different groups that um are. They're not
4:46
Speaker 1: tinfoil hat wearing crack pots who are bounded determined to
4:50
Speaker 1: find if there's life out there, but they're open minded
4:53
Speaker 1: folks that say, if there isn't life out there, let's
4:57
Speaker 1: get ahead of the game here and listen out for
4:59
Speaker 1: him and see if they're trying to say something to
5:01
Speaker 1: us right there. They're basically people who say the there's
5:04
Speaker 1: just too many stars out there that have planets and
5:09
Speaker 1: that have are potentially habitable to life for us. It
5:14
Speaker 1: just it just it boggles their mind to think that
5:17
Speaker 1: we are the only living beings. And they're scientists, right,
5:21
Speaker 1: And to these scientists the much more logical conclusions that
5:24
Speaker 1: were one of many um civilizations out there, and so
5:28
Speaker 1: they have dedicated their their astronomical talents to searching for that. Yeah,
5:35
Speaker 1: and this all started happening in the early nineteen seventies
5:37
Speaker 1: and Earnest and uh, I think it actually started in
5:40
Speaker 1: the sixties and Earnest. But with the Big Ear it
5:44
Speaker 1: was in the seventies, their steady program, that's right, nineteen
5:49
Speaker 1: seventy three, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. I love
5:54
Speaker 1: that laugh every time. Um, they have something called the
5:57
Speaker 1: Big Ear, or had something called the Big Ear. Yeah,
6:00
Speaker 1: they needed a golf course, though, yes they did, so
6:02
Speaker 1: they got rid of the Big Year. Even worse than that, Um,
6:05
Speaker 1: the Big Ear Radio Telescope Ohio State was demolished, not
6:10
Speaker 1: to build the golf course. But to expand an existing
6:13
Speaker 1: golf course, we need another nine holes, right, we need
6:16
Speaker 1: another clubhouse. Well, I think the Big Year had seen
6:20
Speaker 1: its best days by that point, So don't feel bad
6:22
Speaker 1: for the Big Year. I still feel bad for the
6:23
Speaker 1: Big Year. So nineteen seventy three, the Big Ears starts
6:27
Speaker 1: scanning listening for stuff out in outer space, hence the name,
6:32
Speaker 1: and UM what would happen is because it was seventy three, Uh,
6:37
Speaker 1: it would print stuff out on a dot matrix printer
6:41
Speaker 1: and UH student would uh student assistant would take that
6:45
Speaker 1: print out of of what it was listening to and
6:48
Speaker 1: take it to another volunteer, UM teachers, professors, and they
6:53
Speaker 1: would just basically look at all these numbers. Yeah, page
6:57
Speaker 1: by page by page. If you've ever seen the wild signal,
7:00
Speaker 1: you it's just numbers ones, twos, maybe a three here there. Yeah,
7:04
Speaker 1: it's the level of background noise in space exactly. So, um,
7:08
Speaker 1: A one is blip a radio transmission that was one
7:12
Speaker 1: time the intensity of the normal background noise in space
7:16
Speaker 1: on a particular frequency. Right, A one is nothing like
7:20
Speaker 1: there's ones all over the place all the time. There's ones,
7:23
Speaker 1: twos and threes. Yeah, very common stuff. Um. And so
7:27
Speaker 1: this these these poor astronomers who were donating their time
7:31
Speaker 1: to the bigger telescope. We're basically they were the the
7:37
Speaker 1: They were analyzing the stuff with their eyes. Yeah, there
7:42
Speaker 1: wasn't like a computer program they spit it into. They
7:45
Speaker 1: looked at this computer print out sheet after sheet after sheet, right,
7:48
Speaker 1: So for they would look at a whole night's scan
7:53
Speaker 1: of deep space from a radio telescope, again with their
7:57
Speaker 1: eyes going over sheets and heets of computer paper, dot matrix,
8:02
Speaker 1: printer paper, and UM, that's what this guy named Jerry Aman,
8:05
Speaker 1: who was an astronomer at Ohio State, was doing UM
8:09
Speaker 1: on August eighteen, nineteen seventy seven. He was looking over
8:13
Speaker 1: some stuff from three days before. Yeah, and so he's
8:18
Speaker 1: scanning all the stuff and there's ones, twos, and threes,
8:21
Speaker 1: and he's you know, he's watching uh, Love American Style
8:24
Speaker 1: on TV and eating his TV dinner and he's bored
8:27
Speaker 1: out of his mind love American stuff and he's bored
8:31
Speaker 1: out of his skull. And then UM, well here's another
8:34
Speaker 1: important thing to point out, because it was also nineteen
8:37
Speaker 1: seventy three, that was the seventy seven. At this point,
8:41
Speaker 1: they didn't have UM double digit print outs. It just
8:46
Speaker 1: went one through nine and then started with the letter A, B, C,
8:50
Speaker 1: D AS ten, eleven, twelve and so on, right exactly.
8:53
Speaker 1: So he's reading this stuff and he sees six e
8:58
Speaker 1: q U J five, which means the transmission at its
9:03
Speaker 1: peak of you peaked at thirty times louder than anything
9:06
Speaker 1: they had ever seen before. Then the normal background noise,
9:10
Speaker 1: and he circled it and put wow exclamation point on
9:13
Speaker 1: the paper. And that's why it's the Wow signal, exactly.
9:16
Speaker 1: And this is a big deal. I mean, like, in
9:18
Speaker 1: this whole huge ream of dot matrix paper filled with
9:22
Speaker 1: ones and twos and maybe a three here there, there's
9:25
Speaker 1: a you standing in the middle of this string which
9:30
Speaker 1: was high. Yeah. I mean six alone would be like whoa,
9:33
Speaker 1: this is kind of significant. This thing went up to you,
9:36
Speaker 1: and like you said, he circled it and wrote wow
9:38
Speaker 1: next to him. It became the Wow signal, and um,
9:42
Speaker 1: almost immediately they started investigating this thing. Sure, And there
9:46
Speaker 1: are a lot of details to the Wow signal that
9:50
Speaker 1: are make it even more impressive than just the fact
9:53
Speaker 1: that it peaked at you, started at six and ended
9:55
Speaker 1: at five and peaked at you. There's a lot of
9:58
Speaker 1: different aspects of the Wow signal that make people say,
10:01
Speaker 1: what in the name of God is this? And we
10:06
Speaker 1: will start getting those details right after this break. So, Chuck,
10:25
Speaker 1: we were talking about how the wild signal looks on
10:29
Speaker 1: dot matrix papers six e q u J five, and
10:33
Speaker 1: that means that at its peak it goes from six
10:35
Speaker 1: times the normal background noise all the way up to
10:38
Speaker 1: thirty times and then back down to five times the
10:41
Speaker 1: normal background noise over what we know over seventy two seconds, Yes,
10:47
Speaker 1: which is very significant. It turns out so um. The
10:52
Speaker 1: Big Ear telescope, we should say a little bit more
10:54
Speaker 1: about it was a crowds telescope. It was built in
10:56
Speaker 1: the sixties and it didn't move it um eavesdropped on
11:02
Speaker 1: the electromagnetic radio spectrum UM coming from outer space. Eaves
11:09
Speaker 1: dropped on it. But it used the rotation of the
11:12
Speaker 1: Earth to move it. Yeah, it didn't pan its little
11:16
Speaker 1: big ear back and forth. It wasn't a show off, No,
11:19
Speaker 1: it just stayed fixed. The rotation the Earth very slowly
11:22
Speaker 1: would pick up a new patch of Earth at the
11:26
Speaker 1: rate of the Earth spin right. So um, the big
11:28
Speaker 1: ears the sky at the rate of the Earth spin right,
11:30
Speaker 1: and so it's just pointing out there in deep space,
11:33
Speaker 1: and as the Earth rotates, it would move the big
11:36
Speaker 1: ears field of reception I guess across any given point
11:41
Speaker 1: in the sky over a seventy two second period. And
11:46
Speaker 1: it just so happens that the six e q u
11:50
Speaker 1: J five wild signal transmission was seventy two seconds, which
11:55
Speaker 1: suggests something very important here, Chuck. It suggests that the
11:59
Speaker 1: wild signal came from a fixed point in the sky
12:02
Speaker 1: that was staying in one place, and the Big Year
12:06
Speaker 1: just swept past it over the course of its normal
12:08
Speaker 1: seventy two seconds. Yeah, And uh, I liken it to
12:11
Speaker 1: like if you're driving through the desert listening to your radio. Uh,
12:16
Speaker 1: your signal, the further you are from that radio transmitter
12:20
Speaker 1: or that radio station is going to be pretty faint.
12:23
Speaker 1: And then as you get closer and have that direct signal,
12:25
Speaker 1: it's gonna peak. And then as you drive further past it,
12:28
Speaker 1: it's gonna get more faint again. And that's what shape
12:31
Speaker 1: that this wild signal took. It took the shape of
12:33
Speaker 1: a pyramid if you graph it out. And I believe
12:36
Speaker 1: that's the Doppler effect because I always hear the Doppler
12:38
Speaker 1: effect being explained by how an ambulance siren sounds far
12:42
Speaker 1: away and then gets louder as it gets closer, and
12:45
Speaker 1: then it gets, you know, weaker, the further way you get. Yeah, well,
12:49
Speaker 1: it also changed his pitch though, isn't that the Doppler effect?
12:52
Speaker 1: I think so. It's not just loudness. It's like er
12:56
Speaker 1: er er. If you're in England, did you change pitch
13:01
Speaker 1: just then? Yeah, you didn't hear any difference. No, you
13:05
Speaker 1: didn't hear it go down in volume. You didn't hear
13:08
Speaker 1: it go down in in tone? No? Wow? Did you really?
13:12
Speaker 1: Are you tone deaf? I don't think so. It would
13:15
Speaker 1: explain a lot as far as karaoke goes. Do you
13:20
Speaker 1: sind karaoke? Did you recently? What do you say? Um?
13:26
Speaker 1: I got some songs here there? You can't You can't
13:28
Speaker 1: tell us one of them? Is that too revealing? No?
13:32
Speaker 1: Let me think of one of my karaoke songs. My
13:36
Speaker 1: big move is always under pressure and someone's always like, oh,
13:39
Speaker 1: i'll do it with you'll do the bowie part. I
13:41
Speaker 1: might not do both parts. I recently sang um I
13:44
Speaker 1: have a tiger. Oh, yeah, there you go. I have
13:46
Speaker 1: a big problem though, with my karaoke stuff. A lot
13:49
Speaker 1: of the songs that I pick are just slightly out
13:52
Speaker 1: of the key that I can comfortably achieve. Well, if
13:55
Speaker 1: you're picking eighties rock, then yeah, but you would think
13:59
Speaker 1: the Tiger that the the guy's not singing that high picture,
14:01
Speaker 1: although I know he hits that high note and I
14:03
Speaker 1: knew that, But from the start that guy starts out
14:06
Speaker 1: like a little higher than I can go. So it's
14:09
Speaker 1: just it's not necessarily a treat for everyone around me
14:13
Speaker 1: when I'm singing karaoke, because I accidentally every once in
14:17
Speaker 1: a while I have a night where like every song
14:18
Speaker 1: I pick is right in my wheelhouse and I'm nailing him.
14:21
Speaker 1: But for the most part, it's uh yeah, I woarrible
14:26
Speaker 1: a little bit. I guess I think the key to
14:28
Speaker 1: karaoke is to get your songs that you know you
14:30
Speaker 1: can do and kind of stick to those. Well, I'm
14:32
Speaker 1: I'm not like a pro. Well you know, uh like
14:36
Speaker 1: I did Foreigners Cold as Ice one time by accident
14:39
Speaker 1: because the song I wanted to do, I think, under pressure,
14:42
Speaker 1: someone had done and I was they were calling me.
14:44
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, well, I guess I'll just do this,
14:46
Speaker 1: and the karaoke guy hit in Philadelphia said, well, I
14:48
Speaker 1: hope you're hope you can have a vice for your testicles,
14:52
Speaker 1: but you didn't say testicles why? And then I remembered
14:56
Speaker 1: how high that song was. It is. It's a disaster
15:00
Speaker 1: that I have the Tigers not that far off. Um
15:04
Speaker 1: and I should give a plug here to um. Sig
15:08
Speaker 1: Gold's Request Room. If you're in New York City, you
15:12
Speaker 1: should go to sig Gold's Request Room. It's on one
15:16
Speaker 1: of those private karaoke twenty six. It's not private. It's
15:19
Speaker 1: just a piano karaoke bar, not private room. But it's
15:24
Speaker 1: a back room with like a heavy curtain, so there's
15:27
Speaker 1: a sense that it's private, but it's not private. It's
15:30
Speaker 1: just you just show up and but it's live. It's
15:32
Speaker 1: a guy playing piano instead of a backing track. Yeah,
15:34
Speaker 1: it's a guy named Joe McGuinty. He's a very good
15:37
Speaker 1: talented musician. He's actually a friend of you, Mace, and
15:41
Speaker 1: he used to play for the Psychedelic First and he
15:44
Speaker 1: now he's one of the owners of Sig Gold's Request Room. Man,
15:48
Speaker 1: that place is gonna blow up now, I hope so
15:50
Speaker 1: it should. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, Alright, boy,
15:53
Speaker 1: that was a good segue or not segue, because that
15:56
Speaker 1: leads to nothing. No, it leads to how do we
16:00
Speaker 1: get on that Doppler effect? Yeah? Exactly, So, uh, let's
16:05
Speaker 1: talk about set again. Let's bring this all back home
16:09
Speaker 1: set or the different STIs around the world. Decided at
16:12
Speaker 1: one point that UM, like you said, a good way
16:15
Speaker 1: to find transmission might be to listen out for it.
16:19
Speaker 1: And if we're gonna listen, UM, what would be the
16:23
Speaker 1: most likely UM radio station that they would transmit? Well, yeah,
16:28
Speaker 1: I mean like and of course it's not a radio station.
16:30
Speaker 1: I'd say that as a joke, but but that was
16:33
Speaker 1: the first That was the first. Um. That wasn't the
16:37
Speaker 1: first thing they thought of. Like if if you say, okay,
16:41
Speaker 1: we can't go to distant planets to start searching for aliens,
16:45
Speaker 1: there's just it's just too far away. We would all
16:48
Speaker 1: die on the way there. Right, we're gonna wait for
16:51
Speaker 1: them to come down and play a mood at Devil's Tower. Instead,
16:57
Speaker 1: we're gonna look for traces of them. Yeah, how can
17:00
Speaker 1: we find But that were listening wasn't immediately the thing.
17:04
Speaker 1: They started thinking like in different ways that you could
17:07
Speaker 1: find evidence of alien civilizations. And finally what they settled
17:12
Speaker 1: on was there, if you're an alien civilization, you are
17:16
Speaker 1: probably familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum, So let's start looking there.
17:21
Speaker 1: And they started looking at the electromagnetic spectrum to see
17:25
Speaker 1: maybe where you would find some sort of evidence of
17:28
Speaker 1: alien civilization. And they thought, how about the radio band. Yeah,
17:31
Speaker 1: there were a couple of physicists from Cornell in the sixties,
17:35
Speaker 1: Philip Morrison and Giesipicconi, who reckoned that, you know, they're
17:40
Speaker 1: going to find a common language. They're going to broadcast
17:43
Speaker 1: on what's like the most common language of the universe,
17:50
Speaker 1: hydrogen Espanola, espaniola. Not quite uh. I'm sort of being
17:58
Speaker 1: fun here with like saying, it's a radio stay and
18:00
Speaker 1: it's a line. But hydrogen is the most abundant common
18:03
Speaker 1: element in the universe, and there is a hydrogen line
18:06
Speaker 1: hydrogen frequency, so they figured this may be a good
18:10
Speaker 1: place to start listening. Yeah, and and um, Hydrogen's protons flip.
18:14
Speaker 1: They change spin pretty pretty much all the time, right,
18:20
Speaker 1: And as they flip and change their spin, they admit
18:24
Speaker 1: a little bit, just a tiny teensy bit of electromagnetic radiation,
18:27
Speaker 1: like a little glow right, and that the frequency of
18:31
Speaker 1: that emission is at four hundred and twenty mega hurts.
18:36
Speaker 1: Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe
18:40
Speaker 1: and hydrogen is flipping all of the time, it's also
18:44
Speaker 1: emitting this radiation all the time, which makes twenty mega
18:48
Speaker 1: hurts the most common frequency on the entire electro magnetic spectrum.
18:55
Speaker 1: Oh hydrogen all the time. And again the city researchers
18:59
Speaker 1: Philip Morris and just set be um and I know
19:04
Speaker 1: it's Philip Morrison. I was just making a show, a
19:07
Speaker 1: tobacco joke. They have their hands and everything. Um. Since
19:11
Speaker 1: these guys said they would probably transmit somewhere on the
19:16
Speaker 1: radio spectrum, um, and they would probably be familiar with
19:21
Speaker 1: radio spectrums and electromagnetism, they would also probably know, just
19:25
Speaker 1: like we just figured out, that the most common frequency
19:29
Speaker 1: in the entire universe, no matter where you are, mega hurts.
19:33
Speaker 1: So maybe this would be a really good place to
19:36
Speaker 1: listen out for alien radio transmissions. That's right, and the
19:40
Speaker 1: wild signal was broadcast at four point four or five
19:45
Speaker 1: five six mega hurts right in the middle of the
19:48
Speaker 1: hydrogen line, right on the most common frequency in the
19:53
Speaker 1: entire universe. We found in nineteen seven radio transmission that
19:58
Speaker 1: was thirty times strong or than the normal background noise
20:03
Speaker 1: on that frequency. That's right, and that makes uh made
20:06
Speaker 1: scientists go holy cow or wow. That even made skeptics go, oh,
20:12
Speaker 1: but what's this all about? Exactly the shape of it,
20:16
Speaker 1: like we talked about the pyramid shape, um, is exactly
20:19
Speaker 1: what you would expect. So that made everyone sit up
20:22
Speaker 1: and go all right, well there's also that. And then
20:25
Speaker 1: the sharpness, I know is the third big reason that
20:28
Speaker 1: it just doesn't fit in right or it does fit
20:31
Speaker 1: in as an alien transmission. So there are tons of
20:33
Speaker 1: like um, very powerful bursts here. They're radio transmissions like quasars,
20:39
Speaker 1: emit um radio transmissions and UM satellites. There's well, there's
20:45
Speaker 1: a lot of natural ones. I mean the natural ones
20:48
Speaker 1: that are very messy. They get spread across the band,
20:52
Speaker 1: the electromagnetic pants. So um, if you got like a
20:56
Speaker 1: burst from like a quasar or something like that, you
20:59
Speaker 1: found it through the big year, you're going to it's
21:02
Speaker 1: gonna turn up on say like channel fourteen forty four,
21:06
Speaker 1: it's going to spill over across the band. They're very messy.
21:10
Speaker 1: One of the things that really makes the Wild signals
21:13
Speaker 1: so significant is that it was um tuned. Basically, it
21:19
Speaker 1: appears to have been tuned because it came through only
21:22
Speaker 1: on the fourteen frequency. It didn't spill over, and the
21:26
Speaker 1: Big Year was listening to fifty channels. So imagine like
21:30
Speaker 1: your radio is tuned, or you have fifty radios tuned
21:32
Speaker 1: to and so on right up to fourteen whatever that
21:41
Speaker 1: goes to fifty channels out Um, the wild signal only
21:45
Speaker 1: came through on the fouency right then, So you've got
21:48
Speaker 1: the sharpness, You've got the fact that it was right
21:50
Speaker 1: in the middle of the hydrogen line, you have that
21:52
Speaker 1: pyramid shape, and everyone is wondering what the heck is
21:55
Speaker 1: going on? And uh, right after this message, we will
21:58
Speaker 1: talk about a few reasons why I may not be
22:01
Speaker 1: an alien transmission. All right, So we've made a bit
22:18
Speaker 1: of a case that there's something hinky that happened on
22:21
Speaker 1: August seven, Right, Yeah, I think so pretty strong case. Um.
22:29
Speaker 1: Of course, when you make a case like this, it's
22:32
Speaker 1: like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Basically, what
22:36
Speaker 1: we've ended up with is this is some evidence. So
22:40
Speaker 1: you can't make like a full claim that hey, this
22:43
Speaker 1: is definitely an alien trying to get in touch with us,
22:45
Speaker 1: because all we have is that SEV burst. We haven't
22:49
Speaker 1: been able to find it since then. Uh, and we've
22:52
Speaker 1: looked or listened, right, and just attending in an unexplained
22:56
Speaker 1: radio signal doesn't I mean, it's just it's not like
23:00
Speaker 1: the signal said, hey, we're broadcasting to you live from
23:04
Speaker 1: Kepler forty three B. We'll be seeing you guys in
23:09
Speaker 1: a dr when we come down and take over your
23:12
Speaker 1: planets can be a bad day for you. Um. Yeah,
23:15
Speaker 1: So there's like you said, that it's not in and
23:18
Speaker 1: of itself approven alien signal. But um, there are a
23:22
Speaker 1: lot of really unexplainable things that support the idea that
23:26
Speaker 1: that's potentially possible. There are a lot of people who
23:29
Speaker 1: have tried to put out explanations to the contrary. Right.
23:33
Speaker 1: For one, they have gone back and listened to that
23:37
Speaker 1: same patch of sky over and over again more than
23:40
Speaker 1: a hundred times, and no one's ever picked up the
23:42
Speaker 1: wild signal again. Yeah, and I have sure it would
23:46
Speaker 1: be nice to go back to that same patch of
23:48
Speaker 1: sky and hear it again. But if it takes a
23:51
Speaker 1: lot of energy to beam a signal like that from
23:53
Speaker 1: deep space it may have been a one off or um.
23:57
Speaker 1: Some people have theorized that maybe if you were an
24:00
Speaker 1: alien civilization, it takes so much power to broadcast in
24:04
Speaker 1: every direction, you might use more of a lighthouse sweeping method, um.
24:08
Speaker 1: And so it wouldn't be at that fixed point, you know,
24:11
Speaker 1: it's just out there moving across the sky, right and um,
24:14
Speaker 1: it just so happens that the big ear and this
24:17
Speaker 1: lighthouse radio beacon crossed one another the same Yeah, it's
24:23
Speaker 1: just the right time. Um. Yeah, that is a pretty
24:26
Speaker 1: good counter explanation or counter argument to that one. Another
24:29
Speaker 1: one was that it was, um, it was some sort
24:33
Speaker 1: of transmission from Earth projected and reflected off of like
24:38
Speaker 1: a piece of space debris. There's a lot of junk
24:40
Speaker 1: out in space. You've seen gravity. I've seen gravity. There's
24:44
Speaker 1: a lot of space junk out there, and it can
24:46
Speaker 1: reflect radio signals. Right. But there's some real problems with
24:50
Speaker 1: that explanation as well. Yeah, because I believe that from
24:54
Speaker 1: Earth we we don't transmit on the hydrogen line, correct, right,
24:59
Speaker 1: it's protected, like you're not allowed to transmit on that
25:01
Speaker 1: because people are listening out for aliens on that line.
25:05
Speaker 1: So no bounce back. No, So even if you do
25:07
Speaker 1: have one jerk whose sole purpose in life is to
25:11
Speaker 1: mess with SETI scientists by beaming radio signals at twenty
25:16
Speaker 1: mega hurts um so that they'll get beam back into space.
25:21
Speaker 1: Even if there was somebody transmitting and it it's supposedly
25:24
Speaker 1: bounced off a space junk, there's still problems with that explanation.
25:29
Speaker 1: To Chiefly, the space junk would have to be moving
25:34
Speaker 1: in the same direction at the exact same rate as
25:37
Speaker 1: Earth in order to give the illusion that it was
25:40
Speaker 1: coming from a fixed point in outer space, because remember,
25:45
Speaker 1: the Earth would actually it would have to it would
25:48
Speaker 1: have to be even more mind boggling and perfect than that.
25:52
Speaker 1: It would have to be moving at a rate that
25:54
Speaker 1: allowed the Earth to pass by it over the course
25:58
Speaker 1: of seventy two seconds. It couldn't just be moving at
26:01
Speaker 1: the same rate or else the bigger exactly so um.
26:06
Speaker 1: Apparently Jerry Ahman was a skeptic of his own WOW signal,
26:10
Speaker 1: and even he was like this, no, that the space debriefing,
26:15
Speaker 1: It's just that probability of everything lining up like that
26:20
Speaker 1: is just so um small that I hereby dismissed that
26:26
Speaker 1: that's what he did and uh, here's the thing. A
26:29
Speaker 1: few years later, I think in nine actually develop the
26:32
Speaker 1: capability for this big year uh, and then other radio
26:35
Speaker 1: telescopes to move on their own. UM. So, in other words,
26:39
Speaker 1: if it would have locked onto that signal, it could
26:41
Speaker 1: have locked on and then counteracted the rotation of the
26:44
Speaker 1: Earth and really listened to see how long that thing lasted. Yeah,
26:47
Speaker 1: because we have no idea how long it lasted. We
26:49
Speaker 1: know it lasted at least seventy two seconds, but no
26:52
Speaker 1: more than twenty four hours because it wasn't there the
26:55
Speaker 1: day before, and it wasn't there the day after when
26:57
Speaker 1: the Big Year went through and swept past the same
27:00
Speaker 1: the same patch of sky. UM. So the data believe me, Yes,
27:06
Speaker 1: they did UM. And like we said, they started listening
27:08
Speaker 1: for it, specifically UM the very large array the v
27:13
Speaker 1: l A in the mid nineties, and that is is
27:16
Speaker 1: that in New Mexico. I think, uh, yeah, New Mexico
27:20
Speaker 1: UM that has the power of twenty seven separate radio
27:24
Speaker 1: antenna's UM a hundred times more sensitive than the Big Year.
27:28
Speaker 1: And they specifically UM. This guy named Robert Gray, an
27:32
Speaker 1: amateur astronomer, went looking for it, pointed it towards Sagittarius,
27:36
Speaker 1: which is sort of the rough direction that the wild
27:39
Speaker 1: signal came from. And again he's like, I haven't heard
27:42
Speaker 1: anything since then. Um, well then, and that's another point
27:46
Speaker 1: that a lot of people say it was nothing, is
27:49
Speaker 1: that the that point out in deep space, out in
27:52
Speaker 1: the sky. There's nothing there, right, There's no planet, there's
27:56
Speaker 1: no star, there's no nothing. So what what is some
28:01
Speaker 1: seemingly artificial radio transmission being broadcast from when there's nothing
28:05
Speaker 1: but space out there? Pretty weird? It is very weird.
28:09
Speaker 1: But again, every argument that's been made has been Uh,
28:15
Speaker 1: you can make a counter argument to an irrational reasonable one.
28:18
Speaker 1: So where are we saying that there that this was
28:22
Speaker 1: an alien transmission? Not necessarily, but it is still potentially
28:28
Speaker 1: a reasonable explanation given the the evidence that the Wow
28:33
Speaker 1: signal presents. Yeah, I think, um, the way I like
28:37
Speaker 1: looking at it is what Jerry Aiman said, Um sometimes
28:40
Speaker 1: in the eighties he says, the best way I can
28:41
Speaker 1: think of it is that it was a tug on
28:44
Speaker 1: the cosmic fishing line. Doesn't prove that you have a
28:46
Speaker 1: fish on the line, but it does suggest it if
28:48
Speaker 1: you keep your line in the water at that spot,
28:50
Speaker 1: you might get a fish. So I don't know necessarily
28:53
Speaker 1: about that spot, but it was it was something that
28:55
Speaker 1: we can't quite explain. And um, you know, keep the
29:00
Speaker 1: very large array going, like, keep listening, keep watching the
29:03
Speaker 1: skis skies. Um, you got anything else? Do we miss anything? Oh? Man,
29:11
Speaker 1: we could go on about ceti and all that stuff
29:14
Speaker 1: for days. Maybe we will someday. I think the official
29:17
Speaker 1: skeptics um line is that what did they finally say?
29:23
Speaker 1: They like, it's a the Skeptics Club. Yeah, the Skeptics Club,
29:27
Speaker 1: they said, uh oh, an interstellar radio source of unknown
29:31
Speaker 1: origin is the official line. So the Skeptics Club A
29:36
Speaker 1: big shrug of the shoulders essentially. Yeah, so who knows?
29:40
Speaker 1: Six e q U J five pretty remarkable. I'll bet
29:44
Speaker 1: somebody has that tattooed on them somewhere. I bet he
29:46
Speaker 1: spit oh yeah, totally, like on the back of their neck. Um.
29:49
Speaker 1: I bet Jerry Amin like spit his coffee all over
29:51
Speaker 1: the paper too, you know, did a big spit take. Yeah, uh, classic, totally.
30:00
Speaker 1: He's like the Jerry Lewis of astronomers. Uh. If you
30:06
Speaker 1: want to know more about Jerry Lewis or the Wow
30:08
Speaker 1: signal or anything like that, you can type some words
30:11
Speaker 1: like six e q U J five in the search
30:15
Speaker 1: bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I
30:18
Speaker 1: said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. I'm
30:22
Speaker 1: gonna call this purpose of life. We've got a lot
30:25
Speaker 1: of great responses from does the Body replace Itself? When
30:28
Speaker 1: you went into that really nice philosophical um sidebar on
30:33
Speaker 1: like why are we here? I thought it was interesting. Um. Hey, guys,
30:37
Speaker 1: just finished my four month binge of all seven hundred
30:40
Speaker 1: plus episodes of stuff you should know you wanted to
30:43
Speaker 1: write in about does the Body replace itself? Towards the end,
30:46
Speaker 1: you discuss the purpose of life and why there can't
30:49
Speaker 1: be just a one or a few species. Uh. If
30:51
Speaker 1: the purpose of life is two cycle carbon et cetera,
30:55
Speaker 1: speaking as a geologist biologist, the Earth doesn't need life
30:58
Speaker 1: for anything. The planet would be just fine with no
31:01
Speaker 1: life and no carbon cycling. It would just look quite
31:04
Speaker 1: a bit different. Uh. Talking about the purpose of life
31:08
Speaker 1: like this is an easy and common fallacy that implies
31:11
Speaker 1: some need that's being filled. A life's purpose, if you
31:14
Speaker 1: want to call it, that is simply to replicate itself.
31:18
Speaker 1: That is, at some point there was a molecule able
31:20
Speaker 1: to replicate itself as it did that some copies were
31:24
Speaker 1: better at replicating than others, and so on and so on.
31:27
Speaker 1: Over time, it became more effective to be encased in
31:30
Speaker 1: a membrane uh than to use d N A. Then
31:33
Speaker 1: to use DNA instead of RNA, and so on and
31:36
Speaker 1: so on. Everything a lot today shares the history of
31:38
Speaker 1: ancestors that replicated and passed on their genes successfully. Life
31:42
Speaker 1: doesn't need to live or die, or eat or breathe
31:46
Speaker 1: or swim or fly or photosynthesize or procreate or think
31:49
Speaker 1: or love, but it does those things because they help
31:53
Speaker 1: it effectively copy and pass on the genes. This is
31:57
Speaker 1: the fundamental purpose of life. And though some may think
31:59
Speaker 1: it's cynical or heartless, I find it beautiful and truly awesome.
32:04
Speaker 1: And that is Danny in Seattle. Thanks a lot, Danny Seattle.
32:07
Speaker 1: All the atheists and agnostics out there, right, I just
32:10
Speaker 1: posted a thing. They have like seven percent more agnostics
32:15
Speaker 1: and atheists than the rest of the country, really and
32:18
Speaker 1: seven that's pretty significant, and less identify as Christian than
32:23
Speaker 1: the rest of the country. So there's a bunch of
32:26
Speaker 1: godless freaks. Well, thanks Danny for tossing your O pining
32:31
Speaker 1: in about the purpose of life or the purposelessness of life. Uh.
32:36
Speaker 1: If you want to chime in on this whole thing,
32:39
Speaker 1: we can keep it going. You can tweet to us
32:41
Speaker 1: at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
32:44
Speaker 1: on Facebook, dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You
32:47
Speaker 1: can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how
32:49
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com, and as always, join us at
32:52
Speaker 1: at home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot
32:54
Speaker 1: com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
33:01
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff Works dot com. MHM