Man I'm always so happy when another Simon cold read comes out. On a lot of his other channels he's a presenter or educator, but on the cold reads his personality really comes out and he becomes an entertainer. Thanks to Simon and his staff my 300 miles of daily driving goes so much better.
@@Ntwolf1220agreed. At first it the me off but now I mostly just watch channels where he does this (Brain Blaze, Casual Criminalist, Brain Blaze (Mind Fire - Simon Blower), and decoding the unknown (unraveling the unverified - Simon Blower). Are there more?
Its so funny watching him on his other channels because he seems like a really smart confident guy because he puts on a persona and reads from a teleprompter. But here he's so relaxed and completely normal, not knowing things I've i heard of before, its kind of jarring
38:30 > Humans, after receiving a strong signal from the direction of a globular cluster: "It doesn't repeat, therefore not aliens." > Also humans in 1974: "Let's fire up Arecibo and send a message to potential aliens in a globular cluster **********ONCE*************, and never do it again."
Exactly. The important part would not be the content of the message, but the rhythm of the message. If we send one strong beep, but repeat it after a certain time, then two beeps after 2x the period, then four after 4x, eight after 8x, etc. That might be a better way. Or if we send a repeating drum pattern. Something that makes it clear it's a deliberate signal created by an intelligence.
For those interested, there was another explanation offered recently (Aug '24) by Abel Mendez et al involving magnetar flares striking clouds of hydrogen - ie a very rare phenomenon we don't really understand. Depending on who you listen to it solves everything or it's just another random guess, last I looked the paper was still awaiting any sort of official peer review though. It's an interesting idea and a good read, if you like that sort of thing!
Simon talking about how everybody knows what a stochastic process is while mispronouncing stochastic was golden. Keep doing your thing, fact boi, it's fun and informative
Im getting ready to apply for my PhD in Astronomy, and have alwayse been fascinated by the wow signal. Your idea of just building a new big ear telescope with newer, cheaper, technology is just the thing I'm looking for for my Dissertation inspiration. Thank you!
Best of luck to you with your journey to getting your doctorate! I wish I had studied astronomy or astrophysics, but I got my degree in Cell and Molecular Biology…bummed about this still! But I must ask, did the false assumption that you can HEAR radio signals from the radio observatory make you cringe? I always lose my shit when I see the movie Contact, and Jodie Foster is “listening” to the radio telescope array used by SETI? I literally cannot make it through that movie because of the glaring errors in the science of astronomy and the basic understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum
@@SeauxNOLALady actually, contact doesnt make me cringe nerly as much as Armageddon or Geostorm. Contact just tried to convey the concept of radio astronomy and dramatize it for an otherwise uninformed audience. To me, "any space is good space" -usually.
I almost didn’t watch this, because I’ve heard about this before, but I did on the off chance that Danny wrote it. And he did. I get excited every time I realize he has another one out. I’m wondering if he took a few disco biscuits to help him tune in to that soup machine frequency he was talking about.
Oh, if you broadcast on a forbidden channel they absolutely know. When we were kids we used the sqns radios to shout 'bogies' and other immature stuff over different frequencies while on a sugar high. A week later the sqn got a letter from the MOD telling us to pack it the f in 😂 paraphrasing of course.
Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame has a great quote. "Sometimes i think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has ever tried to contact us." Couldn't find anything connecting Steven Spielberg to Mac and Me. He did do ET.
I'm wondering if that's largely in part because they were not responsible for the initial discovery. I presume that it was to their great consternation that it was via "mere" amateurs, rather than one of their esteemed astronomers that the "message" was heard. NASA is pretty well-known in the "fringe science" community (referring to those of us unafraid of asking logical questions; who seek the answers by extending our focus well outside the box and beyond) as being massively egoistic. It was a serious blunder on their part to ignore/ forfeit the opportunity to follow up on that super-rare lead simply bc they were amateurs. It seems like NASA could have, at the very least, done an investigation to confirm/ disprove the claim. It's wild that they instead chose to ignore it all. It does bring the question to mind, tho, "How do we know that NASA didn't follow up secretly? What if they already knew about the msg before its radio appearance? If there's one abundantly clear thing, it's that NASA and the US federal govt are two entities that have long track records suggesting that they are not to be trusted 🤷♀️
@@aprilwills6777No. It is because it was non reproducible. If you can't test your theory, it's a worthless theory. And without at least a second similar event or with data of other possibly related stuff in the same time window, you're basically unable to verify anything. It really could have been aliens, or it could be the proof for dark matter, or whatever you can think of
Funding is so limited that the money they do get usually goes towards other things. The problem with the wow signal is that it was an apparent one off. Science requires things be reproducible and without more signals there’s just nothing that can be done other than the theoretical. One time isn’t science.
I heard a quote from a group of writers and scientists talking about something like this. The idea is that discovery of a signal would be far more likely to just be brief and look really strange. Like if we ever discovered a completely unambiguous signal people might ask "Well what do we know about them" and the rather unsatisfying answer might just be "Well we know they use radar..." It is unlikely that an intelligent species would spend the amount of time and resources and energy needed to broadcast a narrow band signal out into space attempting to contact another species, especially with radio, that they would be unable to meaningfully communicate with. High power narrow band radio broadcast takes a lot of power after all.
You only communicate via electromagnetic wavelengths if…. You are too far away. A scientist will be a scientist. You will reach the roof certainly. If you wanna go beyond that, like I usually do, there’s definitely all sorts of possibilities. Maybe the signal wasn’t for us. Maybe the signal was sent much more closer than we thought.
The problem with assuming the best frequency to listen to is the vibrational frequency of the most abundant element in the universe is that, well, it's the most abundant element in the universe and it vibrates at that frequency. If there was a cloud of hydrogen gas that got excited by a CME or Nova or something, it might send out a signal at that frequency. And you know where there is a high likelihood of gas clouds and energetic waves from stars? A globular cluster. It just seems like it could easily be a natural phenomenon that wasn't specifically directed at us, it just happened to line up one time. And it may line up again (or it may have done so many times in the past) it just does so on such a long scale that we may not hear it again in our lifetimes.
@personzorz yeah, it would make more sense to broadcast at the quietest frequency in the universe, or maybe the inverse of hydrogen or something. And there lies the problem, if we could come up with dozens of logical choices, how many could an alien intelligence come up with? Maybe all that does just bring us back to hydrogen. But who knows?
The scientist part of my brain says, “Well, Simon, any intelligent species is bound to invent numbers, because they originate as a template for exchange. For example, if I want 5 Reese’s cups from you, but I have 30 Laffy Taffys, and we both agree that Reese’s is the superior candy, I may need to pay you 3 Laffy Taffys per Reese’s so that each of us finds the terms agreeable. Intelligent beings across the cosmos will undoubtedly perform similar exchanges, and thus be motivated to create mathematics. If they don’t have 10 fingers like us, they’ll probably choose a base other than 10, but the resulting calculations will be the same when they build their own big-eared radio telescope.” The part of me that still tries to incorporate dinosaurs and mermaids into my home decor thinks, “But if the aliens we meet *do* think like us, we’ll all be best friends!”
"Intelligent beings across the cosmos will undoubtedly perform similar exchanges" is an interesting claim. The scientist part of my brain would like to see evidence to back it. 😃
@秋月無 I'm not entirely sure that exchanges were all that early in our use of numbers. It seems like tracking the stores of a community (family or similar) had to have come first, simply because how can you perform exchanges if you don't know how many you have? Additionally, tracking time seems really basic to humanity -- tracking seasons, gestation periods, etc.
@@occamschainsaw3450 plus you can count 12 on one hand. Which is a dozen. Like in 2x 12 hours, 5x 12 minutes, 12 months, 12 musical notes, 12 numbers with their own words...
@@oliviarecommends If they're intelligent enough to send and receive a signal, they're intelligent enough to build something to do it with, which means they'd have an industrial production with high precision. Which necessitates mathematics. And mathematics and numbers are also important for civilization. They would have people who aren't just producing food but other things. They would have leaders and soldiers and bureaucrats that manage the grain storage. They might not look like us, but there is a high likelihood that they aren't too different. They would have a way to see. They would have a way to interact with their atmosphere. Which means there is sound that they might want to hear. They might be able to make sounds themselves to warn others of dangers. They would have some sort of appendage to interact with the environment and make tools. They would have a way of locomotion. When the alien ship lands it is very likely that the alien slides down the ramp, reaches out with a tentacle, looks the human into their eyes, and make a sound. They basically walk out, give a handshake and say hello.
America: "Searching for life in our galaxy is a waste of taxpayer money. Now, check out this air to ground missile we developed that shoots samurai swords!"
I tend to agree strongly with the guy who makes the point that it would be repeated. However, if we somehow missed other transmissions because we discovered how to find them a bit too late, that could explain it I suppose. YES, you just said it, IT IS REALLY FAR AWAY!!!!!
I mean......apple and samsung and every other 'smartwatch' still thinks calculator eatches are neat. They just calculate more things these days. Like a gps layout of your entire house, place of work, and even how far off the ground you sleep at night. Definitely not at all creepy 🎉
It always makes we wonder why we are looking for intelligent life in the rest of the universe when arguably we haven’t yet found any intelligent life here on Earth.😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
one thing people seem to overlook is the russians were testing massive hydrogen bombs at the time, a system relying on hydrogen frequency to detect sound waves would be comromised by a large enough hydrogen bomb. it would be a massive interference and would come across the system as a massive volume spike because the system is only looking for volume spikes on that particular freqeuncy
7:15 @Simon. Yes, it’s true. You can listen all you want, but don’t transmit on that frequency… especially if you lack permission or a license to do so.
Not to be overly pessimistic or a killjoy, however I don't think people appreciate just how difficult/unlikely it is that a signal sent across the vastness of space actually reaches it's target. Even the distance to our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri is unfathomably large. Even if we were to use the entirety of Earth's energy output to send a signal to Proxima Centauri, and are able to accurately predict where the system will be, since stars move with respect to each other, in a beam cone just wide enough to only bathe the P.C. system and no further, we would still only hit a reasonable size antenna with minute fractions of a mW. Most likely, the "Wow!" signal was just a laser beam from a pulsar or whatever randomly hitting us from millennia in the past.
The Cool Worlds man, David Kipping, does a very good RUclips channel. Intriguing speculation but always grounded in hard facts. Definitely worth a watch.
Go Simon! Danny speaks (types) his mind :) Golf Club... 006 narrowly missed being "Choppered". "the flower reflector swept the sky" "The Soup Machine frequency" :) Childhood history. Danny hates Golfers. "Keep the noise down" "I should have been paying more attention" 30:35 Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth after the Sun, located 4.25 light-years away... "the narrow brand signal"
I worked with satellites during half my time with the US Army (other half was with the Bradley Fighting Vehicle) and I was no expert and I will be the first to admit that I wasn't nearly as good with that job as I was with the Bradley, knowing how weapons work, or any job I ever had really. But from my experience, If it were something from space, it would have repeated at the same time for a couple of days. You would see something occur at the same time, getting stronger, then fading away over those days. Like seeing a comet. You would see it say near sunset, and every day it would get brighter than the day before, as it gets closer then start fading every day as it went away. If it were something ground based, like an atmospheric bounce off of the sky or a cloud, you would have seen it numerous times when those conditions repeated itself. Like the story of a satellite dish at a site that would get an unauthorized access always around a certain time but not on predictable days. Just for it to turn out to be a cop on a highway to the East who would set up his radar gun and the dish would catch it when its look angle was low. If it were aliens, other dishes would have detected it, as they would be constantly transmitting, they wouldn't just send a brief message and give up. It's likely some random event that rarely occurs that was just caught by chance, man made or some cosmic event.
And yet... We as an intelligent species - have done exactly that. We've transmitted messages no more than a handful of times. We haven't ever repeated messages or transmitted in the same direction. So why should we assume an advanced intelligence out there would repeat a broadcast? Given the knowledge that if a transmitted broadcast was received and a reply was transmitted - the timescales involved between serve and receive either be so long that it would be very difficult to justify assigning those resources to it. And given you'd probably want to transmit to numerous parts of the sky, and probably on several different frequencies. You'd need a ton of dishes all listening 24/7 pointing at different parts of the sky for centuries waiting for replies. And if you finally get a reply, what then? It's not like either of you can visit the other civilisation? So given that - how would a civilisation justify the resources required? And given fear of predators (at least in pretty much all life on earth) is primal - why wouldn't it be something they feared too?
look,... I'm a Christian (Episcopalian, specifically), and I often quote Pratchett saying that Revelation is a mushroom dream that belongs in the apocrypha.
7:39 actually most frequency bands are highly protected by various companies and military. I used to work at a news station and our Sony wireless microphones changed frequencies. We were required by law to switch the frequency in a certain amount of time.
Every time I hear about this I say the same thing. If it only happened once and we never hear them again it obviously says, "Be quiet. They'll hear you."
Also about that protected frequency, like your writer suggested, some might use it just for a prank and never be caught. If some dude in Nigeria with a big transmitter, or a ham radio station dude in Memphis has one drunken night messing with the equipment, they surely could send a fake, or accidentally send one.
It definitely came from deep space it matched the antennae pattern of the Big Ear Telescope that rules out Earth based interference or someone on Earth pulling a prank.
I've never seen Mac & Me, but I've seen Paul Rudd on Conan so many times that I immediately recognized the clip just from the audio as I'm watering the garden
I was at a convention where Seth Shostak from SETI answered questions about contact. I got to ask how would aliens even know what a radio signal was, even on the hydrogen line? They would likely call it something else, right? It's possible, he said, but there is no way for that hypothesis to be tested. :)
3:35 - Chapter 1 - What's the frequency kenneth 18:00 - Chapter 2 - Fall on me 31:35 - Chapter 3 - Nightswimming 49:55 - Chapter 4 - New adventurers in Hi Fi 1:04:45 - Chapter 5 - Reckoning
Like the extra-solar rock a couple years back, it's not that aliens is the most likely, but the fact that it's on the list for serious consideration, and actually in the top 5-10 possibilities is awesome. In my sci-fi novel I had the Wow! Signal be the result of an alien spacecraft having a mishap coming out of it's FTL drive. Hitting normal space-time like a bug against a windshield...
While not supposed to be taken seriously, and relating to the subject of the wow signal, I listened to a fictional sci-fi story with a settle reference to the historic wow signal. The story is from the RUclips channel Starbound HFY. In the story The wow signal is purely accidental with the attention to study humans but from a very careful distance. The story mostly revolves around a council of different extraterrestrial species not only learning about humans debating about a future course of action towards humans. It's an interesting perspective on how more advanced / peaceful civilizations would look at humans, especially following the events of World War II. It's one of those stories where I wish it had a sequel but unfortunately it looks like a stand-alone video, for now at least.
Although pretty close, the signal received in Three Body Problem was received in 1979, whereas the Wow! signal was 1977, so these weren't the same event. (which is a missed opportunity really)
If they are sending out signals with radio signals it means they think somewhat similar to us. We already have those similarities despite those vast differences in space and likely culture. Meaning they will probably come to the same conclusion about it being the best frequency for sending a signal, it's not really an opinion... it's more a fact about it being the best. The ability to seperate opinion/belief from reality and objective fact (at least in regards to developing and using actual technology) is likely a necessity. Basically developing radio and sending those signals into space to communicate with other species indicates a huge amount of similarity necessary in our thought processes in regard to this aspect of space and technology.
@@yeoldegunporn You can be *insignificant.* There's a very large disparity between the amount of space in question, and the size of a campfire. From large distances, low energy outputs don't appear significant. Our current energy usage is definitely noticeable. It may not have been, prior to the industrial revolution.
@@tonylawson2222 no, it doesn’t matter. As I said, any intellect can do a spectral analysis of the light our planet reflects and know we existed long before industrialization.
@@yeoldegunporn I agree with you, just look at what we did to cats and dogs, pigs and cows, instead of rewarding the obvious predators/herbivores that hid in the shadows we rewarded the one that seemed "approachable" then learned how taming them could be a benefit to us, and for the former we got dependent on them. if you think about it for half a second, the aliens already know that we have nukes, they can clearly see the "super secret" spy satellite, might as well blast out "oi m8 we're here come check out my server"
Yeah, it's a stretch, but it's a very reasonable one. In order to facilitate communication with unknown entities, you have to start with a basic set of assumptions while acknowledging that these assumptions may be wrong. It gives you a place to start from, as well as to examine what the results of a faulty assumption might look like, so you can be on the look out for those as well.
I always thought the Wow Signal had been observed at many places around the world simultaneously---This was very informative. Danny is a great writer..
The issue with the wow signal is in fact the nature of big ear. A faulty police radio/radio tower/electronic device can cause broad spectrum interference. Its in a car drives past, then away. A broadcast tower strays outside the line due to a momentary short fault or a aircraft radio/transponder fault which is never noticed and/or reported to avoid fines. Issue being, if that signal is bleeding from 1162-1765 mhz (random example, can be any range} but big ear/telescopes of the time would not necessarily be scanning outside that one frequency/any redundancy used to detect such things, if it exists is off/has a fault/is pointing up so misses it.. Such things can be very short range, think dodgy baby monitors, crossed signals or your stereo picking up a signal from your phone before it rings (hard one to explain, it's rarer now, analog vs digital very sort of, but was very common 20+ years ago) In theory big ear/radio telescopes cannot pick that up, except its low to ground, hand built, not monitored 24 7 and requires manual adjustments. The parking lot thing as well, security guard with a "leaky" radio drives or walks across/near.... Plus, 50-60's era tech meets the first generation of mass produced crap tech. TBF, in order to appear as beyond atmospheric/right to big ear still needs a ton of coincidences, but then the longer it runs the more likely it happens, same as with receiving a message from the stars. That and, a ton maybe but still significantly less than a message of alien origin. Last thought, a lot more funding/another 20 years came big ears way off the back. wow.
oh what a TREAT!🤩 i had a short burst of hyperventilating joy when i noticed this video in the sidebar and will now be feeling delighted for more than an hour, yippie😍
Regarding protected frequencies ... that is actually a thing, thanks to the hard work of innumerable radio enthusiasts around the world. The ITU (founded 1865) is part of the UN these days and enjoys international recognition and acceptance of their standards.
Just a couple thoughts from an amateur coder and mathematician: 1) The "Wow" signal could have been a bit flip, provided a few conditions were met. First, taking a look at the "6EQUJ5", I noted that the IBM computer appeared coded so that it only used capital letters and was given (by The Amazing Whistle Boi) that any number greater than 9 was represented by letters A-Z. "6EQUJ5" is exactly equal to 100 when added together. Here, E should equal 14, Q = 26, J = 19, and U = 30, so 6 + 14 + 26 + 30 + 19 + 5 = 100. Now, IF the IBM computer was coded in octal, then 100 would be represented in binary as 0100 0000. Since Simon explained that the Big Ear's readout was usually blank, I can assume that the code for "blank" was just 0000 0000. That means that a bit flip in the seventh bit would result in a change from zero to one hundred. I'm also assuming they didn't code for overflow since they weren't expecting anything more than a 3, and a Z would mean an input of 35 times the normal background. This lack of overflow code means that overflow would have been handled (properly or improperly) by the base software of the IBM itself, not the program assessing the readings. Regardless, the idea is exciting, so I'm going to put out some feelers and actually see if I can get my amateur hands on the original program of Big Ear and an IBM 1130 and see if my theory is correct. 2) It's possible that we may actually the signal again! This rides on another IF, though, sorry to say. If the signal was sent from the other side of a gravitational well strong enough such as a star, galaxy, or black hole, it may have been gravitationally lensed like the supernova dubbed "SN Zwicky", also known as SN 2022qmx, as observed from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai'i. This supernova's light had been split into several different copies of the same image due to a galaxy being located roughly between SN Zwicky and Earth. The cool thing is that these images all arrived at different times because each image had a different amount of space they had to travel in order to reach Earth. This actually let astronomers, who had missed the first supernova image, predict and then observe SN Zwicky go supernova just a few weeks after the initial observation! Here's an article with a neat video that explains the effect: www.keckobservatory.org/sn-zwicky/
That's what I always wondered when we send out messages to be picked up by possible extraterrestrial life: *Why are we not sending them at least twice?* There's a saying in German science, translating to: _Once is never. Twice is once. Thrice is a sufficient experiment._ Sending signals once leaves interpretation to random chance. Sending them twice reduces that likelihood to half. Sending them again and you receive at least two identical messages, it is very unlikely that it was caused by random chance.
Simon is a great motivational speaker: "Everyones life is NOTHING!" - I mean, yea, he is absolutely right - just not often someone says it that bluntly. Would love to hear him talking to his kids about making a difference in the world lol. All jokes - I love Simon
Unfortunately a lot of people don't realize that this probably was the big one. A very powerful Directed signal that probably lasted a long time and contained a lot of Data. Had the Dish been manned and was able to track the Signal and had we been recording the the Modulation and not just the Carrier wave we might today be on a completely different track in our understanding of the universe.
Physics Simon. Physics is how we know aliens will know about radio and realize the importance of the 1420 radio band. Sure, might an alien civilization exist that’s both technologically advanced and doesn’t know about radio/that specific band? It’s possible? But, we’re not really looking for those small chances. The larger chance is that any technological society would understand the significance of a mostly calm radio band and send signals through it.
Really weird to hear Simon suggest telepathy. I feel like if I asked him if humans could invent a telepathy machine, he'd probably say no. That's the thing, it's not just a limit of our brains, the concept doesn't really make sense physically. Now, an alien species could develop an implant that lets them communicate over long distances, sort of like an internal cell phone. But now we're back to aliens discovering the EM spectrum. Besides, I think that's making a common mistake: We're not looking for what every single alien species does, or even what most of them do, we're looking specifically for alien species that understand technology. Even if there were somehow a million billion trillion telepathic aliens, we're still looking for the ones that use radio waves, which we know must form at least sometimes, because WE formed. What exactly does it mean that "most abundant doesn't mean anything in their culture?" We're not talking about them valuing something like having a lot of money. Even humans often think something rarer is more special. But life would certainly have to understand the concept of abundance because anything that didn't understand "I should eat more food than less" won't survive. And once they're intelligent enough, they don't need to have some cultural value for abundance to reason that, if they want to find other civilizations, they should look for things various parts of the universe have in common. It's just a matter of logical thinking, & no, aliens wouldn't have "different logic" because that doesn't even mean anything. Logic isn't like opinions or scientific knowledge, it's the ability to understand basic concepts like cause & effect, contradictions, etc. Clearly not everyone is equally good at it, but it's universal in that A cannot equal not A no matter where you are in the universe. Well, it's not just that sunlike stars are like our "sample of 1," it's also that other stellar objects pose significant challenges to the existence of life, let alone the development of intelligent life. Most stars are red dwarfs, but the problem with a red dwarf is planets need to be REALLY close to it to have liquid water & the stars also have a nasty habit of belching out powerful radiation. Larger stars only live for a few million years, which in our timeline would mean life was still just microbial if it existed at all. And for objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars, & black holes, those are stellar remnants, so life either has to survive the death of the star in addition to the harsh conditions or emerge on a world after the remnant forms. Well, I suppose intelligent life could travel away from where it formed, but you get my point. Mind you, I'm not saying we've ruled out these locations, only that there are valid reasons to be skeptical of them harboring life. I'd argue it's less cost-effective to build a new Big Ear, even if the technology is cheaper, just to look for the Wow! Signal (which it might not even find) when a more advanced telescope that can do more things could be built instead. You'd also have to find someone willing to fund that idea of a cheap, low-tech telescope for a hyperspecific purpose. Don't get me wrong, the potential of the Wow! Signal is very exciting, but despite being the most credible evidence yet, it's still very unlikely for it to wind up being intelligent life. That's a lot of eggs to put in a longshot basket when another telescope could find that it's just some rare phenomenon of interstellar hydrogen gas. I'm not saying that wouldn't be an important discovery in its own right that would teach us something about the universe, but if that's what it is, then there's no guarantee it will even happen in that part of the sky again. The main purpose of looking at that particular area is the premise that it might be an alien signal, which is a bit far-fetched to say just because we don't know what else it could be yet.
8:02 Radio communication equipment manufacture is super heavily regulated, you just have to make it so the manufacturers don’t produce transmitters that can broadcast in the restricted frequencies
39:33 I keep thinking about an episode of Star Trek Voyager where they investigate a planet that had been recently wiped out by a catastrophic chain reaction in the world’s power network. What if we’ve recorded the extinction of an alien species?
Anyone else find it funny that "Bob Gray" is looking for cosmic signals? For those who haven't read the original book, Bob Gray is the human name of Pennywise the Dancing Clown from Stephen King's It. Edit: Spoliers fo the book ahead. It was the movies that made Pennywise the primary form of the creature, in the book it is a true shapeshifter, and it took the form of a human named Bob Gray that worked as a clown named Pennywise, it also took the form of a mummy, the wolfman, a giant bird, a bunch of forms. And the big twist is that its actually female. It's true form is a huge spider that came to earth to lay eggs.
This is what I imagine happened: ;-) A young alien, new to its job at an Earth monitoring outpost, incorrectly taped a series of buttons, sending an ancient signal out. After leaving another boring meeting a supervisor saw what was happening and cut off the transmission, hoping if the signal had been picked up, it could not be translated. “Those signals will be for first contact protocol messages, if this species survives that long?” the supervisor remarked.
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Man I'm always so happy when another Simon cold read comes out. On a lot of his other channels he's a presenter or educator, but on the cold reads his personality really comes out and he becomes an entertainer.
Thanks to Simon and his staff my 300 miles of daily driving goes so much better.
This channel is so much more fun than the other ones
@@Ntwolf1220agreed. At first it the me off but now I mostly just watch channels where he does this (Brain Blaze, Casual Criminalist, Brain Blaze (Mind Fire - Simon Blower), and decoding the unknown (unraveling the unverified - Simon Blower). Are there more?
Its so funny watching him on his other channels because he seems like a really smart confident guy because he puts on a persona and reads from a teleprompter. But here he's so relaxed and completely normal, not knowing things I've i heard of before, its kind of jarring
Braiñ Blaze is the one you want. Thats the purest form of Simon imo
Unless you're in the field of transportation, your commute is both alarming & disconcerting.
38:30
> Humans, after receiving a strong signal from the direction of a globular cluster: "It doesn't repeat, therefore not aliens."
> Also humans in 1974: "Let's fire up Arecibo and send a message to potential aliens in a globular cluster **********ONCE*************, and never do it again."
Exactly. The important part would not be the content of the message, but the rhythm of the message. If we send one strong beep, but repeat it after a certain time, then two beeps after 2x the period, then four after 4x, eight after 8x, etc. That might be a better way. Or if we send a repeating drum pattern.
Something that makes it clear it's a deliberate signal created by an intelligence.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosthen they find out where we are 😅
@@GullyPonDecks bit late for that.
I've always said that when aliens drive by earth, they lock their doors and roll up the windows.
Kinda like east st louis.
@@giselematthews7949 i drove through STL. early last month and can confirm.
😂
Alright Goober, you just made me snort my tea up my nose. It wasn't pleasent.
Sorry @@casey7187
For those interested, there was another explanation offered recently (Aug '24) by Abel Mendez et al involving magnetar flares striking clouds of hydrogen - ie a very rare phenomenon we don't really understand. Depending on who you listen to it solves everything or it's just another random guess, last I looked the paper was still awaiting any sort of official peer review though.
It's an interesting idea and a good read, if you like that sort of thing!
I was waiting for this to come up!!
There is a good description of this explanation on John Michael Godier's channel from about one month ago.
Was recently covered by Anton, Mr “Hello Wonderful Person”. A detailed brief of this work.
It's the best explanation
Yeah it is a big nothing burger. It is weird that he did not research the topic.
Simon talking about how everybody knows what a stochastic process is while mispronouncing stochastic was golden. Keep doing your thing, fact boi, it's fun and informative
stochastic comes from the greek “to guess”, and in that sense Simon nailed it!
Ty, i was gonna say the same thing. Lol
classic whistler 😅
"the narrow brand signal"
He also mispronounced Alpha Centauri. 😂
Im getting ready to apply for my PhD in Astronomy, and have alwayse been fascinated by the wow signal. Your idea of just building a new big ear telescope with newer, cheaper, technology is just the thing I'm looking for for my Dissertation inspiration. Thank you!
Best of luck to you with your journey to getting your doctorate! I wish I had studied astronomy or astrophysics, but I got my degree in Cell and Molecular Biology…bummed about this still! But I must ask, did the false assumption that you can HEAR radio signals from the radio observatory make you cringe? I always lose my shit when I see the movie Contact, and Jodie Foster is “listening” to the radio telescope array used by SETI? I literally cannot make it through that movie because of the glaring errors in the science of astronomy and the basic understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum
@@SeauxNOLALady actually, contact doesnt make me cringe nerly as much as Armageddon or Geostorm. Contact just tried to convey the concept of radio astronomy and dramatize it for an otherwise uninformed audience. To me, "any space is good space" -usually.
"Mostly harmless", thank you for the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy reference 😊
Not bad for a disintegrated pile of rubble.
And lucky to get that much of a mention, if not for Ford it would have been just "harmless".
The whole style of the opening was Doug Adams, Danny had it down nicely. 👍
Hearing “Disco Biscuits” and immediately confused and flashback to early 2000s festival days…
Mid-90s and 'unregulated' raves for me but otherwise took the words right outta my mouth 👏
😂😂 🎉
@@1Thomkro 👌
or the original biscuits (Quaaludes) from, wait for it, the 70s (hence disco) :D
they're still touring, caught them at scamp a few years ago!
I almost didn’t watch this, because I’ve heard about this before, but I did on the off chance that Danny wrote it. And he did. I get excited every time I realize he has another one out. I’m wondering if he took a few disco biscuits to help him tune in to that soup machine frequency he was talking about.
Oh, if you broadcast on a forbidden channel they absolutely know. When we were kids we used the sqns radios to shout 'bogies' and other immature stuff over different frequencies while on a sugar high. A week later the sqn got a letter from the MOD telling us to pack it the f in 😂 paraphrasing of course.
Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame has a great quote. "Sometimes i think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has ever tried to contact us."
Couldn't find anything connecting Steven Spielberg to Mac and Me. He did do ET.
You’re my favorite person for mentioning Bill Waterson! I don’t know anyone who knows Calvin and Hobbes!!! You just made my day 😀
Have you read "The Mysteries"?
Calvin and Hobbes helped raise me and it shows 😂
@RoseJ1983 You are seeeen! My father had the whole collection basically and I loved going over on weekends and pulling it off the shelf
@@RoseJ1983 Lots of people know Calvin and Hobbes.
The fact that simon mispronounced stochastic 47 times in a row is the best post of this video.
Which part of the post?
Came here to say it. "You don't need to tell me what a "sto-chase-ick" process is" lmao
It's "sto-kas-tik" for anyone wondering.
It is pretty weird that more people aren't in the "let's figure out what that weird event was", when that's a huge part of what astronomy does.
I'm wondering if that's largely in part because they were not responsible for the initial discovery. I presume that it was to their great consternation that it was via "mere" amateurs, rather than one of their esteemed astronomers that the "message" was heard. NASA is pretty well-known in the "fringe science" community (referring to those of us unafraid of asking logical questions; who seek the answers by extending our focus well outside the box and beyond) as being massively egoistic. It was a serious blunder on their part to ignore/ forfeit the opportunity to follow up on that super-rare lead simply bc they were amateurs. It seems like NASA could have, at the very least, done an investigation to confirm/ disprove the claim. It's wild that they instead chose to ignore it all. It does bring the question to mind, tho, "How do we know that NASA didn't follow up secretly? What if they already knew about the msg before its radio appearance? If there's one abundantly clear thing, it's that NASA and the US federal govt are two entities that have long track records suggesting that they are not to be trusted 🤷♀️
@@aprilwills6777No. It is because it was non reproducible. If you can't test your theory, it's a worthless theory. And without at least a second similar event or with data of other possibly related stuff in the same time window, you're basically unable to verify anything. It really could have been aliens, or it could be the proof for dark matter, or whatever you can think of
They recently figured it out!! Or at least narrowed it down...
I always palmed it off because I thought it was explained as being something that wasn't as exciting.
Funding is so limited that the money they do get usually goes towards other things. The problem with the wow signal is that it was an apparent one off. Science requires things be reproducible and without more signals there’s just nothing that can be done other than the theoretical. One time isn’t science.
I heard a quote from a group of writers and scientists talking about something like this. The idea is that discovery of a signal would be far more likely to just be brief and look really strange. Like if we ever discovered a completely unambiguous signal people might ask "Well what do we know about them" and the rather unsatisfying answer might just be "Well we know they use radar..."
It is unlikely that an intelligent species would spend the amount of time and resources and energy needed to broadcast a narrow band signal out into space attempting to contact another species, especially with radio, that they would be unable to meaningfully communicate with. High power narrow band radio broadcast takes a lot of power after all.
You only communicate via electromagnetic wavelengths if…. You are too far away. A scientist will be a scientist. You will reach the roof certainly. If you wanna go beyond that, like I usually do, there’s definitely all sorts of possibilities. Maybe the signal wasn’t for us. Maybe the signal was sent much more closer than we thought.
Actually, Proxima Centauri is only 4.25 lightyears away.
I read that as lightsabers and had a moment 😅
Also known as 25 trillion miles.
I came here to say the same thing. I'll upvote and comment to get this higher.
@@jesthered7966 May the force be with you, my friend. Always.
The problem with assuming the best frequency to listen to is the vibrational frequency of the most abundant element in the universe is that, well, it's the most abundant element in the universe and it vibrates at that frequency.
If there was a cloud of hydrogen gas that got excited by a CME or Nova or something, it might send out a signal at that frequency. And you know where there is a high likelihood of gas clouds and energetic waves from stars? A globular cluster.
It just seems like it could easily be a natural phenomenon that wasn't specifically directed at us, it just happened to line up one time. And it may line up again (or it may have done so many times in the past) it just does so on such a long scale that we may not hear it again in our lifetimes.
Hence, hydrogen times pi in the book and movie "contact"
@personzorz yeah, it would make more sense to broadcast at the quietest frequency in the universe, or maybe the inverse of hydrogen or something. And there lies the problem, if we could come up with dozens of logical choices, how many could an alien intelligence come up with?
Maybe all that does just bring us back to hydrogen. But who knows?
@@QBCPerdition As Simon said, it is also a very quiet frequency.
@@TheLithp it's quiet on Earth because we protect it...but if it's the natural vibration frequency of hydrogen, it's probably pretty "loud" in space
The scientist part of my brain says, “Well, Simon, any intelligent species is bound to invent numbers, because they originate as a template for exchange. For example, if I want 5 Reese’s cups from you, but I have 30 Laffy Taffys, and we both agree that Reese’s is the superior candy, I may need to pay you 3 Laffy Taffys per Reese’s so that each of us finds the terms agreeable. Intelligent beings across the cosmos will undoubtedly perform similar exchanges, and thus be motivated to create mathematics. If they don’t have 10 fingers like us, they’ll probably choose a base other than 10, but the resulting calculations will be the same when they build their own big-eared radio telescope.”
The part of me that still tries to incorporate dinosaurs and mermaids into my home decor thinks, “But if the aliens we meet *do* think like us, we’ll all be best friends!”
"Intelligent beings across the cosmos will undoubtedly perform similar exchanges" is an interesting claim. The scientist part of my brain would like to see evidence to back it. 😃
@秋月無 I'm not entirely sure that exchanges were all that early in our use of numbers. It seems like tracking the stores of a community (family or similar) had to have come first, simply because how can you perform exchanges if you don't know how many you have? Additionally, tracking time seems really basic to humanity -- tracking seasons, gestation periods, etc.
We as humans already came up with a bunch of non-base 10 counting systems. The amount of fingers isn’t really a determinate factor here.
@@occamschainsaw3450 plus you can count 12 on one hand. Which is a dozen. Like in 2x 12 hours, 5x 12 minutes, 12 months, 12 musical notes, 12 numbers with their own words...
@@oliviarecommends If they're intelligent enough to send and receive a signal, they're intelligent enough to build something to do it with, which means they'd have an industrial production with high precision. Which necessitates mathematics.
And mathematics and numbers are also important for civilization. They would have people who aren't just producing food but other things. They would have leaders and soldiers and bureaucrats that manage the grain storage.
They might not look like us, but there is a high likelihood that they aren't too different.
They would have a way to see. They would have a way to interact with their atmosphere. Which means there is sound that they might want to hear. They might be able to make sounds themselves to warn others of dangers. They would have some sort of appendage to interact with the environment and make tools. They would have a way of locomotion.
When the alien ship lands it is very likely that the alien slides down the ramp, reaches out with a tentacle, looks the human into their eyes, and make a sound. They basically walk out, give a handshake and say hello.
Like for more Danny scripts 👍
I'm not a big fan of Danny's scripts. His computer's scripts on the other hand.
The "First DTU where Aliens is the most likely theory" is a pretty good badge of honor
America: "Searching for life in our galaxy is a waste of taxpayer money. Now, check out this air to ground missile we developed that shoots samurai swords!"
Don’t knock the samurai missile until you have tried it, promise you won’t be disappointed
@@Michael_G980 i’d like to try the samurai sword missile, can i order one? you can deliver it directly to me
That’s not real is it? It sounds interesting
@Jnp366 sort of, their description is a bit hyperbolic. Look the up the R9X hellfire missile.
I tend to agree strongly with the guy who makes the point that it would be repeated. However, if we somehow missed other transmissions because we discovered how to find them a bit too late, that could explain it I suppose. YES, you just said it, IT IS REALLY FAR AWAY!!!!!
Funny enough, in the book 3 Body Problem it isn't the WOW signal, but I really like how they added it into the show. Which is indeed amazing!
A small blue green planet where it's inhabitants thought calculator watches were a neat idea. 🎉😂... Rip Douglas Adams
In retrospect, aren't all the Western Watches, Cal-Q-Laters ? 🤓
Oh shit... where is my towel...
42
I mean......apple and samsung and every other 'smartwatch' still thinks calculator eatches are neat. They just calculate more things these days. Like a gps layout of your entire house, place of work, and even how far off the ground you sleep at night. Definitely not at all creepy 🎉
It always makes we wonder why we are looking for intelligent life in the rest of the universe when arguably we haven’t yet found any intelligent life here on Earth.😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
WOW...another amazingly entertaining video!!!
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy quotes are delightful
one thing people seem to overlook is the russians were testing massive hydrogen bombs at the time, a system relying on hydrogen frequency to detect sound waves would be comromised by a large enough hydrogen bomb. it would be a massive interference and would come across the system as a massive volume spike because the system is only looking for volume spikes on that particular freqeuncy
Russia stopped testing H bombs in the atmosphere in 1963, when the nuclear powers all signed a treaty. The WOW Signal happened in 1977.
7:15 @Simon. Yes, it’s true. You can listen all you want, but don’t transmit on that frequency… especially if you lack permission or a license to do so.
Not to be overly pessimistic or a killjoy, however I don't think people appreciate just how difficult/unlikely it is that a signal sent across the vastness of space actually reaches it's target. Even the distance to our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri is unfathomably large.
Even if we were to use the entirety of Earth's energy output to send a signal to Proxima Centauri, and are able to accurately predict where the system will be, since stars move with respect to each other, in a beam cone just wide enough to only bathe the P.C. system and no further, we would still only hit a reasonable size antenna with minute fractions of a mW.
Most likely, the "Wow!" signal was just a laser beam from a pulsar or whatever randomly hitting us from millennia in the past.
Best call seti and nasa. You've figured it out.
I've been to the Very Large Aray in New Mexico and it was very interesting. Those radio discs are huge!
And it is indeed, very large
The Cool Worlds man, David Kipping, does a very good RUclips channel. Intriguing speculation but always grounded in hard facts. Definitely worth a watch.
"on a more religious note" was the best joke in the entire video!
I love all the REM references. Even the ones that went over Simon's head.
Yep - I just paused at the Fall on Me chapter to see if anyone else noticed that he missed the theme.
Thank you so much for a deep dive on this topic folks 👍
"Elvis is not dead, he just went home"
Agent K knew what was up
I enjoyed the fact that Danny used REM songs for the chapter titles.
Hi from Cape Town, South Africa - yes Simon your gran did live in JHB🎉
And another one, proudly representing Kenilworth:)
Go Simon!
Danny speaks (types) his mind :)
Golf Club...
006 narrowly missed being "Choppered".
"the flower reflector swept the sky"
"The Soup Machine frequency" :) Childhood history.
Danny hates Golfers.
"Keep the noise down"
"I should have been paying more attention"
30:35 Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth after the Sun, located 4.25 light-years away...
"the narrow brand signal"
I just like to say as a researcher at the Green Bank Observatory, we are in fact, not in the state of Virginia, but the state of West Virginia.
I worked with satellites during half my time with the US Army (other half was with the Bradley Fighting Vehicle) and I was no expert and I will be the first to admit that I wasn't nearly as good with that job as I was with the Bradley, knowing how weapons work, or any job I ever had really. But from my experience, If it were something from space, it would have repeated at the same time for a couple of days. You would see something occur at the same time, getting stronger, then fading away over those days. Like seeing a comet. You would see it say near sunset, and every day it would get brighter than the day before, as it gets closer then start fading every day as it went away. If it were something ground based, like an atmospheric bounce off of the sky or a cloud, you would have seen it numerous times when those conditions repeated itself. Like the story of a satellite dish at a site that would get an unauthorized access always around a certain time but not on predictable days. Just for it to turn out to be a cop on a highway to the East who would set up his radar gun and the dish would catch it when its look angle was low. If it were aliens, other dishes would have detected it, as they would be constantly transmitting, they wouldn't just send a brief message and give up. It's likely some random event that rarely occurs that was just caught by chance, man made or some cosmic event.
There was a paper that dropped recently about it possibly involving cold hydrogen clouds :)
And yet... We as an intelligent species - have done exactly that. We've transmitted messages no more than a handful of times. We haven't ever repeated messages or transmitted in the same direction. So why should we assume an advanced intelligence out there would repeat a broadcast? Given the knowledge that if a transmitted broadcast was received and a reply was transmitted - the timescales involved between serve and receive either be so long that it would be very difficult to justify assigning those resources to it. And given you'd probably want to transmit to numerous parts of the sky, and probably on several different frequencies. You'd need a ton of dishes all listening 24/7 pointing at different parts of the sky for centuries waiting for replies. And if you finally get a reply, what then? It's not like either of you can visit the other civilisation? So given that - how would a civilisation justify the resources required? And given fear of predators (at least in pretty much all life on earth) is primal - why wouldn't it be something they feared too?
Who remembers back in the late 90s when you could run the SETI analysis program on your computer to help with data analysis?
Seti@home!
Helped spawn the offshoot folding@home!
The distributed computing tech was a big deal back then. Essentially a botnet for good 😂
Danny's "Bible" quote made me laugh so much.
look,... I'm a Christian (Episcopalian, specifically), and I often quote Pratchett saying that Revelation is a mushroom dream that belongs in the apocrypha.
7:39 actually most frequency bands are highly protected by various companies and military. I used to work at a news station and our Sony wireless microphones changed frequencies. We were required by law to switch the frequency in a certain amount of time.
Every time I hear about this I say the same thing. If it only happened once and we never hear them again it obviously says, "Be quiet. They'll hear you."
The 1974 Arecibo Message was my birth announcement. I was born there a couple of days before the message was sent.
Yes, during the cold war, the Soviets would totally mess with that signal and not admit to it.
Also about that protected frequency, like your writer suggested, some might use it just for a prank and never be caught. If some dude in Nigeria with a big transmitter, or a ham radio station dude in Memphis has one drunken night messing with the equipment, they surely could send a fake, or accidentally send one.
I'll bet you the drone pilots in Ukraine really don't care what frequency they use.
It definitely came from deep space it matched the antennae pattern of the Big Ear Telescope that rules out Earth based interference or someone on Earth pulling a prank.
I've never seen Mac & Me, but I've seen Paul Rudd on Conan so many times that I immediately recognized the clip just from the audio as I'm watering the garden
If any electronic device didn't work in the '70s it was because somebody was running a blender in the other room.
I was at a convention where Seth Shostak from SETI answered questions about contact. I got to ask how would aliens even know what a radio signal was, even on the hydrogen line? They would likely call it something else, right? It's possible, he said, but there is no way for that hypothesis to be tested. :)
Has anyone figured out how to access episodes of Unravelling the Unfamiliar on Discobiscuit? If so, I'd appreciate a link.
Ah, it’s always good to see Danny working for extra rations in the Blazement! He may have even earned a 36-hour vacation for this script, well done!
3:35 - Chapter 1 - What's the frequency kenneth
18:00 - Chapter 2 - Fall on me
31:35 - Chapter 3 - Nightswimming
49:55 - Chapter 4 - New adventurers in Hi Fi
1:04:45 - Chapter 5 - Reckoning
Douglas Adams is looking for his cut 😂
Caught the "mostly harmless" at the end too did ya?
@@LOTR22090able there was a couple of reference to HHGTG
I was a SETI at Home volunteer for a number of years. The first citizen-scientist program I am aware of.
Like the extra-solar rock a couple years back, it's not that aliens is the most likely, but the fact that it's on the list for serious consideration, and actually in the top 5-10 possibilities is awesome.
In my sci-fi novel I had the Wow! Signal be the result of an alien spacecraft having a mishap coming out of it's FTL drive. Hitting normal space-time like a bug against a windshield...
While not supposed to be taken seriously, and relating to the subject of the wow signal, I listened to a fictional sci-fi story with a settle reference to the historic wow signal.
The story is from the RUclips channel Starbound HFY. In the story The wow signal is purely accidental with the attention to study humans but from a very careful distance.
The story mostly revolves around a council of different extraterrestrial species not only learning about humans debating about a future course of action towards humans.
It's an interesting perspective on how more advanced / peaceful civilizations would look at humans, especially following the events of World War II. It's one of those stories where I wish it had a sequel but unfortunately it looks like a stand-alone video, for now at least.
Yes! A DTU to listen to while doing cardio at the gym
1:42 Ha! There's the glorious reference I've been searching for since the beginning of this story of an intro!
Although pretty close, the signal received in Three Body Problem was received in 1979, whereas the Wow! signal was 1977, so these weren't the same event. (which is a missed opportunity really)
Anton Petrov has a short video explaining exactly what the source was. It was Hydrogen clouds hit by a star emission.
Allegedly. Truth is, we don't have enough data.
We got like. 15 bytes.
Neutron star, but yeap.
What he actually did was talk about a paper that suggests that such a phenomenon could potentially look like that.
It's a hypothesis - that was published with zero peer review
If they are sending out signals with radio signals it means they think somewhat similar to us.
We already have those similarities despite those vast differences in space and likely culture.
Meaning they will probably come to the same conclusion about it being the best frequency for sending a signal, it's not really an opinion... it's more a fact about it being the best.
The ability to seperate opinion/belief from reality and objective fact (at least in regards to developing and using actual technology) is likely a necessity.
Basically developing radio and sending those signals into space to communicate with other species indicates a huge amount of similarity necessary in our thought processes in regard to this aspect of space and technology.
Most importantly: until we know for 100% that the universe isnt a dark forest, we should turn as quiet as possible.
You can’t be quiet in the universe. The moment humans made campfires we were detectable.
@@yeoldegunporn
You can be *insignificant.*
There's a very large disparity between the amount of space in question, and the size of a campfire. From large distances, low energy outputs don't appear significant.
Our current energy usage is definitely noticeable. It may not have been, prior to the industrial revolution.
@@tonylawson2222 no, it doesn’t matter. As I said, any intellect can do a spectral analysis of the light our planet reflects and know we existed long before industrialization.
@@yeoldegunporn I agree with you, just look at what we did to cats and dogs, pigs and cows, instead of rewarding the obvious predators/herbivores that hid in the shadows we rewarded the one that seemed "approachable" then learned how taming them could be a benefit to us, and for the former we got dependent on them.
if you think about it for half a second, the aliens already know that we have nukes, they can clearly see the "super secret" spy satellite, might as well blast out "oi m8 we're here come check out my server"
@@yeoldegunporn That doesn't mean that we should send signals on purpose.
Yeah, it's a stretch, but it's a very reasonable one. In order to facilitate communication with unknown entities, you have to start with a basic set of assumptions while acknowledging that these assumptions may be wrong. It gives you a place to start from, as well as to examine what the results of a faulty assumption might look like, so you can be on the look out for those as well.
I always thought the Wow Signal had been observed at many places around the world simultaneously---This was very informative. Danny is a great writer..
I love how Simon can barely remember stuff that he's made videos on, but he can quote golden eye perfectly 😆
Before i watch, my prediction is that the conclusion will be "pulsar beam."
Tachyons
I binged all of 3 body problem last night. It’s awesome. Can’t wait for the next season!
Yes your live streams are brilliant especially when you can't find Liam and have to replace them with a fake Liam for the day. Ray did amazing!!!
The issue with the wow signal is in fact the nature of big ear. A faulty police radio/radio tower/electronic device can cause broad spectrum interference. Its in a car drives past, then away. A broadcast tower strays outside the line due to a momentary short fault or a aircraft radio/transponder fault which is never noticed and/or reported to avoid fines. Issue being, if that signal is bleeding from 1162-1765 mhz (random example, can be any range} but big ear/telescopes of the time would not necessarily be scanning outside that one frequency/any redundancy used to detect such things, if it exists is off/has a fault/is pointing up so misses it..
Such things can be very short range, think dodgy baby monitors, crossed signals or your stereo picking up a signal from your phone before it rings (hard one to explain, it's rarer now, analog vs digital very sort of, but was very common 20+ years ago)
In theory big ear/radio telescopes cannot pick that up, except its low to ground, hand built, not monitored 24 7 and requires manual adjustments. The parking lot thing as well, security guard with a "leaky" radio drives or walks across/near....
Plus, 50-60's era tech meets the first generation of mass produced crap tech.
TBF, in order to appear as beyond atmospheric/right to big ear still needs a ton of coincidences, but then the longer it runs the more likely it happens, same as with receiving a message from the stars. That and, a ton maybe but still significantly less than a message of alien origin.
Last thought, a lot more funding/another 20 years came big ears way off the back. wow.
Dearest Whistle, you know what a disco biscuits is, of course?
I believe a plausible, natural explanation has now been discovered to explain this, beyond me but JMG did a video on it fairly recently.
I’ve been to the planet disco biscuit many, many times. Mainly in my youth, but I still travel there now and then on occasion… 🕺🏻😅
👍😉
oh what a TREAT!🤩 i had a short burst of hyperventilating joy when i noticed this video in the sidebar and will now be feeling delighted for more than an hour, yippie😍
Regarding protected frequencies ... that is actually a thing, thanks to the hard work of innumerable radio enthusiasts around the world. The ITU (founded 1865) is part of the UN these days and enjoys international recognition and acceptance of their standards.
With what we do know about the size of the universe now, isn't it more rational to assume that there is life on other on other planets !?
No.
What a recommendation while listening to RAH band's 'Messages from the Stars'
1:41 "mostly harmless" 😂😂 shouts to Douglas Adams
Being so confident in knowing about stochastic repeaters while mispronouncing stochastic is peak Simon.
Just a couple thoughts from an amateur coder and mathematician:
1) The "Wow" signal could have been a bit flip, provided a few conditions were met. First, taking a look at the "6EQUJ5", I noted that the IBM computer appeared coded so that it only used capital letters and was given (by The Amazing Whistle Boi) that any number greater than 9 was represented by letters A-Z. "6EQUJ5" is exactly equal to 100 when added together. Here, E should equal 14, Q = 26, J = 19, and U = 30, so 6 + 14 + 26 + 30 + 19 + 5 = 100. Now, IF the IBM computer was coded in octal, then 100 would be represented in binary as 0100 0000. Since Simon explained that the Big Ear's readout was usually blank, I can assume that the code for "blank" was just 0000 0000. That means that a bit flip in the seventh bit would result in a change from zero to one hundred. I'm also assuming they didn't code for overflow since they weren't expecting anything more than a 3, and a Z would mean an input of 35 times the normal background. This lack of overflow code means that overflow would have been handled (properly or improperly) by the base software of the IBM itself, not the program assessing the readings. Regardless, the idea is exciting, so I'm going to put out some feelers and actually see if I can get my amateur hands on the original program of Big Ear and an IBM 1130 and see if my theory is correct.
2) It's possible that we may actually the signal again! This rides on another IF, though, sorry to say. If the signal was sent from the other side of a gravitational well strong enough such as a star, galaxy, or black hole, it may have been gravitationally lensed like the supernova dubbed "SN Zwicky", also known as SN 2022qmx, as observed from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai'i. This supernova's light had been split into several different copies of the same image due to a galaxy being located roughly between SN Zwicky and Earth. The cool thing is that these images all arrived at different times because each image had a different amount of space they had to travel in order to reach Earth. This actually let astronomers, who had missed the first supernova image, predict and then observe SN Zwicky go supernova just a few weeks after the initial observation! Here's an article with a neat video that explains the effect:
www.keckobservatory.org/sn-zwicky/
That's what I always wondered when we send out messages to be picked up by possible extraterrestrial life: *Why are we not sending them at least twice?*
There's a saying in German science, translating to: _Once is never. Twice is once. Thrice is a sufficient experiment._ Sending signals once leaves interpretation to random chance. Sending them twice reduces that likelihood to half. Sending them again and you receive at least two identical messages, it is very unlikely that it was caused by random chance.
@30:46 Promixa Centauri is 4 light years away not 100 as Simon quips. Also love the Douglass Adams reference!
Wow...Simon..just wow...
Simon is a great motivational speaker: "Everyones life is NOTHING!" - I mean, yea, he is absolutely right - just not often someone says it that bluntly. Would love to hear him talking to his kids about making a difference in the world lol. All jokes - I love Simon
The takeaway from this episode? "Everybody's life is a nothing", WOW!
Unfortunately a lot of people don't realize that this probably was the big one.
A very powerful Directed signal that probably lasted a long time and contained a lot of Data. Had the Dish been manned and was able to track the Signal and had we been recording the the Modulation and not just the Carrier wave we might today be on a completely different track in our understanding of the universe.
Absolutely brilliant!! 😊😊😊
Aracebo and the VLA both used in the Jodie Foster film Contact(written by Carl Sagan).
This was one of my favorite episodes I think
Physics Simon. Physics is how we know aliens will know about radio and realize the importance of the 1420 radio band. Sure, might an alien civilization exist that’s both technologically advanced and doesn’t know about radio/that specific band? It’s possible? But, we’re not really looking for those small chances. The larger chance is that any technological society would understand the significance of a mostly calm radio band and send signals through it.
Man. I hope Disco Biscuit gets the glitch in their Big Jugs figured out soon so they can go back to finding those signals!
Really weird to hear Simon suggest telepathy. I feel like if I asked him if humans could invent a telepathy machine, he'd probably say no. That's the thing, it's not just a limit of our brains, the concept doesn't really make sense physically. Now, an alien species could develop an implant that lets them communicate over long distances, sort of like an internal cell phone. But now we're back to aliens discovering the EM spectrum. Besides, I think that's making a common mistake: We're not looking for what every single alien species does, or even what most of them do, we're looking specifically for alien species that understand technology. Even if there were somehow a million billion trillion telepathic aliens, we're still looking for the ones that use radio waves, which we know must form at least sometimes, because WE formed.
What exactly does it mean that "most abundant doesn't mean anything in their culture?" We're not talking about them valuing something like having a lot of money. Even humans often think something rarer is more special. But life would certainly have to understand the concept of abundance because anything that didn't understand "I should eat more food than less" won't survive. And once they're intelligent enough, they don't need to have some cultural value for abundance to reason that, if they want to find other civilizations, they should look for things various parts of the universe have in common. It's just a matter of logical thinking, & no, aliens wouldn't have "different logic" because that doesn't even mean anything. Logic isn't like opinions or scientific knowledge, it's the ability to understand basic concepts like cause & effect, contradictions, etc. Clearly not everyone is equally good at it, but it's universal in that A cannot equal not A no matter where you are in the universe.
Well, it's not just that sunlike stars are like our "sample of 1," it's also that other stellar objects pose significant challenges to the existence of life, let alone the development of intelligent life. Most stars are red dwarfs, but the problem with a red dwarf is planets need to be REALLY close to it to have liquid water & the stars also have a nasty habit of belching out powerful radiation. Larger stars only live for a few million years, which in our timeline would mean life was still just microbial if it existed at all. And for objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars, & black holes, those are stellar remnants, so life either has to survive the death of the star in addition to the harsh conditions or emerge on a world after the remnant forms. Well, I suppose intelligent life could travel away from where it formed, but you get my point. Mind you, I'm not saying we've ruled out these locations, only that there are valid reasons to be skeptical of them harboring life.
I'd argue it's less cost-effective to build a new Big Ear, even if the technology is cheaper, just to look for the Wow! Signal (which it might not even find) when a more advanced telescope that can do more things could be built instead. You'd also have to find someone willing to fund that idea of a cheap, low-tech telescope for a hyperspecific purpose. Don't get me wrong, the potential of the Wow! Signal is very exciting, but despite being the most credible evidence yet, it's still very unlikely for it to wind up being intelligent life. That's a lot of eggs to put in a longshot basket when another telescope could find that it's just some rare phenomenon of interstellar hydrogen gas. I'm not saying that wouldn't be an important discovery in its own right that would teach us something about the universe, but if that's what it is, then there's no guarantee it will even happen in that part of the sky again. The main purpose of looking at that particular area is the premise that it might be an alien signal, which is a bit far-fetched to say just because we don't know what else it could be yet.
8:02 Radio communication equipment manufacture is super heavily regulated, you just have to make it so the manufacturers don’t produce transmitters that can broadcast in the restricted frequencies
Love the nod to the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
The editing on this is great
39:33 I keep thinking about an episode of Star Trek Voyager where they investigate a planet that had been recently wiped out by a catastrophic chain reaction in the world’s power network. What if we’ve recorded the extinction of an alien species?
This one just reminds me of an old Fanta commercial. People were on the disk burping, and observers thought it was a message from aliens x)
Simon, PLEASE do a video about the latest information regarding Lue Elizondo on the alien topic
I think people may not realize just how much power it would require to send a signal that strong that far. Repeating the signal is a huge effort.
Anyone else find it funny that "Bob Gray" is looking for cosmic signals? For those who haven't read the original book, Bob Gray is the human name of Pennywise the Dancing Clown from Stephen King's It.
Edit: Spoliers fo the book ahead.
It was the movies that made Pennywise the primary form of the creature, in the book it is a true shapeshifter, and it took the form of a human named Bob Gray that worked as a clown named Pennywise, it also took the form of a mummy, the wolfman, a giant bird, a bunch of forms. And the big twist is that its actually female. It's true form is a huge spider that came to earth to lay eggs.
The planet of Disco Biscuit?
what kind of biscuits they into on this planet? Purple Tulips or triangular mitsus?
This is what I imagine happened: ;-)
A young alien, new to its job at an Earth monitoring outpost, incorrectly taped a series of buttons, sending an ancient signal out.
After leaving another boring meeting a supervisor saw what was happening and cut off the transmission, hoping if the signal had been picked up, it could not be translated.
“Those signals will be for first contact protocol messages, if this species survives that long?” the supervisor remarked.