A hundred years from now the Vogon Constructor Fleet arrives: "Did you get our message about the hyperspatial express route we're building through your solar system?"
And every single one of them are just a hypothesis. My favorite argument against the wow signal is that it happened only once. And for some reason aliens wouldn't do that. Also, arecibo sent our own "wow signal", and we (and by "we" I mean scientists) did it exactly once. 🤔 Never expect an academic to see the patterns in multi-domain problems. Specialists become too specialized.
@@vileluca whats annoying about it is that scientist are like maybe its aliens, then they invent a new theory which has odds of 1 in gazzillion of being possible, but since its not aliens they just accept that theory.
I wish there could be an afterlife in which you get to explore the universe as a ghost. Since you'd be an immaterial ghost, you wouldn't be limited to the laws of physics, so you could travel at any speed you wanted and be able to go anywhere without worrying about radiation exposure or being hit by astroids. You'd be able to explore gazillions of solar systems at various stages of their life, see how things were at the very beginning and how they are toward the end. You'd have all the time in the world. You'd be able to find out what kind of life is out there, how common it is, etc. You'd be able to look inside a black hole, and be right up close to a supernovae. There would be no end to the worlds you could explore and the things you could learn and observe.
Your describing an intelligent species 1 billion years more advanced than us. A C Clarke said that the tech of a very advanced civ would seem like magic.
I think you would really enjoy a very old science fiction novel, arguably the very first space exploration novel, called "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon.
I had a dream once that was almost exactly like that. I was floating in empty space, I had the ability to travel as fast and as far as I wanted and it was the loneliest experience ever. In the dream space was as vast as it is in reality and with no map, no information, just the stars, it was impossible to do or get to anything. Just endless space. I can't fathom what the dream meant, if anything, but it was kind of scary in an abstract, maximally lost kind of way.
@@Nefville I've had a lot of flying dreams, but never flying in space. I can see how it would be disorienting, though, because there's no fixed points of reference. I can see how it would be easy to get lost. I have had dreams where I kept flying higher and higher trying to get over all the power lines, and if I flew too high, I would start to get disoriented.
I came to discuss this as well. I can’t find any evidence the signal was recorded in any other way, only that RSSI was measured on a 12 second interval, which was always my understanding of how big ear worked. If there is some way to infer no modulation from that I’d love to know more, but I think we just have no evidence of modulation (because we weren’t looking for it).
@@jfutheytheres no point, like you said we werent looking for it, and that is pretty much that. However if I was told to try to communicate with an alien species i would use a bunch of different frequencies because I have no clue how others perceive time
this is a good point. In sensors and data acquisition class, we were told not to connect the dots of samples, cause it implies a smooth transition as opposed to a lack of resolution of the sensor.
It would like "I wonder if in the future, there will be reporting about how certain things we thought were meteorological events were indeed Gods showing their anger". That's not the way history point at...
I wasn't wildly interested in watching this video but then I realized how easily this news could have been clickbait material and how "non-clickbaity" the thumbnail was and I wanted to reward Anton for his honesty and for just being such a great guy. So I watched it anyway. And you know what? He actually made this story very interesting! What a wonderful person he is! Thanks Anton! ♥
I honestly found this extremely click bait-y, especially when compared to some of his older videos. He essentially sold a recent, unconfirmed hypothesis as a definite answer to an astronomical mystery. That's just horrible Science. I don't care how unlikely he thinks aliens is, selling an uncertainty as a definite solution is just intellectual dishonesty. Not knowing the answer to something is totally valid and key to earnest skepticism.
@@DrinkyMcBeer I don't really like the 'it could be worse' when talking about someone that's supposed to be a Science Educator. It could be worse, but I know he can and has done far better. It makes it harder to trust other videos of his when he represents himself as Science Literate and primarily sharing findings of papers when, if a paper's findings partially play into his view of the world, he'll share them as cold, hard fact. How exactly am I supposed to trust someone that'll add information and conclusions to a paper, on a whim, because it reads nicely in a video title? Ironically, a different video by a different channel of someone that *does* believe in Extraterrestrial Life made a video on this same paper called 'The Wow Signal Potentially Explained ... and it's Weird'. So, quite ironically, for the loons Anton typically thinks people who believe in Aliens are, someone who does made a far more earnest and direct video about this same exact topic. And no, the 'and it's Weird' part wasn't aliens in that video, the weird part was legitimate interest over evidence for this rare, natural astronomical event.
Hey Anton, love the channel. Can I suggest that you label your images as CGI when you use them. Astrum started doing this and it's important when you have such a mix of real science images & stock animations.
I'm always happy to see questions answered, but in this case, a 50-year-old, mysterious, one-off radio signal turning out to be a glowing cloud of cold gas might be a touch underwhelming.
Thanks Anton for the great Video. I am not directing this at you, but these kinds of papers that are just released to the Public without any kind of serious peer review are pretty much worthless. The Author gets a lot of attention for a few months until someone else Peer reviews it and shows that many of the assumptions are wrong. I worked with large satellite dishes for the better part of 15 Years in the Telecom industry and there are several issues that while pointed out are not emphasized enough to give people a clear understanding. The 90 seconds that the Signal took to rise and fall was (as you stated) because the Dish itself was stationary and not tracking signals. It was just looking for signals as the Earth rotated. If the Dish had been tracking the Signal the worst case Scenario is that they would have seen a Square Wave that just suddenly ramped up to the highest level and then stayed there for 90 seconds and then suddenly dropped off. The reality is that because no tracking was happening we have no idea how long the signal actually lasted. Even at 90 Seconds that is an incredible length of time for a carrier wave to be On and stable. For context as you know FRB's only last for Milliseconds! The Modulation aspect of the Signal is also not a clear. This signal would have been suffering from the Doppler effect. If someone was trying to send a message it would make sense that they send very few but extremely long pulses to first get someones attention. For example one Pulse for 5 minutes then a break and then two more 5 minute pulses closely spaced and then 3 and so on. Basically counting from 1-10 over a period of an hour or more. It is just to let you know we are here and this is not a natural signal. Then they come back to listen in the calculated minimum time for a Reply from that location in space and start waiting for a similar reply.
I have to wonder why it didn't repeat though. If I were trying to send a general hail that would differentiate itself from natural phenomenon, I wouldn't just do it once. I'd think it should repeat at least a few times. Was it never heard from again because it didn't repeat, or because we just never listened to that patch of sky again? (Genuinely asking, because I'm not at all familiar with radio astronomy.) Wouldn't their first instinct have been to train the dish on the source for a while afterward?
@@jfangm It is not worthless, why do you think everything we accept as fact is heavily Peer Reviewed before it is accepted as Fact? It is the examination of the Methodology the Author used to examine the raw data and the calculations he used based on the Data. It typically reveals that the assumptions the Author made are wrong because they made either made errors in the calculations or they ignored parts of the data because it was invalidating their theory. That is typically the problems with most scientific papers, the Author goes in with a Bias in his head and tries to prove he is right.
@@Deletirium I am not sure but I get the feeling that back in the old days these receivers and printers were not really well manned and there was not any good software to alert people to a sudden find. It is possible that it was hours or days later that someone noticed the signal on the print out. (I am not sure as I have never heard the full back story)
Pretty sure Baron Harkonnen was attacking Arakus at the time and missed. Sadly the ricochet hit Earth and in our ignorance we said "Wow!" Joking aside, thanks Anton, appreciate your perspectives.
4:15 no modulation? How do we know that? Cool Worlds said we don't know if there was modulation because the telescope wasn't looking for it. The only record we have of it is those letters, right?
Jerry Ehrman would be the one to ask but afaik there was no test for modulation, so the claim that none existed is false. What is with the recent trend of all science channels getting so excited to declare "ITS NOT ALIENS!!!"?
@@captainsafety0104There's a new religion called secular humanism that's been spreading and it too has led to many within the scientific community to make claims based in personal preference (self preservation) instead of evidence and logic. Integrity in general has been devalued in western culture, it seems.
Except he has not answered it. We always knew the clouds would amplify it. He has not proven either way whether it was aliens or not that triggered the maser.
So, this would be a reason advanced aliens would NOT use hydrogen emission lines for their contact signals. We're finding that communicating with distant star systems is EXCEEDINGLY difficult with all known techniques. Signals fade, become randomized, or are too similar to natural phenomena. As others have already suggests, advanced aliens, if they do exist, use communication methods we currently do not possess the means to detect.
Maybe quantum entanglement? There's definitely been a theorized way to transmit FTL information near instantaneously, so hopefully within our lifetimes we could also consider looking for these types of signals too.
@@BishopStars Oh lol, I was aware I wasn't very sure of that anyway lol, so that definitely answers my question. We still need some kind of method that doesn't violate the known laws of physics by bending spacetime to transmit information, and I'm sure at a very tiny scale we could using "less than" obscene amounts of energy.
The SETI Institute's Seth Shostak has said they have debunked way better candidate signals, and this one was just famous because it has a cool name. He will be glad when it is finally dead.
As someone who desperately hopes aliens exist, this explanation is a million times cooler than if it was aliens. Like, nature just DOES THAT sometimes???? Amazing! What a universe we get to live in!
It actually makes a lot of sense. Because I doubt any civilization would use the hydrogen line, where there's so much noise... And, above all, who would announce their position without knowing what is out there?
I agree with your first statement. As for who would announce their position? We already have done that with the Arecibo message, among others, so it's definitely not a safe assumption that no one would do it. Civilizations are composed of a whole bunch of private actors doing things for their own reasons. What the sum total of "one civilization" would choose to do is not necessarily correlated with what a random group of scientists and engineers do with taxpayer-funded grants.
@jeffbenton6183 Good point. But most of our radio transmissions become indistinguishable with the background noise after around 2 lightyears. The only ones that could scape are the Arecibo signal and some communications with deep space probes. Like the Voyagers, probes around Jupiter and Saturn and so on.
@@jeffbenton6183I'm not sure that it's safe to assume that other civilizations on other planets are as selfishly motivated and independently acting as our own. I wouldn't be surprised if global cooperation is a necessity for a more civilized civilization's continued existence.
@@user-Aaron-There’s no reason to assume anything with a sample size of one. For all you know, Earth could be the most peaceful of all civilizations to ever exist, the others being savage and brutal organizations that make little sense to us.
Thank you Anton! Another example of our observational skills exceeding our theoretical skills. I've always thought it was some kind of a technical glitch from the ancient electronics of the day.
"first, just a little bit of a background, so that we know we all are in the same page" I'm gonna use this in the literature review of my next paper. 😂
There is more evidence that we are alone in this part of the galaxy at the very least. Probably unique to the milky way. So many new sloutions to the fermi paradox are pointing to us being very very very rare
Absence of evidences are not evidences of absence. Not saying that we are not alone in our small corner of the galaxy. But solving some mysterious signal as natural occurence is not more evidence of us being alone.
@@Dadbro_ if you accumulate the solutions proposed for the Fermi Paradox in support for and against Alien life, there are more reasonable theories for the against. I don't want it to be true. I would absolutely love to find other intelligent life. But just the vast distances, the slow speed of light, and the more we discover how many things to go exactly right for intelligent life with technology to exist just don't seem promising. Every time there is a scientific solution that says "It's not aliens" really bums me out :(
love this channel. Is there a vid on how after the big bang! Everything started to rotate? And not keep going just in straight paths. When did space start to spin and come together?
It blows my mind how many teams are looking for habitable planets around red dwarfs. Last I checked Red Dwarf stars gave off way too much radiation and had a habitable range that was so close any planet in it would almost certainly be tidally locked.... both things not conducive to life, what do they know that most of us don't? Or do they do it just because they are so common and easy to observe.... seems a waste of resources to be looking for something where you are almost certain it can't be.
Actually not necessarily not all red dwarfs are the same. Even the smol ones vary. And title locking can be a blessing and a curse. As there's no day. But it allows planets to be habitable with slightly lower sunlight due to the day time side. Not to mention red dwarfs range from 8-50% of the mass of the sun
Flares may not be as bad as we thought. "A 2021 study lead by Ekaterina Ilin (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, Germany) presented evidence that M dwarf flares tend to emanate from their polar regions, possibly sparing close in planets from direct hits. Their initial data was taken from a small sampling of M dwarf stars from TESS observations, and further studies showed that this may well be the norm." (from Universe Today 8/7/21)
@@ARWest-bp4ybSo far Trappist-1b and c have no atmospheres. d has been observed by J-WST but the M8V (Trappist-1 star) is fully convective making it a flare star which interfered with observations (per Fraser Cain's interview with a researcher on the Trappist-1 priject.)
They're so common and easy to observe so it's worth a shot. It's not possible to directly image an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star (yet), so they're going for the low-hanging fruit. That said, I think there's been this bias among scientists over the past 400 years (going back to Herschel, I think) that life *must* be common in the universe. Dr. Sagan famously described our Sun as a "ho-drum" star, which is now known to be false (it's quite unusual). If life *must* be common, then it also *must* exist around at least *some* red dwarves because 75% of *all* stars in the universe are red dwarves. Moreover, they take longer than the age of the universe to die, so - even assuming it takes at least as long to get to our point as we have (4.5 billion years) - then the red dwarves are the ones that have the most amount of time to allow that to occur.
This is under the assumption that life elsewhere in the uniform will look like and require the same comdition as life on earth, which seems very unlikely.
Yes it does. People keep going on about the fermi paradox, there should be life all over the place but we can't detect any, that must mean it doesn't exist! It's because there's no way for us to do so in the first place. There could be a million civilizations at our current level of technology active in the milky way RIGHT NOW and we still wouldn't be able to detect a peep from them.
Tbf u do need an open mind to beginn make sense of it in the first place. Cant have u be convinced after hearing one random thing after the other, gotta make a pattern illustrating the connections between all of it
@@centura86 yet they come up with these theories that have billion to 1 odds then say yup...that seems legit. Meanwhile they still can't agree on things in our own backyard that can be studied everyday. Examples: they are arguing about whether or not venus has phosphine, and they say it can only be produced by life. watch them come up with another trillion to 1 odds theory for it. Also for years they said mars lost its water due to the thin atmosphere, now they say mars has a vast subsurface ocean.
Relax, no dreams were destroyed. The paper "debunking" the signal is pure conjecture. Rest assured that the signal is still safely in the category of "nobody knows".
Anton! I was hoping, this would have been one of your vids, that was on the comedy route. Where you'd wear a tinfoil hat. You know, those UFO & Space Alien Exteremist, are chomping at the bit, ready to tell you, you are wrong. I have suggested THREE of those Content creators that they'd interview you, since, they keep asking scientific questions, but then answer it with the whole "I'm not saying it was aliens but it was aliens." ~ Giorgio A. Tsoukalos narrative. Thank you Anton for keeping us informed.
This stuff fascinates me. I love his delivery and no fluff BS while simplifying the sciency stuff for the masses. But my favorite video of his has nothing to do with science, astronomy, or cosmology; it was an April fool’s day upload (a couple years ago) which was a fun parody of mukbang featuring noodles, the history of noodles, etc., and it was actually very informative.
When I was a kid, my parents used to go right to a slaughterhouse and buy a half cow twice a year. My mother had trouble chewing so when we got ready to stuff our upright freezer with beef, she would take the most tender cuts and write "MOM" on the butcher paper wrapper with a magic marker so that we knew that it was reserved for her. My brother came home from college on a break once. He got into the freezer for something to eat and he pulled out one of these marked packages and asked what's this package marked "WOW"? Our mother told him that it's upside down and marked "MOM".
@@cretinousswine8234 ...I thought you were gonna say your brother asked who butchered mom up into pieced and put her in the freezer... That came later after she pissed me off. Not really. She passed from lung cancer in 1996.
00:33 -- Tiny correction: you said Megahertz in place of Gigahertz. The correct value was displayed. ps. the quality of your content is amazing, I am in awe. Truly.
I’m just glad they seem to have actually made progress explaining it’s origin. I was worried it was gonna remain one of those mysteries that we will never know the truth about, which would really bug me. Aliens or not at least we potentially know a little bit more about this phenomenon.
You won't see that any time soon. There's a huge trend of "we're alone/it's not aliens" in pop-sci circles for reasons I don't understand. Maybe groupthink.
An interaction with an outburst from a magnetar or something like that. Hitting an H2 gas cloud would make a large signal when the energy state dropped back down. Now they have to prove it!
Excellent work by the researchers, but I on occasion have issues with how Anton presents conclusions. I'd say that the WOW signal is "likely" solved. He always goes a little overboard on the declaratives, certainly in the thumbnails, and that's not what science is about. He undermines his credibility when he does that.
don't know where you see it. This channel is not a course about how to read and retell science papers. Any communication about science is more or less expressing an opinion, for quite obvious reasons. And he clearly says: "I guess that". On the other side, you are chasing a pseudo objectivity that does not exist in tthe first place
@@SugaSharp as a mystery it is solved, because it is not a mystery any more, it changed its location into science. but in science nthing is ever "solved". you can solve in math and logics and in the mafia, but not in science. ...and kind of...its like you do not read precisely.. and a title is a title is a title.... in the text it sounds more nuanced, of course... But if you wanna stick to titles. go... they are more easy to read
You know, I've been following your channel for years under my main profile, and I just can't square how wonderful, personable, and brilliant you are in your scientific videos, and how appallingly unscientific, and brainwashed you appeared in your political posts. I would give anything to have your brain, or your understanding of the universe, but emotion can cloud even the most brilliant of minds.
We haven’t ruled out that it was a beam sent directly from god as a sign of his existence either but it’s redundant to say it. We have a better explanation that fits that data
I really hate that 3 Body Problem used the wow signal as the basis for it's entire premise. We already had a pretty good idea that this wasn't an alien message, so the show was kind of immediately outdated, especially now. They could have just made something up so that a new explanation for previous events don't kill the vibe. Still love the show, just feels weird.
I was confused until you said show. If I recall correctly, the book didn't say it was the Wow signal that was aliens, but a modulated signal using this frequency
It's like that service worker who was asked how he was doing and answered that he was actually not doing that good, and then the manager cut him off and said everything was fine. Some alien broke the universal gag order towards Earth and got cut off and fired.
Hello wonderful Antonaut, this is viewer. Thank you for sharing this! My eyes are beaming with excitement at the juicy prospects for new science here!!! 21cm Astrophysical maser sign me up!!! New distance ladder rung possibility??
How crazy would it be if we couldn’t find anything because we were actually one of the first technological species in the universe. Someone has to be first when you think about it.
And considering it already took earth about 1/4 of the universe’s current age to go from bacteria to multicellular life, it’s easy to imagine life just hasn’t had time or materials to develop in a lot of cases
@@alexsiemers7898 If this is true we have an incredible opportunity to become the first galactic civilization. Imagine being a pioneer of the universe!
One day, if aliens show up instead of acting scared our first reaction would be "F#@$&^g finally! Do you know how many false positives we've had so far?" That is, if we find a moment to lift our heads from our phones ...
Hears a signal that could potentially be artificial. "we can't locate the source and it doesn't repeat. Cannot be aliens." Explanation decades later: "here's what happened, its natural, we cannot find the source though, and it doesn't repeat. But we're right. Everyone: "Seems legit."
I've little great comment of this situation, but in reply to what you've said; if you've worked in scientific academia you will find this is an extremely common way of doing things. When of course you are not working to get more funding. Clever ones will roll this sort of thinking (let's call it, making new science with no new facts) into their funding scheme, and it works. The most puzzling thing is the fact that at the location of the "WOW" signal, there seems to be nothing. Not a magic magnetar, but also not a solar type star, to my knowledge. There are a lot of weasel words in the presented explanations by Mendez et al. "may have been caused"...."could have been" and so on. So the proclamations that it is solved, and that "its not aliens" are completely false and are NOT science. Nothing has been proven, or disproven. The paper itself has been described as vague by another astrophysicist, and he is completely correct. I'm sure the paper generated interest ---> funding, and the RU-vid headlines thus produced are great for monetization. This is the state of modern science, to use the term loosely. Cheers.
If an Alien sent out a signal 1000 years ago and the signal originates from 2000 light years away. We won't detect that signal for another 1000 years. If an alien sent out a signal 1000 years ago, and it originated from a location 1 light year away (and it was not continuous), we would not have had the technology in the year 1024 to have detected it. In either case, we would still see nothing.
