Why Didn't We Hear the Full Wow Signal?

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[vomm]

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

[Baleur]

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

[OddSee.]

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

[Sahuagin]

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

[markoyamashitach]

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

[dante]

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

[soundsoffiction]

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

[gamingwithlacks]

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

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

[gautamkabra]

During nearly 200, 000 years of existence, humans only had capacity to communicate through radio waves for only 130 yrs. So for only 130 out of 200, 000 yrs, we could communicate to Alien.

After all this progress, now if nuclear war happens today, whole human race will come back to original starting point within a moment.

So although we were here for 200, 000 yrs, we were only visible for mere 100-200 yrs.

Probably same could have happened to Alien race also.

[NeroNyte]

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

[GarageSupra]

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

[undyingjin]

I imagine if there is intelligent life relatively near by, the problem would be not that they’ve chosen not to communicate with us, but rather they simply don’t know we’re here, despite trying, just like how we don’t know they exist.

Being how difficult it truly is to combat the laws of the universe and break away from even one’s own planet, I think if there is intelligent life, they likely are in a similar situation; trying to figure out how to break away.

[carpemkarzi]

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

[antiprohibit]

I'm reminded of two quotes that I heard whenever people talk about the Fermi paradox:

"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

And...

"One of two possibilities exists: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

Sweet video, Alex. I enjoyed it.

[Gilgaemesh]

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

[aranthos]

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

[Allan_aka_RocKITEman]

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

[johneygd]

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

[JohnJ]

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