Eternal_Midnight
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Subject:
The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/the-wow-signal-one-mans-search-for-setis-most-tantalizing-trace-of-alien-life/253093/
Late one night in the summer of 1977, a large radio telescope outside Delaware, Ohio intercepted a radio signal that seemed for a brief time like it might change the course of human history. The telescope was searching the sky on behalf of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the signal, though it lasted only seventy-two seconds, fit the profile of a message beamed from another world. Despite its potential import, several days went by before Jerry Ehman, a project scientist for SETI, noticed the data. He was flipping through the computer printouts generated by the telescope when he noticed a string of letters within a long sequence of low numbers---ones, twos, threes and fours. The low numbers represent background noise, the low hum of an ordinary signal. As the telescope swept across the sky, it momentarily landed on something quite extraordinary, causing the signal to surge and the computer to shift from numbers to letters and then keep climbing all the way up to "U," which represented a signal thirty times higher than the background noise level. Seeing the consecutive letters, the mark of something strange or even alien, Ehman circled them in red ink and wrote "Wow!" thus christening the most famous and tantalizing signal of SETI's short history: The "Wow!" signal.
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Urk_VN
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Subject:
The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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I wonder if that was an alien observing us who got bored and decided to troll us by doing that... 
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Testerion
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Subject:
The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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Urk_VN posted:
I wonder if that was an alien observing us who got bored and decided to troll us by doing that...
My bet is that we intercepted someone telling aliens observing us "Remember to bring some cow udders and buttholes for dinner after you're done analprobing the humans"
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smellymotor
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The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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It's probably from future humans
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smellymotor
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Shimatta33
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Subject:
The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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It's an interesting collection of data...it's highly unlikely that a signal of that strength and duration was just random noise. Unfortunately they couldn't capture the modulation of the signal if there was any. Had the technology they were using at the time been able to capture that and not simply the average power level over large time intervals then we'd have a far greater insight.
There are possibilities outside of extraterrestrial, though, even if they are unlikely. Since that's a protected band I'd look towards spurious emissions from nearby transmitting equipment in the form of harmonics. Reflections from a ground based transmissions could cause those kinds of problems but it'd have to be a space object that it was reflecting from (the wavelength is too short for ionospheric reflection) and it seems unlikely to me that that would occur so consistently. It'd have to be a perfect storm of conditions.
That being said, picking up a signal on the exact right frequency in that exact small sliver of the universe is equally as unlikely and is a whole other set of perfect storm-like conditions
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RHWarrior
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Subject:
The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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PMG a signal spiked on a printout!!
There's only one reason for that!!
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"You guys need to stop dick riding wow and compare everything to it. It never invented a godamn thing, just made it popular. " -tinkly
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Blue_arrow
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Subject:
The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=157559
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__Bonk__
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The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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Proves nothing.
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Huges07.1
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Subject:
The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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__Bonk__ posted:
Proves nothing.
Yep.
Nadda.
Aliens are just demons anyway.
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silvadel2
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The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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The more you compress something the more it seems like background noise.
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Shimatta33
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Subject:
The Wow! Signal: Best Evidence Yet for Alien Life
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RHWarrior posted:
PMG a signal spiked on a printout!!
There's only one reason for that!!
A consistent signal of that magnitude for as long of a duration as it was is a little more than a random spike.
In reality, though, I would expect far more of a wideband pseudo-noise code based system for communications in space instead of a narrowband high amplitude one.
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