The "Wow!" signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
64 comments
·August 26, 2025robocat
As compared to Australian FRBs: https://www.planetary.org/articles/0417-the-cosmic-microwave...
reactordev
Precisely.
There’s a group of people who are desperate to prove existence of extraterrestrials because then they no longer have to adult and made decisions for themselves.
You see it in religion too. Blind faith so they can abscond responsibility.
I firmly believe it’s all up to us. Even if there were extraterrestrials, why in the universe would they risk coming here? We got nukes.
bluGill
Forget about why would they - they can't get here. The speed of light is too slow. They can't even detect earth exists much less there is life (dinosaurs). detectable signals won't reach then for a long time if they even can reach them.
spott
Extraterrestrial in this sense is “didn’t come from earth”, not “aliens!”.
decremental
[dead]
j1mr10rd4n
Maybe it was a cobalt spike...
treetalker
Extraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.
moomoo11
Either way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.
richardw
Which of our leaders do you hope their leaders are like?
this_user
Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out.
The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of collective enlightenment where they leave these primitive impulses behind. But based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
0xDEAFBEAD
Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resources on zero-sum conflict.
>based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Earth culture during the current dysfunctional moment?
"Earlier this year, the White House proposed a nearly 24% cut to NASA's 2026 fiscal year budget, primarily aimed at the organization's fundamental science research. If the cuts come to fruition, they would be the largest in the agency's entire history." https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/1266983866/trump-science-spac...
alt187
Bears most likely out-ruthless you, but, uh, I don't sed them building Dyson spheres anytime soon.
Aliens probably aren't this edgy, nihilist caricature. Most likely, they're kind of like us- Curious about us, hoping for the best, but irrationally fearing we're an "highly aggressive apex" or whatever self-absorbed nightmare the less enlightened individuals of their species dreamed.
Seriously, you think anyone is gonna cross 50 light-years to kill a bunch of featherless bipeds and plunder some common rocks?
ArcaneMoose
Not necessarily true! I think this interactive game applies: https://ncase.me/trust/
dlivingston
> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species.
How can you estimate likelihood of behavior when currently N=0 (or N=1 if you count humans)?
There is no baseline, no control; it's just complete speculation, a roundabout way of saying "this is what I think humans would likely do, therefore, all advanced life forms must also be like this".
KumaBear
Depends who got to the top first. If the most advanced was peaceful but eliminated threats. I’d assume they could create a collective empire.
Apex ruthless only gets you so far verses a collective.
fny
Here's a related thought experiment for those hoping for interstellar kumbaya:
On planet Jung dwell the Jungians, sapien-like beings who need only a single cup of a rare liquid to live an entire lifetime. For humans, that same cup grants twenty extra years of healthy life.
Human just landed on the planet Jung and discovered the liquid--what happens next?
xfeeefeee
> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species.
Well we could always be pets. That wouldn't be so bad.
Mistletoe
I think you are wrong and the more humanity has become intelligent, the more empathy and love we have displayed. I think it’s a hallmark of intelligence. The most intelligent people I know are the most kind and understanding. It’s the ignorant that are cruel and uncaring.
lawlessone
I think we're expecting too much, afaik to detect anything we'd need aliens to be deliberately signaling us(tv, radio it's alien equivalent isn't going to be strong enough ). Or sending out a much much more powerful signal in all directions.
And it has to repeat.
We're expecting aliens to be very committed to doing something we don't do ourselves. We have deliberately sent out powerful signals with things like the Arecibo message but not repeating. And it would have to be repeating for a very long time.
To add, with the rules SETI currently uses nobody would have heard of it as they wouldn't consider a non-repeating signal like it as worth shouting about.
DANmode
We're always listening. Why wouldn't "they"?
TillE
Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.
recursive
Most things aren't known. The lack of a known alternative is hardly evidence of anything in this domain.
FatalLogic
>but for now there's not really any known alternative
The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
djrj477dhsnv
That's like saying God is the best explanation for any newly described natural phenomenon.
amenhotep
How? We don't know gods exist. We know beings with technology and agency living on planets in space exist. There seems nothing at all similar between the two explanations.
fallat
God is an extraterrestial or not? :)
zamalek
It could just as easily be known, or unknown, physics.
ghurtado
Not really.
There are many, many cosmic processes that we don't know the first thing about.
At one point, we didn't know what a pulsar was, and a fair amount of people probably thought it was an alien signal.
Human History is littered with examples of attribution of the unexplained to aliens.
So far, non alien explanations have been found for all of them, except possibly this one.
Does it warrant further study? Absolutely. Is it likely to be aliens? Statistically, no.
cmrdporcupine
Indeed. Human history is riddled with anthropomorphism and people here trying to argue for more of it.
We probably whouldn't even recognize real aliens because we'd be too busy looking for our own reflection in the sky.
null
lawlessone
There was something a few years ago saying it was likely hydrogen getting lased or something by starlight and emitting the signal.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-...
shagie
The recent article on the WOW signal is "Arecibo Wow! II: Revised Properties of the Wow! Signal from Archival Ohio SETI Data" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657 by Abel Méndez, Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (and many others)
This is a follow up to a September 2024 paper (the article you link is November 2024)... "Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal" by Abel Méndez, Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (just those three).
krapp
Space aliens are also not a known alternative.
Babkock
Wow!
zippo_the_zippo
Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme.
Alien: sends SOS after years of studying human communication signals, as a last ditch effort to mark their existence before being wiped out by supernova.
Humans: Look - the sky people said WOW.
immibis
A human wrote WOW on the paper because there was a signal, with no idea what the signal meant or where it came from. It wasn't an attempt to decipher the signal.
autoexec
> Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme.
Which meme is that?
bee_rider
I haven’t heard it before, but I just searched it up, it looks like a confused cat with that as the text. The joke is that the person is meowing at the cat, but doesn’t speak cat, so the cat is confused.
The example I found was from 2019.
XorNot
Which isn't what happened, the WOW signal is just because the person who saw it scribbled wow on the printout and that's the picture we have.
Geee
Be careful when training AI models on unknown signals, or uploading them publicly on the Internet to be picked up into training datasets. It might be an adversarial data poisoning attack, which is designed to bias the model into servicing the attacker.
In this case, a superintelligent digital lifeform might be literally sending itself across space into every direction, and who knows what it does once it lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.
Cheer2171
Only on HN can the top comment for a post about astronomy from the 1970s be about fucking 2025 era LLM concerns.
rozab
Although this comment is of course silly, this is a theme in Peter Watts' Echopraxia
Papers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08513, https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657