Odd this day
CONCLUSIVE PROOF that there are aliens out there, who want to land on Earth where no one will see them and put probes up the bottoms of people no one believes. Or say ‘ack, ack’ and vaporise us. Or befriend a small boy in the San Fernando Valley and make people cry. Or it isn’t proof. It’s still not clear yet.
Yes, this is the story, or at least one person’s precis of what we know of it so far, of the ‘Wow!’ signal, when astronomers using the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University noticed an unusual reading. It was a signal from space, but we still don’t know what kind of signal, or what caused it.
Accounts also differ on exactly when it arrived, but the consensus seems to be that the radio telescope picked it up on 15th, and astronomer Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) looked at the printouts on 18th. Most of it, as you can see above, was low numbers. A signal with low power was numbered 0 to 9, and after that, the computer used letters: 10 for A, 11 for B etc. So, the 21st letter of the alphabet was quite something. According to The Atlantic:
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.
(This clears up a question some ask — about the significance of the ‘message’. There are those, you see, who look at the picture but don’t read anything about it, and decide 6EQUJ5 is code. Yes, the aliens misspelt ‘equus’, and were trying to give us their considered literary criticism of a then four-year-old Peter Shaffer play. NPR adds that “SETI scientists traced it back to the constellation Sagittarius, just to the northwest of the globular cluster M55”, so clearly the signal emerged on the road between Preston and Blackpool either. Yes, this is a silly digression.)
Anyway, Atlantic also says:
the signal, though it lasted only seventy-two seconds, fit the profile of a message beamed from another world.
Which made me sceptical. How would you know that? Well, Michael Brooks’s 2008 book 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense explains:
Eighteen years before the Wow! Signal hit Earth, before SETI had even been conceived, two physicists had predicted what an alien communication would most probably look like, and their prediction looked uncannily like the signal Ehman saw. If you believe that science should progress through theoretical predictions that are followed up by confirming observations, the alien hypothesis is a slam dunk.
So, it was, at the very least, promising. Unfortunately, NPR says, they couldn’t find a source for it: “there was nothing there, no planet, no star”. Also, of course, scientists like to replicate their findings to confirm them. Ehman went through the rest of the printouts, but found nothing comparable — it was all just the usual low numbers. And there’s been nothing since. He kept looking for months, and others have looked since with things like the Very Large Array (aka that collection of 28 huge radio telescopes that you see in Jodie Foster movie Contact).
Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Which means this guy’s right, right?
Well, scientists in general, and Ehman in particular, don’t disagree. But they don’t agree, either. Ehman told Brooks:
he was “still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense.” Not that he believes it was aliens; he doesn’t like to “believe” anything. It’s just that it’s the only satisfying explanation — if a one-off contact with ET can be classed as something satisfying.
The Columbus Dispatch says he and others
have worked to rule out other causes: military experiments, distorted space waves, satellites, supernovae, black holes. So far, the only explanation that seems plausible is intelligent life. Something. Way out there. “But I can’t prove that it was, and I can’t prove that it wasn’t,” he said. “It’s an open question.”
One of the most recent hypotheses for the signal — hydrogen clouds around two comets — was dismissed by five different scientists (at least. Those were just the ones I found with a cursory google.) And you can’t now go back to the Big Ear source any longer, because (Brooks again):
John Kraus, Big Ear’s designer, learned Ohio Wesleyan University had sold the ground out from beneath his beloved telescope on December 28, 1982. He called it a day of infamy. “Ohio Wesleyan betrayed my trust and sold the land out from under the ‘Big Ear’,” he wrote in April 2004. “What other discoveries and measurements might have been made if the telescope had not been demolished?”
…and SETI is no longer part-funded by NASA, because Senator Richard Bryan caused the US government to stop funding NASA’s SETI programme. In SETI’s own damning deadpan, it amounted to:
less than 0.1% of NASA’s annual budget, amounting to about a nickel per taxpayer per year. The Senator cited budget pressures as his reason for ending NASA’s involvement with SETI.
…so it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll get a definitive answer any time soon. Brooks says, a little mournfully:
The search for aliens is for enthusiasts only. Considering what scientists say is at stake, this ought to be a scandal. The Wow! Signal, if it is what it seems … could radically alter our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. It would be Copernican in scale. And yet it is, effectively, ignored.
Talk of ‘scale’ there is perhaps pertinent, though. Voyager 2 is currently 20,000,000,000 kilometres away, which seems like a sufficiently immense distance to have come across Kang and Kodos, were it not for the fact that the Milky Way is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km across — and our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.
Which makes my brain hurt. Or, as Arthur C. Clarke famously put it:
Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
