Isn't the title completely misleading? Their main hypothesis is that it was caused by a magnetar and they write:
"Our study did not conclude that the Wow! Signal constituted evidence of a signal emanating from an extraterrestrial civilization."
Same for everything the linked papers say about "extraterrestial". Nothing there justifies the title suggesting it was concluded that it likely was caused by extraterrestial life.
Mars is extraterrestrial. The sun is extraterrestrial. Even the moon is extraterrestrial.
And this article isn't about "coming here".
As for your claims about the motives of people seeking extraterrestrial life or even wanting there to be such life, they are beyond absurd. Likening it to religious faith: it is belief without evidence.
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.
The existence of radio waves was first proven by German physicist Heinrich Hertz on 11 November 1886.
The first commercial radio broadcast was transmitted on 2 November 1920
that means intentional radio signal was underway about 100 years ago.
so suppose that signal despite the "low" power is heard by someone that listens very closely. they tease it out of the noise, and right away know what it is, and try to send back.
at most, they are about 50 radio-years away, if thier signal reaches us now.
beyond that, no signal from earth has propagated that far.
> Forget about why would they - they can't get here. The speed of light is too slow.
They could get here in a generation ship. Heck, we could almost build a generation ship that could reach another solar system.
First, there is the traditional generation ship where you set up a closed self sustaining ecosystem. I don't think we are anywhere near able to make such a closed system that would last for a trip to another star, but give it another few decades and there is probably a good chance we'll know how.
Second, there is another kind of generation ship that is called a seed ship or embryo ship. Your ship just carries a small crew, plus frozen eggs and sperm. During the trip as the crew ages you use artificial wombs to make babies from the frozen eggs and sperm and raise them to be the new crew. Any people you will need other than the crew at the destination (e.g., colonists if this is a colonizing mission) also come from the frozen eggs and sperm.
With enough automation the crew could be quite small. I once calculated the mass of high calorie density food that would be needed to sustain a small crew for thousands of years and it was actually small enough that I'd expect a civilization maybe a century more advanced in space than ours to maybe be able to manage. With that you don't need to solve the problem of making a closed self-sustaining ecosystem.
> With enough automation the crew [of a generation ship] could be quite small.
Other than the engineering challenges, we don't have the faintest idea how a really long-term crew is going to work socially and psychologically in a constrained, isolated, artificial environment.
The closest analog are the naval/polar expeditions, which were unisex and under military or hierarchical command, none of them longer than a couple of years. Some perished (Franklin), some pivoted (Shackleton w/Endurance), some failed with loss of life (Scott), some worked (Amundsen). But all had options unavailable to a ship in vacuum, and were on an incomparably shorter timescale.
I would caution applying our current understanding and limitations onto alien civilizations. I don't believe they will break the light barrier, but they may develop telescopes that can detect life from light-years away, and the stupendous travel times are possible with suspended animation or by stopping the aging process.
While we don't know everything, we do know what we don't know needs to be consistent with what we know. Relativity is well supported by experiments, so whatever this thing is we don't know will have all the things you don't like about relativity.
telestope limits exist in theory not just our manufacturing abilities.
These nutjobs still don't want to grasp the reality that the UFO sighting at Area 51 was the radar test of the A-12 prototype, which was made out of shiny unpainted titanium and done in the salt desert due to its properties of absorbing electromagnetic waves. And then some people that saw this around Roswell were spreading the rumor of UFOs because at the time that was the trend on television.
Always bet on stupidity, they'll say anything to get their 5 minutes of attention on TV / social media. I mean, there were even senate and court hearings over this. Over a rumor that was disproven decades ago.
The US (and probably by extend our species) has a serious education and information validation problem.
It wasn’t the A-12 but a precursor. The A-12 didn’t come about until the late 50s. The Roswell incident happened in the late 40s.
There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.
> It wasn’t the A-12 but a precursor. The A-12 didn’t come about until the late 50s. The Roswell incident happened in the late 40s.
> There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.
You're right with the timeline that the initial rumors didn't start with the A-12 radar tests, but they were reinforced by it. Initially, Project Mogul's crash of the balloon array triggered the rumors, but it's not as fancy and couldn't be interpreted as an "alien spaceship", even at the time.
I pasted the URL into firefox, and didn't see that huge "you're using an adblocker popup".
I opened a firefox private window and navigated to it from the HN page, and got the adblocker popup.
Right now I have two tabs open in the same non-private window, one showing the adblocker popup and one not. In the one that's not I can view the whole page. Reloading in the one that is not showing the adblocker popup then showed it.
I navigated from HN in a non-private window and got the popup. So this seems to be referer constrained in some sense, not necessarily browser based. Hard to confirm.
There is a theory that if we could find the same janitor and get them to plug the same broken vacuum cleaner to the same socket in exactly the same way, mankind's energy problem will be forever solved, one way or the other.
There is another theory that this has already happened.
Simple programmer here. I have a dumb question. What about the "Wow!" signal is special, or unique? What makes someone see it and think "wow"? Is there some kind of information encoded in the signal?
There is no information in it, it looks like a continuous wave of radio energy coming from space. It is on a frequency that might be a natural one for any intelligent civilization to consider broadcasting on, and it is a narrowband signal, meaning it only covers a small range of frequencies.
You need to rule out that you accidentally picked up some radio broadcast and state that otherwise anyone worth their salt will first ask, "Are you sure it didn't come from the local radio station?"
To add to this, it has generally been believed that the Wow signal didn't come from Earth. But being a rare event no one wanted to rule it out completely. Technically these papers don't even rule that out. But they do a good job at expanding the problem of figuring out what that signal might have been.
I'll put it this way: people would probably be more surprised if the Wow signal was terrestrial in origin than extra terrestrial.
I actually briefly worked as a "paranormal investigator" when I was hard up for money --- someone came to me with some satellite photos they felt had evidence of UFOs.
I found a scientist who ran said satellites, who explained what seemed odd were artificacts of the instrument, and they were only noticed because they occured in the area of the Nimitz[1], which then got heavily OSINTed by the woo woo crowd.
I never took another of those kinds of job, because when the guy got an answer he didn't like he blew up on me, accused me of being part of the "deep state" and some kind of X-Files level man in black. (I offered him his money back because I got the sense he was a "true believer" and had dipped into savings, and it had only taken a few emails from my old uni email to show I wasn't a crank to clear up his questions, to no avail.)
I am glad we've gotten to the point that saying life is "out there" isn't considered wackadoo, even if couched with the caveat it may be so far away we may never interact, which is my stance.
It is my understanding that part of why the "wow signal" is so... "wow"... is that it did not repeat.
We have at times, in science, encountered stellar phenomon which sound artificial. Repeated noises/radiations -- classic example being when we first discovered pulsars in the 60s.
The thing with the "wow" signal is... it happened once then... nothing.
Now, maybe there's some natural phenomenon that does it's thing on a very long timescale but it's my understanding that they've ruled out terrestial sources, and so... the mind jumps to crazy stuff like the enterprise going to warp 10 or whatever.
I'll go ahead and say right here if it's definitively proven to be aliens, I'll give a hundred dollars to the Tor Project.
I'll also go ahead right here and say that while it was unusual, I think that we will one day find out the source was extraterrestrial but not "alien" in the sense of another civilization sending us a signal or us picking up something from a spacecraft.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200514012341/https://www.nytim...
[2] "When observations with another telescope confirmed the emission, it eliminated any sort of instrumental effects. At this point, Bell said of herself and Hewish that "we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?"[12] Even so, they nicknamed the signal LGM-1, for "little green men" (a playful name for intelligent beings of extraterrestrial origin). " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Discovery
Thanks for sharing. I think we're seeing a lot of the same thing occurring in these comments. :(
You'd probably be interested in my main comment too[0]. The signal has always been a terrible candidate for alien communication. Classic conspiracy problem where people become fixated on one aspect while ignoring all others.
Like Carl Sagan said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary science". It's sad but I think a lot of people just have these deep misunderstandings of what science actually is and how it works. There's also the really unfortunate human bias in how we read people in positions of authority[1]. Science makes you second guess and forces you to consider everything probabilistically. Nuance and detail dominate. Hard truth is that the world is noisy and figuring things out is hard.
But I think one of the most important things I have learned in life is that truth has a lower bound in complexity while lies don't. You should make things as simple as possible but to make simpler requires losing accuracy. Just because something can't be explained to a layman doesn't mean the person doesn't understand it, it means the topic is complex. Simplicity only ends up coming after a lot of work and dealing with the complexities.
To get side tracked a little, I have a proposal for a great filter: complexity. Any naturally evolved civilization is likely to have brains that preference simplicity and push against complexity. It's natural because complexity simply requires more computational power and that'd be a poor evolutionary strategy. You want enough to get the advantage but nor more. So when these civilizations advance they are likely to get to a point where the system they have created is far more complex that their brains can naturally handle. I think humans are in such a situation right now. No one person can understand the complexities of current issues be that from Global Warming to Geopolitics. We can do these things collectively but not individually. It's absolutely amazing what we've been able to accomplish, but I think if we're to continue we'll also have to recognize how incredible these accomplishments actually are. So the great filter is not some concrete event like Nuclear War or Global Warming (things that there's a good chance those civilizations also face), but the more abstract filter of abstraction itself. Eventually a civilization needs to cross the bridge from where its people can understand enough to navigate major problems of their world to one they aren't. Just seems unlikely brains would evolve fast enough to keep pace, since it is easier to create complexity than to understand it.
I would put forward that we can do many things collectively but not individually because we are part of a collective organism much more than we are individuals, though we are unable to see it due to a human having a limited perspective of only a part of a whole.
It is a common tendency to see humanity as a set of standalone humans[0] (if we cannot do something individually, but we can collectively, then we sort of can’t do it). However, a human only exists in context of others, and all we do is always in many ways (even if not real-time) a collaboration (starting from our education).
I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.
What is an alarming issue is that sometimes even a figurative anthill of many humans, as a collective super-entity, cannot adequately understand and navigate the reality it is facing.
[0] It is not helped by sci-fi that depicts various aliens as being collective beings, somehow contrasted with humans. In reality, we almost never go completely alone[1] for prolonged periods (except pathological cases), we are smarter when there is multiple of us, and the core of our interpretation of consciousness/sentience requires it to be social (anything else, and I don’t think we would even recognize it as consciousness—maybe that somehow relates to the great filter, too).
[1] When we do, our consciousness still supplies models of others in our lives, one way or another motivating our actions.
I don't think you're wrong, I think it is just semantics. I mean as long as you're agreeing we're not like the Borg or some other hive mind collective haha. But yeah, the old saying has stayed true: it takes a village to raise a child.
Just that I think there's a lot of utility in using the terminology of "individual" to talk about each human. It's true, we're dependent on one another for our survival and reproduction. But the "independence" is not a description of our capacity of survival but in that our consciousness is independent.
We have terms like community (and a ton which make implicit approximations about the size) to describe what you're talking about.
I think maybe that part of the problem is, as you point out, there's often a misunderstanding in ants themselves. It is easy to see the emergent behavior of them operating as a group. As if there's some collective mind. But you're absolutely right you could say the same about humans. We know a lot more about ants than we did centuries ago and do know they do operate independently. While it is much more like a monarchy structure, each ant operates, in some form, as a self contained unit. It can exist outside a colony. It's not likely to survive long, but this distinction is worth assigning some word to, right? Clearly there's a distinction from were I to claim that the ant's body were independent from its head. We'd claim that false because the separation causes an immediate (or rather an exceptionally quick) death.
Maybe that is semantics, but I think those semantics are helpful to us communicating and we would be the worse were we to call these things the same.
> I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.
Fwiw, I actually believe this too. I stated it the way I did because I think most people underestimate complexity (there's definitely advantages to that trait lol). But to refine my position more, I'd say that the current complexity of the world and what is required to solve its problems vastly exceeds that of millennia ago. I'd agree, the world has always been too complex for one man to understand, but certainly the scale of things has changed. In the past the forces pushing on a person or even community were primarily local. There were still global phenomena but if you go to 10000 BC a person's actions on the Eurasian continent had no meaningful effect on a person living in the Americas. Maybe Genghis Khan killed so many he that there was a small change in global temperature, but even then the main reason was that even just 1k years ago there were so few people that their combined efforts itself had little effect on the global temperature haha. Today, these things aren't true. One ship gets stuck in one canal and the whole system is put into chaos. There's lots of advantages to this global interaction but that's for the same reason these issues exist. With an over simplification that I think can be helpful to extrapolate from, just treat every person on the planet as a node and their relationship to others as an edge. Nor only do we have more nodes, but the average node also has more connections.
Your take on complexity as a filter reminded me of a fascinating paper I read. You might find it interesting because it claims that evolution does tend to favor simplicity, except when under a certain kind of pressure.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that paper. It definitely is interesting!
But I'd be careful generalizing too much from it. I'm not saying my proposal is correct but rather just recognizing issues with the paper. The reason for my proposal is that 1) here we are as complex entities. We humans exist. 2) One of, if not the, things in physics we are most confident about is that everything will be in its lowest possible energy state. It's true for the electrons that emit light while doing so just as much as it is true that creatures need to eat more to do more.
Notice something subtle but important in the paper. Their focus of efficiency is based on string length and reaction time. They note that string length decreases. Think about this a bit. For these strings to reduce it must mean that there was redundancy or excess in them. If mutations are random then modifying some of the characters in those strings will have no effect. We should also similarly look at parasites and see that these are a lower entropy state, in that they are able to leverage the information from the other "microbes" to perpetuate their own reproduction. They can't dominate because they can't live without the hosts but also at the same time this means they can't mutate as much and survive. There is a self selection bias to the results that isn't being properly accounted for. A survival bias that needs to be accounted for.
Now let's contrast to our more complex forms of life that my proposal is being based on. These lifeforms have lots of repetition in their genetic sequences. This is actually an important fact that the foundation of things like CRISPR are based on: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Even the acronym is a bit repetitive (which makes it great!). This is a defense mechanism made so that we're robust to mutations. My proposal is dependent on some complex life already existing. I don't know how to explain how life got to this complex level (something these researchers are working on), just that we are here, that I myself exist. I hope this is not a contentious axiom :)
They're tackling a really interesting problem and in no way am I trying to diminish their work. The best way to solve complex problems is to first solve overly simplified variants of them. Even if those result in completely inaccurate results the process is highly beneficial to tackling the more complex variants. Due to this we need to take results being mindful of the context. A post on the Relativity of Wrong hit the front page this morning[0] and it links to a page I've had bookmarked for over a decade. It captures what science is really about: being less wrong. Despite my disdain for that site (because it often runs contrary to the meaning of those words), the sentiment is right. Jun8's comment in [0] hits on this. It's not about being right, because "right" does not exist in an absolute sense. There is always more specificity that can make something more right. So instead, it is about decreasing our error. Just because you can't reach an idealized thing doesn't mean you can't get closer to it.
I don't think that word salad really means anything. People fall for complex lies all the time. We just experienced it with 'public health experts' who had never done a single cost vs. benefit analysis in the real world nearly destroy civilization because they were enjoying the power trip. And they lied their asses off to us and many of you on HN still believe it because it's a huge blind spot for your intellects.
I don't think any truth is fundamental at all, I think it all has to remain up for review perpetually even though it irritates the living hell out of some people that it has to be is like that. You all seem to want "settled science" but science is never settled, nor is truth. Just the mere mention of "global warming" on here as an issue creates a knee-jerk reaction in people which makes me realize what we are up against is really a clash of incompatible personality types that will one day have to be sorted out violently. The winners of that conflict will determine "truth."
The existence of a believable but complex lie does not disprove the existence of a believable yet simple lie.
Nor have I made the claim that because something is complex that it must be true.
Maybe it would help if I wrote like this
min(complexity | truth) > x
min(complexity | lie) = 0
I've said nothing about max complexity, only that some lower bound of complexity must exist when something is true.
And again, this statement does not imply that the complexity of something can indicate if it is truthful or not.
We could also write it this way if you want: min(complexity | truth) > min(complexity | lie)
> I don't think any truth is fundamental at all
You and I are actually in agreement. But to be clear, while I do not think anyone can make a claim (in a finite amount of time) that is perfectly correct, I am quite certain that there are things that are more correct than others. Science can always improve, and my previous comment stated as much. It would be wrong to say "the Earth is flat" but certainly it would be more wrong to say "the Earth is the sound a Gorilla makes while eating the color purple." And there's definitely statements even more wrong than that. At least that one was intelligible, even if incoherent.
Yes, various terrestrial sources have been proposed for this signal over the years, primarily because of its strength.
To have an extraterrestrial origin, and still be so anomalously strong at the point of reception, it must have been so strong at the source that it didn’t fit any known cosmic process. Given the inverse square law, the easiest explanation for the unusual strength was simply that it was unusually close. But this work seems to rule that out and also propose a process to create such a strong signal.
We won't. while we don't know for sure if there is life there is nothing close enough to contact. The closest star is 4 light years, anything within 20 light years has been studied and has no signs of radio or other communication. Anything more than 20 light years is a 40 year message round trip - too far to establish contact in your likely lifetime. (If you are very young maybe 30 light years - but that doesn't add much)
HN armchair astronomer question time. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?
Any crazy far-fetched sci-fi / pseudo-scientific ideas?
I'm not really a fan of "Dark Forest". I prefer these:
- We're truly rare, maybe even first. Intelligence is extremely hard. LUCA is old, civilization happened yesterday.
- Fragile universe. It's easy to destroy universes by accidentally setting off vacuum collapse. This would mean we're probably first, else the universe would have been destroyed already. Also, we'll probably destroy it for ourselves and everyone else.
- Simulation hypothesis, Ancestor simulation hypothesis, This is just a video game (wake up!!), ...
- Introvert / internet hypothesis. The universe is huge and travel takes too long. Stars have enough energy, and advanced civilizations have digitized themselves and turned inward. No need to branch out. There will be infinite fun until the heat runs out.
- They've left this universe. Not only are they hyper-advanced AI, but they've broken physics and escaped the current universe. If we're inside a black hole, they've found a way to get out.
> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?
Space big + speed of light is too slow. Sprinkle in a little "suns are fucking loud as shit" but the first two are more than enough to explain all of it. Not to mention the million other factors that make transmitting a viable signal across interstellar distances an incredibly challenging problem.
Radio signals are bunk. The transit method is where it's at.
While the transit method won't find all planets, it'll certainly find a lot of them. And with spectroscopic imaging, we'll be able to read the atmospheric spectra of these planets and have pretty good guesses for what's happening on them.
Do you think we'll find organics? Biosignatures? Technosignatures?
The survey should give us a good feel for what's out there. And as we gather data, we'll have a clearer picture of the rarity of life, intelligent or otherwise.
Sure, but that's a completely different conversation. We're talking about life, not habitable planets. Detection of planets is a step in the right direction but only because it helps us narrow candidates. We were already certain those planets existed without confirmation.
The Fermi Paradox is about the difficulty of confirming life while there's such strong evidence that life should exist elsewhere. These signatures only strengthens the "paradoxical" nature of the Fermi Paradox.
Also, mind you, many of those signatures come through radioastronomy.
Obviously simulation hypothesis. The vastness of space and the limit on the speed of light suggest multiple worlds are being simulated in the same "space" such that isolation between worlds is always maintained.
They can't be chill and like us at the same time.
Chilled aliens most likely don't invent faster than light travel so I pretty much hope aliens won't find us or are not interested in us.
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.
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...
> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.
In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time.
On a species level, you can imagine an aggression/cooperation "species personality" axis. Humans are in the middle, with chimps more on the aggressive side, and bonobos to the cooperation side.
Being in the middle, humans have a bit of a split personality. We cooperate on a large scale during warfare. But consider the Cold War. Both the US and the USSR were continent-spanning countries with multiple ethnicities. I would argue that cooperation on that scale just isn't that different from cooperation on a planet-wide scale. A species that's capable of one is very likely to be capable of the other. That's part of why I'm not terminally pessimistic about humanity, or starfaring species more generally.
I don't think we can rule out starfaring for a species that's a little more bonobo-like, and defaults to a post-national outlook.
The Space Race was partly a Cold War propaganda program but it diverged almost completely from the ICBM programs. ICBMs have to be solid fueled to minimize launch time. But manned orbital launchers have to be liquid fueled (for the core) for efficiency and safety.
There's no reason to think that megastructures are only achievable through slavery, but I think it's fair to say that it's a lot cheaper if you're willing to disregard the humanity of others and abuse them until you get what you want. The alternative is that you pay workers what they're worth and use enough of them that they aren't being overworked, but that eats into profits.
I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits.
When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.
Advanced aliens (and we 'almost') will have robots for that. And they would also have less resource issues than us, so, they would have trillions of them.
Have you seen a modern car manufacturing plant? Many parts of the production pipeline are fully automated. Granted, most of these machines are not ambulatory but they're still considered robots. Or consider modern freight shipping: many ports rely on intelligent automation for container handling. The development path of 3d printing is also leaning more heavily into robotics, featuring freely-moving articulated arms controlled by cameras and sensors.
I'd say robots are entirely viable, and we don't need science fiction to validate them.
I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible.
But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.
How is it not obvious that a one-world empire ruled by totalitarian futurists would have been vastly more motivated and funded to do Big Engineering Stuff than 1990s liberal late-capitalism?
Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth.
EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.
The world wars drove more technical progress than the world has ever seen, before or since. (Making your iPhone better at doing the same thing worse and slower so the end result comes out basically the same isn’t “progress”.)
> 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".
Projecting behavior onto a phantom is just a venue for reflecting a personal worldview onto something else. "Being short-sighted and selfish worked for the aliens, so it would work here too".
It's a safe bet that if they know about us at all they'll just stay away from us. Our media is filled with depictions of us killing aliens. There's little reason to think we'd accept them. We can't even get along with/accept other humans. Some people's first instinct will be to shoot them. Others will want to lock them up and experiment on them.
If aliens did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do, or unaware of what we are.
I'm not too worried they'd kill us to protect themselves though. At the rate we're going, we'll kill ourselves off along with every other living thing on the planet long before we get out of our own solar system.
The most horrifying aspect of the hypothesis as depicted in the Dark Forest book is that it was simply the job of a low-level bureaucrat to identify "low-entropy entities which lack the hiding gene" within their region of the galaxy and allocate a basic bottom-shelf munition to "cleanse" it.
However, humans were aware of this possibility and had spent centuries reorganizing the solar system to have a measure of resilience to it. So, to humanity's great credit, he had to go get permission from his supervisor for to deploy a next-tier solution.
"Why would anyone travel across town (i.e., the galaxy) just to step on an anthill?" We have a whole industry dedicated to exterminating any other life that invades "our" living space. It's considered an unremarkable necessity.
>If aliens did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do
If aliens had the technology to visit us right now, the latter is a given.
You don't have to assume anything crazy. You can create a planet killer by simply accelerating a decently massive object at relativistic speeds and firing it at earth.
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?
The violence we do is a choice we make based on circumstances and conditions. It is not inherently part of us nor is it inevitable. In your scenario it is easy to imagine making the choice you imply. But that's all it is.
If your point is to prove that the patterns of domination and conquests that exist here will necessarily exist in the stars too, then I'm afraid your thought experiment is deeply flawed.
If ever we are able to journey through the interstellar medium, we ought to have achieved immortality by then. We'll probably live as deincarnated beings in virtual worlds, free from any desire to grow exponentially, having realized this is deeply unsustainable and pointless once you have mastery over physical reality.
Read Diaspora by Greg Egan, perhaps it can cure you from this simplistic vision of the far future we have inherited from the 50s pop SciFi books.
Largely depends on the parameters.
I believe it also assumes infinite resources.
In general it's a very simple model not meant to explain all and everything.
The interesting thing here is that it breaks assumptions that to be "alpha" you MUST dominate to win. Even if within only these parameters, it suggest there are conditions where being "nice" isn't just a nebulous ethical thing, but it's an optimal conflict strategy.
I think it carries two different messages to two different groups. If you're a "lets all be friends" type, then it's important that you also guard the resources that allow you to be nice. Being provokable isn't "being mean" its the thing allowing you to be nice. If you're a "take advantage of the rubes" type, it's a hint that there might be metaphorical money left on the table by being too greedy.
> not meant to explain all and everything.
That it's not true ALL the time, is less interesting than the fact that it's true some of the time. At least to me.
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?
At this point, I’m terrified some spacefaring AI is going to come over and relentlessly interface with whatever systems they can find while screaming “IF THIS BOT IS TROUBLING YOU PLEASE BLOCK ME AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL” and self-replicating millions of clones.
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.
You have a really bleak and limited view of the far future. Species that have the means to cross interstellar space probably have found ways to alter themselves and removed their need to grow exponentially as they realized it is unsustainable, and are now perfectly content to chill on their homeplanet.
You're thinking of cancer cells with spaceships, not highly advanced beings who have mastered matter and physical reality. I recommend reading Dispora by Greg Egan, it could potentially expand your mind on what the future may actually look like.
Certainly if they're like us, and travelling to new worlds, they'll be imperialistic and colonial. They'll plant a flag, because we obviously weren't really making use of the planet, not _really_, and attempt to civilise the natives through something between cultural erasure and genocide.
On Earth, in the grand scheme of things, it took a very short time for colonies to a) diverge politically or b) fail. It's not something that stopped happening (much) because we became more cuddly. It's just boring old economics.
So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.
Under a scientific economy like socialism you dont need to be "apex male who exploits the workers under him to get yachts and tax breaks." The workers co-operate and thus the "apex predator" capital owner becomes dismissed the same way our towns and villages in the developed West don't pay fees to warring bands of gangs but instead we've unlocked the Republic and the system of representation and taxes and such via democratic action.
You absolutely can have utopian beings. In fact, I'd argue the greed-based societies get caught in the great filter and if there is a space faring race, its absurdly ethical and fair and, to me, explains the Fermi paradox. They're out there and maybe they see Earth but it would be hugely unethical to intervene here. The proper thing to do would be to only observe us from afar.
If this was a movie or novel maybe the Wow signal was them messing up, or a defector amongst their midst who disagrees with full isolation policies. But most likely it'll end up being something simple. The last good theory I heard was it domestic and was reflected off orbiting space junk, but who knows.
It's far more likely we will discover aliens and then there will be nothing either of us can do about it, especially them since what we discover will be long dead.
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.
No, it’s not:
> "Our study did not conclude that the Wow! Signal constituted evidence of a signal emanating from an extraterrestrial civilization. However, null results are instrumental in refining future technosignature searches," the team concludes.
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.
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.
Planet. Man has reach the moon (not in my lifetime) but that isn't a planet. There are robots out a little farther but so far as we can be sure only one planet has life. (you can calculate odds of others but there isn't enough data to be confident)
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).
I doubt they'd be all that unfathomable. We come from the same universe after all, and as far as we can tell it's all governed by the same physics. It stands to reason that life on their worlds would have developed under at least some of the same rules we developed under on Earth. That should put at least some constraints on their forms and functions.
They might have learned different things than we have, they might know a lot more about our universe than we do, but I'd guess that much of what we've managed to learn so far will still be a part of their reality regardless of their level of familiarity with it. For example, more than 90% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen. They might have discovered things that are more exotic and never seen on Earth, but the hydrogen atoms we've studied won't be any different from hydrogen they'd have studied. We share a home. By the time they've figured out enough of how the universe works to reach us it's pretty likely that we'll have some common ground to talk about.
Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters. A few submissions by them seem to have hit the front page recently and I'm not sure why. This article is a perfect example. There's no reason to talk about aliens here except for dramatization.
I mean what even is this article? It has always been widely believed that the signal did not originate from Earth. Not impossible, but thought to come from Sagittarius. But "Extraterrestrial" != "alien", only "Not Earth".
From the first arxiv paper's abstract
> We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in these clouds triggered by a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR). A maser flare or superradiance mechanisms can produce stimulated emission consistent with the Wow! Signal. Our hypothesis explains all observed properties of the Wow! Signal
From the second one
> we confirm that small, cold HI clouds can produce narrowband signals similar to its detection, which might suggest a common origin.
Nobody is talking about aliens. FFS, Avi Loeb isn't even an author on one of the papers.
The papers are good but nothing really exciting to the general public in them. Just your every day normal science. Science can be really exciting but we don't need fairy tales for that. All that does is degrade science, create confusion, and ultimately strengthen the anti-science crowd because people can't tell the difference between "scientists say" and "news reporter says scientists say". These are very different things...
Edit:
I wanted to add and explain why it people have suggested it is on a frequency that "would be a good candidate for extraterrestrial communication." The reason is absolutely mundane: it is a frequency that doesn't interact with tons of things so can travel pretty far. But mind you, calling it a good candidate for alien communication is also ignoring all the reasons that it would be a terrible way for communicating with others. Like the fact that it was super fast and if you don't have a telescope pointing in the right direction you're really not going to detect it (which is why it's been hard to find more).
Like most people with a degree in physics, I believe in aliens. Similarly, like most people with a degree in physics, I do not believe aliens have visited Earth nor do I believe we have any evidence of their existence. The reason we believe they're out there is because Earth is, as far as we can tell, Earth is not that unique. We're an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary sun and since the time when Sagan said those same words we've only gained more evidence for this being true. So there's good reason to believe they are out there. And we should search for them because either they are out there or the process of searching for them leads to a better understanding of why Earth is unique. It is a no lose situation. Either way we'll learn something incredibly important.
But also, like most scientists, I think it is unlikely we'll find signals from them. Space is too big, star systems are too far apart, the speed of light is too slow, and there's a lot of radio sources out there that are very powerful. Even if there were aliens around Proxima Centauri the signals take over 4 years to get there and our sun is blasting noise that is several orders of magnitude louder. For them to find our general broadcasts would be like trying to find a (specific) needle in the Pacific Ocean.
This article mentions aliens because this particular signal has been the subject of such speculation for decades, including by real working scientists. Heck an entire episode of the X Files was written around it. To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism.
Also, extraterrestrial life is not “fairy tales.” Most serious scientists expect that it does exist given what we know about life and cosmos.
Finally, many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength. Some folks found “close accident” more likely than “distant and impossibly strong.”
I made an edit while you were replying. I think you should read it.
> To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism
I disagree. The speculation of extraterrestrial civilization origins has always been bad journalism. Since day 1. Spreading that more only perpetuates the myth. It has never been a good candidate for extra terrestrial communication.
> many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength
While ignoring absolutely every other attribute about the signal that would make it a terrible way to communicate with alien civilizations.
I think you have a grave misunderstanding of what "most serious scientists" believe and don't believe. I love the X-Files. Great show. But it is also fiction. Unfortunately, so is a fair amount of science reporting. It's unfortunately that most people do not consider the facts interesting enough. But maybe that's because we've been telling too many stories and lying about what most scientists actually believe. There's always some crack job, but one scientist believing in something doesn't mean it is representative of the population.
I haven't read this book, but there are a few books with a similar theme where a digital intelligence spreads throughout the universe. This is a variation on the idea with a somewhat plausible mechanism.
> lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.
Leaving aside how incredibly vague this "mechanism" is, there is a very large list of infinitely unlikely coincidences that would have to take place for this to occur.
Consider how often human software, built in the same planet, by the same race, on the same hardware and using the same language, during the same time period, with most of the same tools, fails to be compatible.
Now take all those "same"s and change them to "different" and you tell me who's gonna file that Jira ticket.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't the title completely misleading? Their main hypothesis is that it was caused by a magnetar and they write:
"Our study did not conclude that the Wow! Signal constituted evidence of a signal emanating from an extraterrestrial civilization."
Same for everything the linked papers say about "extraterrestial". Nothing there justifies the title suggesting it was concluded that it likely was caused by extraterrestial life.
Misleading? Maybe, I don't think so though. "Extraterrestrial" is just "not from/on Earth", it means nothing beyond that.
As compared to Australian FRBs: https://www.planetary.org/articles/0417-the-cosmic-microwave...
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Extraterrestrial in this sense is “didn’t come from earth”, not “aliens!”.
Mars is extraterrestrial. The sun is extraterrestrial. Even the moon is extraterrestrial.
And this article isn't about "coming here".
As for your claims about the motives of people seeking extraterrestrial life or even wanting there to be such life, they are beyond absurd. Likening it to religious faith: it is belief without evidence.
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.
The existence of radio waves was first proven by German physicist Heinrich Hertz on 11 November 1886.
The first commercial radio broadcast was transmitted on 2 November 1920
that means intentional radio signal was underway about 100 years ago.
so suppose that signal despite the "low" power is heard by someone that listens very closely. they tease it out of the noise, and right away know what it is, and try to send back.
at most, they are about 50 radio-years away, if thier signal reaches us now.
beyond that, no signal from earth has propagated that far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_45...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GJ_3929
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_1534%E2%88%921043
> Forget about why would they - they can't get here. The speed of light is too slow.
They could get here in a generation ship. Heck, we could almost build a generation ship that could reach another solar system.
First, there is the traditional generation ship where you set up a closed self sustaining ecosystem. I don't think we are anywhere near able to make such a closed system that would last for a trip to another star, but give it another few decades and there is probably a good chance we'll know how.
Second, there is another kind of generation ship that is called a seed ship or embryo ship. Your ship just carries a small crew, plus frozen eggs and sperm. During the trip as the crew ages you use artificial wombs to make babies from the frozen eggs and sperm and raise them to be the new crew. Any people you will need other than the crew at the destination (e.g., colonists if this is a colonizing mission) also come from the frozen eggs and sperm.
With enough automation the crew could be quite small. I once calculated the mass of high calorie density food that would be needed to sustain a small crew for thousands of years and it was actually small enough that I'd expect a civilization maybe a century more advanced in space than ours to maybe be able to manage. With that you don't need to solve the problem of making a closed self-sustaining ecosystem.
> With enough automation the crew [of a generation ship] could be quite small.
Other than the engineering challenges, we don't have the faintest idea how a really long-term crew is going to work socially and psychologically in a constrained, isolated, artificial environment.
The closest analog are the naval/polar expeditions, which were unisex and under military or hierarchical command, none of them longer than a couple of years. Some perished (Franklin), some pivoted (Shackleton w/Endurance), some failed with loss of life (Scott), some worked (Amundsen). But all had options unavailable to a ship in vacuum, and were on an incomparably shorter timescale.
I would caution applying our current understanding and limitations onto alien civilizations. I don't believe they will break the light barrier, but they may develop telescopes that can detect life from light-years away, and the stupendous travel times are possible with suspended animation or by stopping the aging process.
While we don't know everything, we do know what we don't know needs to be consistent with what we know. Relativity is well supported by experiments, so whatever this thing is we don't know will have all the things you don't like about relativity.
telestope limits exist in theory not just our manufacturing abilities.
These nutjobs still don't want to grasp the reality that the UFO sighting at Area 51 was the radar test of the A-12 prototype, which was made out of shiny unpainted titanium and done in the salt desert due to its properties of absorbing electromagnetic waves. And then some people that saw this around Roswell were spreading the rumor of UFOs because at the time that was the trend on television.
Always bet on stupidity, they'll say anything to get their 5 minutes of attention on TV / social media. I mean, there were even senate and court hearings over this. Over a rumor that was disproven decades ago.
The US (and probably by extend our species) has a serious education and information validation problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
edit: Downvotes without comments create the downvote paradox, and kind of prove my point
It wasn’t the A-12 but a precursor. The A-12 didn’t come about until the late 50s. The Roswell incident happened in the late 40s.
There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.
I know this because my family was involved.
> It wasn’t the A-12 but a precursor. The A-12 didn’t come about until the late 50s. The Roswell incident happened in the late 40s.
> There were a few experiments with supersonic jet propulsion around that time. There were also Generals who would gladly stoke the UFO flames to protect the secrecy of their anti-radar research.
You're right with the timeline that the initial rumors didn't start with the A-12 radar tests, but they were reinforced by it. Initially, Project Mogul's crash of the balloon array triggered the rumors, but it's not as fancy and couldn't be interpreted as an "alien spaceship", even at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul
Maybe they have a relativistic kinetic kill system and we’re on borrowed time.
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https://archive.is/2025.08.26-184549/https://www.iflscience....
Thanks... The fact that websites are now blocking Firefox by default as an "ad-blocker" is saddening.
I pasted the URL into firefox, and didn't see that huge "you're using an adblocker popup".
I opened a firefox private window and navigated to it from the HN page, and got the adblocker popup.
Right now I have two tabs open in the same non-private window, one showing the adblocker popup and one not. In the one that's not I can view the whole page. Reloading in the one that is not showing the adblocker popup then showed it.
I navigated from HN in a non-private window and got the popup. So this seems to be referer constrained in some sense, not necessarily browser based. Hard to confirm.
I do everything in private by default, so I clicked on the link from a private HN tab and did not get the popup on firefox mobile.
FF 142.0 with uBlock Origin works fine.
My money is still on the janitor plugging a faulty vaccum cleaner in the wrong electrical socket!
There is a theory that if we could find the same janitor and get them to plug the same broken vacuum cleaner to the same socket in exactly the same way, mankind's energy problem will be forever solved, one way or the other.
There is another theory that this has already happened.
Vacuum cleaners are an illusion. Broken vacuum cleaners, doubly so.
Simple programmer here. I have a dumb question. What about the "Wow!" signal is special, or unique? What makes someone see it and think "wow"? Is there some kind of information encoded in the signal?
It's an _insanely_ powerful signal. It'd be like watching for fireflies in a field and suddenly seeing a stick of dynamite go off.
There is no information in it, it looks like a continuous wave of radio energy coming from space. It is on a frequency that might be a natural one for any intelligent civilization to consider broadcasting on, and it is a narrowband signal, meaning it only covers a small range of frequencies.
It had a high intensity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Intensity
Extraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.
Was this signal suspected to be from earth? Otherwise why point out the signal was “extraterrestrial origin after all”?
It's not, but interference is a big problem.
You need to rule out that you accidentally picked up some radio broadcast and state that otherwise anyone worth their salt will first ask, "Are you sure it didn't come from the local radio station?"
To add to this, it has generally been believed that the Wow signal didn't come from Earth. But being a rare event no one wanted to rule it out completely. Technically these papers don't even rule that out. But they do a good job at expanding the problem of figuring out what that signal might have been.
I'll put it this way: people would probably be more surprised if the Wow signal was terrestrial in origin than extra terrestrial.
I actually briefly worked as a "paranormal investigator" when I was hard up for money --- someone came to me with some satellite photos they felt had evidence of UFOs.
I found a scientist who ran said satellites, who explained what seemed odd were artificacts of the instrument, and they were only noticed because they occured in the area of the Nimitz[1], which then got heavily OSINTed by the woo woo crowd.
I never took another of those kinds of job, because when the guy got an answer he didn't like he blew up on me, accused me of being part of the "deep state" and some kind of X-Files level man in black. (I offered him his money back because I got the sense he was a "true believer" and had dipped into savings, and it had only taken a few emails from my old uni email to show I wasn't a crank to clear up his questions, to no avail.)
I am glad we've gotten to the point that saying life is "out there" isn't considered wackadoo, even if couched with the caveat it may be so far away we may never interact, which is my stance.
It is my understanding that part of why the "wow signal" is so... "wow"... is that it did not repeat.
We have at times, in science, encountered stellar phenomon which sound artificial. Repeated noises/radiations -- classic example being when we first discovered pulsars in the 60s.
The thing with the "wow" signal is... it happened once then... nothing.
Now, maybe there's some natural phenomenon that does it's thing on a very long timescale but it's my understanding that they've ruled out terrestial sources, and so... the mind jumps to crazy stuff like the enterprise going to warp 10 or whatever.
I'll go ahead and say right here if it's definitively proven to be aliens, I'll give a hundred dollars to the Tor Project.
I'll also go ahead right here and say that while it was unusual, I think that we will one day find out the source was extraterrestrial but not "alien" in the sense of another civilization sending us a signal or us picking up something from a spacecraft.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200514012341/https://www.nytim... [2] "When observations with another telescope confirmed the emission, it eliminated any sort of instrumental effects. At this point, Bell said of herself and Hewish that "we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?"[12] Even so, they nicknamed the signal LGM-1, for "little green men" (a playful name for intelligent beings of extraterrestrial origin). " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Discovery
Thanks for sharing. I think we're seeing a lot of the same thing occurring in these comments. :(
You'd probably be interested in my main comment too[0]. The signal has always been a terrible candidate for alien communication. Classic conspiracy problem where people become fixated on one aspect while ignoring all others.
Like Carl Sagan said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary science". It's sad but I think a lot of people just have these deep misunderstandings of what science actually is and how it works. There's also the really unfortunate human bias in how we read people in positions of authority[1]. Science makes you second guess and forces you to consider everything probabilistically. Nuance and detail dominate. Hard truth is that the world is noisy and figuring things out is hard.
But I think one of the most important things I have learned in life is that truth has a lower bound in complexity while lies don't. You should make things as simple as possible but to make simpler requires losing accuracy. Just because something can't be explained to a layman doesn't mean the person doesn't understand it, it means the topic is complex. Simplicity only ends up coming after a lot of work and dealing with the complexities.
To get side tracked a little, I have a proposal for a great filter: complexity. Any naturally evolved civilization is likely to have brains that preference simplicity and push against complexity. It's natural because complexity simply requires more computational power and that'd be a poor evolutionary strategy. You want enough to get the advantage but nor more. So when these civilizations advance they are likely to get to a point where the system they have created is far more complex that their brains can naturally handle. I think humans are in such a situation right now. No one person can understand the complexities of current issues be that from Global Warming to Geopolitics. We can do these things collectively but not individually. It's absolutely amazing what we've been able to accomplish, but I think if we're to continue we'll also have to recognize how incredible these accomplishments actually are. So the great filter is not some concrete event like Nuclear War or Global Warming (things that there's a good chance those civilizations also face), but the more abstract filter of abstraction itself. Eventually a civilization needs to cross the bridge from where its people can understand enough to navigate major problems of their world to one they aren't. Just seems unlikely brains would evolve fast enough to keep pace, since it is easier to create complexity than to understand it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034860
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45000418
I would put forward that we can do many things collectively but not individually because we are part of a collective organism much more than we are individuals, though we are unable to see it due to a human having a limited perspective of only a part of a whole.
It is a common tendency to see humanity as a set of standalone humans[0] (if we cannot do something individually, but we can collectively, then we sort of can’t do it). However, a human only exists in context of others, and all we do is always in many ways (even if not real-time) a collaboration (starting from our education).
I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.
What is an alarming issue is that sometimes even a figurative anthill of many humans, as a collective super-entity, cannot adequately understand and navigate the reality it is facing.
[0] It is not helped by sci-fi that depicts various aliens as being collective beings, somehow contrasted with humans. In reality, we almost never go completely alone[1] for prolonged periods (except pathological cases), we are smarter when there is multiple of us, and the core of our interpretation of consciousness/sentience requires it to be social (anything else, and I don’t think we would even recognize it as consciousness—maybe that somehow relates to the great filter, too).
[1] When we do, our consciousness still supplies models of others in our lives, one way or another motivating our actions.
I don't think you're wrong, I think it is just semantics. I mean as long as you're agreeing we're not like the Borg or some other hive mind collective haha. But yeah, the old saying has stayed true: it takes a village to raise a child.
Just that I think there's a lot of utility in using the terminology of "individual" to talk about each human. It's true, we're dependent on one another for our survival and reproduction. But the "independence" is not a description of our capacity of survival but in that our consciousness is independent.
We have terms like community (and a ton which make implicit approximations about the size) to describe what you're talking about.
I think maybe that part of the problem is, as you point out, there's often a misunderstanding in ants themselves. It is easy to see the emergent behavior of them operating as a group. As if there's some collective mind. But you're absolutely right you could say the same about humans. We know a lot more about ants than we did centuries ago and do know they do operate independently. While it is much more like a monarchy structure, each ant operates, in some form, as a self contained unit. It can exist outside a colony. It's not likely to survive long, but this distinction is worth assigning some word to, right? Clearly there's a distinction from were I to claim that the ant's body were independent from its head. We'd claim that false because the separation causes an immediate (or rather an exceptionally quick) death.
Maybe that is semantics, but I think those semantics are helpful to us communicating and we would be the worse were we to call these things the same.
Fwiw, I actually believe this too. I stated it the way I did because I think most people underestimate complexity (there's definitely advantages to that trait lol). But to refine my position more, I'd say that the current complexity of the world and what is required to solve its problems vastly exceeds that of millennia ago. I'd agree, the world has always been too complex for one man to understand, but certainly the scale of things has changed. In the past the forces pushing on a person or even community were primarily local. There were still global phenomena but if you go to 10000 BC a person's actions on the Eurasian continent had no meaningful effect on a person living in the Americas. Maybe Genghis Khan killed so many he that there was a small change in global temperature, but even then the main reason was that even just 1k years ago there were so few people that their combined efforts itself had little effect on the global temperature haha. Today, these things aren't true. One ship gets stuck in one canal and the whole system is put into chaos. There's lots of advantages to this global interaction but that's for the same reason these issues exist. With an over simplification that I think can be helpful to extrapolate from, just treat every person on the planet as a node and their relationship to others as an edge. Nor only do we have more nodes, but the average node also has more connections.Your take on complexity as a filter reminded me of a fascinating paper I read. You might find it interesting because it claims that evolution does tend to favor simplicity, except when under a certain kind of pressure.
The paper is titled "Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of parasitism: evolution of complex replication strategies" and you can find it at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210441
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that paper. It definitely is interesting!
But I'd be careful generalizing too much from it. I'm not saying my proposal is correct but rather just recognizing issues with the paper. The reason for my proposal is that 1) here we are as complex entities. We humans exist. 2) One of, if not the, things in physics we are most confident about is that everything will be in its lowest possible energy state. It's true for the electrons that emit light while doing so just as much as it is true that creatures need to eat more to do more.
Notice something subtle but important in the paper. Their focus of efficiency is based on string length and reaction time. They note that string length decreases. Think about this a bit. For these strings to reduce it must mean that there was redundancy or excess in them. If mutations are random then modifying some of the characters in those strings will have no effect. We should also similarly look at parasites and see that these are a lower entropy state, in that they are able to leverage the information from the other "microbes" to perpetuate their own reproduction. They can't dominate because they can't live without the hosts but also at the same time this means they can't mutate as much and survive. There is a self selection bias to the results that isn't being properly accounted for. A survival bias that needs to be accounted for.
Now let's contrast to our more complex forms of life that my proposal is being based on. These lifeforms have lots of repetition in their genetic sequences. This is actually an important fact that the foundation of things like CRISPR are based on: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Even the acronym is a bit repetitive (which makes it great!). This is a defense mechanism made so that we're robust to mutations. My proposal is dependent on some complex life already existing. I don't know how to explain how life got to this complex level (something these researchers are working on), just that we are here, that I myself exist. I hope this is not a contentious axiom :)
They're tackling a really interesting problem and in no way am I trying to diminish their work. The best way to solve complex problems is to first solve overly simplified variants of them. Even if those result in completely inaccurate results the process is highly beneficial to tackling the more complex variants. Due to this we need to take results being mindful of the context. A post on the Relativity of Wrong hit the front page this morning[0] and it links to a page I've had bookmarked for over a decade. It captures what science is really about: being less wrong. Despite my disdain for that site (because it often runs contrary to the meaning of those words), the sentiment is right. Jun8's comment in [0] hits on this. It's not about being right, because "right" does not exist in an absolute sense. There is always more specificity that can make something more right. So instead, it is about decreasing our error. Just because you can't reach an idealized thing doesn't mean you can't get closer to it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45025600
> truth has a lower bound in complexity while lies don't
Very well said
I don't think that word salad really means anything. People fall for complex lies all the time. We just experienced it with 'public health experts' who had never done a single cost vs. benefit analysis in the real world nearly destroy civilization because they were enjoying the power trip. And they lied their asses off to us and many of you on HN still believe it because it's a huge blind spot for your intellects.
I don't think any truth is fundamental at all, I think it all has to remain up for review perpetually even though it irritates the living hell out of some people that it has to be is like that. You all seem to want "settled science" but science is never settled, nor is truth. Just the mere mention of "global warming" on here as an issue creates a knee-jerk reaction in people which makes me realize what we are up against is really a clash of incompatible personality types that will one day have to be sorted out violently. The winners of that conflict will determine "truth."
The existence of a believable but complex lie does not disprove the existence of a believable yet simple lie.
Nor have I made the claim that because something is complex that it must be true.
Maybe it would help if I wrote like this
I've said nothing about max complexity, only that some lower bound of complexity must exist when something is true.And again, this statement does not imply that the complexity of something can indicate if it is truthful or not.
We could also write it this way if you want: min(complexity | truth) > min(complexity | lie)
You and I are actually in agreement. But to be clear, while I do not think anyone can make a claim (in a finite amount of time) that is perfectly correct, I am quite certain that there are things that are more correct than others. Science can always improve, and my previous comment stated as much. It would be wrong to say "the Earth is flat" but certainly it would be more wrong to say "the Earth is the sound a Gorilla makes while eating the color purple." And there's definitely statements even more wrong than that. At least that one was intelligible, even if incoherent.> People fall for complex lies all the time.
Of course. My comment was nothing about what people choose to believe.
> I don't think any truth is fundamental at all
Neither did I mean that.
> You all seem to want "settled science" but science is never settled, nor is truth.
I don't think there was any intent of this in my comment or in the comment I replied to.
Yes, various terrestrial sources have been proposed for this signal over the years, primarily because of its strength.
To have an extraterrestrial origin, and still be so anomalously strong at the point of reception, it must have been so strong at the source that it didn’t fit any known cosmic process. Given the inverse square law, the easiest explanation for the unusual strength was simply that it was unusually close. But this work seems to rule that out and also propose a process to create such a strong signal.
Anyways
What did you have for lunch? I heated up my leftovers in the microwave oven in the office.
:)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)
Either way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.
We won't. while we don't know for sure if there is life there is nothing close enough to contact. The closest star is 4 light years, anything within 20 light years has been studied and has no signs of radio or other communication. Anything more than 20 light years is a 40 year message round trip - too far to establish contact in your likely lifetime. (If you are very young maybe 30 light years - but that doesn't add much)
Chill. There is an extra solar object arriving in time for Christmas 2025. The ship is off gassing CO2 like crazy too. Totes aliens! https://zenodo.org/records/16941949?token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzUxMi...
HN armchair astronomer question time. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?
Any crazy far-fetched sci-fi / pseudo-scientific ideas?
I'm not really a fan of "Dark Forest". I prefer these:
- We're truly rare, maybe even first. Intelligence is extremely hard. LUCA is old, civilization happened yesterday.
- Fragile universe. It's easy to destroy universes by accidentally setting off vacuum collapse. This would mean we're probably first, else the universe would have been destroyed already. Also, we'll probably destroy it for ourselves and everyone else.
- Simulation hypothesis, Ancestor simulation hypothesis, This is just a video game (wake up!!), ...
- Introvert / internet hypothesis. The universe is huge and travel takes too long. Stars have enough energy, and advanced civilizations have digitized themselves and turned inward. No need to branch out. There will be infinite fun until the heat runs out.
- They've left this universe. Not only are they hyper-advanced AI, but they've broken physics and escaped the current universe. If we're inside a black hole, they've found a way to get out.
Radio signals are bunk. The transit method is where it's at.
While the transit method won't find all planets, it'll certainly find a lot of them. And with spectroscopic imaging, we'll be able to read the atmospheric spectra of these planets and have pretty good guesses for what's happening on them.
Do you think we'll find organics? Biosignatures? Technosignatures?
The survey should give us a good feel for what's out there. And as we gather data, we'll have a clearer picture of the rarity of life, intelligent or otherwise.
Sure, but that's a completely different conversation. We're talking about life, not habitable planets. Detection of planets is a step in the right direction but only because it helps us narrow candidates. We were already certain those planets existed without confirmation.
The Fermi Paradox is about the difficulty of confirming life while there's such strong evidence that life should exist elsewhere. These signatures only strengthens the "paradoxical" nature of the Fermi Paradox.
Also, mind you, many of those signatures come through radioastronomy.
Obviously simulation hypothesis. The vastness of space and the limit on the speed of light suggest multiple worlds are being simulated in the same "space" such that isolation between worlds is always maintained.
Creationism.
lol
They can't be chill and like us at the same time. Chilled aliens most likely don't invent faster than light travel so I pretty much hope aliens won't find us or are not interested in us.
Which of our leaders do you hope their leaders are like?
Hmm, I parsed that differently. I wonder if the GPP hopes they like us as pets or as foodstuff...
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.
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...
> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.
In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time.
[0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1
On a species level, you can imagine an aggression/cooperation "species personality" axis. Humans are in the middle, with chimps more on the aggressive side, and bonobos to the cooperation side.
Being in the middle, humans have a bit of a split personality. We cooperate on a large scale during warfare. But consider the Cold War. Both the US and the USSR were continent-spanning countries with multiple ethnicities. I would argue that cooperation on that scale just isn't that different from cooperation on a planet-wide scale. A species that's capable of one is very likely to be capable of the other. That's part of why I'm not terminally pessimistic about humanity, or starfaring species more generally.
I don't think we can rule out starfaring for a species that's a little more bonobo-like, and defaults to a post-national outlook.
The Space Race was partly a Cold War propaganda program but it diverged almost completely from the ICBM programs. ICBMs have to be solid fueled to minimize launch time. But manned orbital launchers have to be liquid fueled (for the core) for efficiency and safety.
obviously the space race was about weaponizing space in many people’s minds
>Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.
Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions.
Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro.
As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.
There's no reason to think that megastructures are only achievable through slavery, but I think it's fair to say that it's a lot cheaper if you're willing to disregard the humanity of others and abuse them until you get what you want. The alternative is that you pay workers what they're worth and use enough of them that they aren't being overworked, but that eats into profits.
I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits.
When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.
Advanced aliens (and we 'almost') will have robots for that. And they would also have less resource issues than us, so, they would have trillions of them.
I remain unconvinced of the viability of robots, as much as I love scifi renditions.
Have you seen a modern car manufacturing plant? Many parts of the production pipeline are fully automated. Granted, most of these machines are not ambulatory but they're still considered robots. Or consider modern freight shipping: many ports rely on intelligent automation for container handling. The development path of 3d printing is also leaning more heavily into robotics, featuring freely-moving articulated arms controlled by cameras and sensors.
I'd say robots are entirely viable, and we don't need science fiction to validate them.
I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible.
But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.
Indeed. Some of those bacteria would love to consume your megproject. As you soon as you lose power to resist, they get a banquet of a lifetime!
How is it not obvious that a one-world empire ruled by totalitarian futurists would have been vastly more motivated and funded to do Big Engineering Stuff than 1990s liberal late-capitalism?
Humans are emotional, and have other attributes so aggression is a possibility, wasting resources is part of the world.
Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth.
EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.
The world wars drove more technical progress than the world has ever seen, before or since. (Making your iPhone better at doing the same thing worse and slower so the end result comes out basically the same isn’t “progress”.)
Not necessarily true! I think this interactive game applies: https://ncase.me/trust/
> 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".
Projecting behavior onto a phantom is just a venue for reflecting a personal worldview onto something else. "Being short-sighted and selfish worked for the aliens, so it would work here too".
Evolution favors highly competitive individuals and collectives
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.
On the other hand they could still see us as a threat to the collective due to our levels of aggression, and eliminate us to protect themselves.
It's a safe bet that if they know about us at all they'll just stay away from us. Our media is filled with depictions of us killing aliens. There's little reason to think we'd accept them. We can't even get along with/accept other humans. Some people's first instinct will be to shoot them. Others will want to lock them up and experiment on them.
If aliens did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do, or unaware of what we are.
I'm not too worried they'd kill us to protect themselves though. At the rate we're going, we'll kill ourselves off along with every other living thing on the planet long before we get out of our own solar system.
The most horrifying aspect of the hypothesis as depicted in the Dark Forest book is that it was simply the job of a low-level bureaucrat to identify "low-entropy entities which lack the hiding gene" within their region of the galaxy and allocate a basic bottom-shelf munition to "cleanse" it.
However, humans were aware of this possibility and had spent centuries reorganizing the solar system to have a measure of resilience to it. So, to humanity's great credit, he had to go get permission from his supervisor for to deploy a next-tier solution.
"Why would anyone travel across town (i.e., the galaxy) just to step on an anthill?" We have a whole industry dedicated to exterminating any other life that invades "our" living space. It's considered an unremarkable necessity.
>If aliens did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do
If aliens had the technology to visit us right now, the latter is a given.
You don't have to assume anything crazy. You can create a planet killer by simply accelerating a decently massive object at relativistic speeds and firing it at earth.
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?
The "2 sentients 1 cup" thought experiment?
The violence we do is a choice we make based on circumstances and conditions. It is not inherently part of us nor is it inevitable. In your scenario it is easy to imagine making the choice you imply. But that's all it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Statement_on_Violence
If your point is to prove that the patterns of domination and conquests that exist here will necessarily exist in the stars too, then I'm afraid your thought experiment is deeply flawed.
If ever we are able to journey through the interstellar medium, we ought to have achieved immortality by then. We'll probably live as deincarnated beings in virtual worlds, free from any desire to grow exponentially, having realized this is deeply unsustainable and pointless once you have mastery over physical reality.
Read Diaspora by Greg Egan, perhaps it can cure you from this simplistic vision of the far future we have inherited from the 50s pop SciFi books.
The somewhat counterintuitive rules for the best expected strategy to repeated conflicts:
- Nice
- Friendly
- Retaliatory/provokable
- Clear
https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM At 15:00 in.
Largely depends on the parameters. I believe it also assumes infinite resources. In general it's a very simple model not meant to explain all and everything.
The interesting thing here is that it breaks assumptions that to be "alpha" you MUST dominate to win. Even if within only these parameters, it suggest there are conditions where being "nice" isn't just a nebulous ethical thing, but it's an optimal conflict strategy.
I think it carries two different messages to two different groups. If you're a "lets all be friends" type, then it's important that you also guard the resources that allow you to be nice. Being provokable isn't "being mean" its the thing allowing you to be nice. If you're a "take advantage of the rubes" type, it's a hint that there might be metaphorical money left on the table by being too greedy.
> not meant to explain all and everything.
That it's not true ALL the time, is less interesting than the fact that it's true some of the time. At least to me.
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?
At this point, I’m terrified some spacefaring AI is going to come over and relentlessly interface with whatever systems they can find while screaming “IF THIS BOT IS TROUBLING YOU PLEASE BLOCK ME AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL” and self-replicating millions of clones.
> 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.
> Well we could always be pets.
Porno for Pyros has you covered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1732/
@13,500 BCE
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.
Sadly, we're becoming less intelligent with time I doubt the trend is going to get better before it gets worse.
You have a really bleak and limited view of the far future. Species that have the means to cross interstellar space probably have found ways to alter themselves and removed their need to grow exponentially as they realized it is unsustainable, and are now perfectly content to chill on their homeplanet.
You're thinking of cancer cells with spaceships, not highly advanced beings who have mastered matter and physical reality. I recommend reading Dispora by Greg Egan, it could potentially expand your mind on what the future may actually look like.
Can a highly aggressive species plundering all of the resources avoid self-suicide by destroying the very conditions of its existence?
Considering multiple invasive animal species, and past and current humans societies fate… the answer seems not very positive.
I think if you develop to that point, you don’t really need to have a competitive scarcity mindset anymore.
My thought exactly. The universe has near infinite resources. There is nothing in our solar system that needs conquering.
Certainly if they're like us, and travelling to new worlds, they'll be imperialistic and colonial. They'll plant a flag, because we obviously weren't really making use of the planet, not _really_, and attempt to civilise the natives through something between cultural erasure and genocide.
Colonialism isn't profitable for the same reason slavery isn't. We did it because we hadn't invented economics yet.
In space it seems like it'd be even worse; something would have to be very valuable to be worth taking it out of our gravity well.
On Earth, in the grand scheme of things, it took a very short time for colonies to a) diverge politically or b) fail. It's not something that stopped happening (much) because we became more cuddly. It's just boring old economics.
So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.
Under a scientific economy like socialism you dont need to be "apex male who exploits the workers under him to get yachts and tax breaks." The workers co-operate and thus the "apex predator" capital owner becomes dismissed the same way our towns and villages in the developed West don't pay fees to warring bands of gangs but instead we've unlocked the Republic and the system of representation and taxes and such via democratic action.
You absolutely can have utopian beings. In fact, I'd argue the greed-based societies get caught in the great filter and if there is a space faring race, its absurdly ethical and fair and, to me, explains the Fermi paradox. They're out there and maybe they see Earth but it would be hugely unethical to intervene here. The proper thing to do would be to only observe us from afar.
If this was a movie or novel maybe the Wow signal was them messing up, or a defector amongst their midst who disagrees with full isolation policies. But most likely it'll end up being something simple. The last good theory I heard was it domestic and was reflected off orbiting space junk, but who knows.
It's far more likely we will discover aliens and then there will be nothing either of us can do about it, especially them since what we discover will be long dead.
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.
We're always listening. Why wouldn't "they"?
[dead]
TFA is suggesting it’s aliens.
No, it’s not: > "Our study did not conclude that the Wow! Signal constituted evidence of a signal emanating from an extraterrestrial civilization. However, null results are instrumental in refining future technosignature searches," the team concludes.
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.
Most things aren't known. The lack of a known alternative is hardly evidence of anything in this domain.
>but for now there's not really any known alternative
The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
It could just as easily be known, or unknown, physics.
That's like saying God is the best explanation for any newly described natural phenomenon.
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.
Planet. Man has reach the moon (not in my lifetime) but that isn't a planet. There are robots out a little farther but so far as we can be sure only one planet has life. (you can calculate odds of others but there isn't enough data to be confident)
God is an extraterrestial or not? :)
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-...
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).
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.
Indeed. Human history is riddled with anthropomorphism and people here trying to argue for more of it.
We probably wouldn't even recognize real aliens because we'd be too busy looking for our own reflection in the sky.
I doubt they'd be all that unfathomable. We come from the same universe after all, and as far as we can tell it's all governed by the same physics. It stands to reason that life on their worlds would have developed under at least some of the same rules we developed under on Earth. That should put at least some constraints on their forms and functions.
They might have learned different things than we have, they might know a lot more about our universe than we do, but I'd guess that much of what we've managed to learn so far will still be a part of their reality regardless of their level of familiarity with it. For example, more than 90% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen. They might have discovered things that are more exotic and never seen on Earth, but the hydrogen atoms we've studied won't be any different from hydrogen they'd have studied. We share a home. By the time they've figured out enough of how the universe works to reach us it's pretty likely that we'll have some common ground to talk about.
The real aliens were the friends we made along the way.
Space aliens are also not a known alternative.
Wow!
Can we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters. A few submissions by them seem to have hit the front page recently and I'm not sure why. This article is a perfect example. There's no reason to talk about aliens here except for dramatization.
I mean what even is this article? It has always been widely believed that the signal did not originate from Earth. Not impossible, but thought to come from Sagittarius. But "Extraterrestrial" != "alien", only "Not Earth".
From the first arxiv paper's abstract
From the second one Nobody is talking about aliens. FFS, Avi Loeb isn't even an author on one of the papers.The papers are good but nothing really exciting to the general public in them. Just your every day normal science. Science can be really exciting but we don't need fairy tales for that. All that does is degrade science, create confusion, and ultimately strengthen the anti-science crowd because people can't tell the difference between "scientists say" and "news reporter says scientists say". These are very different things...
Edit:
I wanted to add and explain why it people have suggested it is on a frequency that "would be a good candidate for extraterrestrial communication." The reason is absolutely mundane: it is a frequency that doesn't interact with tons of things so can travel pretty far. But mind you, calling it a good candidate for alien communication is also ignoring all the reasons that it would be a terrible way for communicating with others. Like the fact that it was super fast and if you don't have a telescope pointing in the right direction you're really not going to detect it (which is why it's been hard to find more).
Like most people with a degree in physics, I believe in aliens. Similarly, like most people with a degree in physics, I do not believe aliens have visited Earth nor do I believe we have any evidence of their existence. The reason we believe they're out there is because Earth is, as far as we can tell, Earth is not that unique. We're an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary sun and since the time when Sagan said those same words we've only gained more evidence for this being true. So there's good reason to believe they are out there. And we should search for them because either they are out there or the process of searching for them leads to a better understanding of why Earth is unique. It is a no lose situation. Either way we'll learn something incredibly important.
But also, like most scientists, I think it is unlikely we'll find signals from them. Space is too big, star systems are too far apart, the speed of light is too slow, and there's a lot of radio sources out there that are very powerful. Even if there were aliens around Proxima Centauri the signals take over 4 years to get there and our sun is blasting noise that is several orders of magnitude louder. For them to find our general broadcasts would be like trying to find a (specific) needle in the Pacific Ocean.
This article mentions aliens because this particular signal has been the subject of such speculation for decades, including by real working scientists. Heck an entire episode of the X Files was written around it. To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism.
Also, extraterrestrial life is not “fairy tales.” Most serious scientists expect that it does exist given what we know about life and cosmos.
Finally, many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength. Some folks found “close accident” more likely than “distant and impossibly strong.”
I made an edit while you were replying. I think you should read it.
I disagree. The speculation of extraterrestrial civilization origins has always been bad journalism. Since day 1. Spreading that more only perpetuates the myth. It has never been a good candidate for extra terrestrial communication. While ignoring absolutely every other attribute about the signal that would make it a terrible way to communicate with alien civilizations.I think you have a grave misunderstanding of what "most serious scientists" believe and don't believe. I love the X-Files. Great show. But it is also fiction. Unfortunately, so is a fair amount of science reporting. It's unfortunately that most people do not consider the facts interesting enough. But maybe that's because we've been telling too many stories and lying about what most scientists actually believe. There's always some crack job, but one scientist believing in something doesn't mean it is representative of the population.
One reasonable interpretation of the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life does not exist elsewhere in the universe.
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Only on HN can the top comment for a post about astronomy from the 1970s be about fucking 2025 era LLM concerns.
Chill dude. You aren't supposed to read everything dead seriously in a thread about extraterrestrial signals. It's just a fun idea to think about.
Although this comment is of course silly, this is a theme in Peter Watts' Echopraxia
I haven't read this book, but there are a few books with a similar theme where a digital intelligence spreads throughout the universe. This is a variation on the idea with a somewhat plausible mechanism.
> lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.
Leaving aside how incredibly vague this "mechanism" is, there is a very large list of infinitely unlikely coincidences that would have to take place for this to occur.
Consider how often human software, built in the same planet, by the same race, on the same hardware and using the same language, during the same time period, with most of the same tools, fails to be compatible.
Now take all those "same"s and change them to "different" and you tell me who's gonna file that Jira ticket.
I believe there are elements of this in A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge too.
Really? As in "intergalactic software virus"?
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.
> Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme.
Which meme is that?
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.
Trips me up too can't find anything related
Edit0: AH! Meowing to your cat and your cat being annoyed at the mistakes in cat speech you're making.
haha
my cat does correct me until I get it right lol
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.
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.