Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So it's Stuff you Should Know. Wow. Uh, first of all, I think we should go ahead and apologize to eight Stuff you Should Know fans. And there were more than who have already heard this. Yeah, we went to the World Science Festival. We were invited to the World Science Festival in New York City, and we want to give a little special shout out to Ben in the Ace Hotel for putting us up while we were there. Yeah. We did a live podcast short form on Washington Square Park on a Sunday afternoon. It was kind of a neat thing. So um, yeah, I hate everybody who came out to see us. We appreciated the support. Yeah, actually I thought I knew everyone by name. There were actual Stuff you Should Know fans. Yeah, I was gonna apologize to them directly. There were some people who clearly were not familiar with us, and we're just mind blown walking around glazed look in their face. They look kind of defeated. I was like, oh, you like Stuff you Should Know? Now. Yeah. I had a couple of people come up and be like, hey, what do you guys do? This is neat and said, well, you just saw a short version of it. My friend, if you want a lot more side stories and anecdotes, then tune into the long version. Yeah, we had twenty minutes. We had twenty minutes that boy, we had to get down to business. Didn't and we did too. It's not bad. We didn't talk about tire stores or anything like that. We just talked about the Wow signal. Yeah, this is um. I think this is fascinating stuff because this is something that even the most hardened skeptic hasn't been able to fully debunk. Yeah, that's that's a good point. It's pretty neat that you know they're they're upset, probably, so we should say that. We keep saying the wild signal, and Chuck's talking about skeptics and everything. There is evidence of a potential transmission from an alien civilization here on Earth, and it's been here on Earth, printed out sitting in the Ohio State University Archives since the nineteen seventies. Yeah, and potential is the key word there. I think that's where most skeptics head will pop off. But you got you gotta say potential you and I did. Yeah, I don't want anybody's head to pop off, you know. Um, the thing is, like you said, Chuck, no skeptic has been able to say, here's your explanation, dumb, dumb, And they've tried. There have been plenty of explanations, but every single one has been systematically addressed and reduced the rubble basically. Um, so the whole thing finds its roots. Um, like I said back in the seventies, but actually goes further back than that. There's a lot of Um. There's been a lot of talk starting in the twentieth century over aliens. Are we the other other people? Are we the only life out there? Um? Are there other people on other planets? And if so, can we communicate with them? And astronomers started crunching the numbers and doing the math and said, we basically have two things we can do here. We can try to go visit aliens and look for them in the flesh, expensive, expensive, and potentially impossible. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Yeah, but also it's the closest, um, the closest planet to us is like a few hundred light years away. I believe four hundred plus, right, which means that, um, we take four hundreds something years traveling at the speed of light to reach that planet. So we couldn't go find them. Instead, we decided that we would try to listen out to see if anybody was really leasing any transmissions out there and find traces of alien civilizations that way. Yeah, and um, did we do a show on set. No, we've talked about it before, all right, the Search for Extra Oh yes, did we? We did. I don't remember when it came in. We definitely have talked about it before. Now that you say that, I think with one of our south By Southwest or comic cons might have had something to do with Oh yeah, the UFOs SSETTI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It's not a single organization, although there is the SETI Institute now since the early nineteen eighties. But SET is a bunch of different groups that um are. They're not tinfoil hat wearing crack pots who are bounded determined to find if there's life out there, but they're open minded folks that say, if there isn't life out there, let's get ahead of the game here and listen out for him and see if they're trying to say something to us right there. They're basically people who say the there's just too many stars out there that have planets and that have are potentially habitable to life for us. It just it just it boggles their mind to think that we are the only living beings. And they're scientists, right, And to these scientists the much more logical conclusions that were one of many um civilizations out there, and so they have dedicated their their astronomical talents to searching for that. Yeah, and this all started happening in the early nineteen seventies and Earnest and uh, I think it actually started in the sixties and Earnest. But with the Big Ear it was in the seventies, their steady program, that's right, nineteen seventy three, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. I love that laugh every time. Um, they have something called the Big Ear, or had something called the Big Ear. Yeah, they needed a golf course, though, yes they did, so they got rid of the Big Year. Even worse than that, Um, the Big Ear Radio Telescope Ohio State was demolished, not to build the golf course. But to expand an existing golf course, we need another nine holes, right, we need another clubhouse. Well, I think the Big Year had seen its best days by that point, So don't feel bad for the Big Year. I still feel bad for the Big Year. So nineteen seventy three, the Big Ears starts scanning listening for stuff out in outer space, hence the name, and UM what would happen is because it was seventy three, Uh, it would print stuff out on a dot matrix printer and UH student would uh student assistant would take that print out of of what it was listening to and take it to another volunteer, UM teachers, professors, and they would just basically look at all these numbers. Yeah, page by page by page. If you've ever seen the wild signal, you it's just numbers ones, twos, maybe a three here there. Yeah, it's the level of background noise in space exactly. So, um, A one is blip a radio transmission that was one time the intensity of the normal background noise in space on a particular frequency. Right, A one is nothing like there's ones all over the place all the time. There's ones, twos and threes. Yeah, very common stuff. Um. And so this these these poor astronomers who were donating their time to the bigger telescope. We're basically they were the the They were analyzing the stuff with their eyes. Yeah, there wasn't like a computer program they spit it into. They looked at this computer print out sheet after sheet after sheet, right, So for they would look at a whole night's scan of deep space from a radio telescope, again with their eyes going over sheets and heets of computer paper, dot matrix, printer paper, and UM, that's what this guy named Jerry Aman, who was an astronomer at Ohio State, was doing UM on August eighteen, nineteen seventy seven. He was looking over some stuff from three days before. Yeah, and so he's scanning all the stuff and there's ones, twos, and threes, and he's you know, he's watching uh, Love American Style on TV and eating his TV dinner and he's bored out of his mind love American stuff and he's bored out of his skull. And then UM, well here's another important thing to point out, because it was also nineteen seventy three, that was the seventy seven. At this point, they didn't have UM double digit print outs. It just went one through nine and then started with the letter A, B, C, D AS ten, eleven, twelve and so on, right exactly. So he's reading this stuff and he sees six e q U J five, which means the transmission at its peak of you peaked at thirty times louder than anything they had ever seen before. Then the normal background noise, and he circled it and put wow exclamation point on the paper. And that's why it's the Wow signal, exactly. And this is a big deal. I mean, like, in this whole huge ream of dot matrix paper filled with ones and twos and maybe a three here there, there's a you standing in the middle of this string which was high. Yeah. I mean six alone would be like whoa, this is kind of significant. This thing went up to you, and like you said, he circled it and wrote wow next to him. It became the Wow signal, and um, almost immediately they started investigating this thing. Sure, And there are a lot of details to the Wow signal that are make it even more impressive than just the fact that it peaked at you, started at six and ended at five and peaked at you. There's a lot of different aspects of the Wow signal that make people say, what in the name of God is this? And we will start getting those details right after this break. So, Chuck, we were talking about how the wild signal looks on dot matrix papers six e q u J five, and that means that at its peak it goes from six times the normal background noise all the way up to thirty times and then back down to five times the normal background noise over what we know over seventy two seconds, Yes, which is very significant. It turns out so um. The Big Ear telescope, we should say a little bit more about it was a crowds telescope. It was built in the sixties and it didn't move it um eavesdropped on the electromagnetic radio spectrum UM coming from outer space. Eaves dropped on it. But it used the rotation of the Earth to move it. Yeah, it didn't pan its little big ear back and forth. It wasn't a show off, No, it just stayed fixed. The rotation the Earth very slowly would pick up a new patch of Earth at the rate of the Earth spin right. So um, the big ears the sky at the rate of the Earth spin right, and so it's just pointing out there in deep space, and as the Earth rotates, it would move the big ears field of reception I guess across any given point in the sky over a seventy two second period. And it just so happens that the six e q u J five wild signal transmission was seventy two seconds, which suggests something very important here, Chuck. It suggests that the wild signal came from a fixed point in the sky that was staying in one place, and the Big Year just swept past it over the course of its normal seventy two seconds. Yeah, And uh, I liken it to like if you're driving through the desert listening to your radio. Uh, your signal, the further you are from that radio transmitter or that radio station is going to be pretty faint. And then as you get closer and have that direct signal, it's gonna peak. And then as you drive further past it, it's gonna get more faint again. And that's what shape that this wild signal took. It took the shape of a pyramid if you graph it out. And I believe that's the Doppler effect because I always hear the Doppler effect being explained by how an ambulance siren sounds far away and then gets louder as it gets closer, and then it gets, you know, weaker, the further way you get. Yeah, well, it also changed his pitch though, isn't that the Doppler effect? I think so. It's not just loudness. It's like er er er. If you're in England, did you change pitch just then? Yeah, you didn't hear any difference. No, you didn't hear it go down in volume. You didn't hear it go down in in tone? No? Wow? Did you really? Are you tone deaf? I don't think so. It would explain a lot as far as karaoke goes. Do you sind karaoke? Did you recently? What do you say? Um? I got some songs here there? You can't You can't tell us one of them? Is that too revealing? No? Let me think of one of my karaoke songs. My big move is always under pressure and someone's always like, oh, i'll do it with you'll do the bowie part. I might not do both parts. I recently sang um I have a tiger. Oh, yeah, there you go. I have a big problem though, with my karaoke stuff. A lot of the songs that I pick are just slightly out of the key that I can comfortably achieve. Well, if you're picking eighties rock, then yeah, but you would think the Tiger that the the guy's not singing that high picture, although I know he hits that high note and I knew that, But from the start that guy starts out like a little higher than I can go. So it's just it's not necessarily a treat for everyone around me when I'm singing karaoke, because I accidentally every once in a while I have a night where like every song I pick is right in my wheelhouse and I'm nailing him. But for the most part, it's uh yeah, I woarrible a little bit. I guess I think the key to karaoke is to get your songs that you know you can do and kind of stick to those. Well, I'm I'm not like a pro. Well you know, uh like I did Foreigners Cold as Ice one time by accident because the song I wanted to do, I think, under pressure, someone had done and I was they were calling me. I was like, oh, well, I guess I'll just do this, and the karaoke guy hit in Philadelphia said, well, I hope you're hope you can have a vice for your testicles, but you didn't say testicles why? And then I remembered how high that song was. It is. It's a disaster that I have the Tigers not that far off. Um and I should give a plug here to um. Sig Gold's Request Room. If you're in New York City, you should go to sig Gold's Request Room. It's on one of those private karaoke twenty six. It's not private. It's just a piano karaoke bar, not private room. But it's a back room with like a heavy curtain, so there's a sense that it's private, but it's not private. It's just you just show up and but it's live. It's a guy playing piano instead of a backing track. Yeah, it's a guy named Joe McGuinty. He's a very good talented musician. He's actually a friend of you, Mace, and he used to play for the Psychedelic First and he now he's one of the owners of Sig Gold's Request Room. Man, that place is gonna blow up now, I hope so it should. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, Alright, boy, that was a good segue or not segue, because that leads to nothing. No, it leads to how do we get on that Doppler effect? Yeah? Exactly, So, uh, let's talk about set again. Let's bring this all back home set or the different STIs around the world. Decided at one point that UM, like you said, a good way to find transmission might be to listen out for it. And if we're gonna listen, UM, what would be the most likely UM radio station that they would transmit? Well, yeah, I mean like and of course it's not a radio station. I'd say that as a joke, but but that was the first That was the first. Um. That wasn't the first thing they thought of. Like if if you say, okay, we can't go to distant planets to start searching for aliens, there's just it's just too far away. We would all die on the way there. Right, we're gonna wait for them to come down and play a mood at Devil's Tower. Instead, we're gonna look for traces of them. Yeah, how can we find But that were listening wasn't immediately the thing. They started thinking like in different ways that you could find evidence of alien civilizations. And finally what they settled on was there, if you're an alien civilization, you are probably familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum, So let's start looking there. And they started looking at the electromagnetic spectrum to see maybe where you would find some sort of evidence of alien civilization. And they thought, how about the radio band. Yeah, there were a couple of physicists from Cornell in the sixties, Philip Morrison and Giesipicconi, who reckoned that, you know, they're going to find a common language. They're going to broadcast on what's like the most common language of the universe, hydrogen Espanola, espaniola. Not quite uh. I'm sort of being fun here with like saying, it's a radio stay and it's a line. But hydrogen is the most abundant common element in the universe, and there is a hydrogen line hydrogen frequency, so they figured this may be a good place to start listening. Yeah, and and um, Hydrogen's protons flip. They change spin pretty pretty much all the time, right, And as they flip and change their spin, they admit a little bit, just a tiny teensy bit of electromagnetic radiation, like a little glow right, and that the frequency of that emission is at four hundred and twenty mega hurts. Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and hydrogen is flipping all of the time, it's also emitting this radiation all the time, which makes twenty mega hurts the most common frequency on the entire electro magnetic spectrum. Oh hydrogen all the time. And again the city researchers Philip Morris and just set be um and I know it's Philip Morrison. I was just making a show, a tobacco joke. They have their hands and everything. Um. Since these guys said they would probably transmit somewhere on the radio spectrum, um, and they would probably be familiar with radio spectrums and electromagnetism, they would also probably know, just like we just figured out, that the most common frequency in the entire universe, no matter where you are, mega hurts. So maybe this would be a really good place to listen out for alien radio transmissions. That's right, and the wild signal was broadcast at four point four or five five six mega hurts right in the middle of the hydrogen line, right on the most common frequency in the entire universe. We found in nineteen seven radio transmission that was thirty times strong or than the normal background noise on that frequency. That's right, and that makes uh made scientists go holy cow or wow. That even made skeptics go, oh, but what's this all about? Exactly the shape of it, like we talked about the pyramid shape, um, is exactly what you would expect. So that made everyone sit up and go all right, well there's also that. And then the sharpness, I know is the third big reason that it just doesn't fit in right or it does fit in as an alien transmission. So there are tons of like um, very powerful bursts here. They're radio transmissions like quasars, emit um radio transmissions and UM satellites. There's well, there's a lot of natural ones. I mean the natural ones that are very messy. They get spread across the band, the electromagnetic pants. So um, if you got like a burst from like a quasar or something like that, you found it through the big year, you're going to it's gonna turn up on say like channel fourteen forty four, it's going to spill over across the band. They're very messy. One of the things that really makes the Wild signals so significant is that it was um tuned. Basically, it appears to have been tuned because it came through only on the fourteen frequency. It didn't spill over, and the Big Year was listening to fifty channels. So imagine like your radio is tuned, or you have fifty radios tuned to and so on right up to fourteen whatever that goes to fifty channels out Um, the wild signal only came through on the fouency right then, So you've got the sharpness, You've got the fact that it was right in the middle of the hydrogen line, you have that pyramid shape, and everyone is wondering what the heck is going on? And uh, right after this message, we will talk about a few reasons why I may not be an alien transmission. All right, So we've made a bit of a case that there's something hinky that happened on August seven, Right, Yeah, I think so pretty strong case. Um. Of course, when you make a case like this, it's like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Basically, what we've ended up with is this is some evidence. So you can't make like a full claim that hey, this is definitely an alien trying to get in touch with us, because all we have is that SEV burst. We haven't been able to find it since then. Uh, and we've looked or listened, right, and just attending in an unexplained radio signal doesn't I mean, it's just it's not like the signal said, hey, we're broadcasting to you live from Kepler forty three B. We'll be seeing you guys in a dr when we come down and take over your planets can be a bad day for you. Um. Yeah, So there's like you said, that it's not in and of itself approven alien signal. But um, there are a lot of really unexplainable things that support the idea that that's potentially possible. There are a lot of people who have tried to put out explanations to the contrary. Right. For one, they have gone back and listened to that same patch of sky over and over again more than a hundred times, and no one's ever picked up the wild signal again. Yeah, and I have sure it would be nice to go back to that same patch of sky and hear it again. But if it takes a lot of energy to beam a signal like that from deep space it may have been a one off or um. Some people have theorized that maybe if you were an alien civilization, it takes so much power to broadcast in every direction, you might use more of a lighthouse sweeping method, um. And so it wouldn't be at that fixed point, you know, it's just out there moving across the sky, right and um, it just so happens that the big ear and this lighthouse radio beacon crossed one another the same Yeah, it's just the right time. Um. Yeah, that is a pretty good counter explanation or counter argument to that one. Another one was that it was, um, it was some sort of transmission from Earth projected and reflected off of like a piece of space debris. There's a lot of junk out in space. You've seen gravity. I've seen gravity. There's a lot of space junk out there, and it can reflect radio signals. Right. But there's some real problems with that explanation as well. Yeah, because I believe that from Earth we we don't transmit on the hydrogen line, correct, right, it's protected, like you're not allowed to transmit on that because people are listening out for aliens on that line. So no bounce back. No, So even if you do have one jerk whose sole purpose in life is to mess with SETI scientists by beaming radio signals at twenty mega hurts um so that they'll get beam back into space. Even if there was somebody transmitting and it it's supposedly bounced off a space junk, there's still problems with that explanation. To Chiefly, the space junk would have to be moving in the same direction at the exact same rate as Earth in order to give the illusion that it was coming from a fixed point in outer space, because remember, the Earth would actually it would have to it would have to be even more mind boggling and perfect than that. It would have to be moving at a rate that allowed the Earth to pass by it over the course of seventy two seconds. It couldn't just be moving at the same rate or else the bigger exactly so um. Apparently Jerry Ahman was a skeptic of his own WOW signal, and even he was like this, no, that the space debriefing, It's just that probability of everything lining up like that is just so um small that I hereby dismissed that that's what he did and uh, here's the thing. A few years later, I think in nine actually develop the capability for this big year uh, and then other radio telescopes to move on their own. UM. So, in other words, if it would have locked onto that signal, it could have locked on and then counteracted the rotation of the Earth and really listened to see how long that thing lasted. Yeah, because we have no idea how long it lasted. We know it lasted at least seventy two seconds, but no more than twenty four hours because it wasn't there the day before, and it wasn't there the day after when the Big Year went through and swept past the same the same patch of sky. UM. So the data believe me, Yes, they did UM. And like we said, they started listening for it, specifically UM the very large array the v l A in the mid nineties, and that is is that in New Mexico. I think, uh, yeah, New Mexico UM that has the power of twenty seven separate radio antenna's UM a hundred times more sensitive than the Big Year. And they specifically UM. This guy named Robert Gray, an amateur astronomer, went looking for it, pointed it towards Sagittarius, which is sort of the rough direction that the wild signal came from. And again he's like, I haven't heard anything since then. Um, well then, and that's another point that a lot of people say it was nothing, is that the that point out in deep space, out in the sky. There's nothing there, right, There's no planet, there's no star, there's no nothing. So what what is some seemingly artificial radio transmission being broadcast from when there's nothing but space out there? Pretty weird? It is very weird. But again, every argument that's been made has been Uh, you can make a counter argument to an irrational reasonable one. So where are we saying that there that this was an alien transmission? Not necessarily, but it is still potentially a reasonable explanation given the the evidence that the Wow signal presents. Yeah, I think, um, the way I like looking at it is what Jerry Aiman said, Um sometimes in the eighties he says, the best way I can think of it is that it was a tug on the cosmic fishing line. Doesn't prove that you have a fish on the line, but it does suggest it if you keep your line in the water at that spot, you might get a fish. So I don't know necessarily about that spot, but it was it was something that we can't quite explain. And um, you know, keep the very large array going, like, keep listening, keep watching the skis skies. Um, you got anything else? Do we miss anything? Oh? Man, we could go on about ceti and all that stuff for days. Maybe we will someday. I think the official skeptics um line is that what did they finally say? They like, it's a the Skeptics Club. Yeah, the Skeptics Club, they said, uh oh, an interstellar radio source of unknown origin is the official line. So the Skeptics Club A big shrug of the shoulders essentially. Yeah, so who knows? Six e q U J five pretty remarkable. I'll bet somebody has that tattooed on them somewhere. I bet he spit oh yeah, totally, like on the back of their neck. Um. I bet Jerry Amin like spit his coffee all over the paper too, you know, did a big spit take. Yeah, uh, classic, totally. He's like the Jerry Lewis of astronomers. Uh. If you want to know more about Jerry Lewis or the Wow signal or anything like that, you can type some words like six e q U J five in the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this purpose of life. We've got a lot of great responses from does the Body replace Itself? When you went into that really nice philosophical um sidebar on like why are we here? I thought it was interesting. Um. Hey, guys, just finished my four month binge of all seven hundred plus episodes of stuff you should know you wanted to write in about does the Body replace itself? Towards the end, you discuss the purpose of life and why there can't be just a one or a few species. Uh. If the purpose of life is two cycle carbon et cetera, speaking as a geologist biologist, the Earth doesn't need life for anything. The planet would be just fine with no life and no carbon cycling. It would just look quite a bit different. Uh. Talking about the purpose of life like this is an easy and common fallacy that implies some need that's being filled. A life's purpose, if you want to call it, that is simply to replicate itself. That is, at some point there was a molecule able to replicate itself as it did that some copies were better at replicating than others, and so on and so on. Over time, it became more effective to be encased in a membrane uh than to use d N A. Then to use DNA instead of RNA, and so on and so on. Everything a lot today shares the history of ancestors that replicated and passed on their genes successfully. Life doesn't need to live or die, or eat or breathe or swim or fly or photosynthesize or procreate or think or love, but it does those things because they help it effectively copy and pass on the genes. This is the fundamental purpose of life. And though some may think it's cynical or heartless, I find it beautiful and truly awesome. And that is Danny in Seattle. Thanks a lot, Danny Seattle. All the atheists and agnostics out there, right, I just posted a thing. They have like seven percent more agnostics and atheists than the rest of the country, really and seven that's pretty significant, and less identify as Christian than the rest of the country. So there's a bunch of godless freaks. Well, thanks Danny for tossing your O pining in about the purpose of life or the purposelessness of life. Uh. If you want to chime in on this whole thing, we can keep it going. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook, dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, join us at at home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com. MHM

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So it's Stuff you Should Know. Wow. Uh, first of all, I think we should go ahead and apologize to eight Stuff you Should Know fans. And there were more than who have already heard this. Yeah, we went to the World Science Festival. We were invited to the World Science Festival in New York City, and we want to give a little special shout out to Ben in the Ace Hotel for putting us up while we were there. Yeah. We did a live podcast short form on Washington Square Park on a Sunday afternoon. It was kind of a neat thing. So um, yeah, I hate everybody who came out to see us. We appreciated the support. Yeah, actually I thought I knew everyone by name. There were actual Stuff you Should Know fans. Yeah, I was gonna apologize to them directly. There were some people who clearly were not familiar with us, and we're just mind blown walking around glazed look in their face. They look kind of defeated. I was like, oh, you like Stuff you Should Know? Now. Yeah. I had a couple of people come up and be like, hey, what do you guys do? This is neat and said, well, you just saw a short version of it. My friend, if you want a lot more side stories and anecdotes, then tune into the long version. Yeah, we had twenty minutes. We had twenty minutes that boy, we had to get down to business. Didn't and we did too. It's not bad. We didn't talk about tire stores or anything like that. We just talked about the Wow signal. Yeah, this is um. I think this is fascinating stuff because this is something that even the most hardened skeptic hasn't been able to fully debunk. Yeah, that's that's a good point. It's pretty neat that you know they're they're upset, probably, so we should say that. We keep saying the wild signal, and Chuck's talking about skeptics and everything. There is evidence of a potential transmission from an alien civilization here on Earth, and it's been here on Earth, printed out sitting in the Ohio State University Archives since the nineteen seventies. Yeah, and potential is the key word there. I think that's where most skeptics head will pop off. But you got you gotta say potential you and I did. Yeah, I don't want anybody's head to pop off, you know. Um, the thing is, like you said, Chuck, no skeptic has been able to say, here's your explanation, dumb, dumb, And they've tried. There have been plenty of explanations, but every single one has been systematically addressed and reduced the rubble basically. Um, so the whole thing finds its roots. Um, like I said back in the seventies, but actually goes further back than that. There's a lot of Um. There's been a lot of talk starting in the twentieth century over aliens. Are we the other other people? Are we the only life out there? Um? Are there other people on other planets? And if so, can we communicate with them? And astronomers started crunching the numbers and doing the math and said, we basically have two things we can do here. We can try to go visit aliens and look for them in the flesh, expensive, expensive, and potentially impossible. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Yeah, but also it's the closest, um, the closest planet to us is like a few hundred light years away. I believe four hundred plus, right, which means that, um, we take four hundreds something years traveling at the speed of light to reach that planet. So we couldn't go find them. Instead, we decided that we would try to listen out to see if anybody was really leasing any transmissions out there and find traces of alien civilizations that way. Yeah, and um, did we do a show on set. No, we've talked about it before, all right, the Search for Extra Oh yes, did we? We did. I don't remember when it came in. We definitely have talked about it before. Now that you say that, I think with one of our south By Southwest or comic cons might have had something to do with Oh yeah, the UFOs SSETTI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It's not a single organization, although there is the SETI Institute now since the early nineteen eighties. But SET is a bunch of different groups that um are. They're not tinfoil hat wearing crack pots who are bounded determined to find if there's life out there, but they're open minded folks that say, if there isn't life out there, let's get ahead of the game here and listen out for him and see if they're trying to say something to us right there. They're basically people who say the there's just too many stars out there that have planets and that have are potentially habitable to life for us. It just it just it boggles their mind to think that we are the only living beings. And they're scientists, right, And to these scientists the much more logical conclusions that were one of many um civilizations out there, and so they have dedicated their their astronomical talents to searching for that. Yeah, and this all started happening in the early nineteen seventies and Earnest and uh, I think it actually started in the sixties and Earnest. But with the Big Ear it was in the seventies, their steady program, that's right, nineteen seventy three, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. I love that laugh every time. Um, they have something called the Big Ear, or had something called the Big Ear. Yeah, they needed a golf course, though, yes they did, so they got rid of the Big Year. Even worse than that, Um, the Big Ear Radio Telescope Ohio State was demolished, not to build the golf course. But to expand an existing golf course, we need another nine holes, right, we need another clubhouse. Well, I think the Big Year had seen its best days by that point, So don't feel bad for the Big Year. I still feel bad for the Big Year. So nineteen seventy three, the Big Ears starts scanning listening for stuff out in outer space, hence the name, and UM what would happen is because it was seventy three, Uh, it would print stuff out on a dot matrix printer and UH student would uh student assistant would take that print out of of what it was listening to and take it to another volunteer, UM teachers, professors, and they would just basically look at all these numbers. Yeah, page by page by page. If you've ever seen the wild signal, you it's just numbers ones, twos, maybe a three here there. Yeah, it's the level of background noise in space exactly. So, um, A one is blip a radio transmission that was one time the intensity of the normal background noise in space on a particular frequency. Right, A one is nothing like there's ones all over the place all the time. There's ones, twos and threes. Yeah, very common stuff. Um. And so this these these poor astronomers who were donating their time to the bigger telescope. We're basically they were the the They were analyzing the stuff with their eyes. Yeah, there wasn't like a computer program they spit it into. They looked at this computer print out sheet after sheet after sheet, right, So for they would look at a whole night's scan of deep space from a radio telescope, again with their eyes going over sheets and heets of computer paper, dot matrix, printer paper, and UM, that's what this guy named Jerry Aman, who was an astronomer at Ohio State, was doing UM on August eighteen, nineteen seventy seven. He was looking over some stuff from three days before. Yeah, and so he's scanning all the stuff and there's ones, twos, and threes, and he's you know, he's watching uh, Love American Style on TV and eating his TV dinner and he's bored out of his mind love American stuff and he's bored out of his skull. And then UM, well here's another important thing to point out, because it was also nineteen seventy three, that was the seventy seven. At this point, they didn't have UM double digit print outs. It just went one through nine and then started with the letter A, B, C, D AS ten, eleven, twelve and so on, right exactly. So he's reading this stuff and he sees six e q U J five, which means the transmission at its peak of you peaked at thirty times louder than anything they had ever seen before. Then the normal background noise, and he circled it and put wow exclamation point on the paper. And that's why it's the Wow signal, exactly. And this is a big deal. I mean, like, in this whole huge ream of dot matrix paper filled with ones and twos and maybe a three here there, there's a you standing in the middle of this string which was high. Yeah. I mean six alone would be like whoa, this is kind of significant. This thing went up to you, and like you said, he circled it and wrote wow next to him. It became the Wow signal, and um, almost immediately they started investigating this thing. Sure, And there are a lot of details to the Wow signal that are make it even more impressive than just the fact that it peaked at you, started at six and ended at five and peaked at you. There's a lot of different aspects of the Wow signal that make people say, what in the name of God is this? And we will start getting those details right after this break. So, Chuck, we were talking about how the wild signal looks on dot matrix papers six e q u J five, and that means that at its peak it goes from six times the normal background noise all the way up to thirty times and then back down to five times the normal background noise over what we know over seventy two seconds, Yes, which is very significant. It turns out so um. The Big Ear telescope, we should say a little bit more about it was a crowds telescope. It was built in the sixties and it didn't move it um eavesdropped on the electromagnetic radio spectrum UM coming from outer space. Eaves dropped on it. But it used the rotation of the Earth to move it. Yeah, it didn't pan its little big ear back and forth. It wasn't a show off, No, it just stayed fixed. The rotation the Earth very slowly would pick up a new patch of Earth at the rate of the Earth spin right. So um, the big ears the sky at the rate of the Earth spin right, and so it's just pointing out there in deep space, and as the Earth rotates, it would move the big ears field of reception I guess across any given point in the sky over a seventy two second period. And it just so happens that the six e q u J five wild signal transmission was seventy two seconds, which suggests something very important here, Chuck. It suggests that the wild signal came from a fixed point in the sky that was staying in one place, and the Big Year just swept past it over the course of its normal seventy two seconds. Yeah, And uh, I liken it to like if you're driving through the desert listening to your radio. Uh, your signal, the further you are from that radio transmitter or that radio station is going to be pretty faint. And then as you get closer and have that direct signal, it's gonna peak. And then as you drive further past it, it's gonna get more faint again. And that's what shape that this wild signal took. It took the shape of a pyramid if you graph it out. And I believe that's the Doppler effect because I always hear the Doppler effect being explained by how an ambulance siren sounds far away and then gets louder as it gets closer, and then it gets, you know, weaker, the further way you get. Yeah, well, it also changed his pitch though, isn't that the Doppler effect? I think so. It's not just loudness. It's like er er er. If you're in England, did you change pitch just then? Yeah, you didn't hear any difference. No, you didn't hear it go down in volume. You didn't hear it go down in in tone? No? Wow? Did you really? Are you tone deaf? I don't think so. It would explain a lot as far as karaoke goes. Do you sind karaoke? Did you recently? What do you say? Um? I got some songs here there? You can't You can't tell us one of them? Is that too revealing? No? Let me think of one of my karaoke songs. My big move is always under pressure and someone's always like, oh, i'll do it with you'll do the bowie part. I might not do both parts. I recently sang um I have a tiger. Oh, yeah, there you go. I have a big problem though, with my karaoke stuff. A lot of the songs that I pick are just slightly out of the key that I can comfortably achieve. Well, if you're picking eighties rock, then yeah, but you would think the Tiger that the the guy's not singing that high picture, although I know he hits that high note and I knew that, But from the start that guy starts out like a little higher than I can go. So it's just it's not necessarily a treat for everyone around me when I'm singing karaoke, because I accidentally every once in a while I have a night where like every song I pick is right in my wheelhouse and I'm nailing him. But for the most part, it's uh yeah, I woarrible a little bit. I guess I think the key to karaoke is to get your songs that you know you can do and kind of stick to those. Well, I'm I'm not like a pro. Well you know, uh like I did Foreigners Cold as Ice one time by accident because the song I wanted to do, I think, under pressure, someone had done and I was they were calling me. I was like, oh, well, I guess I'll just do this, and the karaoke guy hit in Philadelphia said, well, I hope you're hope you can have a vice for your testicles, but you didn't say testicles why? And then I remembered how high that song was. It is. It's a disaster that I have the Tigers not that far off. Um and I should give a plug here to um. Sig Gold's Request Room. If you're in New York City, you should go to sig Gold's Request Room. It's on one of those private karaoke twenty six. It's not private. It's just a piano karaoke bar, not private room. But it's a back room with like a heavy curtain, so there's a sense that it's private, but it's not private. It's just you just show up and but it's live. It's a guy playing piano instead of a backing track. Yeah, it's a guy named Joe McGuinty. He's a very good talented musician. He's actually a friend of you, Mace, and he used to play for the Psychedelic First and he now he's one of the owners of Sig Gold's Request Room. Man, that place is gonna blow up now, I hope so it should. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, Alright, boy, that was a good segue or not segue, because that leads to nothing. No, it leads to how do we get on that Doppler effect? Yeah? Exactly, So, uh, let's talk about set again. Let's bring this all back home set or the different STIs around the world. Decided at one point that UM, like you said, a good way to find transmission might be to listen out for it. And if we're gonna listen, UM, what would be the most likely UM radio station that they would transmit? Well, yeah, I mean like and of course it's not a radio station. I'd say that as a joke, but but that was the first That was the first. Um. That wasn't the first thing they thought of. Like if if you say, okay, we can't go to distant planets to start searching for aliens, there's just it's just too far away. We would all die on the way there. Right, we're gonna wait for them to come down and play a mood at Devil's Tower. Instead, we're gonna look for traces of them. Yeah, how can we find But that were listening wasn't immediately the thing. They started thinking like in different ways that you could find evidence of alien civilizations. And finally what they settled on was there, if you're an alien civilization, you are probably familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum, So let's start looking there. And they started looking at the electromagnetic spectrum to see maybe where you would find some sort of evidence of alien civilization. And they thought, how about the radio band. Yeah, there were a couple of physicists from Cornell in the sixties, Philip Morrison and Giesipicconi, who reckoned that, you know, they're going to find a common language. They're going to broadcast on what's like the most common language of the universe, hydrogen Espanola, espaniola. Not quite uh. I'm sort of being fun here with like saying, it's a radio stay and it's a line. But hydrogen is the most abundant common element in the universe, and there is a hydrogen line hydrogen frequency, so they figured this may be a good place to start listening. Yeah, and and um, Hydrogen's protons flip. They change spin pretty pretty much all the time, right, And as they flip and change their spin, they admit a little bit, just a tiny teensy bit of electromagnetic radiation, like a little glow right, and that the frequency of that emission is at four hundred and twenty mega hurts. Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and hydrogen is flipping all of the time, it's also emitting this radiation all the time, which makes twenty mega hurts the most common frequency on the entire electro magnetic spectrum. Oh hydrogen all the time. And again the city researchers Philip Morris and just set be um and I know it's Philip Morrison. I was just making a show, a tobacco joke. They have their hands and everything. Um. Since these guys said they would probably transmit somewhere on the radio spectrum, um, and they would probably be familiar with radio spectrums and electromagnetism, they would also probably know, just like we just figured out, that the most common frequency in the entire universe, no matter where you are, mega hurts. So maybe this would be a really good place to listen out for alien radio transmissions. That's right, and the wild signal was broadcast at four point four or five five six mega hurts right in the middle of the hydrogen line, right on the most common frequency in the entire universe. We found in nineteen seven radio transmission that was thirty times strong or than the normal background noise on that frequency. That's right, and that makes uh made scientists go holy cow or wow. That even made skeptics go, oh, but what's this all about? Exactly the shape of it, like we talked about the pyramid shape, um, is exactly what you would expect. So that made everyone sit up and go all right, well there's also that. And then the sharpness, I know is the third big reason that it just doesn't fit in right or it does fit in as an alien transmission. So there are tons of like um, very powerful bursts here. They're radio transmissions like quasars, emit um radio transmissions and UM satellites. There's well, there's a lot of natural ones. I mean the natural ones that are very messy. They get spread across the band, the electromagnetic pants. So um, if you got like a burst from like a quasar or something like that, you found it through the big year, you're going to it's gonna turn up on say like channel fourteen forty four, it's going to spill over across the band. They're very messy. One of the things that really makes the Wild signals so significant is that it was um tuned. Basically, it appears to have been tuned because it came through only on the fourteen frequency. It didn't spill over, and the Big Year was listening to fifty channels. So imagine like your radio is tuned, or you have fifty radios tuned to and so on right up to fourteen whatever that goes to fifty channels out Um, the wild signal only came through on the fouency right then, So you've got the sharpness, You've got the fact that it was right in the middle of the hydrogen line, you have that pyramid shape, and everyone is wondering what the heck is going on? And uh, right after this message, we will talk about a few reasons why I may not be an alien transmission. All right, So we've made a bit of a case that there's something hinky that happened on August seven, Right, Yeah, I think so pretty strong case. Um. Of course, when you make a case like this, it's like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Basically, what we've ended up with is this is some evidence. So you can't make like a full claim that hey, this is definitely an alien trying to get in touch with us, because all we have is that SEV burst. We haven't been able to find it since then. Uh, and we've looked or listened, right, and just attending in an unexplained radio signal doesn't I mean, it's just it's not like the signal said, hey, we're broadcasting to you live from Kepler forty three B. We'll be seeing you guys in a dr when we come down and take over your planets can be a bad day for you. Um. Yeah, So there's like you said, that it's not in and of itself approven alien signal. But um, there are a lot of really unexplainable things that support the idea that that's potentially possible. There are a lot of people who have tried to put out explanations to the contrary. Right. For one, they have gone back and listened to that same patch of sky over and over again more than a hundred times, and no one's ever picked up the wild signal again. Yeah, and I have sure it would be nice to go back to that same patch of sky and hear it again. But if it takes a lot of energy to beam a signal like that from deep space it may have been a one off or um. Some people have theorized that maybe if you were an alien civilization, it takes so much power to broadcast in every direction, you might use more of a lighthouse sweeping method, um. And so it wouldn't be at that fixed point, you know, it's just out there moving across the sky, right and um, it just so happens that the big ear and this lighthouse radio beacon crossed one another the same Yeah, it's just the right time. Um. Yeah, that is a pretty good counter explanation or counter argument to that one. Another one was that it was, um, it was some sort of transmission from Earth projected and reflected off of like a piece of space debris. There's a lot of junk out in space. You've seen gravity. I've seen gravity. There's a lot of space junk out there, and it can reflect radio signals. Right. But there's some real problems with that explanation as well. Yeah, because I believe that from Earth we we don't transmit on the hydrogen line, correct, right, it's protected, like you're not allowed to transmit on that because people are listening out for aliens on that line. So no bounce back. No, So even if you do have one jerk whose sole purpose in life is to mess with SETI scientists by beaming radio signals at twenty mega hurts um so that they'll get beam back into space. Even if there was somebody transmitting and it it's supposedly bounced off a space junk, there's still problems with that explanation. To Chiefly, the space junk would have to be moving in the same direction at the exact same rate as Earth in order to give the illusion that it was coming from a fixed point in outer space, because remember, the Earth would actually it would have to it would have to be even more mind boggling and perfect than that. It would have to be moving at a rate that allowed the Earth to pass by it over the course of seventy two seconds. It couldn't just be moving at the same rate or else the bigger exactly so um. Apparently Jerry Ahman was a skeptic of his own WOW signal, and even he was like this, no, that the space debriefing, It's just that probability of everything lining up like that is just so um small that I hereby dismissed that that's what he did and uh, here's the thing. A few years later, I think in nine actually develop the capability for this big year uh, and then other radio telescopes to move on their own. UM. So, in other words, if it would have locked onto that signal, it could have locked on and then counteracted the rotation of the Earth and really listened to see how long that thing lasted. Yeah, because we have no idea how long it lasted. We know it lasted at least seventy two seconds, but no more than twenty four hours because it wasn't there the day before, and it wasn't there the day after when the Big Year went through and swept past the same the same patch of sky. UM. So the data believe me, Yes, they did UM. And like we said, they started listening for it, specifically UM the very large array the v l A in the mid nineties, and that is is that in New Mexico. I think, uh, yeah, New Mexico UM that has the power of twenty seven separate radio antenna's UM a hundred times more sensitive than the Big Year. And they specifically UM. This guy named Robert Gray, an amateur astronomer, went looking for it, pointed it towards Sagittarius, which is sort of the rough direction that the wild signal came from. And again he's like, I haven't heard anything since then. Um, well then, and that's another point that a lot of people say it was nothing, is that the that point out in deep space, out in the sky. There's nothing there, right, There's no planet, there's no star, there's no nothing. So what what is some seemingly artificial radio transmission being broadcast from when there's nothing but space out there? Pretty weird? It is very weird. But again, every argument that's been made has been Uh, you can make a counter argument to an irrational reasonable one. So where are we saying that there that this was an alien transmission? Not necessarily, but it is still potentially a reasonable explanation given the the evidence that the Wow signal presents. Yeah, I think, um, the way I like looking at it is what Jerry Aiman said, Um sometimes in the eighties he says, the best way I can think of it is that it was a tug on the cosmic fishing line. Doesn't prove that you have a fish on the line, but it does suggest it if you keep your line in the water at that spot, you might get a fish. So I don't know necessarily about that spot, but it was it was something that we can't quite explain. And um, you know, keep the very large array going, like, keep listening, keep watching the skis skies. Um, you got anything else? Do we miss anything? Oh? Man, we could go on about ceti and all that stuff for days. Maybe we will someday. I think the official skeptics um line is that what did they finally say? They like, it's a the Skeptics Club. Yeah, the Skeptics Club, they said, uh oh, an interstellar radio source of unknown origin is the official line. So the Skeptics Club A big shrug of the shoulders essentially. Yeah, so who knows? Six e q U J five pretty remarkable. I'll bet somebody has that tattooed on them somewhere. I bet he spit oh yeah, totally, like on the back of their neck. Um. I bet Jerry Amin like spit his coffee all over the paper too, you know, did a big spit take. Yeah, uh, classic, totally. He's like the Jerry Lewis of astronomers. Uh. If you want to know more about Jerry Lewis or the Wow signal or anything like that, you can type some words like six e q U J five in the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this purpose of life. We've got a lot of great responses from does the Body replace Itself? When you went into that really nice philosophical um sidebar on like why are we here? I thought it was interesting. Um. Hey, guys, just finished my four month binge of all seven hundred plus episodes of stuff you should know you wanted to write in about does the Body replace itself? Towards the end, you discuss the purpose of life and why there can't be just a one or a few species. Uh. If the purpose of life is two cycle carbon et cetera, speaking as a geologist biologist, the Earth doesn't need life for anything. The planet would be just fine with no life and no carbon cycling. It would just look quite a bit different. Uh. Talking about the purpose of life like this is an easy and common fallacy that implies some need that's being filled. A life's purpose, if you want to call it, that is simply to replicate itself. That is, at some point there was a molecule able to replicate itself as it did that some copies were better at replicating than others, and so on and so on. Over time, it became more effective to be encased in a membrane uh than to use d N A. Then to use DNA instead of RNA, and so on and so on. Everything a lot today shares the history of ancestors that replicated and passed on their genes successfully. Life doesn't need to live or die, or eat or breathe or swim or fly or photosynthesize or procreate or think or love, but it does those things because they help it effectively copy and pass on the genes. This is the fundamental purpose of life. And though some may think it's cynical or heartless, I find it beautiful and truly awesome. And that is Danny in Seattle. Thanks a lot, Danny Seattle. All the atheists and agnostics out there, right, I just posted a thing. They have like seven percent more agnostics and atheists than the rest of the country, really and seven that's pretty significant, and less identify as Christian than the rest of the country. So there's a bunch of godless freaks. Well, thanks Danny for tossing your O pining in about the purpose of life or the purposelessness of life. Uh. If you want to chime in on this whole thing, we can keep it going. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook, dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, join us at at home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com. MHM