by godelski | 2025-08-27 02:36:19+00:00
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.