What do you think about this?
On the fifteenth of August in 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio nicknamed the Big Ear was quietly scanning the sky for signs of intelligent life. A few days later, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman was going over the printouts when one column of numbers stopped him cold. For seventy two seconds, the telescope had picked up a narrow, powerful burst of radio energy from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It was about thirty times stronger than the background hum of space. Stunned, Ehman circled the reading and wrote a single word in the margin: Wow.
What made it so tantalizing was where it sat on the dial. The signal came in almost exactly at the frequency of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, long considered the natural channel an alien civilization might choose to broadcast on, precisely because any astronomer anywhere would be listening there.
For nearly fifty years since, astronomers have pointed telescopes back at that patch of sky again and again. The signal has never returned. Its rise and fall matched exactly what you would expect from a fixed point in the heavens sweeping through the telescope’s view, which argues against a passing satellite or an earthly glitch.
Could it be that for seventy two seconds in 1977, we caught one word of a conversation never meant for us, and have been straining to hear the rest ever since?
A one time natural fluke, or a message we will never decode? What do you think the Wow signal really was?
