SETI’s Most Tantalizing Recording
#1
[Image: WowSignal.jpg]

Late one night in the summer of 1977, a large radio telescope outside Delaware, Ohio intercepted a radio signal that seemed for a brief time like it might change the course of human history. The telescope was searching the sky on behalf of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the signal, though it lasted only seventy-two seconds, fit the profile of a message beamed from another world. Despite its potential import, several days went by before Jerry Ehman, a project scientist for SETI, noticed the data.

He was flipping through the computer printouts generated by the telescope when he noticed a string of letters within a long sequence of low numbers — ones, twos, threes and fours. The low numbers represent background noise, the low hum of an ordinary signal. As the telescope swept across the sky, it momentarily landed on something quite extraordinary, causing the signal to surge and the computer to shift from numbers to letters and then keep climbing all the way up to “U,” which represented a signal thirty times higher than the background noise level. Seeing the consecutive letters, the mark of something strange or even alien, Ehman circled them in red ink and wrote “Wow!” thus christening the most famous and tantalizing signal of SETI’s short history: The “Wow!” signal.

Despite several decades of searching, by amateur and professional astronomers alike, the “Wow!” signal has never again been found

http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/the-wow-s...recording/
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#2
They might try again in another 1000 years or so. Smiling
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#3
(02-18-2012, 03:37 PM)PonderThis Wrote: They might try again in another 1000 years or so. Smiling

I don't think I was ever aware of this incident!
My whole impression was the whole project was considered a failure which caused it's funding to be stopped.

I find little tidbits such as this quite interesting.

Most of us think there ARE other life forms out there, right?
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#4
I pretty much figured evolution stopped when it got to me. Smiling
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#5
(02-18-2012, 03:49 PM)PonderThis Wrote: I pretty much figured evolution stopped when it got to me. Smiling

Have you been going to church again?????? Laughing
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#6
Shit, those are my license plate numbers.
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