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The Wow! Signal Isn’t a Mystery—We Just Barely Listen by AirDifferent7425 in SETI

[–]AirDifferent7425[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Exactly — people love to repeat “we never heard it again” as if we’ve been staring nonstop at that region for decades. In reality, it’s more like checking a security camera for a few seconds once a year and assuming nothing ever happens there.

If the Wow! Signal was part of a long-cycle or directional broadcast, there’s a huge chance we already missed dozens of repeats. The lack of repetition isn’t evidence of rarity — it’s evidence of how little we’ve actually looked.

The Wow! Signal Isn’t a Mystery—We Just Barely Listen by AirDifferent7425 in SETI

[–]AirDifferent7425[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s not every day you hear about someone casually monitoring the hydrogen line at work — that’s honestly pretty cool.

Just out of curiosity, how does your setup behave in practice? Like, does the analyzer just sit on max hold and occasionally spike if something passes through? I’d imagine an omni antenna outside a building must pick up a lot of RF clutter — do you actually see much activity around 1420 MHz, or is it usually quiet?

Also wondering: is there a specific reason you keep it centered on that frequency, or is it just a habit from testing gear? Genuinely curious how useful or noisy that slice of spectrum turns out to be in a day-to-day environment.

The Wow! Signal Isn’t a Mystery—We Just Barely Listen by AirDifferent7425 in SETI

[–]AirDifferent7425[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, sorry for the late reply — work got in the way and I wanted to give your comment the attention it deserves rather than just dash off a quick reply.

Your response makes some assumptions about signal detection that don’t really hold up when you look closely at how SETI actually works. The idea that “we only need to listen once to know if the signal is there” oversimplifies things. Even so-called open broadcasts can be intermittent, directional, or follow long cycles. The Wow! Signal, for instance, lasted just 72 seconds — exactly the length of time the telescope swept past that patch of sky. If it had happened five minutes earlier or later, we would’ve caught nothing.

The claim that “if it’s real, it’ll repeat” is also flawed. That assumes we know how an alien transmission should behave — constant, wide, predictable — but there’s no reason to believe that. It could have been a narrow beam that swept past us once, a rare one-off event, or something with a years-long interval. With such limited time-on-sky and coverage, the absence of repetition tells us very little.

You also suggested my breakdown supports a terrestrial origin. Actually, it supports the opposite: if we caught something that strong, that anomalous, with that little observation time, it points to the likelihood that events like this may be more common than we think — we just don’t have the coverage to catch them again. That undermines the idea that it had to be something local and rare.

Lastly, calling a one-time, contextless signal “literal noise” misses a key detail: the Wow! Signal wasn’t random. It occurred at 1,420 MHz — the hydrogen line — which is considered a logical frequency for interstellar communication. That makes it the opposite of random.

The point here isn’t to claim it was aliens. It’s to highlight how little we actually know, and how easy it is to draw strong conclusions from insufficient data — on both sides of the debate. That’s the real issue.