BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response

Subject: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: GUEST,Jack Blandiver
Date: 28 Jun 12 - 07:12 AM

Not sure if this shouldn't go under Folklore really, given it's impact on humanity's psyche these last 35 years... But - 35 years after receiving the Wow! Signal, National Geograhic have issued an open invitation to those who wish to contribute to The Reply!

Lots of web coverage on this, but I feel sure one of two of our more Extra Terrestially Minded Mudcatters might have something to say on the matter anyway.

Are we alone in the universe? Do civilisations rise & fall in the blink of the Cosmic Eye ensuring that only one is up to any sort of technological speed at any one time? Or was there only ever the one all along - merrily travelling the spaceways, mining the resources from planet to planet? In which case was The Wow! Signal a reminder of where we came from? Or where we're going? In Sci-Fi terms the Mythology & Folklore is quite boundless, but films like Quatermass & the Pit, Promethetheus and even Babylon 5's Thirdspace offer us Creation Myths every bit as intriguing as the ancient ones, possibly because they hint at things even more ancient...

Keep watching the skies!

Jack Blandiver
(i.e. The Mudcatter Still Known as Suibhne O'Piobaireachd / GUEST Suibhne Astray until such time my request for an official name-change is honoured...)

Subject: RE: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: Stu
Date: 28 Jun 12 - 01:20 PM

You could hardly blame them for staying away. If the Engineers existed they must be wonder what the design fault is that causes us to trash the planet so carelessly and get obsessed with a resource-hungry, unimaginative economic system.

I love the WOW signal, and keep a copy of it on my iPad (sad but true). Inspirational.

Interestingly, I notice some scientists proposed we could use pulsars as intergalactic beacons enabling us to triangulate our location in 3D space. However, I proposed some time ago (it might be on this site somewhere) that aliens could indeed use pulsars for this reason, and with a sufficiently advanced technology might even have created pulsars for that purpose.

They're out there, but I wonder if we would recognise them at all. Do we even recognise what life is on our own planet? I suspect we probably will be revising our ideas about what constitutes life and sentience for many hundreds of years to come. If we're still here and capable of course.

Subject: RE: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: katlaughing
Date: 28 Jun 12 - 02:06 PM

Just in case anyone else is as ignorant as I: WOW Signal.

Subject: RE: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 28 Jun 12 - 07:05 PM

Cheers, Kat - I just assume everyone is as thrilled by this sort of thing as I am - and Sugarfoot Jack of course. Maybe it's a male thing? The Wow! Signal has been iconic since I was 15; at 50, it feels more potent than ever really. Huge, in fact...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Neo_1LGVqE

Subject: RE: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: gnu
Date: 28 Jun 12 - 07:22 PM

Well, I got two new neighbours and they both let their cats stay out all night and the cats make cat noises under my bedroom window and piss on my front steps. Can someone ask the aliens what I should do? Now, I know they can't get back to me for four hundred years but this info might help somebody else in future and I am all for helping others.

In the mean time, I am thinking vinegar. If any of you Mudcatters are aliens, could you advise me on this?

Subject: RE: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 04:09 AM

I always thought cats were aliens? Isn't there a book called Cats are from Venus; Dogs are from Mars? Or am I getting confuddled? Otherwise, Gnu, most reputable UK garden centres deal in this sort of thing (which I'm told is highly effective and anything with Ultrasonic in its name must be alien technology, right? although maybe not of the feline persuasion...):

Ultrasonic Cat Repellent

Maybe the Wow! Signal was an Ultrasonic Interstellar blast from such a device in a far distant universe where cats are as much a pain in the hooter, or whatever alien orifice in considered the most sensitive, as they are here on earth. There is a Zappa song called Alien Orifice from the 80s - one of his convulted & obtusely complex things. I once knew a Trad. Irish player back then who could play it on the fiddle in jig-time (and a lot of other Zappa tunes). Maybe he was from another planet too? I swore he grew extra fingers during a session...

Subject: RE: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: Stu
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 04:34 AM

Gnu - get a dog?

I understand where you're at. Our neighbour has about 15 cats in her semi, and although I keep an eye on them to try to prevent them decimating the local songbird and amphibian population, I often don't notice them until I mow the lawn . . . catshite really stinks, especially spread over my trousers.

Back to the thread . . . I wonder if the WOW signal was the cosmic equivalent of RF breakthrough; the signal was bounced off a passing meteor or planet or spaceship and by an incredible stroke of luck we heard it, possibly millions of years after it was transmitted.

Perhaps it wasn't artificially generated, but there are lifeforms who communicate using the radio frequencies, or the ultra-violet frequencies or . . . the possibilities are endless and fascinating.

Doesn't help Gnu with his cats though.

Subject: RE: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: gnu
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 03:38 PM

SJack... A dog? I'd like to get a dog. An Irish Wolfhound to eat all the yappy little dogs that bark all day long. There's been a yapper for two years two houses away. Two months ago, a new one next door. A week ago, another one two houses away and that yapper barked yesterday from 8AM to 4PM when buddy got home from work. I think treating a dog in that manner is more cruel than my Wolf chomping his ass. I'd let Wolf out at night when the cats make love songs, too.

>;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Wow! Signal - 35th Anniversary Response
From: GUEST,999
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 05:20 PM

Get a slingshot.