Hello there Reader! I hope you're having a great week.

During the last couple of weeks I've been hearing a lot about SETI - a topic that has always interested me. The question of whether we are alone in the universe or not is one that has phenomenal implications, should we answer it.

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." -Arthur C. Clarke

Personally, I think intelligent life must surely have evolved elsewhere in the universe. The fact that we've not encountered it yet is almost certainly due to the vast scale of the cosmos. Sheer size renders all but the loudest signals inaudible, and the vast expanse of time means that we might miss each other by millions of years and still be considered 'close'.

To be clear, I don't think we're being visited. UFOs are a remarkable phenomenon, but I believe they have terrestrial explanations. I'd love to be proven wrong - a spacecraft landing in a world capital, a bug-eyed creature descending the ramp and asking to be taken to our leader would be wonderful - but I fear that the only evidence we will find in my lifetime will be microbes.

That too would be fantastic. So far we only have a single example of life beginning. If we can determine that it started independently on Mars, or in the oceans of Europa, then we can be more confident that it's a commonplace event. We can start filling in some of the blanks in our knowledge, and perhaps put a lower limit on the number of civilisations that exist in the universe.

What do you think? Are we alone? Or just one of billions of lifeforms populating our galaxy?

Space News

The Wow! Signal - Deciphered at last?

If you're at all interested in SETI (The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) then you have almost certainly heard of the Wow! Signal.

In 1977, the 'Big Ear' telescope at Ohio State University was being used for SETI. The scientists were looking at the Hydrogen Band, the frequency at which natural hydrogen radiates energy. There is speculation that this frequency (or one near it) would be chosen for interstellar communication because it would allow for particularly clear signalling. So when they detected a very loud pulse, it was naturally exciting news.

And when a signal arrived that rose and fell over a duration of 72 seconds... that excitement was hard to contain.

Back then, we didn't have the computer power to make fancy displays, analyse the signals in real-time or even monitor many frequencies at once. The output was a series of digits on a printer, indicating the intensity of the radiation detected. Most were 1, 2, 3, and anything like a 6 or a 7 would be circled as interesting peaks.

When Jerry R. Ehman saw a series that expanded past the number range and into the letters, he was so surprised he literally wrote 'Wow!' on the printout.

And so the Wow! Signal got its name. It's also sometimes called 6EQUJ5, after the sequence printed on the paper, which has led to some people assuming that we somehow received that series of letters and numbers from space, and it needed decoding. It's merely a measure of intensity, and we can plot the power on a graph. If there was a message hidden within the signal, our equipment wouldn't have been able to detect it at the time.

Still, it's often believed to be our best candidate for a signal of intelligent origin - since we had no idea what else would cause a signal like that.

Now a group of scientists have pored through old date from the Arecibo radio telescope, and have spotted similar signals from all over the galaxy. Sadly for SETI researchers, they believe the pulses have a natural origin:

"We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by sudden brightening from stimulated emission of the hydrogen line due to a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR),"

In other words, something caused interstellar hydrogen to send out radio waves in the same way a laser works, adding energy to a cloud of gas which then re-radiates it at a very precise frequency. So while it might not be aliens, it's at least some new science.

The original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08513

Source: universetoday.com

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Strange News

The Voynich Manuscript

There's something romantic about a mysterious document. Here's something that must have taken hours, days or even months to create, implying a purpose and a meaning that now eludes us.

And there have been many over the years.

Egyptian Heiroglyphs, for example, resisted translation until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Linear-B, a form of written Greek dating to the Bronze Age, was unreadable until the 1950s (and its predecessor, Linear-A has still not been read).

But the Voynich manuscript is something else entirely. The symbols are unlike any others we know, even as they appear to repeat in patterns that suggest a language. It's beautifully illustrated, although the flowers and plants that decorate the pages are also not ones we recognise. It's tantalising, suggesting some arcane or lost knowledge that we could gain if we only knew how.

Most scholars suspect it's a prank, of sorts. Perhaps a (relatively) modern hoax designed to fool the gullible into parting with money, or the work of a monomaniacal figure from the medieval period, designed to entertain the creator and their friends.

It's resisted attempts to decipher it by NSA cryptographers, medieval scholars, linguists, and gained a reputation as something you only looked into if you wanted your scholarly career to founder and die.

As such, it attracted a certain type of puzzle addict. Those without formal training, but a keen interest in constructed languages perhaps, or heartened by the fact that a self-taught linguist was the one who finally cracked Linear-B. And it also drew in the cranks, conspiracy theorists, and those with a fragile grasp on reality already.

A New Jersey doctor argued that the Voynich was a manual, in Flemish creole, of death rites for an ancient cult of Isis. A Texas chemist spied what she took to be the signature of Leonardo da Vinci. The author of a guide to the end of the world theorized that a "Semite" had written the Voynich in scrambled Hebrew, to record a message from extraterrestrials about "our future doom." A man writing from jail believed that the manuscript was a childhood project of his from the 1980s, written in his own blood.

So when Lisa Davis started to analyse it properly, as a medieval manuscript expert, she discovered some interesting facts. It appeared to be the work of at least five different scribes, based on the handwriting. Each section contained different words that were used most frequently, as if each was a chapter on a different topic. And other scientists got interested, making new discoveries.

We're still a long way from decoding it (if indeed it has a meaning - some believe that a very simple process could have been used to create gibberish that looks like language) but it seems that the Voynich manuscript is finally being taken seriously.

Source: theatlantic.com

Other Books To Check Out

Miscellany

Searching for signs of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence at low frequencies.

Source: seti.org

Timeslips transporting people to the past

Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk

How and Why We Shredded Your Comments

Source: youtube.com

And Finally

As I write this, Lola the cat is arguing with the neighbour's cat about the shared hedge.

Every now and then their patrols overlap and they get into some sort of territorial dispute. Usually it's limited to trying to make the most disturbing, low-pitched howling noise possible, and presumably whoever sounds the most like an unearthly spirit gets to own the hedge that day. Very rarely it escalates to an actual confrontation, but if it does then Lola seems perfectly happy to fight above her weight class. She's small, but feisty.

Still, hearing the kind of sounds a horror movie would use to send shivers down your spine echoing around the garden is not exactly conducive to a relaxed morning...

Hopefully they work out who has the hunting privilege for today soon, and Lola doesn't decide to bring some poor, terrified mouse in as a trophy. Again.