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In 1899, Nikola Tesla received a mysterious message from space. He was listening for lightning discharges with a supersensitive antenna when suddenly, amidst the background crackling, a distinct knock was heard. And these three blows were repeated over and over again. Amazed, Tesla realized that such structured signals could not possibly be emitted by a thunderstorm. But there was no radio communication on the ground at that time. And Tesla concluded that he had heard signals from intelligent beings from Mars that night. With his submission, newspapers began to speculate about the prospects for interplanetary contacts. And yet, most scientists ridiculed Tesla's conclusions. But when 80 years later
we received this incredible cosmic signal, no one was laughing anymore. But that's not all. In the spring of 2022, NASA received mysterious signals from our own probe, Voidr 1. What is happening? Is the Cosmos really trying to speak to us? In this video, you'll learn what signals scientists had to hide from the public so that [the music] wouldn't cause mass panic. How dangerous is it for us to send messages to extraterrestrial civilizations? And will we be able to unravel the secrets of the most mysterious signals from space?
Nikola Tesla was far from the only one who received strange radio transmissions from space in the early 20th century. The inventor of radio, Guglielmo Marconi, himself spoke in about repeating signals that were clearly extraterrestrial. And engineer Thomas Edison discovered that inhabitants of other planets were apparently trying to contact us. Only in the 1950s and 1960s, with the first space missions to explore the solar system, did it become clear that there was no civilization in the vicinity of the Earth. But what did Tesla and Marconi hear then? Maybe this is it? This is what the noise of the Northern Lights sounds like when radio waves are converted to audio. These clicks are the impacts of streams of charged
particles from the Sun on the Earth's magnetic field. Today, scientists suggest that on Tesla and Marconi's primitive equipment, most of the weak peaks were lost and only a few strong clicks remained. But there is a more intriguing version. That night, Tesla's supersensitive antenna was indeed able to receive an extraterrestrial message. But the source was not Mars, but Jupiter's moon Io. It rotates inside the gas giant's powerful magnetosphere, creating structured radio noise that looks very much like an artificial signal. Perhaps, by a happy coincidence, it was he who was heard by Tesla and Marconi. But as our receivers improved, we began to receive more and more mysterious signals from space.
In 1964, physicists Robert Wilson and Arno Pencias were working on the ultrasensitive Hodelhorn microwave antenna in New Jersey. They were tasked with finding the absolute background minimum to improve wireless communications. But wherever Wilson and Penzias pointed their receiver, instead of the expected silence, they heard the same thing. A deafening roar descended on the scientists from literally everywhere. However, they immediately realized that this was not a threatening message from a warlike extraterrestrial civilization, but something even more incredible at the time.
The echo of the biggest explosion. Over billions of years, it weakened and shifted into the microwave range, but it didn't go anywhere. And it was Wilson and Penzias who discovered what we now call the cosmic microwave background. This was the first undeniable confirmation of the Big Bang theory, for which both scientists received the Nobel Prize. But some signals from space were so strange that astronomers were hesitant to report them to the public, fearing mass panic. In 1967, British scientists launched a huge and very sensitive radio telescope called the Interplanetary Scintillation Array. It was originally created to receive signals like this from mysterious space objects.
This is how quasars would sound in the audio spectrum. These are powerful, constant sources of broadband radio noise in many bands at once. Scientists did not yet know that it was produced by matter falling into a supermassive black hole, but they had no doubt of its natural origin. After all, artificial signals that other civilizations could use for communication must be narrowband and variable. Imagine the surprise of British graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell when, on August 6, 1967, the interplanetary scintillation lattice received this.
Narrowband intermittent signals at a frequency of approximately 110 MHz, which repeated every 1/3 of a second. They came from the constellation of the Chanterelle, but astronomers saw nothing in this region. This source looked so much like an extraterrestrial radio beacon that Bell and colleagues half-seriously nicknamed it LGM1, or Little Green Men One. Astronomers decided to keep the discovery a secret so as not to scare the public, and soon found several more very similar LGs. This radio beat was produced by dozens of invisible sources at various distances from the earth. And Jolene Bell realized that she had found not artificial rayo beacons, but completely natural ones.
These are pulsars, very compact and usually invisible neutron stars. As they rotate, they rhythmically shower the earth with powerful streams of intermittent radio waves in a narrow range. And astronomers realized that a real extraterrestrial civilization would be unlikely to use frequencies already occupied by pulsars and quasars. Thus, participants in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence initiative have identified a small number of channels in which the universe is almost silent. And therefore, it is in them that we should look for messages from aliens. Scientists concluded that if they wanted to contact Earth, they would send a powerful narrowband transmission on one of the most convenient frequencies.
And 10 years after the discovery of pulsars, we received just such a signal. This mysterious message from the depths of space forever changed our expectations of contact with aliens. It was this mystical sound that inspired scientist Carl Sagan to write the novel Contact, which was later made into a famous film. There, a radio astronomer played by Jodie Foster unexpectedly hears a planetary-like transmission on the radio and wakes up the observatory staff so that they can aim their antennas more accurately and not lose her. However, in the case of the actual detection of the mysterious signal, things happened completely differently.
Since the early 1960s, Ohio University's Big Ear radio telescope has continuously scanned the sky as part of the SETI initiative. And all his observations went through this old IBM 1130 computer. Its printer printed out kilometers of tape with digital designations of radio signals. And it was simply impossible to cope with such a volume of work in the office. Astronomers took these tapes home and almost always saw endless ones and twos before their tired eyes. Ordinary space radio noise. But as astronomer Jerry Ehman flipped through printouts for August 15, 1977, his gaze caught a completely impossible sequence of symbols. These few
elite numbers against the backdrop of a single two meant an incredibly powerful narrowband signal. Ehman was so impressed that he not only circled the spot in red, but also made a handwritten mark. Wow! Since then, the famous wow signal has given peace of mind to several generations of scientists and still remains the main candidate for artificial transmission of extraterrestrial origin. First of all, it is on average 30 times more powerful than the noise level. And even a non-specialist can appreciate this in a synthesized audio recording based on a signal. At first you hear a barely perceptible crackling sound, but then it's as if
someone suddenly turned on a loud concert on a strange musical instrument. The duration of the solo part of the wah signal is as much as 72 seconds. And this completely rules out transmission from some spy satellite. After all, any object in low-Earth orbit would pass over the big ear in just a few seconds. Moreover, the wow signal has a very special frequency, approximately 1420 MHz. It was precisely this that scientists, at the initiative of Seti, initially considered one of the main ones for potential interstellar communication. But most importantly, it is on it that the nucleus of an atom, hydrogen, emits radio waves when energetically excited. That is, it's like a wink to our own people, saying that we also know quantum physics.
And on Earth, radio transmissions at a frequency of 1420 MHz are completely prohibited precisely so that scientists do not miss a signal from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. So where could she be? Due to the specifics of the Big Ear's design, the answer seems quite strange. The source of the wow signal is somewhere in one of these two zones in the shooter's slur. They seem very small, but in reality each one contains thousands of stars at different distances from Earth. A retransmission would help to clarify the coordinates. But in almost half a century since that August day in 1977, scientists have never again
detected a wow signal. Even when the most sensitive radio telescopes of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, which were filmed in the movie Contact, were pointed at these areas of the sky, the response was complete silence. After all, the discoverer of the wow signal, Jerry Ahmann, in an interview in 1994, blew his top. We should have seen him again after searching the same city 50 times. Something suggests that it was an Earth signal that simply bounced off a piece of space debris. And in 2017, astronomer Antonio Peris concluded that this debris was two comas of the solar system, surrounded by hydrogen clouds.
However, this version does not explain either the extraordinary power of the wow signal or its frequency, at which no known terrestrial transmitter operates. As a result, scientists rejected Paris's conclusions, and Ehman took back the words spoken in a moment of despair. And already in 2020, amateur astronomer Alberto Caballero announced a possible breakthrough. He studied several dozen newly discovered stars in the possible area of the wow signal and singled out an unnamed star 1,800 light-years from Earth as a possible source.
It is practically a twin of the sun, but no exoplanets have been discovered near it yet. It is quite possible that they exist, but are not visible in winter telescopes. But even if we assume that the inhabitants of this system were trying to contact us , at such a distance they would have had to use a radio transmitter that was orders of magnitude more powerful than any terrestrial one. If they could spend that much energy on a wow signal, they would definitely repeat it at least a couple more times. But no, if they invested all their resources into a single signal and at the same time encrypted in the changes in its amplitude the answer to the main question of the life of the universe and all that, then we received it with a telescope that simply cannot
distinguish such nuances. Oops. Such unlucky earthlings and such stupid aliens. Can't we use another method for encryption? If we want to send a signal to other civilizations, we'll do it properly, right? The authors of humanity's very first message into space were Soviet scientists. In 1962, with the help of the Potorian planetary radar, they sent such a radio transmission. Well, they didn't make the mistake of the possible authors of the au signal, because they used interruptions, not amplitude changes, for encoding. The most ordinary Morse code, which encrypts the letters of the earthly alphabet. But to
understand the message of Soviet scientists, you need to have such a tablet at hand. Well, that was ridiculous. True, the message was not intended for the inhabitants of distant stars thousands of light years away, but for our closest neighbors on Venus. At that time, scientists did not yet know that this was a dead infernal furnace. Fortunately, the next space radio transmission from Earth was more thoughtful and meaningful. This is what American scientists sent from the Arecibo radio telescope in November 1974. This is an audio representation of the first of 1,679 binary signals, which were thoughtfully encoded not by amplitude fluctuations but by frequency changes.
An astronomer from another planet will experience even more ecstasy than Jerikhmanzwao. After all, he will face an intriguing puzzle. The authors of the Recibo message are counting on the recipient to guess how to expand the bitmap into a 7323 pixel image and get a broken monitor. Then a scientist from another planet should guess that he doesn't need a horizontal representation with 23 rows, but a vertical one with 23 columns. This is already something interesting. But will the alien understand what is encrypted here? Let me try first. This upper part resembles a cloudy sky with a purple sun. And here appears a large tree under which Stuy from the TV series
Family Guy, in his signature red jumpsuit, is jumping on a children's trampoline. If you think this is too stupid and far-fetched a decoding, then I suggest you take a look at the real meaning of the signal. It begins in a way that is quite understandable to any younger schoolchild. The clouds are actually numbers from one to 10. But then the scientists decided to jump straight to college and depict the chemical elements that make up the DNA molecule. This is the same purple sun, and the crown trees are the nucleotides in the DNA, which are illustrated a little below by its famous spiral. So this isn't Stewie's head. And if you've suddenly gone back from complex chemistry to pixel drawings, why not depict the little red man out of context, under which is
not a trampoline at all, but a dish of a radio telescope. Oh yes. A pixelated model of the solar system is still awkwardly squeezed between them Good. And we are absolutely certain that extraterrestrial recipients with the M13 cluster 22,000 light-years away are viewing this entire collection of images from Racibo's message. In fact, we don't even know if they'll get it, even if they listen carefully to the night sky. After all, the Arecibo signal was not sent at all on the best, let's say, single frequency for interstellar communication, 1420 MHz.
It was sent at a frequency of 2380 MHz, which corresponds to nothing at all. It just so happened that the Resivo transmitter works on it. And because it is not very powerful, the radio signal is likely to dissipate long before arriving at its destination. And so that the newcomer would definitely have no chance of accepting it, we sent the message only once without repetitions. I see, we take the best from the authors and get the signal. However, by the end of the 20th century, scientists from Xie had improved a bit and sent two much more sophisticated radio messages in 1999 and 2003.
These messages to several nearby star systems encrypted mathematical formulas, chemicals necessary for life, and other information about the Earth. But it was not without nuances, which we have already sent on the gold plates of the Pioneer probes. The main thing is that the aliens don't sue us in galactic court for harasport. Well, at least in 2018, the organizers of the Sonar music festival somewhat smoothed out the impression of our behavior by sending specially written electronic music tracks to the Earth-like exoplanet be 33. But some scientists are convinced that by sending messages of any kind into space, we are taking an incredible risk.
Let no extraterrestrial mind guess what kind of Morskie it is and what the pixel man in the Arecibo message is supposed to mean. But based on the transmission parameters themselves, he will definitely understand that he is hearing an artificial signal from another man-made civilization. And if aliens do decipher information from our most detailed and thoughtful messages, it turns out that we simply gave unknown beings the coordinates of the Earth. That the answer will not be hello, we got everything, but a strike with a planetary laser. After all, these aliens may perceive the existence of another advanced civilization not as an incentive for communication, but as an existential challenge. So should we make our
presence felt in the galaxy? I can console you with one thing. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, all our radio noise looks like this. A microscopic blue dot 200 light-years in diameter. So even in the worst case scenario, killer lasers would only incinerate the earth after thousands or even millions of years. But the strangest, most mysterious radio signals from space have been flying to Earth for just that long We started recording these mysterious transmissions quite recently. On September 30, 2002, a very large antenna array in Ni-Memexico received a series of unusual pulses. At first glance, it looks very similar to what Nikola Tesla had received a century earlier
. But each peak lasted about 10 minutes, and the entire sequence took 7 hours. Essentially, it was five series of narrowband radio growls at a frequency of 330 MHz. They hit Earth from a region of space near the center of the Milky Way at a distance of 300 to 24,000 light-years. This spread is explained by the fact that astronomers found nothing at all in the area of the alleged food source. The mysterious signal recurred two more times in 2002 and 2003, and since then it seems to have disappeared forever. What was that? In their scientific papers, astronomers called this and several other similar signals temporary
radio signals in the galactic center, and among themselves they dubbed them cosmic regaches. But this is more of a nervous joke by scientists, because they have no idea who or what produced these signals. They seem to resemble familiar pulsars, but they run continuously like clockwork, rather than exploding with a loud growl once a year and then falling silent. But no sooner had astronomers come up with plausible theories about stag beetles than they were confronted with an even more fascinating ancient mystery. These strange narrow-band signals were first discovered in old data from the Australian Parks radio telescope in 2007. They are really easy to miss, because these beeps last from a fraction of a millisecond to three
seconds and almost never repeat. Therefore, such signals have been called fast radio bursts, and some of them closely match the cherished hydrogen frequency of the wah signal. Yes, maybe all of this is just scattered fragments of messages from extraterrestrial civilizations. But if you superimpose fast radio burst sources on the starry sky, you will see radio spam everywhere. Hundreds of different civilizations are spinning millions of light- years from Earth and from each other. It sounds completely implausible.
Fortunately, in 2012, one of the radio bursts recurred for the first time ever, allowing scientists to narrow down their search for sources. These signals came to us from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years from Earth., in order to create them, a huge amount of energy was spent on each millisecond radio burst, comparable to the activity of the sun in several months. Typically, only supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are capable of such costly tricks. But we've already heard of quasars.
They make noise all the time, and it's not like at least some of the radio bursts are echoes of the work of the Dice Spheres on other civilizations. It is these megastructures around stars that could theoretically operate at such high energies. However, it is impossible to see Dyson spheres at a distance of many millions of light years. But on April 27, 2020, a Canadian radio telescope finally detected the first fast radio burst from the center of our galaxy from a distance of just 30,000 light-years. And by a happy coincidence, several NASA X-ray observatories were looking at its source at the same time
All of this data clearly indicated that the fast radio burst was produced by a rare neutron star, Magnetar. Unlike the pulsar, this object has a magnetic field of incredible power, but remains completely radio silent most of the time. So why did he suddenly speak? Scientists suggest that the magnetar's X-ray and radio emissions could be caused by a collision with an asteroid or an exotic starquake, but they can't say for sure. So, a completely plausible version could even be a collision of the Dyson sphere directly with the magnetarum. However, scientists really don't like to think seriously about aliens, especially since they've already been disgraced on this topic once. The same Australian Parkes Observatory
recorded almost fifty high-frequency cosmic signals from 1998 to 2015. They resembled fast radio bursts, but their characteristics changed in a completely unnatural way and therefore did not look very much like artificial radio transmissions. In the end, that's how it turned out. You have just heard a signal produced by the technology of an advanced civilization. And this technology is a microwave in the dining room of one of the buildings of the Parkes Observatory. It took scientists 17 years to figure this out. And since then, such signals have been called overtones. In addition to microwaves, they can be created by lightning, aircraft radar, and other local sources that reflect off the Earth's ionosphere and fly directly into radio telescopes.
But even after the overtone scandal, the search for space radio did not stop. And in October 2020, Parkes Observatory staff discovered something truly intriguing in the data from the previous year. an hours-long narrowband signal that came from the nearest red dwarf star to us, Proxima Centauri. Its frequency of 980 MHz did not match any terrestrial source and is considered one of the potential frequencies of the network. Moreover, judging by the shift in the graph, the signal was constantly moving away and there is an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, which in its orbit is now approaching us and moving away. The mysterious signal was called Breakthron 1.
And it looked so promising that the press immediately dubbed it the new Wowsignal. But not for long. It turned out that other radio telescopes had picked up several very similar signals, but from completely different directions, and not just from Proximity Centauri. This means that the Parkes Observatory in 2020 received highly distorted and repeatedly reflected radio interference from some near- Earth source. But even though scientists are wrong again, such discoveries give them invaluable experience. It will help filter out microwaves and other oddities from the data when we finally spot something truly valuable. And for now, we have one more curiosity. On May 18, 2022, NASA engineers received another signal from the
Voyager 1 spacecraft, which left the solar system 10 years ago The message received from the probe turned out to be complete nonsense, as if the on-board computer had generated it by accident or simply broken. Before NASA discovered the technical problem that caused this, Suspense could be cut with a knife. After all, on board Voyager 1 there is a golden record with a message to other civilizations. So many people had a question: maybe the aliens had already opened the probe and were trying to decipher it? And then a strange radio signal from Voyager 1 could turn out to be their clarifying question on the most unexpected topic.
Yeah.
