June 9, 2015 • 33 mins
In 1977, Ohio State astronomers discovered a radio transmission from space that was 30 times louder than the cosmic background noise. Since then every explanation of what it was has fallen short and the Wow! Signal remains possible evidence of alien life.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So it's
Stuff you Should Know. Wow. Uh, first of all, I
(00:21):
think we should go ahead and apologize to eight Stuff
you Should Know fans. And there were more than who
have already heard this. Yeah, we went to the World
Science Festival. We were invited to the World Science Festival
in New York City, and we want to give a
little special shout out to Ben in the Ace Hotel
(00:41):
for putting us up while we were there. Yeah. We
did a live podcast short form on Washington Square Park
on a Sunday afternoon. It was kind of a neat thing.
So um, yeah, I hate everybody who came out to
see us. We appreciated the support. Yeah, actually I thought
I knew everyone by name. There were actual Stuff you
Should Know fans. Yeah, I was gonna apologize to them directly.
(01:02):
There were some people who clearly were not familiar with us,
and we're just mind blown walking around glazed look in
their face. They look kind of defeated. I was like, oh,
you like Stuff you Should Know? Now. Yeah. I had
a couple of people come up and be like, hey,
what do you guys do? This is neat and said, well,
you just saw a short version of it. My friend,
if you want a lot more side stories and anecdotes,
(01:26):
then tune into the long version. Yeah, we had twenty minutes.
We had twenty minutes that boy, we had to get
down to business. Didn't and we did too. It's not bad.
We didn't talk about tire stores or anything like that.
We just talked about the Wow signal. Yeah, this is um.
I think this is fascinating stuff because this is something
that even the most hardened skeptic hasn't been able to
(01:48):
fully debunk. Yeah, that's that's a good point. It's pretty
neat that you know they're they're upset, probably, so we
should say that. We keep saying the wild signal, and
Chuck's talking about skeptics and everything. There is evidence of
a potential transmission from an alien civilization here on Earth,
(02:11):
and it's been here on Earth, printed out sitting in
the Ohio State University Archives since the nineteen seventies. Yeah,
and potential is the key word there. I think that's
where most skeptics head will pop off. But you got
you gotta say potential you and I did. Yeah, I
don't want anybody's head to pop off, you know. Um,
the thing is, like you said, Chuck, no skeptic has
(02:34):
been able to say, here's your explanation, dumb, dumb, And
they've tried. There have been plenty of explanations, but every
single one has been systematically addressed and reduced the rubble basically. Um,
so the whole thing finds its roots. Um, like I
said back in the seventies, but actually goes further back
than that. There's a lot of Um. There's been a
(02:59):
lot of talk starting in the twentieth century over aliens.
Are we the other other people? Are we the only
life out there? Um? Are there other people on other planets?
And if so, can we communicate with them? And astronomers
started crunching the numbers and doing the math and said,
(03:19):
we basically have two things we can do here. We
can try to go visit aliens and look for them
in the flesh, expensive, expensive, and potentially impossible. It's like
looking for a needle in a haystack. Yeah, but also
it's the closest, um, the closest planet to us is
like a few hundred light years away. I believe four
(03:42):
hundred plus, right, which means that, um, we take four
hundreds something years traveling at the speed of light to
reach that planet. So we couldn't go find them. Instead,
we decided that we would try to listen out to
see if anybody was really leasing any transmissions out there
and find traces of alien civilizations that way. Yeah, and um,
(04:06):
did we do a show on set. No, we've talked
about it before, all right, the Search for Extra Oh yes,
did we? We did. I don't remember when it came in.
We definitely have talked about it before. Now that you
say that, I think with one of our south By
Southwest or comic cons might have had something to do
(04:27):
with Oh yeah, the UFOs SSETTI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
It's not a single organization, although there is the SETI
Institute now since the early nineteen eighties. But SET is
a bunch of different groups that um are. They're not
tinfoil hat wearing crack pots who are bounded determined to
(04:50):
find if there's life out there, but they're open minded
folks that say, if there isn't life out there, let's
get ahead of the game here and listen out for
him and see if they're trying to say something to
us right there. They're basically people who say the there's
just too many stars out there that have planets and
that have are potentially habitable to life for us. It
(05:14):
just it just it boggles their mind to think that
we are the only living beings. And they're scientists, right,
And to these scientists the much more logical conclusions that
were one of many um civilizations out there, and so
they have dedicated their their astronomical talents to searching for that. Yeah,
(05:35):
and this all started happening in the early nineteen seventies
and Earnest and uh, I think it actually started in
the sixties and Earnest. But with the Big Ear it
was in the seventies, their steady program, that's right, nineteen
seventy three, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. I love
that laugh every time. Um, they have something called the
(05:57):
Big Ear, or had something called the Big Ear. Yeah,
they needed a golf course, though, yes they did, so
they got rid of the Big Year. Even worse than that, Um,
the Big Ear Radio Telescope Ohio State was demolished, not
to build the golf course. But to expand an existing
golf course, we need another nine holes, right, we need
another clubhouse. Well, I think the Big Year had seen
(06:20):
its best days by that point, So don't feel bad
for the Big Year. I still feel bad for the
Big Year. So nineteen seventy three, the Big Ears starts
scanning listening for stuff out in outer space, hence the name,
and UM what would happen is because it was seventy three, Uh,
it would print stuff out on a dot matrix printer
(06:41):
and UH student would uh student assistant would take that
print out of of what it was listening to and
take it to another volunteer, UM teachers, professors, and they
would just basically look at all these numbers. Yeah, page
by page by page. If you've ever seen the wild signal,
you it's just numbers ones, twos, maybe a three here there. Yeah,
(07:04):
it's the level of background noise in space exactly. So, um,
A one is blip a radio transmission that was one
time the intensity of the normal background noise in space
on a particular frequency. Right, A one is nothing like
there's ones all over the place all the time. There's ones,
twos and threes. Yeah, very common stuff. Um. And so
(07:27):
this these these poor astronomers who were donating their time
to the bigger telescope. We're basically they were the the
They were analyzing the stuff with their eyes. Yeah, there
wasn't like a computer program they spit it into. They
looked at this computer print out sheet after sheet after sheet, right,
(07:48):
So for they would look at a whole night's scan
of deep space from a radio telescope, again with their
eyes going over sheets and heets of computer paper, dot matrix,
printer paper, and UM, that's what this guy named Jerry Aman,
who was an astronomer at Ohio State, was doing UM
(08:09):
on August eighteen, nineteen seventy seven. He was looking over
some stuff from three days before. Yeah, and so he's
scanning all the stuff and there's ones, twos, and threes,
and he's you know, he's watching uh, Love American Style
on TV and eating his TV dinner and he's bored
out of his mind love American stuff and he's bored
(08:31):
out of his skull. And then UM, well here's another
important thing to point out, because it was also nineteen
seventy three, that was the seventy seven. At this point,
they didn't have UM double digit print outs. It just
went one through nine and then started with the letter A, B, C,
D AS ten, eleven, twelve and so on, right exactly.
(08:53):
So he's reading this stuff and he sees six e
q U J five, which means the transmission at its
peak of you peaked at thirty times louder than anything
they had ever seen before. Then the normal background noise,
and he circled it and put wow exclamation point on
the paper. And that's why it's the Wow signal, exactly.
(09:16):
And this is a big deal. I mean, like, in
this whole huge ream of dot matrix paper filled with
ones and twos and maybe a three here there, there's
a you standing in the middle of this string which
was high. Yeah. I mean six alone would be like whoa,
this is kind of significant. This thing went up to you,
and like you said, he circled it and wrote wow
(09:38):
next to him. It became the Wow signal, and um,
almost immediately they started investigating this thing. Sure, And there
are a lot of details to the Wow signal that
are make it even more impressive than just the fact
that it peaked at you, started at six and ended
at five and peaked at you. There's a lot of
different aspects of the Wow signal that make people say,
(10:01):
what in the name of God is this? And we
will start getting those details right after this break. So, Chuck,
(10:25):
we were talking about how the wild signal looks on
dot matrix papers six e q u J five, and
that means that at its peak it goes from six
times the normal background noise all the way up to
thirty times and then back down to five times the
normal background noise over what we know over seventy two seconds, Yes,
(10:47):
which is very significant. It turns out so um. The
Big Ear telescope, we should say a little bit more
about it was a crowds telescope. It was built in
the sixties and it didn't move it um eavesdropped on
the electromagnetic radio spectrum UM coming from outer space. Eaves
(11:09):
dropped on it. But it used the rotation of the
Earth to move it. Yeah, it didn't pan its little
big ear back and forth. It wasn't a show off, No,
it just stayed fixed. The rotation the Earth very slowly
would pick up a new patch of Earth at the
rate of the Earth spin right. So um, the big
ears the sky at the rate of the Earth spin right,
(11:30):
and so it's just pointing out there in deep space,
and as the Earth rotates, it would move the big
ears field of reception I guess across any given point
in the sky over a seventy two second period. And
it just so happens that the six e q u
J five wild signal transmission was seventy two seconds, which
(11:55):
suggests something very important here, Chuck. It suggests that the
wild signal came from a fixed point in the sky
that was staying in one place, and the Big Year
just swept past it over the course of its normal
seventy two seconds. Yeah, And uh, I liken it to
like if you're driving through the desert listening to your radio. Uh,
(12:16):
your signal, the further you are from that radio transmitter
or that radio station is going to be pretty faint.
And then as you get closer and have that direct signal,
it's gonna peak. And then as you drive further past it,
it's gonna get more faint again. And that's what shape
that this wild signal took. It took the shape of
a pyramid if you graph it out. And I believe
(12:36):
that's the Doppler effect because I always hear the Doppler
effect being explained by how an ambulance siren sounds far
away and then gets louder as it gets closer, and
then it gets, you know, weaker, the further way you get. Yeah, well,
it also changed his pitch though, isn't that the Doppler effect?
I think so. It's not just loudness. It's like er
er er. If you're in England, did you change pitch
(13:01):
just then? Yeah, you didn't hear any difference. No, you
didn't hear it go down in volume. You didn't hear
it go down in in tone? No? Wow? Did you really?
Are you tone deaf? I don't think so. It would
explain a lot as far as karaoke goes. Do you
sind karaoke? Did you recently? What do you say? Um?
(13:26):
I got some songs here there? You can't You can't
tell us one of them? Is that too revealing? No?
Let me think of one of my karaoke songs. My
big move is always under pressure and someone's always like, oh,
i'll do it with you'll do the bowie part. I
might not do both parts. I recently sang um I
have a tiger. Oh, yeah, there you go. I have
(13:46):
a big problem though, with my karaoke stuff. A lot
of the songs that I pick are just slightly out
of the key that I can comfortably achieve. Well, if
you're picking eighties rock, then yeah, but you would think
the Tiger that the the guy's not singing that high picture,
although I know he hits that high note and I
knew that, But from the start that guy starts out
like a little higher than I can go. So it's
(14:09):
just it's not necessarily a treat for everyone around me
when I'm singing karaoke, because I accidentally every once in
a while I have a night where like every song
I pick is right in my wheelhouse and I'm nailing him.
But for the most part, it's uh yeah, I woarrible
a little bit. I guess I think the key to
karaoke is to get your songs that you know you
(14:30):
can do and kind of stick to those. Well, I'm
I'm not like a pro. Well you know, uh like
I did Foreigners Cold as Ice one time by accident
because the song I wanted to do, I think, under pressure,
someone had done and I was they were calling me.
I was like, oh, well, I guess I'll just do this,
and the karaoke guy hit in Philadelphia said, well, I
hope you're hope you can have a vice for your testicles,
(14:52):
but you didn't say testicles why? And then I remembered
how high that song was. It is. It's a disaster
that I have the Tigers not that far off. Um
and I should give a plug here to um. Sig
Gold's Request Room. If you're in New York City, you
(15:12):
should go to sig Gold's Request Room. It's on one
of those private karaoke twenty six. It's not private. It's
just a piano karaoke bar, not private room. But it's
a back room with like a heavy curtain, so there's
a sense that it's private, but it's not private. It's
just you just show up and but it's live. It's
a guy playing piano instead of a backing track. Yeah,
(15:34):
it's a guy named Joe McGuinty. He's a very good
talented musician. He's actually a friend of you, Mace, and
he used to play for the Psychedelic First and he
now he's one of the owners of Sig Gold's Request Room. Man,
that place is gonna blow up now, I hope so
it should. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, Alright, boy,
that was a good segue or not segue, because that
(15:56):
leads to nothing. No, it leads to how do we
get on that Doppler effect? Yeah? Exactly, So, uh, let's
talk about set again. Let's bring this all back home
set or the different STIs around the world. Decided at
one point that UM, like you said, a good way
to find transmission might be to listen out for it.
(16:19):
And if we're gonna listen, UM, what would be the
most likely UM radio station that they would transmit? Well, yeah,
I mean like and of course it's not a radio station.
I'd say that as a joke, but but that was
the first That was the first. Um. That wasn't the
first thing they thought of. Like if if you say, okay,
(16:41):
we can't go to distant planets to start searching for aliens,
there's just it's just too far away. We would all
die on the way there. Right, we're gonna wait for
them to come down and play a mood at Devil's Tower. Instead,
we're gonna look for traces of them. Yeah, how can
we find But that were listening wasn't immediately the thing.
(17:04):
They started thinking like in different ways that you could
find evidence of alien civilizations. And finally what they settled
on was there, if you're an alien civilization, you are
probably familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum, So let's start looking there.
And they started looking at the electromagnetic spectrum to see
(17:25):
maybe where you would find some sort of evidence of
alien civilization. And they thought, how about the radio band. Yeah,
there were a couple of physicists from Cornell in the sixties,
Philip Morrison and Giesipicconi, who reckoned that, you know, they're
going to find a common language. They're going to broadcast
on what's like the most common language of the universe,
(17:50):
hydrogen Espanola, espaniola. Not quite uh. I'm sort of being
fun here with like saying, it's a radio stay and
it's a line. But hydrogen is the most abundant common
element in the universe, and there is a hydrogen line
hydrogen frequency, so they figured this may be a good
(18:10):
place to start listening. Yeah, and and um, Hydrogen's protons flip.
They change spin pretty pretty much all the time, right,
And as they flip and change their spin, they admit
a little bit, just a tiny teensy bit of electromagnetic radiation,
like a little glow right, and that the frequency of
(18:31):
that emission is at four hundred and twenty mega hurts.
Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe
and hydrogen is flipping all of the time, it's also
emitting this radiation all the time, which makes twenty mega
hurts the most common frequency on the entire electro magnetic spectrum.
(18:55):
Oh hydrogen all the time. And again the city researchers
Philip Morris and just set be um and I know
it's Philip Morrison. I was just making a show, a
tobacco joke. They have their hands and everything. Um. Since
these guys said they would probably transmit somewhere on the
(19:16):
radio spectrum, um, and they would probably be familiar with
radio spectrums and electromagnetism, they would also probably know, just
like we just figured out, that the most common frequency
in the entire universe, no matter where you are, mega hurts.
So maybe this would be a really good place to
(19:36):
listen out for alien radio transmissions. That's right, and the
wild signal was broadcast at four point four or five
five six mega hurts right in the middle of the
hydrogen line, right on the most common frequency in the
entire universe. We found in nineteen seven radio transmission that
(19:58):
was thirty times strong or than the normal background noise
on that frequency. That's right, and that makes uh made
scientists go holy cow or wow. That even made skeptics go, oh,
but what's this all about? Exactly the shape of it,
like we talked about the pyramid shape, um, is exactly
(20:19):
what you would expect. So that made everyone sit up
and go all right, well there's also that. And then
the sharpness, I know is the third big reason that
it just doesn't fit in right or it does fit
in as an alien transmission. So there are tons of
like um, very powerful bursts here. They're radio transmissions like quasars,
emit um radio transmissions and UM satellites. There's well, there's
(20:45):
a lot of natural ones. I mean the natural ones
that are very messy. They get spread across the band,
the electromagnetic pants. So um, if you got like a
burst from like a quasar or something like that, you
found it through the big year, you're going to it's
gonna turn up on say like channel fourteen forty four,
(21:06):
it's going to spill over across the band. They're very messy.
One of the things that really makes the Wild signals
so significant is that it was um tuned. Basically, it
appears to have been tuned because it came through only
on the fourteen frequency. It didn't spill over, and the
Big Year was listening to fifty channels. So imagine like
(21:30):
your radio is tuned, or you have fifty radios tuned
to and so on right up to fourteen whatever that
goes to fifty channels out Um, the wild signal only
came through on the fouency right then, So you've got
the sharpness, You've got the fact that it was right
(21:50):
in the middle of the hydrogen line, you have that
pyramid shape, and everyone is wondering what the heck is
going on? And uh, right after this message, we will
talk about a few reasons why I may not be
an alien transmission. All right, So we've made a bit
(22:18):
of a case that there's something hinky that happened on
August seven, Right, Yeah, I think so pretty strong case. Um.
Of course, when you make a case like this, it's
like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Basically, what
we've ended up with is this is some evidence. So
(22:40):
you can't make like a full claim that hey, this
is definitely an alien trying to get in touch with us,
because all we have is that SEV burst. We haven't
been able to find it since then. Uh, and we've
looked or listened, right, and just attending in an unexplained
radio signal doesn't I mean, it's just it's not like
the signal said, hey, we're broadcasting to you live from
(23:04):
Kepler forty three B. We'll be seeing you guys in
a dr when we come down and take over your
planets can be a bad day for you. Um. Yeah,
So there's like you said, that it's not in and
of itself approven alien signal. But um, there are a
lot of really unexplainable things that support the idea that
(23:26):
that's potentially possible. There are a lot of people who
have tried to put out explanations to the contrary. Right.
For one, they have gone back and listened to that
same patch of sky over and over again more than
a hundred times, and no one's ever picked up the
wild signal again. Yeah, and I have sure it would
be nice to go back to that same patch of
(23:48):
sky and hear it again. But if it takes a
lot of energy to beam a signal like that from
deep space it may have been a one off or um.
Some people have theorized that maybe if you were an
alien civilization, it takes so much power to broadcast in
every direction, you might use more of a lighthouse sweeping method, um.
(24:08):
And so it wouldn't be at that fixed point, you know,
it's just out there moving across the sky, right and um,
it just so happens that the big ear and this
lighthouse radio beacon crossed one another the same Yeah, it's
just the right time. Um. Yeah, that is a pretty
good counter explanation or counter argument to that one. Another
(24:29):
one was that it was, um, it was some sort
of transmission from Earth projected and reflected off of like
a piece of space debris. There's a lot of junk
out in space. You've seen gravity. I've seen gravity. There's
a lot of space junk out there, and it can
reflect radio signals. Right. But there's some real problems with
(24:50):
that explanation as well. Yeah, because I believe that from
Earth we we don't transmit on the hydrogen line, correct, right,
it's protected, like you're not allowed to transmit on that
because people are listening out for aliens on that line.
So no bounce back. No, So even if you do
have one jerk whose sole purpose in life is to
(25:11):
mess with SETI scientists by beaming radio signals at twenty
mega hurts um so that they'll get beam back into space.
Even if there was somebody transmitting and it it's supposedly
bounced off a space junk, there's still problems with that explanation.
To Chiefly, the space junk would have to be moving
(25:34):
in the same direction at the exact same rate as
Earth in order to give the illusion that it was
coming from a fixed point in outer space, because remember,
the Earth would actually it would have to it would
have to be even more mind boggling and perfect than that.
It would have to be moving at a rate that
(25:54):
allowed the Earth to pass by it over the course
of seventy two seconds. It couldn't just be moving at
the same rate or else the bigger exactly so um.
Apparently Jerry Ahman was a skeptic of his own WOW signal,
and even he was like this, no, that the space debriefing,
(26:15):
It's just that probability of everything lining up like that
is just so um small that I hereby dismissed that
that's what he did and uh, here's the thing. A
few years later, I think in nine actually develop the
capability for this big year uh, and then other radio
(26:35):
telescopes to move on their own. UM. So, in other words,
if it would have locked onto that signal, it could
have locked on and then counteracted the rotation of the
Earth and really listened to see how long that thing lasted. Yeah,
because we have no idea how long it lasted. We
know it lasted at least seventy two seconds, but no
more than twenty four hours because it wasn't there the
(26:55):
day before, and it wasn't there the day after when
the Big Year went through and swept past the same
the same patch of sky. UM. So the data believe me, Yes,
they did UM. And like we said, they started listening
for it, specifically UM the very large array the v
l A in the mid nineties, and that is is
(27:16):
that in New Mexico. I think, uh, yeah, New Mexico
UM that has the power of twenty seven separate radio
antenna's UM a hundred times more sensitive than the Big Year.
And they specifically UM. This guy named Robert Gray, an
amateur astronomer, went looking for it, pointed it towards Sagittarius,
which is sort of the rough direction that the wild
(27:39):
signal came from. And again he's like, I haven't heard
anything since then. Um, well then, and that's another point
that a lot of people say it was nothing, is
that the that point out in deep space, out in
the sky. There's nothing there, right, There's no planet, there's
no star, there's no nothing. So what what is some
(28:01):
seemingly artificial radio transmission being broadcast from when there's nothing
but space out there? Pretty weird? It is very weird.
But again, every argument that's been made has been Uh,
you can make a counter argument to an irrational reasonable one.
So where are we saying that there that this was
(28:22):
an alien transmission? Not necessarily, but it is still potentially
a reasonable explanation given the the evidence that the Wow
signal presents. Yeah, I think, um, the way I like
looking at it is what Jerry Aiman said, Um sometimes
in the eighties he says, the best way I can
think of it is that it was a tug on
(28:44):
the cosmic fishing line. Doesn't prove that you have a
fish on the line, but it does suggest it if
you keep your line in the water at that spot,
you might get a fish. So I don't know necessarily
about that spot, but it was it was something that
we can't quite explain. And um, you know, keep the
very large array going, like, keep listening, keep watching the
skis skies. Um, you got anything else? Do we miss anything? Oh? Man,
(29:11):
we could go on about ceti and all that stuff
for days. Maybe we will someday. I think the official
skeptics um line is that what did they finally say?
They like, it's a the Skeptics Club. Yeah, the Skeptics Club,
they said, uh oh, an interstellar radio source of unknown
(29:31):
origin is the official line. So the Skeptics Club A
big shrug of the shoulders essentially. Yeah, so who knows?
Six e q U J five pretty remarkable. I'll bet
somebody has that tattooed on them somewhere. I bet he
spit oh yeah, totally, like on the back of their neck. Um.
I bet Jerry Amin like spit his coffee all over
the paper too, you know, did a big spit take. Yeah, uh, classic, totally.
(30:00):
He's like the Jerry Lewis of astronomers. Uh. If you
want to know more about Jerry Lewis or the Wow
signal or anything like that, you can type some words
like six e q U J five in the search
bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I
said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. I'm
(30:22):
gonna call this purpose of life. We've got a lot
of great responses from does the Body replace Itself? When
you went into that really nice philosophical um sidebar on
like why are we here? I thought it was interesting. Um. Hey, guys,
just finished my four month binge of all seven hundred
plus episodes of stuff you should know you wanted to
(30:43):
write in about does the Body replace itself? Towards the end,
you discuss the purpose of life and why there can't
be just a one or a few species. Uh. If
the purpose of life is two cycle carbon et cetera,
speaking as a geologist biologist, the Earth doesn't need life
for anything. The planet would be just fine with no
life and no carbon cycling. It would just look quite
(31:04):
a bit different. Uh. Talking about the purpose of life
like this is an easy and common fallacy that implies
some need that's being filled. A life's purpose, if you
want to call it, that is simply to replicate itself.
That is, at some point there was a molecule able
to replicate itself as it did that some copies were
better at replicating than others, and so on and so on.
(31:27):
Over time, it became more effective to be encased in
a membrane uh than to use d N A. Then
to use DNA instead of RNA, and so on and
so on. Everything a lot today shares the history of
ancestors that replicated and passed on their genes successfully. Life
doesn't need to live or die, or eat or breathe
or swim or fly or photosynthesize or procreate or think
(31:49):
or love, but it does those things because they help
it effectively copy and pass on the genes. This is
the fundamental purpose of life. And though some may think
it's cynical or heartless, I find it beautiful and truly awesome.
And that is Danny in Seattle. Thanks a lot, Danny Seattle.
All the atheists and agnostics out there, right, I just
(32:10):
posted a thing. They have like seven percent more agnostics
and atheists than the rest of the country, really and
seven that's pretty significant, and less identify as Christian than
the rest of the country. So there's a bunch of
godless freaks. Well, thanks Danny for tossing your O pining
(32:31):
in about the purpose of life or the purposelessness of life. Uh.
If you want to chime in on this whole thing,
we can keep it going. You can tweet to us
at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook, dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how
stuff Works dot com, and as always, join us at
(32:52):
at home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff Works dot com. MHM
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So it's
Stuff you Should Know. Wow. Uh, first of all, I
(00:21):
think we should go ahead and apologize to eight Stuff
you Should Know fans. And there were more than who
have already heard this. Yeah, we went to the World
Science Festival. We were invited to the World Science Festival
in New York City, and we want to give a
little special shout out to Ben in the Ace Hotel
(00:41):
for putting us up while we were there. Yeah. We
did a live podcast short form on Washington Square Park
on a Sunday afternoon. It was kind of a neat thing.
So um, yeah, I hate everybody who came out to
see us. We appreciated the support. Yeah, actually I thought
I knew everyone by name. There were actual Stuff you
Should Know fans. Yeah, I was gonna apologize to them directly.
(01:02):
There were some people who clearly were not familiar with us,
and we're just mind blown walking around glazed look in
their face. They look kind of defeated. I was like, oh,
you like Stuff you Should Know? Now. Yeah. I had
a couple of people come up and be like, hey,
what do you guys do? This is neat and said, well,
you just saw a short version of it. My friend,
if you want a lot more side stories and anecdotes,
(01:26):
then tune into the long version. Yeah, we had twenty minutes.
We had twenty minutes that boy, we had to get
down to business. Didn't and we did too. It's not bad.
We didn't talk about tire stores or anything like that.
We just talked about the Wow signal. Yeah, this is um.
I think this is fascinating stuff because this is something
that even the most hardened skeptic hasn't been able to
(01:48):
fully debunk. Yeah, that's that's a good point. It's pretty
neat that you know they're they're upset, probably, so we
should say that. We keep saying the wild signal, and
Chuck's talking about skeptics and everything. There is evidence of
a potential transmission from an alien civilization here on Earth,
(02:11):
and it's been here on Earth, printed out sitting in
the Ohio State University Archives since the nineteen seventies. Yeah,
and potential is the key word there. I think that's
where most skeptics head will pop off. But you got
you gotta say potential you and I did. Yeah, I
don't want anybody's head to pop off, you know. Um,
the thing is, like you said, Chuck, no skeptic has
(02:34):
been able to say, here's your explanation, dumb, dumb, And
they've tried. There have been plenty of explanations, but every
single one has been systematically addressed and reduced the rubble basically. Um,
so the whole thing finds its roots. Um, like I
said back in the seventies, but actually goes further back
than that. There's a lot of Um. There's been a
(02:59):
lot of talk starting in the twentieth century over aliens.
Are we the other other people? Are we the only
life out there? Um? Are there other people on other planets?
And if so, can we communicate with them? And astronomers
started crunching the numbers and doing the math and said,
(03:19):
we basically have two things we can do here. We
can try to go visit aliens and look for them
in the flesh, expensive, expensive, and potentially impossible. It's like
looking for a needle in a haystack. Yeah, but also
it's the closest, um, the closest planet to us is
like a few hundred light years away. I believe four
(03:42):
hundred plus, right, which means that, um, we take four
hundreds something years traveling at the speed of light to
reach that planet. So we couldn't go find them. Instead,
we decided that we would try to listen out to
see if anybody was really leasing any transmissions out there
and find traces of alien civilizations that way. Yeah, and um,
(04:06):
did we do a show on set. No, we've talked
about it before, all right, the Search for Extra Oh yes,
did we? We did. I don't remember when it came in.
We definitely have talked about it before. Now that you
say that, I think with one of our south By
Southwest or comic cons might have had something to do
(04:27):
with Oh yeah, the UFOs SSETTI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
It's not a single organization, although there is the SETI
Institute now since the early nineteen eighties. But SET is
a bunch of different groups that um are. They're not
tinfoil hat wearing crack pots who are bounded determined to
(04:50):
find if there's life out there, but they're open minded
folks that say, if there isn't life out there, let's
get ahead of the game here and listen out for
him and see if they're trying to say something to
us right there. They're basically people who say the there's
just too many stars out there that have planets and
that have are potentially habitable to life for us. It
(05:14):
just it just it boggles their mind to think that
we are the only living beings. And they're scientists, right,
And to these scientists the much more logical conclusions that
were one of many um civilizations out there, and so
they have dedicated their their astronomical talents to searching for that. Yeah,
(05:35):
and this all started happening in the early nineteen seventies
and Earnest and uh, I think it actually started in
the sixties and Earnest. But with the Big Ear it
was in the seventies, their steady program, that's right, nineteen
seventy three, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. I love
that laugh every time. Um, they have something called the
(05:57):
Big Ear, or had something called the Big Ear. Yeah,
they needed a golf course, though, yes they did, so
they got rid of the Big Year. Even worse than that, Um,
the Big Ear Radio Telescope Ohio State was demolished, not
to build the golf course. But to expand an existing
golf course, we need another nine holes, right, we need
another clubhouse. Well, I think the Big Year had seen
(06:20):
its best days by that point, So don't feel bad
for the Big Year. I still feel bad for the
Big Year. So nineteen seventy three, the Big Ears starts
scanning listening for stuff out in outer space, hence the name,
and UM what would happen is because it was seventy three, Uh,
it would print stuff out on a dot matrix printer
(06:41):
and UH student would uh student assistant would take that
print out of of what it was listening to and
take it to another volunteer, UM teachers, professors, and they
would just basically look at all these numbers. Yeah, page
by page by page. If you've ever seen the wild signal,
you it's just numbers ones, twos, maybe a three here there. Yeah,
(07:04):
it's the level of background noise in space exactly. So, um,
A one is blip a radio transmission that was one
time the intensity of the normal background noise in space
on a particular frequency. Right, A one is nothing like
there's ones all over the place all the time. There's ones,
twos and threes. Yeah, very common stuff. Um. And so
(07:27):
this these these poor astronomers who were donating their time
to the bigger telescope. We're basically they were the the
They were analyzing the stuff with their eyes. Yeah, there
wasn't like a computer program they spit it into. They
looked at this computer print out sheet after sheet after sheet, right,
(07:48):
So for they would look at a whole night's scan
of deep space from a radio telescope, again with their
eyes going over sheets and heets of computer paper, dot matrix,
printer paper, and UM, that's what this guy named Jerry Aman,
who was an astronomer at Ohio State, was doing UM
(08:09):
on August eighteen, nineteen seventy seven. He was looking over
some stuff from three days before. Yeah, and so he's
scanning all the stuff and there's ones, twos, and threes,
and he's you know, he's watching uh, Love American Style
on TV and eating his TV dinner and he's bored
out of his mind love American stuff and he's bored
(08:31):
out of his skull. And then UM, well here's another
important thing to point out, because it was also nineteen
seventy three, that was the seventy seven. At this point,
they didn't have UM double digit print outs. It just
went one through nine and then started with the letter A, B, C,
D AS ten, eleven, twelve and so on, right exactly.
(08:53):
So he's reading this stuff and he sees six e
q U J five, which means the transmission at its
peak of you peaked at thirty times louder than anything
they had ever seen before. Then the normal background noise,
and he circled it and put wow exclamation point on
the paper. And that's why it's the Wow signal, exactly.
(09:16):
And this is a big deal. I mean, like, in
this whole huge ream of dot matrix paper filled with
ones and twos and maybe a three here there, there's
a you standing in the middle of this string which
was high. Yeah. I mean six alone would be like whoa,
this is kind of significant. This thing went up to you,
and like you said, he circled it and wrote wow
(09:38):
next to him. It became the Wow signal, and um,
almost immediately they started investigating this thing. Sure, And there
are a lot of details to the Wow signal that
are make it even more impressive than just the fact
that it peaked at you, started at six and ended
at five and peaked at you. There's a lot of
different aspects of the Wow signal that make people say,
(10:01):
what in the name of God is this? And we
will start getting those details right after this break. So, Chuck,
(10:25):
we were talking about how the wild signal looks on
dot matrix papers six e q u J five, and
that means that at its peak it goes from six
times the normal background noise all the way up to
thirty times and then back down to five times the
normal background noise over what we know over seventy two seconds, Yes,
(10:47):
which is very significant. It turns out so um. The
Big Ear telescope, we should say a little bit more
about it was a crowds telescope. It was built in
the sixties and it didn't move it um eavesdropped on
the electromagnetic radio spectrum UM coming from outer space. Eaves
(11:09):
dropped on it. But it used the rotation of the
Earth to move it. Yeah, it didn't pan its little
big ear back and forth. It wasn't a show off, No,
it just stayed fixed. The rotation the Earth very slowly
would pick up a new patch of Earth at the
rate of the Earth spin right. So um, the big
ears the sky at the rate of the Earth spin right,
(11:30):
and so it's just pointing out there in deep space,
and as the Earth rotates, it would move the big
ears field of reception I guess across any given point
in the sky over a seventy two second period. And
it just so happens that the six e q u
J five wild signal transmission was seventy two seconds, which
(11:55):
suggests something very important here, Chuck. It suggests that the
wild signal came from a fixed point in the sky
that was staying in one place, and the Big Year
just swept past it over the course of its normal
seventy two seconds. Yeah, And uh, I liken it to
like if you're driving through the desert listening to your radio. Uh,
(12:16):
your signal, the further you are from that radio transmitter
or that radio station is going to be pretty faint.
And then as you get closer and have that direct signal,
it's gonna peak. And then as you drive further past it,
it's gonna get more faint again. And that's what shape
that this wild signal took. It took the shape of
a pyramid if you graph it out. And I believe
(12:36):
that's the Doppler effect because I always hear the Doppler
effect being explained by how an ambulance siren sounds far
away and then gets louder as it gets closer, and
then it gets, you know, weaker, the further way you get. Yeah, well,
it also changed his pitch though, isn't that the Doppler effect?
I think so. It's not just loudness. It's like er
er er. If you're in England, did you change pitch
(13:01):
just then? Yeah, you didn't hear any difference. No, you
didn't hear it go down in volume. You didn't hear
it go down in in tone? No? Wow? Did you really?
Are you tone deaf? I don't think so. It would
explain a lot as far as karaoke goes. Do you
sind karaoke? Did you recently? What do you say? Um?
(13:26):
I got some songs here there? You can't You can't
tell us one of them? Is that too revealing? No?
Let me think of one of my karaoke songs. My
big move is always under pressure and someone's always like, oh,
i'll do it with you'll do the bowie part. I
might not do both parts. I recently sang um I
have a tiger. Oh, yeah, there you go. I have
(13:46):
a big problem though, with my karaoke stuff. A lot
of the songs that I pick are just slightly out
of the key that I can comfortably achieve. Well, if
you're picking eighties rock, then yeah, but you would think
the Tiger that the the guy's not singing that high picture,
although I know he hits that high note and I
knew that, But from the start that guy starts out
like a little higher than I can go. So it's
(14:09):
just it's not necessarily a treat for everyone around me
when I'm singing karaoke, because I accidentally every once in
a while I have a night where like every song
I pick is right in my wheelhouse and I'm nailing him.
But for the most part, it's uh yeah, I woarrible
a little bit. I guess I think the key to
karaoke is to get your songs that you know you
(14:30):
can do and kind of stick to those. Well, I'm
I'm not like a pro. Well you know, uh like
I did Foreigners Cold as Ice one time by accident
because the song I wanted to do, I think, under pressure,
someone had done and I was they were calling me.
I was like, oh, well, I guess I'll just do this,
and the karaoke guy hit in Philadelphia said, well, I
hope you're hope you can have a vice for your testicles,
(14:52):
but you didn't say testicles why? And then I remembered
how high that song was. It is. It's a disaster
that I have the Tigers not that far off. Um
and I should give a plug here to um. Sig
Gold's Request Room. If you're in New York City, you
(15:12):
should go to sig Gold's Request Room. It's on one
of those private karaoke twenty six. It's not private. It's
just a piano karaoke bar, not private room. But it's
a back room with like a heavy curtain, so there's
a sense that it's private, but it's not private. It's
just you just show up and but it's live. It's
a guy playing piano instead of a backing track. Yeah,
(15:34):
it's a guy named Joe McGuinty. He's a very good
talented musician. He's actually a friend of you, Mace, and
he used to play for the Psychedelic First and he
now he's one of the owners of Sig Gold's Request Room. Man,
that place is gonna blow up now, I hope so
it should. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, Alright, boy,
that was a good segue or not segue, because that
(15:56):
leads to nothing. No, it leads to how do we
get on that Doppler effect? Yeah? Exactly, So, uh, let's
talk about set again. Let's bring this all back home
set or the different STIs around the world. Decided at
one point that UM, like you said, a good way
to find transmission might be to listen out for it.
(16:19):
And if we're gonna listen, UM, what would be the
most likely UM radio station that they would transmit? Well, yeah,
I mean like and of course it's not a radio station.
I'd say that as a joke, but but that was
the first That was the first. Um. That wasn't the
first thing they thought of. Like if if you say, okay,
(16:41):
we can't go to distant planets to start searching for aliens,
there's just it's just too far away. We would all
die on the way there. Right, we're gonna wait for
them to come down and play a mood at Devil's Tower. Instead,
we're gonna look for traces of them. Yeah, how can
we find But that were listening wasn't immediately the thing.
(17:04):
They started thinking like in different ways that you could
find evidence of alien civilizations. And finally what they settled
on was there, if you're an alien civilization, you are
probably familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum, So let's start looking there.
And they started looking at the electromagnetic spectrum to see
(17:25):
maybe where you would find some sort of evidence of
alien civilization. And they thought, how about the radio band. Yeah,
there were a couple of physicists from Cornell in the sixties,
Philip Morrison and Giesipicconi, who reckoned that, you know, they're
going to find a common language. They're going to broadcast
on what's like the most common language of the universe,
(17:50):
hydrogen Espanola, espaniola. Not quite uh. I'm sort of being
fun here with like saying, it's a radio stay and
it's a line. But hydrogen is the most abundant common
element in the universe, and there is a hydrogen line
hydrogen frequency, so they figured this may be a good
(18:10):
place to start listening. Yeah, and and um, Hydrogen's protons flip.
They change spin pretty pretty much all the time, right,
And as they flip and change their spin, they admit
a little bit, just a tiny teensy bit of electromagnetic radiation,
like a little glow right, and that the frequency of
(18:31):
that emission is at four hundred and twenty mega hurts.
Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe
and hydrogen is flipping all of the time, it's also
emitting this radiation all the time, which makes twenty mega
hurts the most common frequency on the entire electro magnetic spectrum.
(18:55):
Oh hydrogen all the time. And again the city researchers
Philip Morris and just set be um and I know
it's Philip Morrison. I was just making a show, a
tobacco joke. They have their hands and everything. Um. Since
these guys said they would probably transmit somewhere on the
(19:16):
radio spectrum, um, and they would probably be familiar with
radio spectrums and electromagnetism, they would also probably know, just
like we just figured out, that the most common frequency
in the entire universe, no matter where you are, mega hurts.
So maybe this would be a really good place to
(19:36):
listen out for alien radio transmissions. That's right, and the
wild signal was broadcast at four point four or five
five six mega hurts right in the middle of the
hydrogen line, right on the most common frequency in the
entire universe. We found in nineteen seven radio transmission that
(19:58):
was thirty times strong or than the normal background noise
on that frequency. That's right, and that makes uh made
scientists go holy cow or wow. That even made skeptics go, oh,
but what's this all about? Exactly the shape of it,
like we talked about the pyramid shape, um, is exactly
(20:19):
what you would expect. So that made everyone sit up
and go all right, well there's also that. And then
the sharpness, I know is the third big reason that
it just doesn't fit in right or it does fit
in as an alien transmission. So there are tons of
like um, very powerful bursts here. They're radio transmissions like quasars,
emit um radio transmissions and UM satellites. There's well, there's
(20:45):
a lot of natural ones. I mean the natural ones
that are very messy. They get spread across the band,
the electromagnetic pants. So um, if you got like a
burst from like a quasar or something like that, you
found it through the big year, you're going to it's
gonna turn up on say like channel fourteen forty four,
(21:06):
it's going to spill over across the band. They're very messy.
One of the things that really makes the Wild signals
so significant is that it was um tuned. Basically, it
appears to have been tuned because it came through only
on the fourteen frequency. It didn't spill over, and the
Big Year was listening to fifty channels. So imagine like
(21:30):
your radio is tuned, or you have fifty radios tuned
to and so on right up to fourteen whatever that
goes to fifty channels out Um, the wild signal only
came through on the fouency right then, So you've got
the sharpness, You've got the fact that it was right
(21:50):
in the middle of the hydrogen line, you have that
pyramid shape, and everyone is wondering what the heck is
going on? And uh, right after this message, we will
talk about a few reasons why I may not be
an alien transmission. All right, So we've made a bit
(22:18):
of a case that there's something hinky that happened on
August seven, Right, Yeah, I think so pretty strong case. Um.
Of course, when you make a case like this, it's
like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Basically, what
we've ended up with is this is some evidence. So
(22:40):
you can't make like a full claim that hey, this
is definitely an alien trying to get in touch with us,
because all we have is that SEV burst. We haven't
been able to find it since then. Uh, and we've
looked or listened, right, and just attending in an unexplained
radio signal doesn't I mean, it's just it's not like
the signal said, hey, we're broadcasting to you live from
(23:04):
Kepler forty three B. We'll be seeing you guys in
a dr when we come down and take over your
planets can be a bad day for you. Um. Yeah,
So there's like you said, that it's not in and
of itself approven alien signal. But um, there are a
lot of really unexplainable things that support the idea that
(23:26):
that's potentially possible. There are a lot of people who
have tried to put out explanations to the contrary. Right.
For one, they have gone back and listened to that
same patch of sky over and over again more than
a hundred times, and no one's ever picked up the
wild signal again. Yeah, and I have sure it would
be nice to go back to that same patch of
(23:48):
sky and hear it again. But if it takes a
lot of energy to beam a signal like that from
deep space it may have been a one off or um.
Some people have theorized that maybe if you were an
alien civilization, it takes so much power to broadcast in
every direction, you might use more of a lighthouse sweeping method, um.
(24:08):
And so it wouldn't be at that fixed point, you know,
it's just out there moving across the sky, right and um,
it just so happens that the big ear and this
lighthouse radio beacon crossed one another the same Yeah, it's
just the right time. Um. Yeah, that is a pretty
good counter explanation or counter argument to that one. Another
(24:29):
one was that it was, um, it was some sort
of transmission from Earth projected and reflected off of like
a piece of space debris. There's a lot of junk
out in space. You've seen gravity. I've seen gravity. There's
a lot of space junk out there, and it can
reflect radio signals. Right. But there's some real problems with
(24:50):
that explanation as well. Yeah, because I believe that from
Earth we we don't transmit on the hydrogen line, correct, right,
it's protected, like you're not allowed to transmit on that
because people are listening out for aliens on that line.
So no bounce back. No, So even if you do
have one jerk whose sole purpose in life is to
(25:11):
mess with SETI scientists by beaming radio signals at twenty
mega hurts um so that they'll get beam back into space.
Even if there was somebody transmitting and it it's supposedly
bounced off a space junk, there's still problems with that explanation.
To Chiefly, the space junk would have to be moving
(25:34):
in the same direction at the exact same rate as
Earth in order to give the illusion that it was
coming from a fixed point in outer space, because remember,
the Earth would actually it would have to it would
have to be even more mind boggling and perfect than that.
It would have to be moving at a rate that
(25:54):
allowed the Earth to pass by it over the course
of seventy two seconds. It couldn't just be moving at
the same rate or else the bigger exactly so um.
Apparently Jerry Ahman was a skeptic of his own WOW signal,
and even he was like this, no, that the space debriefing,
(26:15):
It's just that probability of everything lining up like that
is just so um small that I hereby dismissed that
that's what he did and uh, here's the thing. A
few years later, I think in nine actually develop the
capability for this big year uh, and then other radio
(26:35):
telescopes to move on their own. UM. So, in other words,
if it would have locked onto that signal, it could
have locked on and then counteracted the rotation of the
Earth and really listened to see how long that thing lasted. Yeah,
because we have no idea how long it lasted. We
know it lasted at least seventy two seconds, but no
more than twenty four hours because it wasn't there the
(26:55):
day before, and it wasn't there the day after when
the Big Year went through and swept past the same
the same patch of sky. UM. So the data believe me, Yes,
they did UM. And like we said, they started listening
for it, specifically UM the very large array the v
l A in the mid nineties, and that is is
(27:16):
that in New Mexico. I think, uh, yeah, New Mexico
UM that has the power of twenty seven separate radio
antenna's UM a hundred times more sensitive than the Big Year.
And they specifically UM. This guy named Robert Gray, an
amateur astronomer, went looking for it, pointed it towards Sagittarius,
which is sort of the rough direction that the wild
(27:39):
signal came from. And again he's like, I haven't heard
anything since then. Um, well then, and that's another point
that a lot of people say it was nothing, is
that the that point out in deep space, out in
the sky. There's nothing there, right, There's no planet, there's
no star, there's no nothing. So what what is some
(28:01):
seemingly artificial radio transmission being broadcast from when there's nothing
but space out there? Pretty weird? It is very weird.
But again, every argument that's been made has been Uh,
you can make a counter argument to an irrational reasonable one.
So where are we saying that there that this was
(28:22):
an alien transmission? Not necessarily, but it is still potentially
a reasonable explanation given the the evidence that the Wow
signal presents. Yeah, I think, um, the way I like
looking at it is what Jerry Aiman said, Um sometimes
in the eighties he says, the best way I can
think of it is that it was a tug on
(28:44):
the cosmic fishing line. Doesn't prove that you have a
fish on the line, but it does suggest it if
you keep your line in the water at that spot,
you might get a fish. So I don't know necessarily
about that spot, but it was it was something that
we can't quite explain. And um, you know, keep the
very large array going, like, keep listening, keep watching the
skis skies. Um, you got anything else? Do we miss anything? Oh? Man,
(29:11):
we could go on about ceti and all that stuff
for days. Maybe we will someday. I think the official
skeptics um line is that what did they finally say?
They like, it's a the Skeptics Club. Yeah, the Skeptics Club,
they said, uh oh, an interstellar radio source of unknown
(29:31):
origin is the official line. So the Skeptics Club A
big shrug of the shoulders essentially. Yeah, so who knows?
Six e q U J five pretty remarkable. I'll bet
somebody has that tattooed on them somewhere. I bet he
spit oh yeah, totally, like on the back of their neck. Um.
I bet Jerry Amin like spit his coffee all over
the paper too, you know, did a big spit take. Yeah, uh, classic, totally.
(30:00):
He's like the Jerry Lewis of astronomers. Uh. If you
want to know more about Jerry Lewis or the Wow
signal or anything like that, you can type some words
like six e q U J five in the search
bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I
said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. I'm
(30:22):
gonna call this purpose of life. We've got a lot
of great responses from does the Body replace Itself? When
you went into that really nice philosophical um sidebar on
like why are we here? I thought it was interesting. Um. Hey, guys,
just finished my four month binge of all seven hundred
plus episodes of stuff you should know you wanted to
(30:43):
write in about does the Body replace itself? Towards the end,
you discuss the purpose of life and why there can't
be just a one or a few species. Uh. If
the purpose of life is two cycle carbon et cetera,
speaking as a geologist biologist, the Earth doesn't need life
for anything. The planet would be just fine with no
life and no carbon cycling. It would just look quite
(31:04):
a bit different. Uh. Talking about the purpose of life
like this is an easy and common fallacy that implies
some need that's being filled. A life's purpose, if you
want to call it, that is simply to replicate itself.
That is, at some point there was a molecule able
to replicate itself as it did that some copies were
better at replicating than others, and so on and so on.
(31:27):
Over time, it became more effective to be encased in
a membrane uh than to use d N A. Then
to use DNA instead of RNA, and so on and
so on. Everything a lot today shares the history of
ancestors that replicated and passed on their genes successfully. Life
doesn't need to live or die, or eat or breathe
or swim or fly or photosynthesize or procreate or think
(31:49):
or love, but it does those things because they help
it effectively copy and pass on the genes. This is
the fundamental purpose of life. And though some may think
it's cynical or heartless, I find it beautiful and truly awesome.
And that is Danny in Seattle. Thanks a lot, Danny Seattle.
All the atheists and agnostics out there, right, I just
(32:10):
posted a thing. They have like seven percent more agnostics
and atheists than the rest of the country, really and
seven that's pretty significant, and less identify as Christian than
the rest of the country. So there's a bunch of
godless freaks. Well, thanks Danny for tossing your O pining
(32:31):
in about the purpose of life or the purposelessness of life. Uh.
If you want to chime in on this whole thing,
we can keep it going. You can tweet to us
at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook, dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how
stuff Works dot com, and as always, join us at
(32:52):
at home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff Works dot com. MHM
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